Chapter 22: Capitalism and Logistics / Rhythms of Life

In a society under a Capitalist paradigm where life is dominated by the forced demands to constantly come up with ransom money, one's job is essential to survival, even if it is damaging to one’s health and well-being. Most employers offer little or no flexibility or tolerance for anything that interferes with the employer’s perceived business needs. Yet life doesn't always fit into that constraint. People have doctor appointments and medical procedures; cars need repair and servicing; toilets overflow; roofs leak; extreme weather makes commuting to and from work hazardous; loved ones come to visit and only have a day or two; loved ones get sick or need rides to necessary appointments; errands sometimes need to be run during work hours; court appearances need to be made and more. Yet most employers place strict limits on when and how the employee is permitted to respond to these kinds of situations without endangering their job, meaning their survival. One is forced to choose to take sick days and lie about it, take unpaid days off, or use one's vacation days to take care of errands and so forth, always subject to the approval of the employer.

It is true that there is variation among employers in this matter. Some employers are very accommodating and others utterly inflexible. The overriding reality, the norm in a Capitalist paradigm is that all such activities are subject to the whim and approval of one's feudal Lord AKA employer. Under Capitalism the employer has the right to approve or not approve, has the right to terminate the employee at any time for any reason. The employer is lord and dictator of your life and time during the hours that they specify. Many employers specify and limit when, how often and how long one may or may not go to the bathroom. Under the “at-will” employment paradigm, this situation has become even more dire. Under Capitalism this is deemed to be their right.

Apologists for Capitalism point out that the employee is also free to quit at any time, but this is a largely meaningless assertion. If the employee quits without having another job or source of income in hand, most will face homelessness in a very short time. Survival will be denied if not paid for. For the employer on the other hand, loss of the employee is usually a minor inconvenience at worst, since there is no shortage of people applying for most jobs. In addition, under Capitalist paradigms most jobs will suffer from the same stresses and dysfunction as the one the employee left. Any laws protecting employees in such societies were passed only after a long and bitter struggle against an army of powerful mega-businesses working to block them.

Under Capitalism, people’s lives are fragmented. The job dominates existence. Still more time and energy go into the process and mechanics of paying the various parties that one is forced to pay for the privilege of being permitted to continue living. There is little or no flexibility to enable one to weave one's life together into an organic integrated whole. Instead one must do all of one's necessary activities and errands under stress and on the fly, often missing paid work days and having to choose between livelihood and the other necessities of living. This creates constant conflict, intensifies stress and perpetuates alienation and the lack of healthy continuity.

In post-Transitionary paradigms, demands upon the individual will reflect actual, rather than artificially conceived, enforced and inflated, need and necessity. Hierarchies will be replaced with peership. Human happiness, well-being and quality of life will replace profit motive and "business needs” as primary criteria for deciding priorities. Nobody will need to come up with money to live. The logistics and choreography of daily life will have the flexibility to allow truly integrated lifestyles to develop and flourish.

Of course, there will still be situations where one will have to put their job first and leave other things on hold temporarily. Examples include harvest time in agricultural settings, crises in a hospital due to accidents, disasters or epidemics, and other real crises that occur in life. But these will be real situations, not artificially imposed from above as is the case in Capitalist societies, where artificially-inflated overproduction and cutthroat competition translates into capricious, arbitrary deadlines and production demands on employees. If it will improve stock prices to get the latest model out before the next financial quarter, even if the new model has no real improvements over the previous model, then employees will be under a level of stress and pressure that is best reserved for true emergency and crisis situations. Under normal circumstances after the Transition, one will be free to choreograph one's life in ways that serve self and others in balanced and reasonable ways.