I started to think about
the idea and the figure, if you like, of the emancipated laborer.
Emancipated, of course, in a double sense,.
That, to some degree they have a job situation
which is under their control as opposed
to being controlled by capital.
They have a livelihood which is kind of acceptable.
They have living conditions which are reasonable.
So you could say I have a certain image of emancipation,
which is emancipation from the travails of actually living and working
under the domination of a capitalist mode of production.
But I think emancipation also means something else.
And I started to think about, well, the thing that probably would concern me
a lot would be that people be emancipated in their conceptual apparatus,
in the way they think, that they can actually see through
all of the games and bourgeois tricks that get played,
all of the ideological gambits that are around, all of
the false promises which exist through advertising
and all of the things that go on and through social media.
The emancipated labor would be somebody
who is emancipated in their heads and in their consciousness.
And I was thinking to myself, well, if I wanted somebody
to be emancipated of that sort, where would I begin if I was in a position
to somehow or other instruct them on how to think about the world?
There are these five points: the quality of life in the household,
the nature of the labor market (how it's organized and how fair it is,
and all the rest of it), the experience in the workplace.
Then there is the kind of experience as money manager
and then as a person but as a buyer in the market who then takes their stuff.
So if you have those five points, if you like.
And so one of the things I would say to a working person is to say,
think about the qualities of those five points
and isolate for me one or two things in
that whole circulation process which are most troublesome for you.
Where’s the point where you feel that there's most
aggravating circumstances and something that
you really would like to see cleared up and the like.
And so at that point, the worker is in a situation
of being able to address the conditions of their daily life.
And instead of me coming along and saying whether you should do this
or you should do that, the emancipated labor to think about
the qualities of those different moments and their experience
in those different moments, and where that experience needs
something done to it to make it fairer, more acceptable,
more useful, and more facilitative
for you personally.
So you would ask those questions.
That point, it would seem to me, is a point where you start to say, Well,
I'm not in this alone.
There are other people
I see in the supermarket, there are other people I see in the bank.
There are other people I'm seeing in the workplace.
There are other people I'm seeing in the labor market.
So you would then say, why not start talking to people about these separate,
different moments and ask that question so that everybody starts to think
and then collectively come up with an idea that we’re going to have to try to push
somehow or other some sort of regulatory practice
so that all of this cheating, which is going on
in terms of mortgage originations and all of these scams which are going on.
By asking this question, it seems to me
you start to define what is lacking and what kinds of things
are lacking in the current society, in the current situation.
What I'm talking about here is not something exceptional
because in fact, people often are doing this.
One of the things that
the pedagogy of the emancipated labor will be about
will be trying to get people to think through what it is
and what are the issues that most concern them.
This may sound and is of course incredibly reformist and it's very small scale.
But my point here is that this small scale
is actually part of the process
of organization building that has to be gone
through and things should always come back to the local level.
That's one of the things that seems to me is really essential, is that what happens
is that many of these ideas get put together
and they become national kind of crusade, whether it becomes a national issue,
which it has to become at a certain point, planetary issues
at a certain point, even though they must they must do that.
And you should never, ever give up on the fact that questions
which should be addressed at a global level come back to
actually change the life of
ordinary people in ordinary situations.
So there are there are modes of action that people can do.
And I'm not saying everybody should do that.
What I'm saying is that there are examples of all kinds of possibilities
which are very hopeful in the sense
that what they do is they start to actually create
the ferment on the ground and a hopeful possibility.