this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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Antiwork
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For the abolition of work. Yes really, abolish work! Not "reform work" but the destruction of work as a separate field of human activity.
To save the world, we're going to have to stop working! — David Graeber
A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. ...the love of work... Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists, and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. — Paul Lafargue
In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. — Karl Marx
In the glorification of 'work', in the unwearied talk of the 'blessing of work', I see the same covert idea as in the praise of useful impersonal actions: that of fear of everything individual. — Friedrich Nietzsche
If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves. — Lane Kirkland
The bottom line is simple: all of us deserve to make the most of our potential as we see fit, to be the masters of our own destinies. Being forced to sell these things away to survive is tragic and humiliating. We don’t have to live like this. ― CrimethInc
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In a functioning society, low unemployment would produce demand for labor, raising prices.
That doesn't happen for the lower class.
Help wanted signs stay up forever to avoid paying "a lowly worker" a wage actually worth their trouble. Somehow they get away with it, either by exploiting understaffed staff or by automating that position. They just can't fathom a worker earning competitive rates (like 40 bucks an hour to work retail).
At least in my sector, low unemployment does do that. Swapping jobs can easily net 10k or 20k increases. That'll come to a halt of it jumps back to Bush era numbers, though. I couldn't get a job out of college thanks to that; 10% unemployment forces people to stick with terrible wages at all levels, or not get a decent job at all since there's just too many people looking.
The reason people take those shitty jobs is that not having a job is even worse, due to social safety nets being design to force people to work, whenever possible no matter the conditions. So capitalists just have to wait until somebody looses their job and they really need a new one. Obviously not doing that would improve working conditions for other workers as well. It is even better for the entire economy as people allowed to change jobs and look for actually proper jobs ends up with them earning more money long term.
Another part is demographics. In the 90s the Iron Curtain fell and that increased the global labour market a lot, due to workers from "Communist" countries becoming available to the capitalist system. The biggest one being China. At the same time the global population was growing very fast and had done so in the past. The population growth rate peaked in 1963 globally and then slowly decreased. That meant a lot of workers were around and working conditions were not improving for the first world, while third and second world countries saw the realities for capitalism for the first time. The good news is population growth is slowing down and huge parts of the world will have decreasing workforces by 2050.