Funny this guy was arguing, in 1883, that automation could reduce the average workday to 4 hours.
Good example to consider when reasoning about the current AI wave
The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
51–60 of 222 posts
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wage labor was a deal that many, many people freely accepted, because on net it was better than subsistence farming. Serious question: If you aren't doing wage labor, how are you going to live? Subsistence farming? Welfare? How?
Worker ownership is not the same thing as wage labor. Wage labor bifurcates people into an asset owning class and laborers who don't own the assets they're forced to depend on to eat. Wage labor divorces workers from owning the fruit of their labor in place of wages, whereas worker ownership doesn't. Wage labor was imposed upon people hundreds of years ago with the enclosure and privatization of common lands that peo…
I gather that you're not in the US, then.
Worker ownership is at least a respectable alternative. But it has a problem with capital-intensive industries. The workers typically don't have the resources to pool their funds and build a semiconductor fab.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wage labor was a deal that many, many people freely accepted, because on net it was better than subsistence farming. Serious question: If you aren't doing wage labor, how are you going to live? Subsistence farming? Welfare? How?
There lies the problem: in todays society, I’m not free to choose how I live outside of a pre-approved selection of careers due to a small portion of people deciding they wanted this specific setup.
> ... due to a small portion of people deciding they wanted this specific setup.
This sounds like you're saying: It's all the fault of them. Not our own choices, not even structural forces pushing us this direction. It's them.
That is, without further credible details, this sounds like paranoid conspiracy-theory stuff.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#54IDK about y'all, but being lazy generally makes me feel horrible. I love getting things done. I hate having to labor simply to enrich others and for me to survive. But I love doing work that I think is meaningful and makes a difference so much more than chilling all day. Chilling needs to happen, but not all the time!
"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something."
― Robert Heinlein
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wage labor is an imposition on people by people with power, wage labor is not a natural law or state of being. It is not unlike feudalism in that respect.
People engage in wage labor because they find it preferable to alternatives like hunting and gathering berries. However meager is their lifestyle, it's better than what it would be under the alternatives. That's what people are slaves of: consumption. People engage in wage labor because it sustains a certain level of consumption that alternative activities wouldn't.
It isn't a dichotomy between wage labor and living in the woods picking berries. You can have extremely similar production and economies that we have now, but without wage labor. One other option is worker ownership, as owning the fruits of one's own labor is not the same thing as wage labor. There are plenty of examples of historical and contemporary worker ownership, and none of them involve living in the woods.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wage labor was a deal that many, many people freely accepted, because on net it was better than subsistence farming. Serious question: If you aren't doing wage labor, how are you going to live? Subsistence farming? Welfare? How?
There lies the problem: in todays society, I’m not free to choose how I live outside of a pre-approved selection of careers due to a small portion of people deciding they wanted this specific setup.
There are an incredible variety of careers to choose from and there are countless unconventional jobs out there that people have never heard of. There is no small portion of people creating a pre-approved selection of roles that we have no choice but to follow. Even if there were, it definitely begs the question of 'who are these people' and 'how do they have this power'?
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#57IDK about y'all, but being lazy generally makes me feel horrible. I love getting things done. I hate having to labor simply to enrich others and for me to survive. But I love doing work that I think is meaningful and makes a difference so much more than chilling all day. Chilling needs to happen, but not all the time!
Me too. As a 'victim' of the Protestant Work Ethic, or maybe personality traits of the industrious/conscientious type, I find it the struggle is fighting for my right to be active in a world that increasingly lionises a passive, convenient and dependent life-stance. I just want to shake people sometimes. Look around you and see what needs to be done and the duty life demands of you!
Yeah I suppose if we had fully automated space communism already I may have a different viewpoint..
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is consistent with the meaning of bourgeoisie then, which transposed to modern systems means more like "the owner class" than the contemporary social connotation of well-compensated professionals. Owners benefit from more/harder work, both their own and that of others, and so it (reasonably) becomes a class value for them. A non-owner worker doesn't benefit in the same way, but many still value work in the same wa…
>It is consistent with the meaning of bourgeoisie then, which transposed to modern systems means more like "the owner class" than the contemporary social connotation of well-compensated professionals. That's still the definition used in Marxist circles today.
Think it may be helpful to point out how the term evolved over time.
Before Marx, the bourgeoisie only meant the middle, or upper-middle, class as opposed to the proletariat on the one side (which, despite its contemporary Marxist connotations, dates from Ancient Rome's proletarii) and the nobility on the other.
After the rapid industrialization and social displacement of the 19th century that saw the middle class' rise, it was Marx who coopted the term to mean the owner class.
Outside of Marxist circles today, I think the original upwardly mobile meaning is still more common, as in bougie.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wage labor is an imposition on people by people with power, wage labor is not a natural law or state of being. It is not unlike feudalism in that respect.
People engage in wage labor because they find it preferable to alternatives like hunting and gathering berries. However meager is their lifestyle, it's better than what it would be under the alternatives. That's what people are slaves of: consumption. People engage in wage labor because it sustains a certain level of consumption that alternative activities wouldn't.
> People engage in wage labor because they find it preferable to alternatives like hunting and gathering berries.
They don't exactly choose.
If a person wants to live by hunting and gathering, or by subsistence agriculture, he first has to acquire fertile land. And all that land is taken. In the United States, you don't even have the Right to Roam. Nor, on the public rights-of-way, do you have any right to so much as a sidewalk.
The ability to live an "indigenous" lifestyle no longer exists. The whole place has been terraformed.
You are trapped by the actions of everyone else. Mathematically, it's some kind of game theoretic equilibrium. But what it feels like is a prison.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
People engage in wage labor because they find it preferable to alternatives like hunting and gathering berries. However meager is their lifestyle, it's better than what it would be under the alternatives. That's what people are slaves of: consumption. People engage in wage labor because it sustains a certain level of consumption that alternative activities wouldn't.
It isn't a dichotomy between wage labor and living in the woods picking berries. You can have extremely similar production and economies that we have now, but without wage labor. One other option is worker ownership, as owning the fruits of one's own labor is not the same thing as wage labor. There are plenty of examples of historical and contemporary worker ownership, and none of them involve living in the woods.
In order to own the fruits of your labor, you have to pay for all the tools and materials you need, and the space where you apply the tools to the materials.
The material suppliers and toolsmiths also own the fruits of their labor, and don't owe them to you.
Capitalism exists because individual worker ownership doesn't scale beyond simple trades. If a worker gets enough wherewithal to scale his or her operation to just a small shop, there are going to be workers there, who are either wage labor, or else customers who pay to use the shop.