Două avioane militare israeliene au efectuat un zbor de antrenament din Israel până în Ungaria, provocând un scandal la Budapesta. Cei 2.200 de kilometri care despart Ierusalimul de Budapesta acopera cea mai mare parte a teritoriului Iranului, pornind tot de pe teritoriul israelian. Se poate trage concluzia că zborul de antrenament este fie parte dintr-un antrenament real, fie o încercare de intimidare a Iranului. Sau ambele.
Rochelle Gurstein scrie în numărul din martie al revistei online Guernica despre muncă şi despre modul în care munca complexă a meşterilor şi artizanilor a fost spartă în părţile sale componente şi transformată într-o serie de sarcini repetitive pentru a deveni compatibilă cu modul de lucru construit în jurul liniilor de asamblare ale uzinelor Ford.
De la stilul vechi de a munci
In the mid-sixteenth century, a book described ninety different crafts, including jewelers, metalsmiths, goldsmiths, coiners, tapestry makers, printers, musical instrument makers, dyers, potters, tanners, weavers, carpenters, bakers, and millers. Two centuries later, Diderot’s Encyclopedia counted two hundred and fifty. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in a medium-sized town in England, over fifty crafts were still being practiced.
care presupunea o ucenicie îndelungată şi un act în care se îmbinau imaginaţia şi măiestria unui artizan, s-a trecut la un stil de lucru pe care muncitorii îl găseau revoltător:
By 1910, these once-independent craftsmen refused to accept what they experienced as the mind-numbing and degrading division of their labor and began to walk off the job. During the next few years, Ford took even more extreme measures to step up production, instituting the endless-chain conveyor system; car assemblies now moved past fixed stations where men carried out ever more simple, repetitive operations. Again, these men registered their revulsion at this systematic destruction of their knowledge and skill by walking off the job, this time in droves. “It was apparent,” writes Keith Sward in his The Legend of Henry Ford, “that the Ford Motor Co. had reached the point of owning a great factory without having enough workers to keep it humming.” For the year 1913 alone, the employee turnover rate reached 380 percent. “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system,” Sward reports, “that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.”
Din nefericire, pe măsură ce sistemul de muncă bazat pe linia de asamblare a început să se extindă, artizanii au fost împinşi din ce în ce mai mult către periferia societăţii de tip nou, în care o mare parte a membrilor săi nu au habar să facă nimic dincolo de cele câteva sarcini repetitive pentru care s-au pregătit.
Instead of putting forward, as so many of our elected officials, policy analysts, pundits, and journalists predictably do, a picture of our world that is essentially the same, except that it is somehow “green” and somehow peopled with college-educated or better “trained” workers, we need to focus our attention on the more pressing and more basic question of what kinds of work people should be expected to devote their lives to doing. The last time this question—the question of meaningful, satisfying, dignified labor—got a public hearing was in the nineteen sixties and seventies, with Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital being the intellectual high-water mark. What Braverman convincingly demonstrated is that there is nothing natural or inevitable about our system of labor; that it came about through conscious decisions made by industrial capitalists in the name of profit for them alone; and, so long as there were living alternatives to it, that assembly line work was forcefully resisted by skilled craftsmen who walked off the job rather than submit to work that they felt demeaned them. William Morris spoke for those men when he declared the new factory work “worthless; it is slaves’ work—mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil.”
Din păcate, alternativele au cam dispărut. În ziua de astăzi oamenii visează să meargă la ţară sau să devină entrepreneurs, metode indirecte de a recâştiga ceea ce s-a pierdut şi de a scăpa de plictiseala incredibilă a muncii repetitive.
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Sursa:
Rochelle Gurstein, Labor Pains
So it always ends.
O altă încercare a lui Barack Obama de a îşi construi propriul monument se termină cu un eşec major. Joe Biden, Vice-Preşedintele S.U.A., a plecat către Orientul Mijlociu pentru a ajuta la negocierea unei păci între Israel şi palestinieni. Ajuns la faţa locului, Biden a fost întâmpinat nu cu pâine şi sare, ci cu o palmă în plină figură. Israelul a anunţat construcţia unei noi serii de case în Ierusalimul de Est pentru a mai disloca nişte palestinieni.
Evident, anunţul a distrus orice şansă de a porni negocierile de pace de la bun început, iar declaraţiile oficialilor de la Tel Aviv
“Messages have been sent to Biden and the Americans that there was no intention to undermine him,” a senior Israeli official said. “We were genuinely surprised, just as surprised as the Americans.”
conţin o ironie extrem de fină. Evident că scopul deciziei de a începe construcţia şi de a anunţa public acest lucru exact înaintea vizitei lui Biden a fost sabotarea negocierilor. În cazul în care toată distracţia nu a fost pusă la cale cu acordul S.U.A., atunci avem de-a face cu un mesaj clar din partea Israelului către marele prieten de la Vest: „Dacă pacea nu se va face aşa cum vrem noi, când vrem noi, atunci nu se va face deloc”.
În urma anunţului, palestinienii a decis să nu mai participe la negocierile indirecte, care urmau să constituie primul pas pe calea către negocieri direct. Se pare că de efortul lui Obama de a rezolva acest conflict s-a cam ales praful.
Fragmentul de mai jos mi-a atras atenţia în timp ce citeam „Junk Medicine”, o carte de Anthony Davis.
During the past fourteen years, I have worked as a doctor in a large general hospital in a British slum, and in the even larger prison next door. In that time, I have seen addiction to opiates—principally heroin—rise from an infrequently encountered problem to a mass phenomenon. Indeed, it has become so widespread that the city council has now put a request that citizens not put their used needles and syringes in the black plastic bags that it distributes to households for garbage collection. And no stairwell in a public housing project is quite complete without the discarded paraphernalia of intravenous drug abuse.
No doubt the sudden increase in the number of heroin abusers in my city was multifactorial, to use the word favored by epidemiologists when the proximate cause of a phenomenon is still unknown to them or anyone else. In all probability, the supply of heroin to the city became much greater and more secure, but no supply would or could have expanded so quickly unless it met its corresponding demand. The demand derived principally from disaffected adolescents and young adults who had been brought up to believe that the immediate satisfaction of personal desires was the highest, indeed the only, good, but whose economic prospects were, relatively speaking, grim, and who would never be able to fulfill their fantasies of a luxurious existence.
Cred că acest fragment explică destul de bine criza care a lovit Grecia şi care a forţat România să ceară ajutorul organismelor internaţionale. Trezindu-se faţă în faţă cu posibilitatea de a trăi mai bine decât le permit mijloacele lor, românii şi grecii au împrumutat mai mulţi bani decât era cazul. Orice, doar să nu se termine petrecerea.
