https://aeon.co/ideas/lets-bring-back-th...total-work
EXCERPT: . . . We are expected to compete with each other for our own labour, so that we each become our own taskmaster, our own pharaoh. Offer your employer more and more work for the same amount of pay, so that you undercut your competition – more and more bricks, and you’ll even bring your own straw.
In our neo-pharaonic economy, we are worth no more than the labour we can perform, and the value of our labour is being ever devalued. We can never work enough. A profit-driven capitalist society depends on the anxious striving for more, and it would break down if there were ever enough.
The Sabbath has no place in such a society and indeed upends its most basic tenets. In a Sabbatarian economy, the right to rest – the right to do nothing of value to capital – is as holy as the right to work. We can give freely to the poor and open our homes to refugees without being worried that there will be nothing left for us. We can erase all debts from our records, because it is necessary for the community to be whole.
It is time for us, whatever our religious beliefs, to see the Sabbatarian laws of old not as backward and pharisaical, but rather as the liberatory statements they were meant to be. It is time to ask what our society would look like if it made room for a new Sabbath – or, to put it a different way, what our society would need to look like for the Sabbath to be possible....
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/lets-bring-back-th...total-work
EXCERPT: . . . We are expected to compete with each other for our own labour, so that we each become our own taskmaster, our own pharaoh. Offer your employer more and more work for the same amount of pay, so that you undercut your competition – more and more bricks, and you’ll even bring your own straw.
In our neo-pharaonic economy, we are worth no more than the labour we can perform, and the value of our labour is being ever devalued. We can never work enough. A profit-driven capitalist society depends on the anxious striving for more, and it would break down if there were ever enough.
The Sabbath has no place in such a society and indeed upends its most basic tenets. In a Sabbatarian economy, the right to rest – the right to do nothing of value to capital – is as holy as the right to work. We can give freely to the poor and open our homes to refugees without being worried that there will be nothing left for us. We can erase all debts from our records, because it is necessary for the community to be whole.
It is time for us, whatever our religious beliefs, to see the Sabbatarian laws of old not as backward and pharisaical, but rather as the liberatory statements they were meant to be. It is time to ask what our society would look like if it made room for a new Sabbath – or, to put it a different way, what our society would need to look like for the Sabbath to be possible....
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/lets-bring-back-th...total-work