Good lord this community is cringe most of the time.
Yup, they want to live in fantasy land where they benefit from other people’s work, but do none themselves. They’re still children, but most of them will eventually grow up.
The rest will become communists, which is something I’ve been seeing a lot of on Lemmy.
Let’s not forget that communists do work. Not saying you said otherwise, just a reminder.
So spot on, dude.
Yeah the 40+ hours of manual labor I do producing 3 $25,000 machines in a week while being paid $1000 is totally not work at all.
Critiquing a system of exploitation is only possible if one is lazy and worthless, not something that typically and historically comes from those most oppressed under a given system.
Refusal to blindly submit to coercive hierarchies is a sign of immaturity, while blind obedience to that system makes you a real man. Only people who blindly accept their and the exploitation of their friends and family are adults.
What’s the plan then?
You obviously don’t have the slightest idea what communism is
Or you could try reading what was actually said properly, rather than making up something different that wasn’t said by anyone except you.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live without working. I already do this as a landlord and a business owner/investor. Maybe when you grow up you will be successful like me and understand the virtues of not grinding away all day to make somebody else rich, instead, let other people make you rich.
Complete strawman. No one wants to sit around and do nothing.
I love to sit around every once in a while, nothing wrong with that. Sometimes I sit in quiet contemplation for days at a time, other times I just go golfing or fishing or take a vacation to Bora Bora to sit on the beach and drink. If you want to do these things it’s not hard, start a successful business or make a smart real estate investment!
If you want to do these things it’s not hard, start a successful business or make a smart real estate investment!
Exactly!
Nice trolling
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fucking about and doing whatever I want!
That doesn’t sound like doing nothing ;)
So they will stay children forever because that is what a communist is someone who is emotionally stunted
I don’t get all the people who are here that clearly aren’t anti-work.
like why are they here? Isn’t this a community for anti work and not against it?
IMHO there’s two main groups
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“Wage labor is inherently unfair, we need to build a new economic system.”
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“fuck work amirite guys?”
The former moved to “workreform”, at least on Reddit. The latter group are the dog walkers that stayed put.
Work reform are liberals who don’t want a new economic system. For example they want a higher minimum wage, with wage labor still existing. Maybe they’re a little bit of the latter, when it’s not too impolite.
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It is unfortunate that this anti-work rhetoric often comes off as outrageous, when in reality it isn’t. I don’t know if the people doing it are intentionally trying to be controversial, or if they just are not good at communicating.
When we complain about work, this doesn’t mean that we are asking for a world where we lounge all day at home, and expect that food, shelter and entertainment are magically delivered to us without any regard to how it happens. No, anti-work is not about a blind sense of entitlement. But that is how a lot of these posts come off as, even if their authors don’t intend it.
Anti-work is a recognition that the working class works way too damn much; so much more than we need to to have a functioning society with everyone living happily and having their needs met. There’s so much inefficiency in capitalism, with aims to drive more capital to the wealthy, and working around other stupidities of capitalism (check out the book “Bullshit jobs” for examples). The ruling class holds hostage the world’s resources, and requires you to give them a large portion of your life to get even the minimum needed to sustain your living. Now that is outrageous.
I think a lot of people have trouble understanding the difference between “I don’t want to contribute anything to society” and “I don’t want to spend half my waking life laboring for peanuts so that my boss can get rich”.
Obviously, we should contribute according to our means, but we need to be compensated for those contributions accordingly.
You are responsible for negotiating your compensation. You allow yourself to be paid peanuts.
…but we need to be compensated for those contributions accordingly.
This is the part they object to, thanks to the proliferation of Econ 101 thinking. Market wages are, after all, competitive by definition. For someone that hasn’t gone beyond basic economics, what you’re paid for the work you do is fair compensation.
The anti-work rhetoric is, first of all, incredibly misleading for people who take things at face value. But more important, the underlying theory for why market wages aren’t fair is different for each person you talk to. There is no coherent, rhetorically forceful reasoning for why people should be paid more. And separate messages that arrive at the same conclusion aren’t really effective at scale.
Getting paid better would be nice, but that will just bring the middle class closer to poverty. I’ve been a part of this community for a few years now and I have been fighting for better wages this whole time. But the biggest pain to me is inflation. Things keep costing more and more, but I keep making the same amount of money. Wouldn’t price regulations be a better solution to all of this to all of this? Not trying to start a fight, but looking for a slight skew from the topic.
Wouldn’t price regulations be a better solution to all of this
What would that solve though?
I mean say, a loaf of bread is price regulated at $3/loaf. Do we treat it like the minimum wage and let it sit there for 15 years at $3? What about bread producers? After a few years, they’re certainly not getting paid the market price for their production. Is that justified to ensure that bread remains at $3?
The problems of price controls are demonstrated quite convincingly with rent controls versus just building affordable housing: the former doesn’t increase the housing supply which means, even if rent is affordable, some people remain homeless.
Idk, how are thinking about it?
I was born in a comunist society and can wholeheartedly tell you (I presume you are from US or a western country): you don’t even know or can imagine what inefficient is :)
I am not from the US or Western, and I understand and can imagine it well. Socialism is still the answer. I’d be happy to discuss this further with you, but I’ll keep it at that otherwise.
Coming up with something even more inefficient isn’t a win.
A good start might be not calling the movement Anti-work, as that seems to be an all or nothing type of negative name, to those who feel everyone should put in their fair amount of work to earn the rewards from society.
Perhaps smart-work or fair-work or right-work would have been a better name for the movement, less of a blockage / hurtle for others to get over.
The thing of such names is they cannot be hijacked as fas as I know. You simply can’t do anti-work-washing or create yellow anti-work union. Distorted anti-work is worse for capitalism than real anti-work because supporter of distorted anti-work will not agree to work at all.
You have a good point. Although I doubt it’s worth the trade off. I think pirate party movements vs environmental movement is a good comparison. Pirate party-ism kind of died. Environmentalism lives on. Not saying it’s necessarily because of naming. But, I don’t think sounding like you’re “pro theft” helped.
Although I doubt it’s worth the trade off.
Could you elaborate?
The negative connotation that you mention is the point of the trade off. On one hand it makes the message less appealing - because it’s using a symbolic name with a negative connotation.
On the other hand - the negative connotation makes it less likely that the symbols will be hijacked by opponents.
By example:
- Green movements don’t have symbols with such connotation. Opponents use green washing to hijack the movement.
- Pirate party movements do have names and symbols with negative connotations. If you’re working with intellectual property you don’t want to be associated with piracy. There’s no such thing as pirate-washing…(?) However, open source movements is a related phenomenon and a counter example. There have been examples of open source-washing. Companies that pretend to be open but they really aren’t really. Android and openai comes to mind.
When a movement is formed there is a possibility to build a narrative that is more or less desirable to hijack. Making it less desirable to hijack might make it less desirable overall. That’s the trade off.
Pirate party-ism kind of died.
Wouldn’t say so. They got more popular, they are just not as often mentioned in news as before.
In Russia for example Pirate Party was frozen becase during Putin’s reign it is unsafe(as in you will be killed or imprisoned) to register opposition. So currently PP works as Roskomsvoboda(PP’s project like EFF).
The thing of such names is they cannot be hijacked as fas as I know. You simply can’t do anti-work-washing or create yellow anti-work union.
Actually that’s usually the number one way if somebody combating you where they want to “kill the messenger”, they hijacked a term and make it mean something different than it should be.
For example being a liberal used to mean one thing and then conservances painted it in a different light, and now it has a negative connotation in our society to centrists.
Distorted anti-work is worse for capitalism than real anti-work because supporter of distorted anti-work will not agree to work at all.
I honestly read this four times, and just literally do not understand the point you’re trying to make.
If you can elaborate on it so I can see what you’re trying to tell me I’d appreciate it.
Fundamentally the point I was trying to make is that “anti-work”, when people hear that they think “this person doesn’t want to work for their living and carry their weight in our society”. It’s a very strong negative connotation, and usually it shuts somebody down from listening to you and to your ideas right at the start.
If your goal is a fair work philosophy then you should state that in the tldr name for it. If otherwise you truly mean no work, then ‘anti-work’ has a tldr name that matches that philosophy better.
I certainly agree. I never liked the term anti-work at all. I prefer to just cut to the chase and explain what I’m about. Or call myself a socialist. That may have its own baggage to unpack as well, but at least its not a core semantic flaw in the term.
Anti-work is extremely unfortunate. We really named a movement after a strawman criticism of leftists by boomers.
Like your thesis that capitslism is inefficient. I agree! It is efficient though solving a problem, it’s just the wrong one (money instead of happiness as the x).
Never thought about it that way
Now say that in 160 characters. Brevity is the capitalist way.
Capitalism bad. Hope that’s short enough for you to comprehend.
Zinger!
“Hello, I would like to benefit from society without contributing to it”
Yes, owners do this.
It is very unfortunate that posts like the OP portray the anti work movement in that way, but anti work does not mean that. I think this other commenter summarized it better: https://lemm.ee/comment/3155176
So like a CEO?
Nah, like a land lord. The CEO of my company is a very productive person.
there are ways to contribute that aren’t 40+ hours a week.
Pretty sure in the old days, when there were fewer people, you could just fuck off into the forest and build yourself a cottage. If your feudal lord found out you’d be in trouble, but they didn’t have satellites or whatnot to track you down.
We have this weird unwritten assumption that the cost of technological advancement (esp medical) was our own domestication. That we sacrificed freedom and privacy for health and safety. I wonder if that’s really the case, or if it’s some bullshit post hoc justification
You’d still have to work for your living in said scenario.
Nobody is gonna bring you chicken tendies three times a day in your hidden cottage.
Uncontacted hunter gathered tribes work, it’s right there in the description. Not 40 hours a week, sure, but you can live a much simpler lifestyle in the wilderness on a similar work ethic.
Labor is an intrinsic requirement of human life.
Working for your own reasons is fundamentally different than laboring and having part of what you produce taken from you by an employer
You can work for your own reasons right now. But you don’t have the right to just grab any piece of land and confiscate it for your own use. There are too many of us for that.
But then you’re gonna have to pay taxes to fund the military industry regardless. But at least you get more than the crumbs of your work
you don’t have the right to just grab any piece of land and confiscate it for your own use
Maybe not just any piece of land, but there are enormous swaths of empty land in this world that OP can fuck off to, if they’re that determined to not be a member of a society. Of course, they’re not interested in that because pioneering is to much work. 🙄
It’s the kind of work that makes you feel fulfilled and accomplished though. I bet OP would be better off mentally in 2 years if he fucked off to alaska and built himself a cabin. Hell, I bet I would too.
This corporate wage slavery is so fucking detrimental to my well-being. I want to solve challenges and make decisions of consequence. I want to have agency in my life.
I bet OP would be better off mentally in 2 years if he fucked off to alaska and built himself a cabin. Hell, I bet I would too.
Go ahead then. What’s stopping you?
Those are both subcategories of work. You still work in either, it’s just in one case you get everything but you must do everything and in the other case you don’t get what you worked for but you instead get luxuries from society.
It’s not just bullshit.
Soon after we invented agriculture we began to lose survival skills, and it got progressively worse until we reached the point of grocery stores.
This was our choice. We stopped roaming to stop and grow, harvest, and store grain to be sure we had food stocks in reserve for low yield months. This gave us time to create and learn which led to civilisation.
Before agriculture, we were no more than bands of maybe 50, probably territorially killing each other on discovery much like Chimps do.
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One main reason for keeping the pressure in the system is that whichever global superpower exploits their population the most effectively has the upper hand in most fronts. If there wasn’t a competition for world dominance then we could all relax a bit more. Til then we are forced into vigilance.
This sounds like something I would hear in Russia. Those who have at least fraction of functioning brain will ask question “If every citizen will be grinded in name of superpower then what everyone will get? 2 by 2 in the nearest forest and a wooden cross.”
When state acquires its own will that contradists of majoroty of own citizen, it is not a state. Maybe it is Prutin’s mafia, maybe it is China’s puppet, but not a state.
I mean I guess you can go all Fountainhead and just live in the woods. Of course, you’ll probably die if you don’t do any work, but you definitely have a choice.
do you think it is possible to make a genuine choice under such coercion?
and under which conditions can we even have genuine choice?
in general, we can make genuine choice when we are presented with several good options and there’s minimal pressure to choose a specific one. (i know the term “good” is vague, it depends on the specifics of the situation.) in the context of what we’re talking about, a genuine choice could be made if people didn’t depend on their job for housing, food, or healthcare.
it’s not only about choosing between working and not working. it’s also about giving people more flexibility to choose a job they would like to do. workers have much less control over their working conditions when they’re effectively forced to always have a job.
I think that when you deny individuals agency by assuming they are brainwashed, then it’s difficult to have democracy.
i don’t see how this answers my question
And I think when you don’t butter your bread, the sandwich tastes shit and dry
Now, are we finished making irrelevant statements?
You should get a bread maker.
I think the alternative is living out in the wild, fending for yourself. As much as I hate the inequality and mediocrity of modern life, it’s something of a step up from living like that. I love watching Primitive Technology, but I probably couldn’t handle that life. Imagine spending hours collecting fire wood, spending hours/days turning it into charcoal and building a clay oven just to fire up some shit you picked up from the river in hopes of getting a few globules of iron, to make like a small shank or a spear tip or something (after maybe weeks of effort). Oh, and you’re having to get your own food and maybe bathe yourself every so often. Super interesting to watch, but holy shit is that alot of work for so little (compared to what we’re used to seeing). Life is work.
https://youtu.be/hTREU-xVeY0?si=qRTOs6AuK0Z2jWGs
The VAST majority of human history disagrees. Humans are collaborative not competitive naturally.
I don’t think he mentioned competition in his comment, rather he’s stating the bare minimum for survival
You’re correct, I misread.
It’s not, actually. The majority of human history is neither humans fending for themselves, nor submitting to wage slavery. Humans are collaborative, social beings. Even the nuclear family is an aberration on our otherwise multi generational and communal shared history.
Yeah, all human societies worked together on large communal projects and would make things and exchange it with others through barter. We still do those things fairly regularly.
Sure, it wouldn’t work for a large an complex project like going to the moon, but that wasn’t done by a capitalist company either.
Barter, as was taught to me at least, is mostly a myth. Barter certainly existed, but we have no evidence to support barter as the primary method of trade in any period of history. It primarily existed, where it did exist, as a way for people from disparate cultures to trade, within communities barter was nearly non existent, and most things were done in a sort of social credit system for much of history.
Honestly, I have more of an anarchist mindset. You shouldn’t have to work, at least not a job. I’d rather build my own house and grow my own food. Everything I do directly benefits me and my family, not the rich. But I need money to buy the land…
I just don’t think anyone agreed to waste 40 hours of their life at this.
Whether you like it or not, you live in a civil society. You are not alone, which is why we have rules on how we interact with eachother. I guart you, take away those rules and it’ll get a lot worse for all of us. Calling yourself an anarchist at 20 is fun and edgy, doing it at 30 is just anti social and ego centric and at 40 it’s just plain sad.
You have to work because we all do. You have to eat, use electricity, drink water. Why do you thinnei we pay taxes?
Good luck finding a sucker to subsidize you and your lazy ass.
Like an employee or a tenant?
Delicious delicious boot leather huh?
Is this a community of a bunch of children? What is this?
I’m 43, own a couple successful businesses, and agree with the post. I have no issues finding labor, because I pay them what they are worth, by figuring out what they would have been paid in 1955, and adjusting that to inflation and productivity. Turns out I still make money paying people the $35 an hour to start, that they are worth.
Grow the fuck up and drop your “got mine, fuck you” boomer attitude.
Living up to your username. Calm your waters sailor it’s going to be ok. Go back to running your successful businesses
I seriously doubt you know what a communist or a Kender is. Prove me wrong.
I’ll pass thanks
Because you don’t know. Thanks for proving me right.
You’re still replying?
Yep, cause you have nothing to say. I really want to hear the lies you tell yourself so that I can bury you in sources that are actually factual, rather than the Murdoch inspired lies you tell yourself.
Meanwhile I’m making 1.5 million US dollars a year, personally after taxes, without exploiting a single worker, and you’re licking boots.
Lemme is mostly spoiled teenagers raised by single moms that never had to work.
Who’s going to take care of you?
Are we owed anything simply by being born?
You are not owed a damn thing, the universe is a cold, uncaring bitch.
That said, we humans are nothing if not an ingenious bunch. We’ve come up with all sorts of ways to work more efficiently. The amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it
Instead of choosing to work less and live a life of leisure, freedom and the pursuit of happiness, we kept working at the same or an increasing rate to make more money, or rather, those who own(ed) the capital and technology that makes it so did.
It’s a bit of a pithy answer in an online comment but I genuinely believe humanity as a whole would be happier with less if it meant we got to live life on our own terms by default. Ever growing consumption way past the point of necessity comes with a host of problems (power and wealth imbalance, climate change, destruction of nature, etc) but by far the biggest one is the sheer waste of our few laps around the sun.
Every square inch of the earth is owned. I cannot fuck off into the woods, build a cabin, grow vegetables, hunt food, etc. I’m forced to be a part of society. Laws say I cannot provide for myself by natural means, there for society is required to provide for me within its system.
In actual civilization, yes, we are.
Basic accommodations are a human right according to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Jesus had a few things to say about feeding the hungry, but Paul didn’t fully agree.
Are we owed anything simply by being born?
A major problem with our society is that everything is framed conceptually as debt. A world where you are not born into debt is seen as unjust because your basic needs must be provided by others, and that can supposedly only be a financial transaction.
But from a purely logistical and motivational perspective, it’s easy to imagine not threatening people with homelessness and death for not working. Everything is heavily automated. The large majority of people used to be subsistence farmers, now the proportion working in agriculture is less than 2% and we produce way more than is actually needed for human survival. You only need a little bit of labor provided beyond transactional compensation to make it happen. As for why anyone would choose to do so, it would be for all the same reasons people already work other than the threat of death; status, money, luxury, desire for purpose and fulfillment.
The only question is whether it is morally good and acceptable to allocate resources to someone without demanding payment. And it is; just stop thinking of debt as inherently right and required, and recognize that it’s better not to force debt on someone just for being born and having basic needs.
The premise here is kinda blurred, but I think it does exist and goes something like that:
If you want to live and benefit from a society you must contribute to it
Is it wrong? Is it right? I think the anwser lies somewhere in between.
However one that is not established and I think it should be written down is one that my pops used to say:
Do not live to work, and if you love your job and enjoy it there more than anywhere in the world than you are already living, but even so do it with moderation else it will destroy you or turn something you love back to work.
There’s a difference between contributing to society by performing productive or helpful labor, and the sort institutionalized wage slavery we currently call “work.”
Most of us are subject to the tyranny of the clock, petty bosses, arbitrary rules about where we work or how we dress. This is what we never opted into and can opt out only after a lifetime of it or at great cost in terms of our ability to provide the necessities for ourselves.
Anarchist Bob Black explores this distinction in his essay, The Abolition of Work. I recommend reading it.
True, but honestly I think the only solution to such wage slavery is basic universal income, which is something truly hard to achieve in my ignorant eyes.
Once people feel/know that they can go on without a job, those who do have one, either because they want more or want to dive and contribute back to a certain area, would not subject to unfair conditions regulating everything in and related to work from
tyranny of the clock, petty bosses, arbitrary rules about where we work or how we dress …
Thanks for the recommendation will give it a look.
The main thing that is overlooked is that people who don’t work still contribute to society in ways that don’t align with capitalism. Not all art needs to be bought and sold. A ton of care is provided for free instead of through a job. A community cleaning up a common space without exchanging money is still contributing to society.
I wouldn’t even consider a lot of things that do align with capitalism to be contributing to society. Most advertising for example.
Not all art needs to be bought and sold.
Damn straight. I’m an artist and I don’t sell my art cause I don’t like having a transactional relationship with someone.
Why the FUCK do you think you’re entitled to get the free labor of bakeries working hard to make bread, farmers farming to create food, and people building technology to make your life easier?
No, you don’t have to work. Go live in the forest and farm your own food. Maybe then when a lion attacks you you’ll realize the value of modern civilization.
Because if FOSS exist he imagines that also people would like to do real actual work just for fun!
That’s true, but the whole point of technology and modern civilization was to make us lazy and somehow people are working even more? Except for like 5 people.
You ARE working much less. Have you tried working in a farm for 12 hours a day? You wanna compare serving coffee in Starbucks with farming for months then losing it because there’s frost?
Who TF is working on a farm 12 hours a day? What’re you watching grass grow? My mom’s family has a farm and I have worked there before and it’s pretty fun actually and all the usual work is done by 2 pm. Feeding animals, cutting grass for them using a spinny wheel thingy. Getting eggs from chickens, milking cows, ploughing the fields is done by tractors and only thing you have to do is throw seeds around. And it’s not like you’re doing the same thing for 8 hours straight. So yeah I’d say it’s more work. I’d much prefer doing that over graphic design for 8 hours. As for the frost, well, just grow shit where it’s not cold I guess.
Im pretty sure 95% of farmers would aggressively disagree with you. Lots of farmers in my country burn out from over working. Unless you are talking about a hobby farm for personal use
Unless if they’re slave farms you’re talking about. Then i haven’t seen any other farms like that, maybe it’s just a country to country thing. And it’s not a hobby farm it’s a proper farm, they sell milk eggs and and the field produce. Even got mango trees. Sure it’s a lot of work but it’s not overwhelming and they take a lot of breaks and even chat with neighbours for hours. And my grandma’s 80 and still milks the cows and walk them in the field and stuff. Not because someone tells her to, but because she likes it.
Most people in the west can work less, if they are willing to sacrifice comfort, material goods etc.
Most people can live without teeth and with cancer killing them, while eating cheap ramen for the whole month staring at a wall, sitting naked on the floor, in a house without a roof and walls.
When did antiwork get filled with bootlickers?
How I see this problem is that we aren’t given to tools to help us decide how we want to live our lives. Work sucks and is a waste of time. Contributing to society is valuable and something I want to do.
During the 2020 epidemic and lockdown bunches of people were furloughed and we all got to acquaint ourselves with extended cabin fever. Many of us picked up new hobbies and some of those could ne monetized and were better than the (often toxic, underpaid) dayjobs.
It was a conspicuous phenomenon now called the great resignation. Our capitalst masters compain how no one wants to work, but it’s evident to the rest of us that it’s the toxic underpaid conditions we don’t like, and we’d be glad to work if conditions were better.
I suspect laziness isn’t a real character flaw or deadly sin so much as the desire to not suffer as we work. (There is avolition, a symptom of mental illnes such as major depression, and this is what drives people to couch-potaro for weeks or months at a time.)
I think that modern work is something done to us, as a form of violence. We’re told to go here, do this, and in return we get just enough to get by. Humans are definitely not lazy, but we do have a problem with slavery.
