Our corporations and administrations are dominated by a clique of people who, because they are symbolically interested, "give 100%" and expect others to do the same.
We can speak of a social class in charge of organizing work:
"Capital chooses a management team to represent it on the spot [in the corporations. Executives are meant] to supervise and organize the labors of the working population" (Harry Braverman USA, 1974, p. 405)
For Braverman, the people who really count in this team are those whose managerial positions offer them "a share in the surplus produced in the corporation, and thus is intended to attach them to the success or failure of the corporation and give them a ‘management stake’, even if a small one." (pp.405–6, original emphasis)
The Ghosts of Max Weber in the Economic History of Preindustrial Europe
“References to Weber in the literature on preindustrial Europe published by economists during the last fifty years show that the more economists have rehabilitated culture as an autonomous force of economic change, the more they have heralded Weber as a precursor of their endeavors. The casting of Weber in such terms, moreover, has gone hand in hand with a decline, rather than an increase, in conversations between economists, sociologists, historians, and other humanists and social scientists interested in the role of culture in the formation of modern economic life.”
Trivellato, Francesca. “The Ghosts of Max Weber in the Economic History of Preindustrial Europe.” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 4, no. 2 (2023): 332-376. https://doi.org/10.1353/cap.2023.a917621.
Today in Writing History June 4, 1917: Laura E. Richards, Maude H. Elliott, and Florence Hall won the first Pulitzer prize for biography. They wrote about their mother Julia Ward Howe, the feminist, abolitionist, pacifist author and poet. You can read the biography here.
Howe not only wrote the lyrics to The Battle Hymn of the Republic; she also wrote the pacifist 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation. Also known as the Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World, the proclamation called on women to unite worldwide for peace. In 1872, Howe called for a Mother’s Day for Peace to be celebrated each year on June 2. Yet today, women throughout the U.S. and Europe (along with the men) are calling for ever more heavy weaponry and NATO troops to be sent to the Ukrainian killing fields, where over 200,000 Ukrainians have already lost their lives, and where this now direct NATO involvement risks precipitating WWIII between nuclear-armed powers, neither of which show any indication that they are willing to back down or negotiate an end to the slaughter. Where is the peace movement today? Or, is some slaughter justified in the name of capitalism (er, I mean against despotism)? And, if that is true, where are all the people screaming for war against India? Philippines? Italy? Saudi Arabia? El Salvador? Egypt? Sudan? And Israel?
Today in Labor History June 1 is the day that U.S. labor law officially allows children under the age of 16 to work up to 8 hours per day between the hours of 7:00 am and 9:00 pm. Time is ticking away, Bosses. Have you signed up sufficient numbers of low-wage tykes to maintain production rates with your downsized adult staffs?
The reality is that child labor laws have always been violated regularly by employers and these violations have been on the rise recently. Additionally, many lawmakers are seeking to weaken existing, poorly enforced laws to make it even easier to exploit children. Over the past year, the number of children employed in violation of labor laws rose by 37%, while lawmakers in at least 10 states passed, or introduced, new laws to roll back the existing rules. Violations include hiring kids to work overnight shifts in meatpacking factories, cleaning razor-sharp blades and using dangerous chemical cleaners on the kills floors for companies like Tyson and Cargill. Particularly vulnerable are migrant youth who have crossed the southern U.S. border from Central America, unaccompanied by parents. https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attack/
Of course, what is happening in the U.S. is small potatoes compared with many other countries, where exploitation of child labor is routine, and often legal. At least 20% of all children in low-income countries are engaged in labor, mostly in agriculture. In sub-Saharan Africa it is 25%. Kids are almost always paid far less than adults, increasing the bosses’ profits. They are often more compliant than adults and less likely to form unions and resist workplace abuses and safety violations. Bosses can get them to do dangerous tasks that adults can’t, or won’t, do, like unclogging the gears and belts of machinery. This was also the norm in the U.S., well into the 20th century. In my soon novel, “Anywhere But Schuylkill,” the protagonist, Mike Doyle, works as a coal cleaner in the breaker (coal crushing facility) of a coal mine at the age or 13. Many kids began work in the collieries before they were 10. They often were missing limbs and died young from lung disease. However, when the breaker bosses abused them, they would sometimes collectively chuck rocks and coal at them, or walk out, en masse, in wildcat strikes. And when their fathers, who worked in the pits, as laborers and miners, went on strike, they would almost always walk out with them, in solidarity.
F. A. Hayek, Libertarianism, and the Denationalization of Money
“Hayek found support within the American libertarian movement. Libertarians realized that Hayek’s radical proposal would limit state control over the monetary system and allow for the free exchange of gold.”
McIntosh, W. (2024) ‘F. A. Hayek, Libertarianism, and the Denationalization of Money’, Modern American History, pp. 1–20. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/mah.2024.19.
High levels of ultra-processed foods linked with early death, brain issues.
I found that for me, it was much easier to cut out highly-processed foods altogether (I went on a whole-food non-animal diet) that it was to "cut back." By cutting them out altogether, I lost my taste for them in just a few weeks.
"Ultra-processed foods are ready-to-eat/heat industrial formulations made mostly or entirely from substances derived from foods, including flavors, colors, texturizers, and other additives, with little if any intact whole food."
That's the definition from a BMJ study of the effects of UPF on all-cause mortality (not good).
Now this one might be a little heated, but an example of this happening is the game Stellar Blade, whilst it is still a good game, there was also a sex appeal to it which they cut out the jiggle physics and sultryness out of the game before release....
Controversy and Censorship
Now this one might be a little heated, but an example of this happening is the game Stellar Blade, whilst it is still a good game, there was also a sex appeal to it which they cut out the jiggle physics and sultryness out of the game before release....