You’ll see people on anti-work posting stories about their bosses taking advantage of them and the responses are almost always, ‘quit your, get a new one and double your wage/salary’.
‘Bro your job and your boss suck, just quit and get a new one with 2x pay’
Or ‘I hate my line of work, what should I do’
A:‘Just get a job at a fortune 500 and transition into a different role’
Or ‘just go back to school bro’
I’m studyied engineering and this theme hits even closer to home to people like me.
‘Oh you earn 50k as an engineer? Weird, the entry level pay of people in my company and everyone I know ever is 120 Million’
The general sentiment on reddit and places like antiwork is one of anger, frustration with our economic system, or general despair. But the frustrations always seem to be ‘I am living paycheck to pay check in a big city earning 200k’ and not ‘I have a PHD and I’m struggling to find a job that pays above minimum wage’, which is more of I’ve encountered. Why does everyone seem so fucking comfortable?
Because most of us actually struggling don't have time for, or don't give a fuck about reddit.
Can't bitch at people on Reddit when you're busy cutting coupons and picking up day labor on your day off
Reddit's principle demographic is socially awkward white male labor aristocrats who work at tech. This was true pre-Digg migration and is true now. Given all this, it's no surprise the go-to advice is "find another job that pays more."
what's a bit funny is that it's started to get harder for them.
But they are Very Important Main Character Computer Touchers that deserve job security and safety nets, unlike those le underwater basket weaving humanities majors!
Reddit is the heart of petty bourgeoise discontent. Its telling that even people who look like they have it good to us are also discontent and feel precarious. Their attachment to the proletarian cause is thin and not only certain, but as the crisis of capitalism intensifies, more and more of them will enter/be dumped in our camp.
Antiwork was always a dogshit sub, just like every other sub that's "anti-tankie"
Fucking va*shites
I’m against the problem but I wouldn’t dream of supporting the solution
Free college and legal weed would fix it. Anything left of that is tankie.
Also I am pretty well convinced that anti-work sentiment is either a natural outgrowth of naive, unprincipled, unmaterialist contra sentiment (e.g. anti-government, anti-authority, anti-bosses etc.) or it's an op.
The revolution is going to require hard work, and there's no convincing me otherwise.
Securing the revolution, after it's successful, will likewise require hard work.
It is sometimes asked whether it is not possible to slow down the tempo somewhat, to put a check on the movement. No, comrades, it is not possible! The tempo must not be reduced! On the contrary, we must increase it as much as is within our powers and possibilities. This is dictated to us by our obligations to the workers and peasants of the USSR. This is dictated to us by our obligations to the working class of the whole world.
To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten. But we do not want to be beaten. No, we refuse to be beaten! One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her because of her backwardness, military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. They beat her because to do so was profitable and could be done with impunity. Do you remember the words of the prerevolutionary poet: "You are poor and abundant, mighty and impotent, Mother Russia." Those gentlemen were quite familiar with the verses of the old poet. They beat her, saying: "You are abundant; so one can enrich oneself at your expense. They beat her, saying: "You are poor and impotent '" so you can be beaten and plundered with impunity. Such is the law of the exploiters-to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle law of capitalism. You are backward, you are weak-therefore you are wrong; hence, you can be beaten and enslaved. You are mighty-therefore you are right; hence, we must be wary of you. That is why we must no longer lag behind.
In the past we had no fatherland, nor could we have one. But now that we have overthrown capitalism and power is in our hands, in the hands of the people, we have a fatherland, and we will defend its independence. Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? If you do not want this you must put an end to its backwardness in the shortest possible time and develop genuine Bolshevik tempo in building up its socialist system of economy. There is no other way. That is why Lenin said on the eve of the October Revolution: "Either perish, or overtake and outstrip the advanced capitalist countries.
We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.
— Stalin, Speech to Industrial Managers, February 1931
If you think that your western, developed, so-called "service economy" would be insulated from the circumstances that the USSR faced, ask yourself what the primary products of your country are, what that would look like under an effective blockade from liberal nations like what the USSR faced and what Cuba faces today, and how (de)industrialised your country currently is.
Now ask yourself how your country is going to be able to pay reparations for the peoples who have been subjected to imperialism and colonialism at the hands of your country and its economic development.
I think anti-work sentiment is yet-another way to domesticate potentially dangerous radical sentiments in the west.
They have the luxury of posting while they are ostensibly 'working' from their cushy corner office.
Multiple accounts of mine on reddit got banned from r/antiwork because I kept trying to radicalize people there with commie shit. I only occasionally check r/nursing now (without being logged in) in an attempt to stay abreast of the latest wave of plague. Accessing reddit also pumps out a few liters of C02 into the atmosphere IIRC.
"Its not the system that's bad, its just those darned bad apples."
For those of us at the bottom, all that "bosses taking advantage" stuff is just the normal cost of getting a meager paycheck that doesn't quite cover the bills. Its just ... normal.
Capitalist realism is fuck.
People with some type of certification or recent technical degree or academic degree, if they're young or single, or don't have any other responsibilities except to themselves actually could tell their bosses to fuck off and go find a better job somewhere. But they are in the minority.
I stocked shelves in a grocery store and the boss fucked me over? Great, I'll just quite my stocker job and checks notes get another stocker job for a boss that is equally likely to fuck me over. OR... I could just keep my head down and do what I need to do to get by for as long as I can get away with it. Because trying to look for work is a fucking nightmare unless you know people or stumble into random shit.
Like my current and last job were total flukes. One, my wife told me about after she mentioned I was looking for work to some of her people (but it was temporary) and the current job I literally got because I saw a note in the window of my local post office. Neither of those jobs was something I was looking for specifically, or would have EVER found by accident, and all the "normal" jobs found by searching for stuff online resulted in fuckin' naught all.
No phone calls, no emails, no letters saying "Hey, thanks for applying but you didn't get the job"... nothing.
That shit is absolutely terrifying. I'm old enough to feel the "middle aged white guy" economic anxiety that used to be nothing more than a concept 10~15 years ago.
Probably too many factors to list. But the one I'd point out is that a lot of it is just lies. We live in an age where, no matter your views (and I include a lot of left spaces) etc, earning more money makes you seem more impressive to a lot of people. So people will frequently just lie about the money they can get because why not? It's free social credit.
In regard to r/antiwork specifically a lot of it is also weird power fantasy stuff. You'll routinely see posts about "I would tell them these are my contract rates at 3-5 times whatever your equivalent hourly was with a 4 hour billable minimum" failing to recongize the power dynamic that previously existed and the idea of reputation in industry or the like.
The example isn't the best but when you browse you can tell that most of these psots come from people unfamiliar with professional environments assuming it works radically different than it does.
But, like, I come from the middle class (I think?) and things seem absolutely dire for people like me.
you american?
i know "middle class" there is weirdly broadhere the main markers of the "middle class" are:
- your parents went to university - this one is becoming less relevant as the years go by and a higher percentage of people have degrees, it used to be that there would not be much competition for degree-requiring jobs, so a degree meant almost certain financial comfort, that comfort would lead to a more financially comfortable childhood for their kids
- your parents own their own home - yes, home ownership is a good thing, but you can't ignore that under a western housing market, a house is a financial asset more than anything else, it's collateral for loans, a relatively safe investment, and a place to live in
- you definitely own a car (unless you live in a city centre) and it is relatively new - newer car (usually) means less that needs repairing/replacing
- you work a profession - you have a job that requires a degree, those almost always pay more than those that don't, another thing that is becoming more blurry as the middle class are increasingly becoming downwardly mobile
there are more but you get the idea
It's true though, we made it up so that everyone can convince themselves they're not one of The Poors and accidentally develop solidarity
As ideology, that has some legs. I've known desperately poor people that nothing but a part time shift at minimum wage that called themselves "middle class" and even "capitalist" while I've also had distant relatives call themselves "middle class" that were landlords with properties all across the state.
you work a profession - you have a job that requires a degree
Tangent: In the most technical sense, a profession requires a specialized body of knowledge and training, a self-regulating and self-licensing body, and a professional code of ethics. Very few occupations are actually professions in this sense.
I like keeping this fact in the back pocket for dunking on tech bros and bankers who are too far up their own asses about their "professions". Especially funny if you're a nurse or some other profession they look down on and you get to gatekeep them.
"Middle Class" is full-on vibes based class analysis. It doesn't exist, at all.
this sentiment speaks to
the sentiment of the middle class not being real? it's simply not a category under capitalist relations, you own capital or don't, it's a binary. you can talk about & further define edge-cases but there is no unified middle area that complies with any marxian analysis of class. what the middle class is depends on the speaker, is it a function of income? a self-identification? this is why it's "vibes" because there isn't a coherent and dominant definition, it's just a word anybody gets to use to mean almost anything.
the middle class was real in the society from which capitalism emerged, and important to early capitalist identity, but it's not a meaningful way to understand capitalism as it functions as an economic system
Do you get bank holidays off and actual benefits (not the bullshit insurance most employers ship with)? Or are you in a trade?
In the US at least I think the broader working class could be divided into a few subclasses of maybe service industry, trades, and white collar/management jobs. I think their class experience is distinct enough to justify that division. So one could argue that the non service subclasses are "middle class".
I typed reddit out of habit yesterday and saw an askreddit thread asking about people making 250k a year or some shit and instantly remembered why I despise it.
Hmm I always thought I was a third world country phenomenom only where only the people that know english use reddit and at least where I live the only people who know english learnt it in their expensive schools (even tho they will say "I learned through videogames", not me tho, I totally learnt it from tv shows), so basically only relatively wealthy people use reddit.
No idea that it could happen in the first world too
Nah reddit skews heavily to richer tech workers.
Most of us in the US are pretty fucking poor.
STEM means computer programming and some Math. Everyone who isn't working for Dronestrike Ltd or the hit new Cryptovapes AI App is struggling.
