I just wanted you to know that.
But also, labor should come with a ranked ELO system for unlockable cosmetics and titles to make society more productive than it has ever been before.
"But nobody would do the shitty jobs!"
Nobody would do them 40+ hours a week. If we rotated it and I only had to do it like once a week with a shorter shift hell yes I'd volunteer to collect garbage. It feels good to be be doing something useful and important.
All that farm labor that we fob off onto immigrants? Explain U-pick farms then. If we freed everybody from their fake jobs, I think we could manage it. Do it like my dad did trains in the USSR. Send a bunch of people out to do the work for a while and then send them home to do absolutely nothing for a month or two. My dad used to maintain the refrigerated train cars in the USSR. He worked 2 months on, two months off and he got to travel to every republic. It was perfect for his severely ADHD brain.
Plus if I knew my work was going to help the community and for the good of everyone instead of to enrich my boss and landlord I'd be motivated to do anything. I've always said I'd pretty much do any job if I only had to work 2 or 3 days a week. Society could totally run just fine on everyone working 2 or 3 days a week if we aren't trying to maximise profits for the capitalist class.
People did the shitty jobs before there was even money or capitalism. I would absolutely work in a sewer if I could also live a comfotable life otherwise and knew I was being genuinely useful to others. And we could prioritize automating said shitty jobs. Why not have shit drones for sewers? Why not have your local library drop you off a Roomba once a week or so to clean your floors for you? Why not aggressively automate mundane bullshit if capital isn't using slave wages as a substitute?
We talk about FALGSC like it's some far-off dream, but we do have the technology now to do a lot of it, if only we could abolish wage labor. We might not be dyson sphering the sun, but we can certainly more equitably distribute the benefits of automation.
Yeah I was thinking about who deals with the literal shit of the world and it became obvious to me that everyone should do manageable parts. Some folk would rather help with the plumbing in their neighborhood than the garden and vice versa.
All that farm labor that we fob off onto immigrants? Explain U-pick farms then.
I mean, to be fair CSAs fix that problem in a slightly more ethical way as well
I laugh at all the chuds working their asses off
I cry for all the comrades working their asses off
Imagine working a laborious job and only lamenting that you can't take more if your free time to work more. Even further, lamenting that other people aren't spending enough of their time on a task that could be automated away
Loot boxes is capitalist innovation. All my homies love a clear reward structure with a time-gate that can be overruled with more gameplay.
Uhm ackshually people who don’t conform to life under capitalism deserve to starve
The amount of people I work with who blame the people for taking money to not starve instead of blaming businesses for paying so pitifully isind numbing. We're also always complaining about the shit pay - across all departments, ages, seniority levels, and authority levels!
I want less well-meaning lib friends and more Soros-funded comrades 🥺
Corporations are the real Marxists is even deeper brain worms than antifa being the real Nazis
Ain't no such thing as lazy! Just different people with different levels of motivation, energy, and ability; and they're all equally valid. . :heart-sickle:
I am far more concerned about people being overworked/underpaid than I am about “welfare queens” or whatever.
Stop forcing people into shitty wage slave jobs, provide them security, let them pursue their passions, and "laziness" would be much less of an issue altogether. I don't think someone's " lazy," for wanting to just stay home during a damn pandemic. Ridiculous we've allowed this notion to become so prevalent.
I suppose so. I was sort of hoping we would have shoulder pads, capes, and elemental swords instead of suits and cars.
If you played enough online games you'd know that just working as usual for two years wouldn't guarantee you higher elo than working as usual for half a year.
Golf, lie to shareholders, and sexually harass subordinates?
all ceo born after 1992 only know golf, lie they shareholders, and sexually harass subordinates
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
Have you guys heard of this work abolition thing? The idea I think is that society should try to incentivise labor by tying it with access to (even luxury) goods and services. We shouldn't nessesary strive for productivity considering that in economic sense it's tied with environmental destruction.
Edit: Shit. The idea of work abolition is that we should NOT incentivise labor by giving people thinks they want conditionally.
For sure, I think doing something cool, good, difficult, or even doing unpopular work should come with perks. Maybe not dominion over enough wealth to dwarf a South American country, but there's no doubt society ought to value and thereby incentive certain behaviors. But nobody should ever have to fear automation will take away their meal ticket in my world. Nobody should feel obligated to get to work even though they have a fever because they're not well-staffed enough and they'd be evicted if they missed that day's pay.
Being a doctor, when compared with other super 'professional' jobs, is very difficult work with a hard path getting there. Why do people want to be doctors, then? What's the 'perk' that makes up for the (again, relatively) poor easiness-to-pay ratio? Why not be an engineer? The perk is that it is important, good, and cool and it's viewed that way by our society.
Since doctors are paid well, people have no trouble properly assessing their value. Compared with a home health care worker taking care of the elderly for $10 an hour, which is viewed much more poorly.
Or think about how otherwise apolitical people sign up for the military for the validation and veneration. That's an unhealthy instance, but I don't have much doubt that once you remove the classism that clouds people's perception by removing wage inequality, the cool, good, hard, unpopular jobs will be highly valued by society. And that is incredibly important to people!
I'm not against perks that stem from the situation either... your family getting to see exhibits at the museum you clean before the general public, for instance. But too many external, abstract perks will lead to the same classist mis-evaluations. It's such a powerful thing - we currently value social media marketing experts over utility workers, lol
Everyone should be able to do what works for them. I am just not a focused, productive person most of the time. Working an office job is like 80% faking my way through it. Other people seem like they're wired for productivity and aren't happy unless they'd doing something, which is great, they should go forth and do what fulfills them. But for me, work is not fulfilling. It's draining and makes me miserable. I shouldn't have to live in a way that is completely opposed to my natural brain chemistry just so some dead-eyed psycho can make another billion killing people and destroying the planet.
Also, most office jobs don't actually do anything productive. Not that the skills used in office work are necessarily a waste, that there isn't a genuine need for office work. But a lot of things that are ultimately about marketing, about preventing theft, about producing some bullshit plastic tat that will end up in a landfill, about presenting information so some executive can decide how to extract the most wealth from both their customers and their employees, all that stuff just stops needing to be done, at all. I don't need to work a cash register because making sure people pay the right amount of money for the food they're taking isn't actually valuable work, it exists only for the sake of making someone else rich at the expense of others, it exists only to gatekeep goods from those that need it but can't pay for it.
Imagine a grocery store transformed into a food dispensary. You don't have to work the cash registers. You don't have to move everything from one side of hte store to the other because corporate thinks confused customers buy more shit they dont' need the longer they wander around lost. You don't have to simultaneously check every receipt super carefully to make sure no one's stealing anything while also not bothering customers in the slightest and getting the wink wink nudge nudge from management to keep your eyes on black people going into the expensive part of the store.
You don't have to get yelled at by the store manager who hasn't worked a day in their fucking life because you called in sick yesterday. You don't have to constantly dart back and forth trying to stock tiny shelves with not nearly enough space for niche-ass products that'll sell out in a few hours because there has to be twenty different types of identical cereal, you can just have a huge wall of the shit people are actually coming into the store so you have plenty of time to keep it continually stocked without rushing. You don't have to tape your receipts to everything you buy and get screamed at by management anyways because they think you might be stealing a 70 cent bottle of generic soda, you can just pull it off the fucking shelf and chug if you feel like it. You can wear earbuds and listen to music, audiobooks, theory while you work. You can have not shit music playing over the intercom, or at least silence or something generally nice that won't drive you up the fucking wall the twentieth time you've heard "I Want You and Your Beautiful Soul" today. If you're out of something, you can just take something off the shelf to do the job at hand instead of just not cleaning something up because the store's out of the "approved" cleaner.
You can actually hang out with your coworkers, date who you want without fearing that you'll make coming into work difficult if you break up since you can literally just start helping out at a different dispensary if things go really bad. You can ask a "customer" to help you with something if they're handy instead of just struggling to lift something over your head like a fucking schmuck. You don't have to put up with someone demanding you do 10 hours work after scheduling you for 8 and yelling at you when it's not done in 6. You don't have to compete with other employees for hours even though all of you are fucking tired and don't want to work so much. You can wear what you want and be honest with others. You don't have to try to upsell a "customer" something they don't need and can't afford when you know what it is they actually want. You don't have to have any moral dilemmas watching someone trying to sneak something out, worrying you'll lose your job and be unable to pay rent if you get fired because you didn't try to stop someone who really needed it. You don't have to be forced by some coward in management to go tell a homeless man to leave and not sleep on that bench nobody is using because it makes rich shitheads "uncomfortable."
So much of what makes work suck has everything to do with capitalism, even the work that will remain after can be so much better.
Great post. Most people like getting things done when it can be an outlet for socialization and they're not being micromanaged. So many come home from official "work" and voluntarily go do more work - church bake sales, coaching youth sports, helping people in their cycling group fix their bikes. And more people want to do those things but can't because official "work" drains them so completely.
It's such a stupid take that people would all sit at home if we eliminated capitalism. Evidence to the contrary is everywhere.
Forcing lazy people to work both devalues our labor and makes things more difficult for people who want to work.
Fun fact: in revolutionary Catalonia, individualist anarchists who didn't work were just fed by social anarchists, for free. Even during war, producing enough food to feed everyone, including the so-called lazy, isn't really a problem. It's only when we attach monetary value to food that we start treating giving away food as somehow equivalent to giving up having some other necessity later, because we get brainwormed into thinking food is money and money is rent so if you feed your neighbor you might not pay rent or get to replace your broken TV or whatever.
Even the shittiest person should still be able to eat and have a decent place to live.
