I mean… probably originally, but that’s not all that it is, nowadays. Some people really do unironically mean the former, in that sub on the social network that shall not be named (though I haven’t checked it for… hrm, almost a year now!:-P).
You mean that sub that saw a huge surge in subscribers, increased bad faith actors, and general chaos ahead of the infamous mod schism that shredded any credibility that might have been hanging on?
As someone who watched it happen in real time, no one will ever be able to convince me that all of that was a coincidence.
I didn’t go into the details, but yeah you got exactly what I meant:-). 💯
Some of them were probably even real.
Represented by the dogwalker in the famous interview
Lmao it was hilarious. Destroyed all the credibility in one strike
Link to the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCo-OgSC7Ps
That was as intentional and obvious as the agent provocateurs that were used to break up and arrest the occupy wall street protests.
They’ve stopped shooting us because MLK Jr became a martyr. Now they just arrest us and make us disappear.
I do feel like the former or something close to it should be our goal as a society.
Um… you probably meant the latter, as in the second one, right? Eating Doritos while slaves do all the hard work - presuming we aren’t talking about non-sentient robots but actual people - sounds kinda selfish to me:-P.
Edit: to clarify, I’m down with the live like a King 👑 and eat Doritos 🔺 parts, it’s only the pesky slavery 🤕 part that I’m against!
Lol, I did mean the former, but yes, I was imagining automation/etc taking over the role of most jobs.
Best I can do is bad AI art and music to take away the hobbies of a lot of people and to stop paying people who do that for a living.
Oh man, so very many movies would disagree with you there. “I, Robot” and “Terminator” come to mind, and “The Matrix”. But perhaps most important: “Wall-E”, as in those fat fuckers sat down and simply… never stood up again. (yeah, you can tell I am old from my selection:-D)
Don’t get me wrong, Doritos are effing delicious! But also, we need some amount of balance in our lives to help make them worth living. What we gain in comfort there, we lose in autonomy, and that’s not a trade-off I would willingly make, even if I could. I mean, I’m not insane - or Amish - I use technology and I enjoy comfort, but I also value the ability to give something back to society through my work.
What e.g. “made America great” (in the 50-60s) was that people’s work would get them something in return for it - a house, a family, college education for their kids, etc. - as opposed to today where other than rent work only buys the ability to purchase barely some food & weed, and many people have lost all hope of ever owning their own home, or getting healthcare.:-( I get it - that’s beyond fucked up. But what that means is that something was stolen from us (autonomy & freedom), not given (comfort & ease, e.g. look at Google search).
TLDR: When we become reliant upon the machines, that’s when they own us rather than the other way around.
we need some amount of balance in our lives to help make them worth living. What we gain in comfort there, we lose in autonomy,
Is it really inherently a reduction in autonomy to remove compulsory labor from society using automation? Why? IMO the whole, spend your life in a job and get the American Dream in exchange thing, is not really freedom and is not much of a choice, even when the work to reward ratio is favorable. Being able to actually choose how your time is spent beyond picking between various jobs which all require you to live the same general sort of on-rails lifestyle could ideally mean a lot more autonomy than we’ve ever had, and there’s no reason I can see to think the result would have to be a bland culture of Wall-E style consumerist vacationers. Our imagination of leisure is defined by its nature as a brief reprieve from working life. Why should we be limited to that, if we had space to grow past it?
I also value the ability to give something back to society through my work
To clarify: work need not be “compulsory” in order to give back to society. I have contributed towards multiple Open Source software projects, been a moderator of a small & then another medium-sized Reddit sub, written the sole content for many a wiki page and aided the creation & extension of far many more others, etc. - not one bit of any of that gave me any direct monetary compensation (though may have helped me get other jobs, from polishing those skillsets), but was all fulfilling and helped my common human to enjoy their leisurely pursuits, and that was enough for me.
And doing that kind of non-compulsory work I feel like adds to my freedom, rather than detracts from it. For the same reason that walking or cycling to some places enhances my enjoyment of life, rather than always having to take a car - and yet I have also been without a car entirely for certain periods of my life, and yes that too was constraining. It is best to have choices imho, from my own direct & personal experiences.
The scenario that Wall-E describes is that they leaned so heavily into their “comfort” that they literally lost the ability to have choices anymore - instead of being able to choose to sit, or stand, or walk, or run, or bike, or swim, etc., their only “choice” was to sit in their chairs. Period. This is not “best” - this is not maximum “freedom”: when you have zero viable alternatives, that is in fact no choice or freedom at all. Leading up to that: sometimes you have to stand up, even if you don’t feel like it in the moment, in order to preserve your ability to stand up in the future. And if not, well that’s your “choice” - but is it though, if it is not one based on informed consent?
Why I say the latter is that, remember that the OP graphic specifically precluded automation: it talked about living like a king, eating Doritos, “while other people do all the hard work”. Essentially it advocates that we all be like Elon Musk, playing games all day long and then taking credit and all the monetary rewards resulting from that hard work of others. The implication even goes further: that we would be forcing others to do our bidding as our slaves (colonialism = do that to “others” abroad, vs. inflation where we do it to our own citizens at home). To that I say fuck that noise! But then we got off on this other tangent, which is: what if other humans didn’t have to be slaves, and robots just did all the work for us? Okay… that’s not nearly so ethically unsound as the OP. But my point was that it is still far from the ideal, unless we made (non-compulsory) work a part of the balancing of our lives - exercise and rest, not one or the other but both.
TLDR: When we become reliant upon the machines, that’s when they own us rather than the other way around.
I am not advocating for slavery here, e.g. as opposed to having robots do our work. On that point I think we are in agreement - it sure would be nice if robots would take over the compulsory stuff (NOT HUMAN BEINGS USED AS SLAVES!!1!!), to allow us the freedom to live however we choose. So moving on, next: if we sit down into those couch-chairs, then we make slaves of ourselves, i.e. our comfort takes precedence but at the cost of our autonomy, whereupon we have lost something - our freedom to choose what to do next. So my note was a cautionary tale, to be mindful of the balance, as opposed to the overly simplistic “work=bad (always)” mindset that was so prevalent in that sub, even before bots took it over. In the OP graphic, the second meaning of ditching work would be unquestionably good, but the former one of ditching work MINUS THE HUMAN SLAVERY PART would not be a uniformly positive outcome… and in fact I think it would be quite negative, overall.
So my note was a cautionary tale, to be mindful of the balance, as opposed to the overly simplistic “work=bad (always)” mindset
I think we’re basically in agreement then. Work definitely doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It’s just so conceptually tied up with the institution of jobs that it’s hard to know exactly what people are talking about and considering. The OP image and its responses are a little confusing to me because, not being compelled by force to do a job implies at least the option of sitting around and doing nothing, and there is a popular sentiment that is violently opposed to anyone having that option, often accompanied by arguments about work being necessary for people to have purpose, as if we can only have purpose if made to work. Also arguments like, there is work that needs to be done, so it’s only fair if everyone be made to work, and that’s the only way.
You’d be dismayed by how many people don’t even have that scruple, as long as it’s happening in the third world.
Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism after all.
I mean… current democracies are, and all of them throughout history have devolved into plutocracies, before eventually falling. e.g. the USA is neoliberal, and it is not the only one:-(.
But I don’t know if all “social democracies” inherently imply that. Then again, that term might just be a fantasy one rather than applicable to irl structures, especially in the modern age of the internet and therefore the “disinformation age”. Who could have guessed (cough Reagan cough) that some nations might want to take over other nations, not with overt warfare that could cause mutual nuclear annihilation but by simply buying out a single TV station and being allowed to label it as “news”?
details
But from a personal standpoint, isn’t gradualism the only way to have any hope of any kind of impact at all, without the weight of a corporation or government behind someone? e.g., upon hearing that children without protective gear are being used to gather cacao used to make chocolates and not being paid fairly, do we personally avoid purchasing chocolate forevermore, or upon further learning that children harness cacao without protective gear purely for fun (apparently it’s easy and enjoyable?), and that their only other alternative is actual slave labor like in a mine or some such, continue our purchases and maybe even buy more (getting fair trade wherever available)? Personally I have no fucking clue, but I could see someone ethically going either direction, and that’s something, though on an individual level neither seems like it would do much good. (personally I am leaning in the latter direction, lately, b/c you cannot regulate or improve an industry that does not exist, but I suppose that depends on what else you would purchase instead - bananas? sugarcane or a derivative? what foodstuffs even don’t involve slavery at some point!? but that’s what I mean: you can’t improve something unless you keep it alive, so if you switch to something that doesn’t involve slavery, that’s awesome, but if you cannot, then maybe pick something to improve and work on that until it gets better - which is gradualism, aka vote for Biden now and hope for better later, even if it seems unlikely, b/c you know for sure that Trump will move things in a direction for the worse)
Social democracy maintains that very exploitation. There is little disagreement among liberals when it comes to the exploitation of the third world.
You want food stuffs that don’t involve slavery? End neocolonialism.
Social democracy maintains that very exploitation.
Right, it maintains that exploitation… by keeping the democracies of the Western world functioning. Whereas in contrast, Right-wingers want to end all of that - the democracy, the modern society (of e.g. middle-class), etc. - and replace it with both even higher exploitation abroad, as well as similar levels of it at home as well.
An analogy is a person who stinks, due - in part - to the fact that they refuse to wear deodorant or wash. If we kill said person, they won’t stink less - in contrast, they will stink quite a bit moar! - and they still will refuse to put on deodorant and to wash themselves (and in fact, perhaps they could have been persuaded to do such before, but now they are flat incapable of either no matter what amount of either carrot or stick are used).
That said, when I mentioned “keeping the democracies of the Western world functioning”, I don’t mean to imply that democracy is the only way to survive. Rather, I meant that the two things are not mutually exclusive - we need some kind of government, and then the principles that (meta-? hehe) govern said government will dictate what radiates outwards from it.
To pick one notable example, an “Emperorship” (oh right, “for a day”… r-r-RIIIIIIIGHT) where one man (person? no, who are we kidding) ruling the masses might do it? But that seems extremely doubtful, especially given the propensity of Trump to just grab whatever he wants that is within reach - even if that thing is someone’s genitals.:-( (of either gender, one to pet and the other to crush ruthlessly, like Chris Christie’s hopes & dreams)
There is little disagreement among liberals when it comes to the exploitation of the third world.
Um… I think you are perhaps not listening to the right set of liberals? Probably there is a more specific (narrow) meaning to what you said like modern philosophers or some such, perhaps adding constraints like what might be viable in the modern world, in the sense of traversing a pathway from here to the desired end-goal, and if so then I probably could not educate you further than you already know. But not all liberal-minded common folk agree that exploitation is either good or even that it is not horribly bad, I can tell you that much! John Oliver is one such exemplar - I know, he’s no “philosopher”, but at some point shouldn’t the opinion of the masses weigh in, especially if the way to get to there from here would be by voting?!
You want food stuffs that don’t involve slavery? End neocolonialism.
Absolutely, we should! Except right now, Boomers are still in charge, so how about we play Russian roulette with the very existence of our nation instead? And then, even if we survive, we’ll leave Mitch McConnell and Mike Johnson in charge of our budgets from basically here on out, while also paying lip mere service to liberalism (which doesn’t mean that liberalism, in theory, does not espouse certain values, only that like Magats follow “Christianity” and “Patriotism”, we’d rather merely say that we do but we really do not).
That said, when I mentioned “keeping the democracies of the Western world functioning”
Most of those “democracies” are dictatorships of capital who depend on the exploitation of the third world to maintain a standard of living at home, the essence of social democracy. Maintaining them isn’t a good thing.
I think you are perhaps not listening to the right set of liberals
I think you are not looking at the history of their actions or reading between the lines. The sales of weapons to western-backed dictatorships for the purpose of putting down restive populations in the event they try to rise up don’t stop when a democrat is in charge.
I can’t speak for living like a king but we were able to recently confirmed again the whole lazy proletariat myth is a capitalist fiction. During the COVID-19 lockdown we had furloughed workers with a perfect opportunity to just lounge for months, and they just couldn’t. Healthy adults just can’t couch potato and watch TV for two weeks. When they try, they get cabin fever and start leaning how to
widdlewhittle wood into bear sculptures. The Great Resignation was driven partially by lockdown hobbies that became lucrative,I, personally, can couch-potato out for weeks, but at my worst, I have slept for months, getting up only to eat and excrete. I didn’t sleep always; sometimes I’d lie there awake but my inertia would be so great I couldn’t lift a hand. This is avolition a symptom of mental illness, such as major depression. When doctors noticed that I can make like a log for almost a year, I was diagnosed and qualify for disability.
When all your workers are lethargic or crabby or stealing all the nitrous canisters, maybe your workplace is toxic. Maybe the managers aren’t actually managing but acting like children who need to be handled. Or maybe you’re not paying them enough to get out of precarity, which is a major cause of chronic mental illness like major depression.
True dat. A lot of people would love to work - making art, preparing meals, teaching students, protecting innocents, prosecuting criminals, building things, knowledge discovery, curing sickness, caring for needs, etc. - if only the managers would allow it rather than impose all those constraints for profit or no reason except to sound (and be) bossy.
Oh, and also for proper pay - at least enough to be able to eat and afford a home. And a LOT of dedicated people skimp REALLY heavily on the latter, I mean workers doing the job for a fraction of what they are truly “worth”.
“But nobody wants to work anymore” is code for “they don’t want to do what I say, how I say, if I say, for next to no pay”.
I’ll do a LOT of work for a friend for free, but not for an ass-hat unless compensated appropriately or as close to that as I can manage.
leaning how to widdle wood
“Whittle.”
Barring some hobbies both risky and risque.
Work as capitalism defines it is alienating. I am very much against unfulfilling drudgery.
Most of us are, including me. Chase your bliss - I truly hope you find it:-).
But please, don’t make other people into your bitch.
Your choice is one thing, but why force others to do your work for you? Read the OP again in case you missed it: in addition to living like a king and eating Doritos, it also says “while other people do all the hard work” - the keyword there is people, as in human beings, not robots.
If, as you claim, you are “very much against unfulfilling drudgery”, then why would you support having others do that work for you?
And maybe that’s not what you meant, so it’s all good and we are in agreement. But it kinda sounded like the opposite, and you were against work only when you might have to do it, and thus by implication perhaps for work so long as it is others who end up doing it? So I just wanted to make sure that I did not leave that unsaid.
You do you, that’s great, so long as you allow the same of others. That’s all I’m saying.
Listen, I’m from the rural south. We do basically everything ourselves. If a toilet needs repaired, we fix it. If the road needs to be graveled in in the potholes, we fix it.
Nobody is asking to do no work. They’re just tired of doing work at the behest of the capitalist class. The problem is that work is both an adjective and a noun. Nobody likes the noun.
The OP graphic literally already distinguished between these two classes. The second one is the “work” you mentioned - we all seem to agree on that part - while the first one is the “sit on your fat, lazy ass while forcing others to do all the work for you”. I hoped that most people here would agree that outright blatant slavery is wrong, but based on a lot of comments here, unfortunately I see that that assumption on my part was wrong. Mea culpa. !antiwork[email protected] is oddly pro-slavery I now understand.
Also, you seem to be arguing for literally all of the sides of this, literally all at once. “We do basically everything ourselves” = “we do the work”… as we… both are saying? Except “Nobody likes the noun”, except I guess when everyone in the South does it, and me too.
Btw, every single nation on Earth has a “south” - from your username, am I to assume that you are from South Africa?
Listen,
Wow, starting the conversation with that right off the bat, huh? :-P
those are a small minority, from my experience over there.
Is anyone even left there at all? (On Reddit I mean, not just the sub:-P)
i think a sizeable chunk of leftists migrated here, so probably a bunch of people using at least both.
What? A left wing movement that uses the wrong name to make people understand what they truly mean? Really? Nah, that would never happen!
Adversaries to a movement will split hairs and redefine a movement anyways.
That’s all we are seeing here. Look at now they tried to frame Black Lived Matters, something quite clean cut.
No. We suck at naming things. And communication in general.
“Black Lives Matter Too” would have been more clear.
“Replace the Police” would have been better also.Even mainstream Democrats suck at it. They should be shouting every day, how they’re taking on big corp’s, going after antitrust abuses and unpaid taxes; While refusing to audit anyone making less than $250,000. But instead they just keep saying some variation of “The economy’s great, stupid.”
They would have willfully misinterpreted both of those alternatives and convinced you they were poorly named anyways.
They may have willfully misrepresented, but couldn’t really have an excuse to mistakenly misinterpret them. That was our bad.
Is your argument that a genuine, good faith interpretation of “Black Lives Matter” is “Only Black Lives Matter”?
This isn’t how English works. If I say “I like your mom” to an SO, they wouldn’t interpret it as I don’t like them and instead like their mom. I don’t have to say “I like your mom too”.
Anyone coming back with “all lives matter” proves the ease of confusion over the slogan.
My own immediate response to it was “Yah, of course they do. All lives matter. Why single out Black lives? The police shouldn’t be killing anyone.”
I’m not going to try mind read anyone else.
People who go out and counter protest actively have given it more than a cursory thought. They know BLM isn’t advocating for white genocide (okay, most of them understand this. There are some literal nazis/skin heads/white nationalists in the counter protesting groups that believe in The Great Replacement, but they believed this prior to BLM existing).
Yet they still go out and counter protest. It’s not confusion at that point. You can’t go up to an all lives matter reactionary and say “Hey! Did you know BLM doesn’t actually want to murder all white people? Are you a fan of BLM now?” and actually expect any progress.
Why single out Black lives?
Isn’t that kind of the point of BLM?
It should have been called of course black lives matter then move on from the stupid race baiting movement and get back to living.
Law enforcement based on the Peelian principles is not a tennable thing. Sure, every US beat officer will learn it in training but they also learn the public is the enemy, which has been the way of things for over a century.
if we could imagine a new age of policing, it would involve much less enforcement and much more prevention, mostly disincentivising people from engaging in desperation crime. Heck, we might even end retributive sentencing for a more restorative system.
If we dropped our current law enforcement – the whole thing – and turned to investigating and intercepting elite deviance (white collar crime) we would save more lives, prevent more damage and more cost by orders of magnitude. Not that law enforcement actually does much to reduce crime.
Leftists can name things appropriately. You just proved that. It’s the “moderate” “liberals” that run the DNC that have the issue. That’s just because they are desperately trying to to convince the right that “there won’t be any significant changes,” while still pandering to the center. They don’t care about the left except to make us shut up and sit down.
If people are trying to make you shut up and sit down then you’re probably the problem.
If that’s the case I’m proud to be a “problem,” and “inconvenience.”
Your time is up weirdo commie.
“too” implies
a) they don’t matter yet
and
b) mattering is a new concept we should consider.
The statement is clear without modifier and requires no qualification, clarification or context: do black lives matter or not?
Or to take the inverse: under what circumstances do black lives not matter? If the answer is “there are none” then obviously black lives matter.
You’re not wrong, I guess the biggest issue with it being misconstrued was by people who watch Fox news, but honestly Fox news was gonna find a way to spin it no matter what.
I’m not sure if you’re arguing for or against “too”.
Because yah, police specifically, and society generally, have been acting as though black lives don’t matter. And the slogan “black lives matter” was created to argue against that idea. But it was easily confusing. Hell I was immediately confused the first time I heard it, and actually thought “Well yah. All lives matter. What are they talking about?” It took me a good min or two to understand. But simply adding the “too” immediately clarifies that.
“Black lives matter” isn’t wrong. It’s just not immediately as clear as it could be.
BLM was a scam, a grift… that’s an undeniable fact.
What was achieved? Because what we witnessed was violence, theft and property destruction. If you deny this, you are willfully ignorant or a bold faced liar.
Oh and Malcolm X was right. More Black people should study Malcolm X and his message.
I distinctly remember Malcolm X saying the white moderate fucking sucks
Malcolm X saying the white liberals
Fixed.
They are kind of the same thing, no?
Classical liberalism and all that jazz.
Classical Liberalism is an economic philosophy.
It’s unrelated to sociopolitical liberalism.Bold of you to assume the two aren’t completely intertwined.
Some people do argue for a post-work, scarcity-free utopia. However, I don’t see how that’s ever a possibility even in an endless universe unless we solve mortality and answer every possible question there is about the nature of existence and reality. There will always be “work”.
I think work reformists look at exploitative conditions both at home and in developing nations, and rightfully want better. There’s no reason why millions of people cannot be lifted out of poverty via direct intervention. Training and educating those people for whatever self determined purpose makes the most sense. Currently people’s lives are wasted on perma survival mode, and it’s a waste of human intellectual potential and intellectual capital.
to make people understand what they truly mean
Sizable portion won’t understand though. That’s a big issue with that sort of names
Yeah, but that interview on Fox News really killed the movement pretty hard lol
Why? An interview with any right wing idiot doesn’t dent their movement
Because their movement is idiots.
Because they lost all credibility that day
No, a jackass appeared on fox.
You gotta stop doing the propaganda for them, dude.
Yes I agree with that but what matters is how the people saw it. That jackass became the face of the movement, and with that face the movement could only die
Actually given the mass of ‘how to push back against bad bosses’ ‘workers rights explained’ ‘go fuck yourself employers’ et al across the net i’d say otherwise.
Genz is notoriously not putting up with bullshit.
Perhaps in the USA, which may or may not be true. But many of us internationally haven’t even seen the interview. Either way, [email protected] is more appropriate.
A leading figure (well, mod but…) acting like a fool and making the movement sound ridiculous does happen fairly often.
So they lost an argument to Fox and fox are the idiots. Do you realize how stupid you sound?
Behave
It’s hard. I must reply to far left and far right views. Both are the problem.
Is that right? To the average person, “Anti-Work” sounds like you’re straight up against working, and unless you want to explain this to every single person individually, Fox News is going to keep having a field day misrepresenting your movement.
Yeah, “Work Reform” is much better. There’s this weird trend of massively exaggerating a talking point, as the echo chamber seems incapable of thinking about any kind of optics or moderation
No work reform implies slightly different, which isn’t the point. Any message must make you question the system.
If you’re marketing only to people with critical thinking skills you’ll miss most of the voting population, but you do you.
“Anti-Work” does this better how? I’m genuinely confused
Honestly that mod torpedoing the whole movement with a dumb interview and forcing the rebrand to work reform was probably one of the best things that could’ve happened.
Leftists really suck at marketing. Between that, antifa, and defunding the police, they really don’t seem to know how to put a name to an idea that can’t be misconstrued by an opponent with the maturity of a 5 year old (which, as luck would have it, is most opposition). I’d even argue BLM should be on that list.
Edit to add: global warming.
We’re really good at marketing exclusively to other leftists.
Yes, the problem is you create a bubble and look stupid when you talk about anything outside of your bubble.
I believe it stems from Liberalism. Class consciousness is on the rise, but newly-class aware liberals aren’t yet aquainted with Leftist theory. These ideas are popular among liberals that are becoming more familiar with leftism but are disconnected from the centuries of leftist progress.
The real problem is that big media (and therefore the prevailing narratives) are all controlled by the authoritarian corporate establishment.
Black lives matter is the least hyperbolic statement of that movement imaginable. That there was pushback even on that framing speaks more to the vile ess of its opponents than to a failure of marketing.
You might want to put it on your list but it’s the opposite problem to your other examples if anything.
- 60 seems optimistic
- Plenty of “antiwork supporters” do believe option 1
- Your stance is valid
They may think they believe it, but the lockdowns of 2020 showed otherwise. Unless you’re one of the “lucky” nonneurotypical people with a disorder that makes it possible to just lay around and do nothing, people go stir crazy. Feeling productive may as well be on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. That’s one of the reasons the great resignation happened. Way too many of us are working bullshit jobs, and we got to face that reality head on, and didn’t like it one bit.
Once I saw a guy arguing for pure capitalism because otherwise the state would have to force people to work with threats of incarceration or whatever.
It’s like some sort of trolley problem delusion. It is fine shoving desperate people into whatever jobs they can get, but only if the Invisible Hand does it. It’s fine if the threat is homelessness and starvation, but only if the Invisible Hand does it.
Why the hell haven’t you guys shifted the movement name over to work reform after what happened on tv? It’s not helping
Exactly! I have a genetic illness that caused congenital deformities and injuries and disability later in life, starting around my teens thanks to puberty.
From an early age my relationship with work was distorted because I found myself trapped in the gap between two pathways. I was obviously capable of work, with the right treatment and support I had a lot of potential. But I was disabled, and I required expensive supports and medical intervention, and under the public healthcare system there reaches a point of disability and limitations in capacity that you are written off by the system. Shoved in a residential group home, given a pension below the poverty line, and expected not to try. (genuinely, we’re expected not to try, if someone on a disability pension works a job, they can loose their pension, which is many cases is also tied to housing and access to medical services)
I’d flip between the two systems, I’d have a great few months with regular access to treatment, I’d get a job plan from the dole office, I’d sit through work readiness courses, I’d be getting healthier and looking forward to working and being a good little contributor to society. Then I’d hit a waiting list for my medical care, my health would slip, I’d be re-assessed by the welfare department and deemed too disabled to work, my job plan would be shredded and I’d get a pension support plan. Then I’d get to the top of the wait list, resume treatment, and get back to getting to work.
I didn’t start a “real job” until I was 24, it was a call centre gig and I near killed myself trying to do it.
It wasn’t even hard. It was a true 9-5 (no overtime, no bullshit) and you mentally didn’t need to bring any of it home with you. It was easy for me, but my body decided it was too much. My health suffered and it took years to fully recover, with me barely pulling myself together here and there for gig work in between being bounced on and off the disability pension system.
The whole endeavour was far more expensive to tax payers than a system like UBI. Processing my case 70 times because the disability support, and employment support eligibility requirements are so strict and the lines between streams so black and white took a lot of administrative resources.
I’ve been in my current industry for 10 years this November. I work part time, 12-20 hours a week depending on my health. I’m highly successful in my field because I’m working within my body and mind’s means and playing to my strengths. I’m a whole person with a life outside work and I bring that range of experiences to my job, enriching what I bring to my organisation - which is good, because my job is a mutual exchange between me and my employer, it’s not exploitive towards me the worker, which further prevents burn out for me.
But we exist within the capitalist system of funding and our wages are set by the department of health and human services. I make $34,000AUD a year and it’s not enough to survive.
But if I work any harder my body will not survive.
I’m asking to do what I can do for my community, while living a safe existence… Not being forced to choose between litteraly breaking my back working for someone else’s greedy profit, or starving in a tent (though realistically, a lot of people are doing both)
Anti-work is anti-exploitation.
It’s not about people wanting to be lazy yet still have all the niceties, it’s about not being coerced into a lifetime of labor to enrich the ones coercing you. A person’s labor should enrich themselves and those they choose.
Anti-work is anti-exploitation.
Well, then why not call it anti-exploitation? That would clear up a whole lot of things.
I think that would cause a different confusion. I don’t know that this is a concept that can be expressed in a single existing word. Sometimes concepts take time before the right word arises. No sense blaming people for using the language available to them to express a novel idea.
It is tricky to make something both snappy and accurate. I think anti-JOB might have worked better, but it sounds like a sex strike, so don’t put me in charge of marketing.
If everyone here, as they claim, is not against work, then why call it anti work? Why not call it anti labour exploitation?
For all the claims made in this post, I see a hundred saying that wage labor is the same as slavery, so this is a bit hard to believe
As someone who is legitimately anti-work I have a real problem with people who just want to change things. We’re not getting FALGSC with “work reform” because then there’s no reason to fully automate it.
“Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism” for those that want to save the time searching.
What even…?
I just learned the term, but it sounds like the society from Star Trek but everyone is Sulu.
FALGSC isn’t going to happen overnight, and work reform is a realistic interim solution.
Arguing for lower hours and more pay to match the massive increases in productivity we’ve seen over the last 100 years is totally feasible. And a step in the right direction long term.
FALGSC is currently not feasible, and at this rate automation is only making the rich richer
So much this, even if we saw automation replace millions of jobs tomorrow, it would take years for any meaningful shift to support those out of work. On the other hand, even some conservatives are interested in 32 hour work weeks. Baby steps are the most we can realistically hope for.
We’re pretty far from being able to automate everything
And we’ll stay that way as long as we think people should have jobs
Which is why it’s a goal not a demand.
Thank you for getting it
There’s [email protected]
When I dig my garden I am doing work. That obviously entails no wage labour let alone labour exploitation. Why is it hard to belive people might be against wage labour in its present form but not against fulfilling, self directed labour?
Because getting food from your own garden is cute but absurdly unsustainable for 8 billion people in this world?
Like it or not, factories and large companies are the reason that 8 billion people can love on this planet. Granted, said companies can be quite abusive and a lot of rules are still in place allowing this abuse, but we’re getting better at it, ymmv per country. Either way, abuse is not as bad today as it was 100 years ago or even 50 years ago. If automation and AI continue their current course, we’ll all be working 2-3 day weeks soon as well.
Either way, I get the point, I’m just saying don’t swing too far in the other direction either.
Just an example, take caring for my kids or decorating my house or even working out if you don’t like that one. What do you mean by “the other direction”?
I’m sorry, I don’t understand. You listed child care, and hobbies. What havr those to do with work?
The other direction being this antiwork thing which is highly unrealistic and in reality just a bunch of lazy guys complain about having to actually do work, like everyone else, thinking that somehow magically the world would be so much better if everyone dat on their fat ass
OK so you’re just here to strawman and insult. Thanks for outing yourself.
No I said what my average experience here in this sub was, relating to the original post. Yeah, most people here quite literally simply don’t want to work, and somehow think that goods and resources come into existence magically or something. So yes, I call them lazy because that’s what they are.
If you want to have a serious discussion about work situations needing to improve I’m all for it. I just don’t want to have another discussion about “my vegetable garden will sustain me, the entire world should do this”
Also, I quite literally did not understand what you wrote as you listed childcare and hobbies
Yeah no.
That is not what most here say when they talk about it. It’s immediately “working for a salary is slavery!” (Literally that I’ve been told literally dozens of times now here)
Everyone can agree with the second paragraph, most people here subscribe to the first paragraph, though.
Didn’t they have a whole civil war over that in the Reddit sub? Some genuinely thought the sub was for people who just don’t want to work at all and some were more thinking of work reform
Something like that, yes. I believe that was the cause why /r/WorkReform was started which is much better name - less confrontational, less off-putting for people who might be on the fence on the topic. Because honestly, “anti work” means “against work”.
The civil war was mainly because one of the mods went on Fox News, and it did not go well.
That’s putting the dogwalker fiasco mildly
It’s weird how the name doesn’t break down to what it really means.
If only there was a word that meant forced labour that injured the worker.
Every time someone brings up wage slavery, there’s some doofus who feels the urge to argue that it’s unfair to chattel slavery.
“Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.”
— Frederick Douglass
So… anti-physical labor work?
Non-physical labour is also often incredibly stressful, stress has similar effect on both mental and physical health of people.
Hm… I can agree with that. Especially if working in a toxic environment. After all, when you’re negatively impacted mentally, it does have the effect of making you physically lethargic.
Not just lethargy really, chronic stress is really bad for your body. Also the symptoms make it more likely for people to not engage in good lifestyle choices like exercise and better food.
Personally I am in favour of the former definition, just substitute “othet people” with “automation”
