this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Antiwork
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Date Created: June 21, 2023
This community supports labor, with an aspiration for it to cease to be required to live our lives. Members of this community want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and/or want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.
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Essential Reads
Start here! Some of the more talked-about essays on the topic.
- The Abolition of Work by Bob Black (1985) | listen
- On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2013) | listen
- In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1932) | listen
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The difference is someone has to do the labor to stop you from being homeless and starving. So, either you will do labor that can compensate them- or you should do the labor to stop yourself from starving. Starvation is the natural state of humanity
Starvation is the natural state of the individual. Society separates us from that. You will find that other things are also fairly natural, such as death, disease, and exposure.
Unfortunately, for the support that manages to feed people, work must be done, and not every job can find enough people that want to do it sincerely to avoid some people hating their job.
That doesn't mean employers should get away with being exploitative and abusive, or that reform isn't needed. But the philosophy "no one should ever have to do something they don't want to do" is unrealistic.
Agreed. Now imagine if the people doing the work they don't enjoy, do it because the compensation outweighs the hardship. Rather than creating systems that both compensate disproportionately less for some roles in society AND ensure there is enough labour through coercive means.
Lets say everyone gets free college education, and there is no bias in the system for who gets to work where. No one wants to be lets say.. a technician for utility lines, or work in maintaining sewage systems because there are easier jobs.
Should we a) increase compensation or b) make it difficult for people who work there transition to other work.
Universal healthcare, unemployment income, free education, universal child care, universal housing etc. all undermine the societal ability to keep people at work that is difficult but underfunded.
I'm on board with the reforms that properly recognize jobs people are inclined to hate as deserving of being some of the highest paid rather than lowest paid. I think health insurance should not be tied to employment (universal ideally, but at least decoupled from employment benefits). Free education to a point. I think universities need to be held more accountable for efficiency, rather than anything resembling a blank check (the well-intended student loan system has caused unintended badness without any accountability for actually managing expense). I'll accept that universal 'housing' can be difficult when you get into the minutia (a fine line to walk between providing universal housing and appearance of just packing away undesirables out of sight, and auditing the living conditions)
You listed power line technician, but Linemen (as they are called) make crazy good money. I believe they deserve more, because the job is insane, but it's a skilled, union job that pays very well.
Also they commonly only work 4 days per week.
Awesome. Firefighters are also paid quite well and have an on and off schedule. Thanks (sincerely) for the name - Linemen. Couldn't remember it for the life of me.
All labour requires skill, some more, some less. Unfortunately pay doesn't always scale with skill and danger/dislike/inconvenience etc.
I agree that there should be rewards for doing undesirable jobs. It would improve coordination.
We could have a society without employers. Everyone could be individually or jointly self-employed as in a worker coop. Such a society would give workers control rights over the fruits of their labor, which employer-employee relationships inherently deny. This denial makes being an employer by itself exploitative and abusive. We need to abolish the property relationships of work not reform
How so? Isn't the point of this meme that you have to work in society (in general) to not starve?
Some societies have figured out how to care for people better than other societies.
That's awesome!
No. Capitalism requires that we 'work'. I.e. provide output that is valuable to the capitalists. In a normal society, there are other forms of value that merit the person existing.
But also, we're human. One of the reasons I want people to not starve is that I'm not a sociopath. So sometimes the value a person provides to society is that they're not starving in the middle of the street. There's value in that.
What's a normal society? Is this a no true scottsman argument? It'd be my perspective that in the vast majority of societies people generally have to work to live.
Good point! Let's start with a definition that's something like... a society of humans that are treated like humans, and not treated like 'human capital', and go from there.
This is false. You need to provide output that is valuable to your consumers
No, the owner needs to do that to stay in business. You need to provide output valuable to the owners. The owner can decide whether you need to provide value to the customers or not.
Example: Nepotism.
Because unethical acts that are bad business practice are such a great example.
Nepotism isn't unethical. The owner of the company has every right to do what they want with their capital. There is nothing that says the owner must act in a rational or profit seeking way. A CEO must act in a profit seeking way, but that's because he is accountable to the owner.
It's also not necessarily bad business practice. You seem to be suffering under the misconception that the world is a meritocracy, and the 'best' person for a job should get it. That's not how any of this works in the real world.
Regardless, you seem like a creative chap. You can come up with other examples of when a business owner might keep someone on payroll that wasn't directly to extract value for the customer and instead to provide value for other reasons. I believe you can do it.
I can think up all sorts of things, but that doesn't make those things good business practice.
What's "good"? Maximized growth? Maximized returns? Having your face on the TV the most times you can? Making a name for yourself in your town? When you're the owner, you choose what 'good' is because it's your business.
And to my point, since the owner picks what is good, they will employ people whose output is valuable to the owner.
"good business practice" would be behaviors that are good for the long-term health of your business. These are objective, not subjective. You might want your face on the news but if it hurts, rather than helps, it's poor business practice (just ask Papa John).
You're still assuming that long-term health of the business is the 'good'. You may think that's good, and when you're a capitalist, you can choose that as your goal. It may even seem like the most obvious goal. But it's not the only one. "Good business practice" is whatever achieves the goals of the owner of the business. Otherwise, it's not a good business, because a business exists to serve the owner.
Scenario: A business owner chooses to liquidate his entire company and shut down so he can retire. This is a good business decision, for him. But it is clearly not good for the long-term health of the business.
This is false. There are many types of work that the market fails to value accurately. An example of this would be economic public goods. A producer of these will not be rewarded anywhere near the social value of what they produce
I didn't say you're rewarded commensurate to value brought, but rather that workers produce output valuable to consumers.
The person I was correcting misattributed what work fundamentally is, from an employer's point of view, to represent it from a point of view that seeks to "other" the employer.
In some cases, the valuation of work by the market due to it involving economic public goods can be insufficient, so people producing valuable public goods are forced to take on another job. In the case of public goods, there is nothing for the employer to appropriate and exclude others from to charge consumers for access, so employers don't value it despite it being valuable to consumers. I don't believe they were mis-attributing what work is under the current economic system
Thank you for articulating this very important distinction!
Morally, everyone has an equal claim to products of nature and the value they add to production. Today's economic system denies people their equal claim. If society secured people's equal right to natural resources and their value, the notion of coercion in the post would be reduced. Therefore, the economic system's structure causes this coercion not just nature
No sufficiently sophisticated political ideology is against labor (capitalist work is not synonymous with labor). On the contrary, most anti-capitalist ideologies are extremely pro-labor.
The question isn't whether we need labor, that's reductive and (currently) we obviously do. The question is how should labor be treated. Right now labor is a commodity to be bought and sold by capitalists. If we instead setup a system that decommodified labor, outlawing renting of humans (just as we have with buying humans), then even in a market-based economy you have far better compensation for labor.
Market-value for labor in a capitalist society is done as a commodity as I've previously said, so the goal is to reduce the price of the commodity as far as allowable for the business owners. This means a viable path towards profitability is reducing the labor force, or cutting compensation. This is why layoffs happen when companies are doing incredibly well, to increase immediate profits.
If instead there was a democratic assembly of workers that held their interests in common, there'd be no reason to just layoff a bunch of great workers during times of good business.
In short, we don't need two different classes with two different relationships to capital. Instead of allowing one class to rent the other, compensate them as little as possible, and pocket the surplus value, outlaw that commodification of humans and allow the market to properly compensate workers.
This isn't an end all solution, but market socialism is a massive improvement over capitalism, and once we dismantle the parasitic owner class (capitalists, landleeches, cops, etc.) we can focus on more interesting discussions about the merits of markets in certain situations (e.g they're good at reacting to consumer desires, they're bad at accounting for externalized costs like climate change, etc.)
With respect to climate change, it has more to do with the property relationships of the current economic system than the market itself. If natural resources were commonly owned and people had a recognized right to their value, polluters and other people harming the environment during production would have to pay citizens collectively proportional to the social costs. Then, prices would accurately represent the social cost of pollution involved in the production of the product