The July/August issue of Books & Culture has a pretty good essay by Eugene McCarraher--professor at Villanova, "faithful Catholic," and "fierce socialist"--about the limits of capitalism. Unfortunately, it's more of a screed. Moreover, I'm suspicious of anyone who claims to be both a socialist and a Christian, since the amount of coercion required by socialism cuts against freedom, as explained by Hayek in The Road to Serfdom. Nonetheless, the essay has some gems and cites intelligent counter-revolutionary thinkers, like Weil, Pieper, and Ruskin. Sample:
What have these labor-saving devices achieved? More work fo everyone. (That was always the purpose behind technology: save labor on one task so you could perform some more.) Imprisoned in the free market, Americans now work longer hours, are more harried, tired, and distracted, and dislike their jobs and bosses more than they have in a generation. According to Juliet Schor, the average worker now spends a month longer on the job [annually?] than in 1970. And that job follows them everywhere: as one executive proudly exclaimed to Jill Fraser in White-Collar Sweatshop: " I want my employees to have telephones in their bathrooms."
(No link available.)
I intuitively sympathize with such sentiments. Things are hectic; workers are harried; multi-tasking is required to keep up; exhaustion is the result of keeping up. McCarraher proposes poesis : "skill in making, the discovery and creation of beautiful forms for objects of daily use." He wants every worker to be "a special kind of artist." That sounds great.
Still, I can't imagine how such a system could come together without coercion. I also am not convinced that things are as bad as the above quote and my observations indicate. Is there no way to get away from the harried workforce? Couldn't a person opt for less money?
Maybe not. I know I can't: I have seven children to support. But most people don't have seven (most have 2.1). Can't most people opt for jobs in less-urban areas, thereby reducing their commute, if not also the number of hours expected in the office (rural and semi-rural employers expect less from their workers; it's reflected in the wages, but that's only fair).
I'm not convinced MCCarraher is right, and I'm not convinced he's wrong. It's a problem I ponder frequently. It has driven me to the works of the distributists and the works of anarchists like Murray Rothbard. Unfortunately, all the extra reading just makes the mental cloud in my head get denser.
