Pawl Hawken: the unstoppable multitude
(5:49)

To have or not to have. We are working longer than the workers did at the time of the Pharaohs. For thirty years, forty years or even fifty years. The pensionable age is moving ever further away, to the point where soon it will coincide with the date of our death. Earning a salary is increasingly becoming the sole objective of work. It is no longer important for work to be useful or to have some sort of meaning for society or for the person doing it. The purpose of a business is usually to show a profit. Money that is useful in order to buy useless goods, produced by people who equally perform useless jobs. In order to make useless goods useful and increase the salivation level of the consumers, we invented the advertising industry. A massive deception, a kind of self-hypnosis for profit.
We have lost all sense of reason and communal purpose. We are like a load of laundry that has been washed and re-washed in a washing machine whose programme has gone haywire. Information and advertising, which at one time were two separate things, have now become one, merged into an obscene entity that is everywhere and justifies everything. The destruction of the planet, the elimination of time (no one has time for anything these days...), the loss of all meaning, the total lack of any values other than financial one. We have lengthened our life span only to find that we can no longer afford to live so long, because we are too busy producing. Having, having has become our drug of choice and we work in order to have. We have transformed our world and ourselves into a GDP, into perishable goods. We have everything, yet we no longer have anything.
In a society that is based on production for its own sake and at all costs, anyone that loses his/her job becomes nothing more than a dead weight. He/she is out of the game. In order to survive, one must have a job, any job will do. Work is progress, work is the future. Progress, instead, should mean a reduction in the amount of work. The elimination of unnecessary work. Work for everyone, but only if the work is useful and in a reasonable quantity.
The damnation of work is the “other” side, a mirror image, namely the social parasites. Those people that don’t work, thanks to the useless work of other people. They are merely devourers of human and environmental resources. They don’t have a job as such, but they manipulate and own the capital, often huge amounts of capital. They are the ones in control of the wheel within which the often unwitting workers turn. Social inequality is what makes useless work become essential. Social solidarity and the equitable distribution of resources would spell the end for production for production’s sake, as well as for the financial parasites. What sense is there for any Country, such as Italy for example, to have millions of people living below the breadline and millions more unemployed, while hundreds of thousands of other people are inordinately wealthy? What does it mean to “live” in the same Country for the tax evaders and for the temporary workers? Poverty is the raw material for consensus for all regimes. A wealth threshold and a poverty threshold must be established, neither of which may be exceeded. To have or not to have.