this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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From my own experience I can tell you that bullshit jobs are paid quite good but that's beside my point.
Unskilled labor is less a myth but rather a strategy of capital. In the past you needed skilled masons to build a house or what ever. Now you rather use concrete, a material anyone can learn to work which makes the worker expendable. Same with factories where skilled craftsmen were replaced by production line workers, reduced to barely more than extensions of the machine. This is really happening, it's not a myth, it's a way to take away our dignity. Bullshit jobs are a similar but different phenomenon.
I am not sure if we're even disagreeing here. "Removing our dignity" and "poverty wages" are two sides of the same coin.
My problem is the term "myth". It implies that unskilled labor doesn't exist. It argue it does exist because of capital and shouldn't
I disagree. It doesn't exist. Nobody is "unskilled".
That's a different question and I disagree with the implicated identification of people and their occupation. You can put a shoemaker skilled to produce shoes all by themself and sit them on a pipeline with one simple task. They, as a person, are still skilled even though their skill isn't wanted anymore by capital, and still their job is unskilled.
Putting skilled people into unskilled jobs is taking away their dignity. And since nobody is unskilled, unskilled jobs shouldn't exist.
Even then, I disagree. Even in the simplest of task, one can get very skilled at it. You can easily tell the difference between a newbie and a veteran on a production line.
I also disagree that these sort of unskilled jobs shouldn't exist. There's benefit to this sort of separation of duties. If people want to organize to do it on their own, without hierarchical coercion, I don't see a problem with it.
I like the idea presented in The Dispossessed where unpleasant labor is distributed to everyone with relatively short shifts of a few months I think. This is less efficient since, as you said, there is skilled involved in every activity, but who cares about efficiency.
But sure, if people find pleasure and meaning in it, I'm not going to take it away from them. I just don't think that's true for the majority of people in these jobs today. And it's not doing justice to them to praise them for a job they would rather not do.
And the word "unskilled" might not be perfectly accurate but there are jobs that are by design replaceable and "unskilled" is still the best word to describe that until you offer a better one. But I'm also happy to agree to disagree. I totally see and understand your point and we are not too far away from each other
Why not both? Capital is actively creating such jobs as you described. Capital is also actively trying to suppress wages in existing jobs by various means.
I never disagreed on your second part. These jobs can't simultaneously exist and be a myth but looking at the meme, there are jobs that aren't what I had in mind. So unskilled labor is both created by capital and used to marginalize preexisting occupations like farming if that's what you mean
Can you build your own house, concrete or otherwise? No? That couldn't possibly be because there is skill involved in building a house even from concrete, could it? 🤔🙄🙄🙄
No job is "unskilled", no matter how much better it makes you feel about yourself (literally the point - to divide the working class further and give people an easy high horse to jump on to so they can punch down at their peers).
I'm not punching down. Giving unskilled jobs to skilled people is wrong. It takes away their potential for personal growth. And even these unskilled jobs contribute more to society than my academic bullshit job.
Where we disagree is, you say calling a pipeline job unskilled is doing injustice to the person performing the job. I say giving the job to someone is already doing injustice to them.