We are today surrounded by an abundance of productivity that the market does not recognize or value. In this consumer society, we think about “work” as what people do to pay for goods and services in the marketplace. If our work doesn’t earn money, it’s not counted as an economic asset. The power of the market is so strong that we often don’t recognize or value work that is essential to society’s future. The unpaid contributions of homemaking, parenting, volunteering, care giving and citizenship are not valued or nor appreciated.
Americans (and many others in the modern world) have internalized a limited definition of work defined exclusively as employment in the market economy. As a result, we have discarded the real and potential productivity of young people and retirees—and everyone else who is outside of the paid workforce.
Todd Suomela on 29 Jul 11"The real problem is that the State and Market are locked in a symbiotic alliance to the detriment of the commons. This unholy alliance so tenacious because it is embedded in our very phenomenological understanding of life, writes Mattei. We perceive the world as a mechanistic system in which subject and object are separate and distinct, and we supposedly have individual autonomy to do what we wish to act upon the world. As subjects, we tend to pracel out and commodify the world into units that are isolated from the larger whole; thus we see humanity as separate from Nature and the various elements of it (wetlands, atmosphere, genes) as isolated objects. "
