Attitude, attitude, and attitude

These are the three most important words in Claire Wolfe's new book How to Kill the Job Culture Before It Kills You.

I know that Sunni reviewed it, but I have a different take, so decided to contribute my two cents.

In my opinion, Part II of the book "Freeing Ourselves", is the most important, and most powerful, section. Chapter six, the closing chapter for Part II, alone is worth the price of the book. Claire offer 12 tips for getting out of the job trap, closing the chapter with "The #1 most important thing". Namely "Attitude, attitude, and attitude." This is the great strength of the book. It is written for those who have the correct attitude.

As she points out, everyone is in a different place, so it is impossible to lay out a single, or even thousands, of detailed plans to get oneself free. Instead, in Part II, and especially in Chapter six, Claire gives those with the right attitude many things to think about. If someone is looking for a clue, this book has many for them. If they are not, then no amount of step-by-step guidance will work. If someone is like the main character in the latest JibJab production "Big Box Mart", then this book is not for them. It is for people who really want to escape the job culture and are at a loss as to how to start doing it.

In Part III, a possible, admittedly sketchy, vision of a post job culture world is presented. Once again, I feel Claire gave just the right amount of information. It is impossible to say what this type of future world would look like, but this rough vision can spark the reader's imagination. They can think up their own vision. Mine is rather different from Claire's but I would not have thought about it if she had not planted the seed.

Part I, "Why Jobs Suck", is the only section I have problems with. While chapter three, "The Free-Market Case Against Jobs" is excellent, chapter one "Inventing the Job Culture" leaves a bit to be desired. Specifically the notion that people had more free time, or worked in a more "organic" way, prior to the Industrial Revolution/Job Culture. Claire does not romanticizes the pre-Industrial period, noting that poverty, hunger, and disease were everyday reality, but seems to think that people had more time with their families.

This may have been true for a part of the population, including some of the poor, but for a large percentage it was not. She quotes Ernie J. Zelinski, who says "The early Greeks and the Romans relegated all activities done with the hands, done under orders, or done for wages to the lower-class citizens or the slaves." Guess what classes most of the people belonged to in those societies. Guess where we probably would have been.

She rightly takes conservatives to task when they define the "traditional" family in terms of the 1950s, but her alternative is subject to the same criticism. Why take the pre-Industrial period as the base? We were pre-Agrarian for the earliest and by far the longest period of our history.

However, these complaints are minor. This is a very good book for anyone who either wants to get out of the Job Culture or for young people (such as my children) who do not want to get into it in the first place.

Finally, I am going to disagree with one point in Sunni's review. Sunni says: "The only other substantial quibble I have with How to Kill the Job Culture Before It Kills You is a subtle thing that many readers probably won't notice; in describing shifts in work environments and relationships Wolfe often asserts that individuals were forced to do certain things, or to give up others. I wonder how many of them, unarmed with the hindsight we have, would view their choices in that way. While it's true that they may not have fully understood what they were giving up in taking the jobs they did, outside of true slave labor individuals did have the choice of trying to secure employment in a factory, or to stay with a specific job under changing conditions. To characterize voluntary choices as forced adopts a victim mentality that is probably inaccurate, somewhat hyperbolic, and undermines the shift to greater self-reliance that Wolfe is advocating."

I think the word "forced" is appropriate. Many people had to leave the land and take factory jobs because the State forced them into a cash economy. Subsistence farmers could not pay the new taxes, because they did not have money. Many lost their land. Given that a free market did not exist, and that it can be strongly agrued that the market was in fact less free for the common man than it is today, the choices these individuals had were greatly limited.