Intro:
This thing we call "work" is such a large part of our existence, that I can't imagine people not wanting to be in control of it. I can't even fathom the idea of people accepting this as anything even close of being tolerable. We live in an age where the bad guys have won and they've raised generations of people to accept it. We live in a top down prison land!
Part 1: Education
Of course, the story all starts with our first day in school. You're nervous about making new friends, it's a whole new big world, new experiences and you get your first glimpse into society. You learn all the defaults of how your little school world works. You learn which kind of kids you get along with, you learn personal responsibility, social skills and last but not least... obedience.
Yes, obedience. Your number one key to success! Get to class on time, do all your work, stay quiet, raise your hand to ask a question. Sure, personal responsibility is a great key to life, but what's the point of all of this? To be apart of a functioning society? No. You're taught obedience to save yourself. You always have to answer to an authority figure or a number of authority figures.
Now, to be fair, it's not so much the structure in the class rooms which is the problem but the lesson that the students take with them home at the end of the day. After all, it'd be a wishful thought to assume kids weren't in need of guidance. But the lesson they take home with them is one they'll most likely run with for the rest of their lives which is to find personal success, ignore the success of your peers and focus on pleasing the master (or the "teacher").
Familiarizing children with hierarchical systems is an early default taught to them by the older generation. It's the same logic that's kept humanity enslaved to each other since the beginning of civilization.
Part 2: Domination Culture/ Techno-Bureaucracies
We are all living in a hegemonic culture in which we subscribe to normal domination structures. Unlike totalitarianism, where we all succumb to one dominant power, capitalism has loosened our chains a little and instead divided us into thousands and thousands of miniature forms of tyranny. These little top-down structures consist of politicians, police, financial institutions and most noticeably... private corporate tyrannies. This is also known as "managerialism." I think it's important to label it as an "ism" to decipher it from what most people would consider it to be... a natural human tendency.
Corporate hierarchies generally consist of the chairman, then the CEO, then the general manager and then the other little managers below that person. It's a general system where everyone basically has to answer to someone else. One of the problems with a top-down work environment is the relationships it creates between employees and managers. Many people get the feeling of incompetence from their managers because of the persistent feeling of being looked down upon and reviewed while they work. Generally speaking, most people don't prefer the feelings of mistrust and scrutiny, especially while working for eight hours.
Another issue with having various ranks of employment is the balance of responsibility. Managers have higher amounts of responsibility in regards to the welfare of their company which leaves workers below feeling less entitled and concerned about their jobs. Imagine having someone who was expected to drive your car around for you whenever you needed to go some place, all the while you had the competence in you to learn how to drive yourself. You would never feel entitled to learn to drive and therefore you'd be less skilled and more dependent. This would also lead to deficiency.
Part 3: Four Hour Work Day
Our free market, as you may or may not know, is anything but free. The various constraints it puts on workers is nothing short of a voluntary prison sentence. Of course... you don't have to be subjected to a corporate 9 to 5 job. There's always homelessness or... I guess throwing yourself in front of a bus could do the trick as well.
There is no democracy for workers in your typical corporate structure. The only real reason workers have any safety standards is because of governmental regulation and the only driving force outside of managerial decision making is the profit incentive. The amount of hours you receive at work all depends on the company's ability to schedule you from which is determined by the amount of profit it receives.
An important thing to distinguish is the amount of productivity that takes place versus the amount of time a worker spends at their job. For example, having an eight hour schedule doesn't guarantee eight hours of output. The amount of income a business takes in doesn't equate to the amount of hours a worker actually works. Therefore, a company may have excess product or excess time that amounts to absolutely nothing.
Now, while a worker may financially benefit from the extra hours they receive, it's also important to note that this is a waste of time as far as productivity goes. The point being, people waste lots and lots of time doing nothing. This is a part of the reason why efficiency suffers and also people waste away so much time that they could've been enjoying.
One step towards solving this issue would be to create workplace democracy on a large scale. Give people the power to control how much actual time is needed for a good day's worth of production. There would need to be an alternative to the current profit driven production.
Part 4: Alternative Proposal
It is a widely accepted idea today that competition is what drives productivity, but does the average worker really go in to work each day with the idea that their hard work is going to destroy their company's competitors? The true force behind productivity is more likely to be our collective struggle for survival. At the end of the day, people just want to eat, have a bed to sleep in, enjoy themselves with their hobbies and socialize with the people they love.
The idea that cooperation has failed because state communism has failed is just absurd. State communism failed because it was implemented through totalitarianism. State communism was based around serving the ruling party and a command economy. Neither of those two actually dealt with cooperation or democracy.
So while some may point to the pathetic examples of North Korea (or any modern day tyranny) as reasons to why "communism" has failed, there are numerous other examples of cooperation actually being very successful.
A lot of the examples of successful cooperation would take more time to expand upon than I'd be willing to explain (because they've already been elaborated on many times). Some examples worth looking into however would be the 1936 anarchist Catalonia, the worker-run Argentina factories, the various examples of worker-run cooperatives all over the world, the Mondragon Corporation, Dan Pink's TED talk on the science of motivation or any of the other mountains of evidence which show the success of worker-run, horizontal work structures.
Outro:
Looking at the real issues of managerialism, it ultimately comes down to power relations. When does a person possess too much power? How can power be justified? Although worker control has its roots deep in socialist theory, everyone across the spectrum can generally agree that their own personal oppression is worth fighting. But how can we ever solve the issue of oppression when we treat it with power struggles (tugging back and fourth to gain control) rather than dismantling the very hegemony that keeps it going?
The issues of power that we're presented with are always set up as false dichotomies. Democrat or Republican? Socialist or libertarian? More taxes or less taxes? Union or management? But at the end of the day, your own free will is what ultimately suffers and you're never satisfied, but there's always the next election... the next chance for hope and renewal.
Truth is... the only way out of this mess is to work together. As simple as it sounds. Cooperation is the key to finding liberty. It all starts with education. That was the very point of all of this. This is to present the evidence. The cases for cooperation can all be read online. It's not a dream world or a utopia... it's just a way of dealing with our human nature. A dream world is one where people can be trusted to rule over others, economic inequality and the crime it generates is a way of nature as well as the justification for the wars that were all fought in the name of some grand power struggle. In a dream world, it's ok to be poor and the economic deprivation that's forced among children growing up in low income housing is completely justifiable. In a dream world, we can look down upon the low productivity of welfare recipients while completely ignoring the excessive wealth granted to those at the top of this cannibalistic social food chain.
We need to deal with our own reality and confront the entire domination culture at large. Until we realize our true potential, we'll never stop making the same mistakes over and over.
Information Sources:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
http://thinksimplenow.com/productivity/the-4-hour-workday/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_Catalonia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
http://vodpod.com/watch/3439516-the-take-naomi-klein-2004
http://www.syndicalist.org/archives/llr14-24/15f.shtml
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