I've been slacking at holding up the crunchy-idealist dept, sorry.
Grace Lee Boggs on the MLK Day celebration in Detroit:
Quote:
Our program began with a video montage of small groups growing their own food and building community in Detroit. This was followed by a power point presentation of excerpts from King’s speeches,. I especially welcomed this excerpt from his 1967 anti-Vietnam war speech:
‘”We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.”
Our main speaker was philosopher and community catalyst Frithjof Bergmann. Bergmann said that one of the main reasons why we are a thing-oriented rather than a person-oriented society is that most jobs in our industrial society manacle us to machines.
So we try to compensate for our dehumanization on the job by struggling for higher wages that enable us to buy bigger cars and fancier clothes. In other words, we become consumers and materialists, more concerned with our possessions than with community or our relationships with each other.
However, this job system is only a few hundred years old and it is rapidly being made obsolete by HI-Tech which eliminates jobs but also makes it possible for local groups to produce most of our real needs ( e.g. for clothing, housing and transportation) with the same ease with which it has made possible independent book and film production.
Therefore since we can now practice the system of self-reliant local production of most of our real needs, we should not be trying to bring back a job system which is not only dehumanizing but has jeopardized all life on our planet by poisoning our air and our waters.
Instead of organizing marches and demonstrations demanding jobs, as many radical and community organizations have been doing, we need to use Hi Tech to make our commiuities more self-reliant.
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Emphasis added. The bolded sentences particularly resonate with me -- I work as a fabricator (electric signs) in the suburbs making some fairly soulless dreck. The days when I make a sign with a tiny bit of character to it are markedly better days.