this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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How does this explain early societies and people that opted to work to improve their environment before money was invented?
I disagree. We do just want to work. That's what makes us human. We labor.
Working for our own benefit or for the benefit of those we love is a natural inclination. Working for others, often harder and at a detriment to our own personal joy, without a comparable benefit to us and our family is not natural.
Not to mention to our physical detriment, sometimes acutely, always long-term.
Agreed. Thats why I never made the claim that people have a natural urge to get yelled at by a shitty manager in an exploitative fast food gig. No one is saying that here.
The situation you describe is an illustration of alienation in the workplace, and this happens when workers lose the means of production. All of the comments in this thread tiptoe around this idea - for which there have been volumes of thought written btw.
My issue with the meme is that it is ahistorical and can distract people away from the concept of alienation. The capitalist class pays us not because we are "naturally opposed to working" (which is the thesis of the meme), but because it is unbearable to work in an alienating environment, which, as you perfectly explained, abstracts us away from the products we create, compartmentalizes our work, and violently separated us from working for our families or communities.
I think your point makes sense if the meme defines "work" as broadly as you do: "any labor.". However, i read the meme to refer to "work for others.". So i think your criticism of it is on shaky ground because that criticism assumes and requires the existence of an intent that was not present.
Work has a broad reach. Putting effort into something is work, be it something you enjoy, like building a chair or a table for example, or into a company project.
Sure, but in the context of the meme, "work" means "doing labor for someone else in exchange for payment". Broadening the scope of the word "work" is valid, sure, but bound to cause confusion given the context.
People worked to have a calorie surplus so they could not work the next day, or they could make sure their shelter wasn't leaking, or they could do something they found entertaining.
People don't work for the sake of work.
So you're saying people labor in order to entertain, love, create, do art, and do philosophy?
Sounds very human to me.
Never did i claim that people "work for the sake of work". My argument is that humans can be characterized as working creatures who use labor to change their environment - be it geographically, politically, socially, etc...
And that is very true.
It's that at some point someone realized they could use their momentary surplus to exploit someone else's dire need and thus use other people's labor to generate an even larger surplus for themselves.
The rationale to justify this exploitation has changed through the ages, as well as how much has to be spent to coax others - going from slavery all the way to whatever is on the other end, which I guess would be the shared ownership of the means of production.
Getting me to improve my own house or community isn't hard.
Getting me to improve your house that I'm not allowed to use? Yeah, you're gonna have to pay me.
I think people like to work when the work/coworkers are actually enjoyable or the work goes towards a goal one wants to achieve
If you didn’t work you died of starvation.
The majority of all people who ever lived were in subsistence agriculture, which needed constant labour to produce the food you needed to eat in order to keep yourself and your family alive. What improvements were made were developed to keep starvation at bay. If you gave a medieval peasant modern farming equipment, they’d be jazzed about how little time they’d have to spend plowing and milling and threshing and harvesting and how much more time they could spend getting piss drunk with their family and friends.
A babylonian farmer didn’t “just want to work.” They wanted to live, and that meant they spent their life in back-breaking labour in the fields.
Yes, the majority of people who ever lived, but for most of the time we've existed we didn't need to do much labor at all. The reason it's the most people who ever lived is because the agricultural revolution trapped us into having to grow more food to feed a growing population that could grow more food to feed a growing population that could grow more food.
I don't see how you could see my original claim of
"Humans are laboring creatures"
Respond to it with
"Humans need to labor in order to make food to survive"
And still come from a place of disagreement.
Never did I claim "people work just to work". We don't see people spending every waking hour outside making mud pies. We don't see people spending entire days moving 100-ton blocks from one side of town to the other just for the hell of it.
If people liked to work we wouldn't invent labor-saving devices
If people didn't like to work, we wouldn't have began down the perpetual path of putting effort into meticulously engineering labor-saving devices.
If we liked to work we'd prefer to do everything by hand than use a something that saves our labor.
No one said that, wanting to do something on a daily basis is normal. But if I didn't have to pay rent, for food, etc. I would certainly not be doing what I'm doing now on the daily, and if I did I wouldn't be able to afford to live.