journal/Notes/Right to Useful Unemployment.md

# The Right to Useful Unemployment

Those two words give pause to the typical American mind: what could even be meant by useful unemployment? We know what self-employment is - that American dream. But what would useful unemployment look like?

Well, consider the homesteader - who keeps themself busy and provides for themself. Nobody employs them - not even themself, for they do not recieve pay. All the value they create is maintained in *use-value* rather than *exchange-value*.

Well, there are homesteaders today, we might say. What need of a 'right'?

Well, Illich isn't arguing for any new amendment or true 'right' - he's merely critiquing. But the homesteader does face obstruction. At the very least, Ceasar demands tribute, and will not be satisfied with spare chickens or surplus corn - he wants cold hard cash. He wants surplus exchange value.

What else obstructs the usefully unemployed? What's so bad about exchange value? And actually, don't we all want to be usefully unemployed, at least some of the time?

Illich's postscript to his essay Tools for Conviviality sets out to do three things:

	1. Describe the character of a commodity/market-intensive society in which the very abundance of commodities paralyzes the autonomous creation of use-values;

	2. Insist on the hidden role that professions play in such a society by shaping its needs;

	3. Expose some illusions and propose some strategies to break the professional power that perpetuates market dependence.

# 1. The market society

Illich bemoans the global homogenization we have come to see:

	In only a few decades, the world has become an amalgam. Human responses to everyday occurrences have been standardized. Though languages and gods still appear to be different, people daily join the stupendous majority who march to the very same megamachine. The light switch by the door has replaced the dozens of ways in which fires, candles and lanterns were formerly kindled.

But it is not merely that the typical mode of existing has converged, but:

	Light that does not flow from high-voltage networks and hygiene without tissue paper spell poverty for ever more people.

Not that more people use non-electrified light - but that we see non-electrified light as a sign of poverty. The things of self-dependence, the signs of life, are now looked down upon by the industrial machine.

	True, more babies get cow's milk, but the breasts of both rich and poor dry up. The addicted consumer is born when the baby cries for the bottle: the the organism is trained to reach for milk from the grocer and to turn away from the breast that thus defaults.

What does this difference between the mother's breast and the grocer entail? At its core is a trade: sacrifice relationship for security. The mother's breast is not always there or ready. But the grocer is, or aims to be. However the quality suffers - as we know breastmilk in particular has certain nutrients and other qualities that make it better suited for nursing. The cow cannot compete on quality - especially when the industrial apparatus required to maintain the cow entails killing off the probiotics in the milk - literally killing the culture.

This obsession with outsourcing is a strange new movement.

	All through history, the best measure for bad times was the percentage of food eaten that had to be purchased. In good times, most families got most of their nutrition from what they grew or acquired in a network of gift relationships.

By such historic standards, we are in the worst of times.

And the rich seem to agree - as we see an increasing desire among some with money to homestead and life off-grid. I don't mean that their desire is wrong, but only to exemplify Illich's words:

	The toil and pleasure of the human condition become a faddish privilege restricted to some of the rich. 

Why? Why is it more expensive now than ever to be a peasant?

	On the day Venezuela legislated the right of each citizen to 'housing', conceived of as a commodity, three-quarters of all families found that their self-build dwellings were thereby degraded to the status of hovels. Furthermore - and this is the rub - self-building was now prejudiced. No house could be legally started without the submission of an approved architect's plan. The useful refuse and junk of Caracus, up until then re-employed as excellent building materials, now created a problem of solid-waste disposal. The man who produces his own 'housing' is looked down upon as a deviant who refuses to cooperate with the local pressure group for the delivery of mass-produced housing units.

The war on poverty, instead of lifting people up economic rungs, has succeeded only in cutting off the lower rungs and leaving them as polluting rubbish, outlawed to be welded back onto the ladder.

Rungs of a ladder which the rich seem to want to be on - why?

We want to be useful, and want to be useful outside the confines of the machine. We want to make use of our hands for ourselves and our neighbors, not a globally homogenous corporate blob. To authentically give of ourselves.

And so we give of ourselves - we give baked goods, hobby crafts, raw milk, and more. We find that this is wonderful - this fostering of relationship between our fellow man, even in the simple things. In the recieving we find joy too - and perhaps even greater utility from these things produced on a small, relational scale.

The same milk given from neighbor to us becomes illegal when an exchange is made - this very same milk we judged superior to that of the grocer. The milk from the cows we walked among, lived next to, and have known on a personal basis for years becomes illegal on the market - unless processed in particular ways and permitted, often at great expense - an expense that makes expanding a small and beneficial enterprise of milk-giving into something that would generate a living for oneself while contributing authentically to the community.

The same building methods we might employ on a small scale to make furniture and equipment, requires codification and approval by professional building inspectors. Vernacular construction methods suffer as 'poverty' is outlawed, relegating these building methods to the eclectic wealthy who can muster the engineering effort to 'prove' anew what tradition and common-sense already has for centuries.

But in all of these something intangible is lost:

	Economists have no effective means of including in their calculations the society-wide loss of a kind of satisfaction that has no market equivalent. Thus, one could today define economists as the members of a fraternity which only accepts people who, in the pursuit of their professional work, can practice a trained social blindness towards the most fundamental trade-off in contemporary systems, both East and West: the decline in the individual-personal ability to do or make, which is the price of every additional degree of commodity affluence.

	Modern societies, rich or poor, can move in either of two opposite directions: they can produce a new bill of goods - albeit safer, less wasteful, more easily shared - and thereby further intensify their dependence on consumer staples. Or, they can take a totally new approach to the inter-relationship between needs and satisfactions. In other words, societies can either retain their market-intensive economies, changing only the design of the output, or they can reduce their dependence on commodities.

Illich even predicts and critiques the Amazon locker:

	A world designed for service deliveries is the utopia of citizens turned into welfare recipients.

# (Disabling) Professions

	The credibility of the professional expert, be he scientist, therapist, or executive, is the Achilles' heel of the industrial system. Therefore, only those citizen initiatives and radical technologies that directly challenge the insinuating dominance of disabling professions open the way to freedom for non-hierarchical, community-based competence.

Here, Illich has a strong anarchist streak - one which I track with for a while, but only to a point. He makes the comparison to clergy, in a critical way. I think this comparison is apt, but Illich seems to be unable to distinguish between the clergy operating normally and properly and the clergy as they were accused (and often were) leading up to the Protestant reformation. Illich would be well to walk the line better here - and I hope to write about this in more depth soon.

The critique he offers of professionals as we have come to know them is damning - worse than the 'oldest profession':

	Merchants sell you the goods they stock. Guildsmen guaruntee quality. Some craftspeople tailor their product to your measure or fancy. Professionals however, tell you what you need. They claim the power to prescribe. They not only advertise what is good, but ordain what is right.

	[...]

	[W]hat counts is the professional's authority to define a person as client, to determine that person's need, and to hand that person a prescription which defines this new social role. Unlike the hookers of old, the modern professional is not one who sells what others give for free, but rather one who decides what ought to be sold and must not be given for free.

The modern professional not only ostracises us from domains we would normally be competent in, but then tells us to what degree we need their products - utterly removing us from their domain of so-called competence. We lose even the ability to develop and identify our own needs.

	As people become apt pupils in learning how to need, the ability to shape wants from experienced satisfaction becomes a rare competence of the very rich or the seriously undersupplied.

As time goes on, our understanding of the professions condenses and procedures get simplified. Rather than giving this revelation to the people, the professional even gets condensed down into the clipboard warrior:

	As pharmacological technique - tests and drugs - became so predictable and cheap that one could have dispensed with the physician, society enacted laws and police regulations to restrict the free use of those procedures had simplified, and placed them on the prescription list.

	Just twenty years ago, it was a sign of normal health - which was assumed to be good - to get along without a doctor... To be plugged into a professional system as a life-long client is no longer a stigma that sets apart the disabled person from citizens at large.

# Strategies

Illich is generally depressing, but still, knows there is a way out:

	[reducing dependence on commodities] entails the adventure of imagining and constructing new frameworks in which individuals and communities can develop a new kind of modern toolkit. This would be organized so as to permit people to shape and satisfy an expanding proportion of their needs directly and personally.

It begins by demolishing illusions.

	The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services.

	[...]

	The illusion that economic models can ignore use-values springs from the assumption that those activities which we designate by intransitive verbs can be indefinitely replaced by institutionally defined staples referred to as nouns: 'education' substituted for 'I learn'; 'health care' for 'I heal'; transportation for 'I move'; 'television' for 'I play'.

Change begins with us - we need to use the right language. I don't need "healthcare" per se, I need to heal - something that I must do; no mechanistic apparatus can possibly eliminate the work that I put in. I don't need food, I need to eat - I must ultimately put fork in mouth. We can begin by acknowledging the ultimate use-values of things and putting them as primary, working back from there - rather than implicitly advocating for the technocratic apparatus.

The second sort of illusion is that all tools are basically of the same sort.

	Throughout history... most work was done to create use-values not destined for exchange. But technological progress has been consistently applied to develop a very different kind of tool: it has pressed the tool primarily into the production of marketable staples... Now women or men, who have come to depend almost entirely on deliveries of standardized fragments produced by tools operated by anonymous others, have ceased to find the same direct satisfaction in the use of tools that stimulated the evolution of man and his cultures.

Tools are formative on their users - and so different tools produce different people. Rapidly evolving tools alienate us even from the culture we inherit. Hammers, sickles, plows, squares - these had a meaning that was understood through direct experience with their usage. Now, we know their meaning only through secondhand accounts. The effects that this has on us as a culture are difficult to comprehend; they require levels of meta-cognition spanning across generations.

	The central planning of output-optimal decentralization has become the most prestigious job of the late seventies. But what is not yet recognized is that this new illusory salvation by professionally decreed limits confuses liberties and rights.

What's a liberty, and what's a right? Per Illich:

	Liberties protect use-values as rights protect the access to commodities.

One may have a liberty to milk the family cow - but the logic of state welfare would say you have a right to milk. The right to clean, safe milk can get twisted against your liberty to milk a cow and sell the excess to your neighbor.

	One certain way to extinguish the freedoms to speak, to learn, to heal, or to care is to delimit them by transmogrifying civil rights into civil duties... As society gives professionals the legitimacy to define rights, citizen freedoms evaporate.

And it seems that we are trying to turn everything into a right:

	At present, every new need that is professionally certified translates sooner or later into a right. The political pressure for the enactment of each right generates new jobs and commodities.

It seems unfortunately that Illich doesn't care much to use this work 'liberty' in other parts of his work; he seems to boil everything down to 'right' which is ironic. Still, he seems to understand that there is a difference between different sorts of rights.

	When the right of the citizen to a lawyer has been established, settling the dispute in the pub will be branded unenlightened or anti-social, as home births are now.

We already have a sort of Orwellian existence, where nothing is real until it is acknowledged by the state (or corporations).

	Labour no longer means effort or toil but the mysterious mate wedded to productive investments in plant. Work no longer means the creation of a value percieed by the worker but mainly a job, which is a social relationship.

And at last we get at the namesake of this essay:

	Unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for one's neighbor. An active woman who runs a house and brings up children and takes in those of others is distinguished from a woman who 'works', no matter how useless or damaging the product of this work might be. Activity, effort, achievement, or service outside a hierarchical relationship and unmeasured by professional standards, threatens a commodity-intensive society.

It is interesting that the housewife seems to be the last vestage of the old ways: a true case of useful unemployment. 

	Only with a license may you teach a child; only at a clinic may you set a broken bone. Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich.



	People are beginning to see that such hegemony [of professional power] deprives them of their right to politics.

In a section wonderfully titled "The self-critical hooker", Illich sees through the attempts at self-regulation that large corporations have taken.

	Professional self-policing is useful principally in catching the grossly incompetent - the butcher or the outright charlatan. But as has been shown again and again, it only protects the inept and cements the dependence of the public on their services.

The regulatory bodies thus formed seem to legitimize the reign of hegemonic entities. And Illich points out an unspoken and illegitimate right that has emerged:

	The idea that professionals have a right to serve the public is thus of very recent origin. Their struggle to establish and legitimate this corporate right becomes one of our most oppressive social threats.



What is the way out? Note modernity and walk right by it:

	A retooling of contemporary society with convivial rather than industrial tools implies ashift of emphasis in our struggle for sical justice; it implies a new kind of subordination of distributive to participatory justice. In an industrial society, individuals are trained for extreme specialization. They are rendered impotent to shape or to satisfy their own needs.

Illich, though, for all his great structural critique still ends in a strange, tacked-on egalitarian stance:

	A society dedicated to the protection of equally distributed, modern and effective tools for the exercise of productive liberties cannot come into existence unless the commodities and resources on which the exercise of these liberties is based are equally distributed to all.

# In sum

	Henceforth the quality of a society and of its culture wil depend on the status of its unemployed: will they be the most representative productive citizens, or will they be dependants? The choice or crisis again seems clear: advanced industrial society can degenerate into a holding operation harking back to the dream of the sixties; into a well-rationed distribution system that doles out decreasing commodities and jobs and trains its citizens for more standardized consumption and more powerless work... The inverse, of course, is equally possible: a modern society in which frustrated workers organize to protect the freedom of people to be useful outside the activities that result in the production of commodities.