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In Praise of Collaborative Labor
An alternative to capitalism: rethinking where exploitation comes from and building a culture and system that makes it obsolete.
I have earned a PhD from an Ivy League school, taught in universities, worked in the corporate world managing projects in excess of $50 million, started businesses, and developed websites writing backend code in Ruby on Rails. I now choose to shovel horse shit and pull weeds on a farm, and find it the most rewarding job I have ever done.
Make no mistake, agricultural work is back-breaking work. That’s why few people would choose to do it if they could do something else. But we all need to eat. If I don’t grow my own food, someone else will have to do that for me.
In human history, hard manual labor is almost always done by the bottom rung of society: slaves, surfs, peasants, peons, prisoners, and now in the USA, “illegal immigrants”. If a certain work is absolutely essential but few want to do, then the powerful will compel the less powerful to do that work for them. And since there is a power differential, the work done will not be fairly compensated. The people doing the actual hard work are always paid less than those who crack the whip.