Let's Get Lazy

The 1960s and the 1970s were the heyday of the working class in Western Europe and North America.
After centuries of eking out a living on marginalized land and constant drudgery in noisy dirty factories, ordinary people were allowed to enjoy some of the fruits of their labour.
Ordinary folk could eat at the top table.
Houses became homes, indoor bathrooms, fitted carpets, double glazing and labour saving devices were installed, shoes and clothing were mass produced and cheaply available, colour television was switched on, jet aeroplanes sent us far away for our holidays in the sun.
We no longer had to light the fire each morning. The heating was put on by the flick of  a switch. We no longer had to play music, we could listen to records. We no longer had to make our own entertainment, it was made for us.
And, indeed, since those glory days of the working class technology has rattled on apace, so much so that the jobs that are essential to life, the building of houses, the growing of food, the provision of heat, are all done by a small minority of people, instead of by the great majority.
For most of us work is unnecessary.
If we need to work at all we only need to work a few hours a week, paid or unpaid. The rest is play.
That is the basic cause of contemporary unemployment and underemployment, and it will never go away.
So why do we still work so hard?
Why do we pretend that we need more goods, more services, more weapons, more war?
Why has that most advanced country, the United States of America, become a Security State?
A hundred and fifty years ago around 70% of Americans worked the land. Now it is about 2% who provide the food for everyone else.
The flight from the land to the cities is a phenomenon throughout the world, because there aren’t enough jobs to go around in the mechanized countryside.
But the same is happening in industry now. Industries like coal mining and steel production use a fraction of the work force they once did.
So why do we serve the economy instead of the economy serving us?
Jobs have been created to keep the structure of hierarchy in place. Indeed, the structure of hierarchy has been expanded to absorb women in ever greater numbers.
And so, in this time of plenty, we have whole armies of middle men and middle women doing unnecessary jobs, people who once might have been occupied in doing a skilled mechanical job or tilling the soil, or mending, cooking and washing, darning socks and pruning trees.
At every turn you find a busybody with a regulation. Where, not so long ago, there were two people in administrative support there are now twenty. You need to sit in a classroom and take a course and acquire a certificate for even the simplest of jobs.
All of this just to maintain the hierarchical principle.
All of this unnecessary activity just to ensure that we all have a boss.