Antiwork movement

Discuss the evolution of human culture, economics and politics in the decades and centuries ahead
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wjfox
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Re: Antiwork movement

Post by wjfox »

Following today's events, people seem to be unsubbing and migrating across to r/WorkReform.
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R8Z
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Re: Antiwork movement

Post by R8Z »

Maybe they should work better on their PR appearances :roll:

To me the /r/antiwork sub/movement as it was was the lazy version of the FIRE subs and communities that popped up last decade. Both want the same thing but only one group is actually working towards it and has some probability of achieving it at the end. I am sorry to the UBI enthusiasts from the forum but even though I like the concept I don't see it happening ever. One living on foodstamps will always have a miserable life compared to a productive member of society of their time and age.

Anyway, I see that the r/WorkReform sibling sub that is receiving the "refugees" is already moving away from the extremists and has a better approach to the problem at hand.
And, as always, bye bye.
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funkervogt
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Re: Antiwork movement

Post by funkervogt »

wjfox wrote: Sun Jan 23, 2022 2:56 pm
Human 'wants' tend to be infinitely extensible...There's not a fixed amount of 'stuff' that we want. If people had been willing to stop at a 1955 standard of living, we could all be working 20 hour weeks. But in fact, one way or another, people wanted more. For some good reasons--stuff is good. For some bad reasons--there's a rat race element to society.
--Economist Paul Krugman on why automation has failed to create a world of leisure for humans (2009)
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Ken_J
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Re: Antiwork movement

Post by Ken_J »

meh, they were shit with branding anyway. It's like seeking a national healthcare system and branding it anti-health-insurance. and I am not really all that surprised they don't have any idea how to organize. The whole thing is more in line with the sort of Anonymous model. Late Stage capitalism seems a better branding in the same area. But I'll not bet any money on that to be better organized and more resilient when the gaze if the media finds it's way there.
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Ken_J
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Re: Antiwork movement

Post by Ken_J »

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
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funkervogt
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Re: Antiwork movement

Post by funkervogt »

Ken_J wrote: Fri Jan 28, 2022 12:07 am “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
I'm OK with that so long as it's linked to the principle that you should not expect anyone else to pay for your stuff.
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Ken_J
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Re: Antiwork movement

Post by Ken_J »

funkervogt wrote: Fri Jan 28, 2022 1:11 am
Ken_J wrote: Fri Jan 28, 2022 12:07 am “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
I'm OK with that so long as it's linked to the principle that you should not expect anyone else to pay for your stuff.
that's from Richard Buckminster Fuller before 1970
Rostov50
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Re: Antiwork movement

Post by Rostov50 »

wjfox wrote: Thu Jan 27, 2022 6:38 pm Following today's events, people seem to be unsubbing and migrating across to r/WorkReform.
Fun fact about /r/workreform: the guy who created it is a canadian banking executive who would absolutely not benefit from anything /r/antiwork talks about. I would avoid that subreddit.
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caltrek
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Re: Antiwork movement

Post by caltrek »

It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.
If it is a "fact" it has not yet been verified. That is to say, I have not seen such a breakthrough.

Sure, the twentieth century and the earliest part of the twenty-first century have been full of technological breakthroughs which in theory should have allowed the labor of "one in ten thousand" to support "all of the rest."

So why didn't that occur?
  • 1. The monopolization of capital goods allowing capitalists to pay for vast armies of servants to fulfill there every whim.
  • 2. Ecological constraints. Often new inventions and modernized work processes created sometimes unintended ecological problems which could only be mitigated by "work."
  • 3. While machines helped make production more efficient, they themselves needed to be maintained. Maybe, someday, robots will take over one hundred percent of the "work" that is needed to do that. In the meantime, folks need to be paid to carry out that bit of drudgery.
  • 4. The (sometimes only perceived) need by some to maintain control over others. Hence, the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex.
Here my definition of "work" is effort that is so inherently alienating to workers that they need to be paid in order to carry out such drudgery. So, yes, I do agree that much of the "work" is seen as socially necessary, as opposed to being needed for the actual production of goods and services for consumption by the entire population. Many of these "jobs" are in fact created because of these "socially necessary" considerations - police, guards, soldiers, etc.
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
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Ken_J
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Re: Antiwork movement

Post by Ken_J »

there are things that need doing to produce needed aspects of life. Maslows needs on the base level are a goods summary of what really needs to be in place at the bare minimum. From there we can add mobility around ones area to access things, energy, communications, and general utilities. And then access to sources if learning and betterment.

In the US we have roughly 350 million people. and we have the capabilities to provide all of the above to every one of those 350 million, with fewer that 1 in ten of those 350 million working Part time to make these things possible.

But that is not how we design work. we structure it such that kids from age 4-5 begin training to become workers in a system they are expected to join in the adolescence, which they are then required to give one third of their life each week to earn the right to survive. and if all goes well they will be let off the hampster wheel when they reach their late 60s to enjoy 6-12 years to seek enrichment and experiences.

So if the needs of the many can be met but so little work, but so much work is being done by so many, their is clearly artificial work being generated. to what end? Because certain classes need to earn survival? Because laboring is fetishised as a reward in and of itself and the purpose of every soul in gods great plan, and that believe was established by lords and clergy in a time most people were livestock on the lands of those with divine rights of rulership, whose hands never blistered or calloused.

Now we've reached a time in our country where most of us will never get that chance to retire, our life expectancy is shrinking so that we are on track to not get that 6-12 years. meanwhile instead of working 1/3 of our days at these jobs, most of us have to work 1/2 to 3/5 just to afford rent and utility costs that are inflated by monopolies to maximise the profits of a few, whose hands never blistered or calloused.

So our lives are no longer ours to use, they belong to somebody else. And when a pandemic hit and our owners worried about the loss of livestock, we got the chances to see exactly how little work was really essential, and what was really important. But soon enough they were talking about how some of us might have to sacrifice ourselves to so that they could get their luxuries supplied to them. And it really was just soo much more blatant than before.

They then said it was $600 stimulus checks that were allowing us to be lazy and not work. Then it was extended unemployment benefits. So they rushed through plans to take it away from the servant class, to make them unable to resist coming back to labor for them. But it didn't. Moratoriums on evictions had to be done away with. and they did, yet they still harp on the labor shortage. They jack up the costs of everything including rents, to make it harder to survive, so people will have to consign their existence to laboring their entire lives to simply not starve homeless. soon student loans will come due, and that's not going to solve it all either.

The veneer was chipped away. Maybe not all people, but enough have seen the rule book of this game they are the pieces in and they are not happy with the rules. They got a sense of how the game could be different, and the players are determined to keep playing with the lives of the pieces, trying to get them back in place after the pandemic upset the board.
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