Survivable work and surviving despots [Note: Content Warning]

This is just a quick “get my thoughts down” post. 

Firstly, survivable work. 

Our (Australia’s) treasurer has “flagged changes” to stop people taking superannuation early. This is a common response, including pushing retirement back, of governments concerned about the impact of people living longer. Well: 

1. People are not economic cogs: the economy exists to serve us, not the other way round.
   The 8 hour working day campaign was based on 8 hours work, 8 hour rest, and 8 hours recreation - and that has been lost at the hands of tech-heads and unions fighting the last working rights war. We - and our economic masters (and that word does apply) - need to start remembering that, and stop thinking about whether we are “serving the economy enough” (often termed “contributing enough” - and sent up on social media by someone as “rich people’yacht money”) and start accepting that simply by existing as humans who do not do harm, we are “doing enough”.
   The unemployed bashing and judgementalism of the concept of “are we doing enough to be worthy of X” actively creates and fosters petty despots in everyday life - the sort of evil IPOCs who make life unbearable, especially for women, all people with caring duties, the less-than-fully-abled, members of minorities, CALD people, etc.
   I’ll restate that: thinking based on whether we are "serving the economy enough" is directly and actively discriminatory - it exacerbates inequity. 
2. Governments and economists need to get over the lie that money invested by governments is less active than money invested by private industry.
   There is no excuse whatsoever for governments not to invest money for future needs. Here in Australia we finally got an acknowledgement of that with various futures funds, although the neoliberals appear to have done their usual neoliberal s**tf*****y by trying to sabotage it, but one of the key outcomes of Norway/Norway’s state owned enterprise hiring a philosopher to advise on the income from fossil fuels is that some should be set aside “for a rainy day”.
   People have been promised income from government investment so they can retire comfortably before now - I am thinking of the promises made specifically in World War Two - and we have that sort of expectation. Deliver it. 
3. People cannot keep working indefinitely, and how long they can work varies from individual to individual. Learn to cater for that.
   Canada has a scheme where people can retire at different ages - but they get a higher pension if they retire at an older age.
   Despite that, people do get worn out by work - and not just blue collar workers. I’ve worked as a white collar worker all my life, but the sheer ****ing INTENSITY of work over the last couple of decades has utterly destroyed me, and I am struggling to survive until I can access my super.
   I also support the case that Indigenous people should be able to retire earlier because they have shorter lives as a result of discrimination.
   Perhaps worst of all is that these changes are effectively retrospective. If some has been timing the destruction of their being from work with a view to being able to stop at age X, the sudden deferral of that to age Y is an act of vicious, malicious, savage sadism.
   

Governments: start serving your people, not your “rich people’s yacht money”.

(I've written about this previously.) 

Next: surviving despots. 

Western governments - especially the USA - have a long history of “intervening” (read: regime change) to support despots and others who are against the economy (“rich people's yacht money”) - such as supporting a fruit packing company over the people of Central America and 1950s Iran, supporting despots they felt comfortable with in Vietnam, and changing the tune to attack despots who were no longer “acceptable”, as happened in Iraq.

That has given the phrase “regime change” a sour taste - and yet there are unquestionably regimes where that would be beneficial - as an example, getting rid of every junta and replacing them, with a genuine, inclusive and equitous democracy. 

The African Union affirmed that just recently. 

Part of the problem is that the military fetishism that has infested governments means the quick, visible clubbing to death of an inconvenient regime gets more political brownie points than using consultation combined with genuine firmness when it is needed - and voters share a role in that, based on their votes and unnuanced responses when problems occur. 

But there is a despotic regime that is in trouble at the moment: Erdoğan’s, in Türkiye. 

Ever since the coup a few years ago, Erdoğan has been becoming more and more authoritarian - although that had started beforehand, which likely contributed to the coup. 

The recent devastating earthquake there has shaken the faith many people seemed to have had in Erdoğan’s regime, and there is, just as an earthquake opened the way for him to come into power, now the prospect of an earthquake removing him from power. 

What should western governments do? 

Support the people of Türkiye in their pronouncements, not Erdoğan - don’t prop up a despot, possibly out of unconscious fear about one’s own situation or guilt over past errors (and adding new types of mistakes to old does not ease guilt, it enhances it). Let the people of Türkiye have their say and do as they deem fit without military or economic interference from us.