{"id":392341,"date":"2019-01-10T17:46:50","date_gmt":"2019-01-10T16:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/what-are-we-working-for\/"},"modified":"2019-01-10T17:46:50","modified_gmt":"2019-01-10T16:46:50","slug":"what-are-we-working-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/what-are-we-working-for\/","title":{"rendered":"What Are We Working For?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cOne also knows from his letters that nothing appeared more sacred to Van Gogh than work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013 John Berger, \u201cVincent Van Gogh,\u201d Portraits<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Ever since I was a young boy, I have wondered why people do the kinds of work they do.\u00a0 I sensed early on that the economic system was a labyrinthine trap devised to imprison people in work they hated but needed for survival.\u00a0 It seemed like common sense to a child when you simply looked and listened to the adults around you.\u00a0 Karl Marx wasn\u2019t necessary for understanding the nature of alienated labor; hearing adults declaim \u201cThank God It\u2019s Friday\u201d spoke volumes.<\/p>\n

In my Bronx working class neighborhood I saw people streaming to the subway in the mornings for their rides \u201cinto the city\u201d and their forlorn trundles home in the evenings.\u00a0It depressed me.\u00a0 Yet I knew the goal was to \u201cmake it\u201d and move away as one moved \u201cup,\u201d something that many did.\u00a0 I wondered why, when some people had options, they rarely considered the moral nature of the jobs they pursued.\u00a0 And why did they not also consider the cost in life (time) lost in their occupations?\u00a0 Were money, status, and security the deciding factors in their choices?\u00a0 Was living reserved for weekends and vacations?<\/p>\n

I gradually realized that some people, by dint of family encouragement and schooling, had opportunities that others never received.\u00a0 For the unlucky ones, work would remain a life of toil and woe in which the…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair \u201cOne also knows from his letters that nothing appeared more sacred to Van Gogh than work.\u201d \u2013 John Berger, \u201cVincent Van Gogh,\u201d Portraits Ever since I was a young boy, I have wondered why people do the kinds of work they do.\u00a0 I sensed early on that the economic system […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-392341","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}