Labor histories are among the saddest, discouraging accounts of human civilization one would ever know, were this body of knowledge and experience held to esteem. Leisure histories by contrast are ubiquitous, anachronistic models of human labor: everyone a king or pharoah, a tyrant, philosopher or homeowner, a fat and content spectator of horticulture and blood shed.

When industrial action against Ryanair picked up, I tried to catch up on aggregated numbers. (I did learn a little about the varieties and structures of trade unions' associations in the EU, by comparison to US custom, never mind their places in complementary "black" histories.) In this industry sector, interstate unions' coordinated planning has been a crucial, enforcement tactic in successfully mediating employment relations --in general and specifically.

But to start with mass is only to conceive the political significance --read, "market power"-- of a particular group enterprise, in the sense merely of numbers of "organized labor" members. I was disappointed not only because the usual international suspects (eg. OECD, ILO, etc) and press demons seemed to have abandoned periodic reporting, but what is published enforces an intuition about declining membership. The people in Brazil are not alone. A statistical claim, for example, that Iceland and Ireland represent the greatest ratios of union membership in the world challenges credulity. My cursory appeal to sacred "empirical data" informs me:

Ideology of an individual, the "self-interested actor," has been as wildly successful --in terms of propagation, socialized adoption-- as any money per se representation of extrinsic value in disorganizing political precepts and action against exploitation of human functions. The evidence is all around us. Braced by the anthologies of which I speak, I think, the mass is as responsible as any one person for accepting imagination of "weaker labour." Or no labor. This is a prerequisite for the leisure which people crave: rest without work, product without function, power without responsibility to or responsibility for one another. "Socialism" is a dead-letter in a value system for which "society" contains no properties or functions but anathema.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.