191–200 of 222 posts
The famous r/antiwork interview is all a fantastic example of where this attitude gets you. https://youtu.be/3yUMIFYBMnc Honestly, being Doreen seems like a nightmare and we should aspire to be better.
I was really puzzled by the comments under the video - people acting as if Doreen really set himself on fire somehow - while to me he seems to have set himself up quite well. He walks dogs for a few hours a day, and it lets him do other stuff he cares about, like reading people's arguments on the internet!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
>duty life demands of you I have no duty towards life. I didn't choose to be born, did I? In fact, I vegetate waiting to have enough strength to suppress my fear of death and kill myself. Yes, I've tried therapy in the last 15 years. Yes, I've tried exercise, meditation, journaling, workaholism, idleness, religion, philosophy, science and so on and on. I just want to be done. Every evening I pray to deities I don't b…
According to the Bardo, Veda, Platonic Phaedo and Tibetan Book of the Dead, yes you did. You just don't remember why your immortal soul chose this adventure.
> Every evening I pray to deities I don't believe in: "Have mercy on my suffering, do not make me wake up".
And every night s/he answers your prayer.
Try it with a different twist. "Have mercy on my suffering, help make me wake up and remember"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is orders of magnitude more challenging to found a co-op. Let alone get enough capital to get started. We've set up our society to make it difficult for worker owned businesses.
A good elaboration of this point is Greg Dow's "Governing the Firm" and "The Labor-Managed Firm". In short, worker-owned businesses are rare because individual workers are poor (relative to the capital that's needed) and they can't get external funding because the investors want control in return, which labor management can't provide. That's why most large-scale worker-owned businesses are part of a federation suppor…
Talk about founding a workers co-op that's democratically run? With shares issued to each worker? There's just no template for it. It's days of work to get it over the line.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
cjfd... >when one hears this kind of complaining today... What complaining, and what kind of complaining is it?
Did you read the comment that they replied to?
Yes, I believe I did read the correct comment that they replied to. However, here, it is not always possible to be 100% certain to whom or from whom one is replying to or from and/or which specific comment in any given paragraph is being referenced (unless specified/re-quoted) - hence my quote and question. And I am very open to being corrected. Thank you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slavery means lots of things. Chattel slavery, yes, but also forced labor like in us prisons. Indentured labor, child soldiers, forced marriage, etc etc. The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve". It's also easy to draw parallels between the commodification of ones labor and slavery. It's a term that is not new, is widely used, and debated plenty. The in…
> The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve". This is the baseline for basically pretty much all life on earth. You will die unless you perform labor to interrupt death. Your body itself must perform labor in order to generate the energy and to allocate the resources you provide it to survive as well. If you expand the definition of slavery to encompass l…
It seems strange now that wage labor is so normalized, but at the start of the industrial revolution, many subsistence farmers were forced off of the land they had farmed for generations as it was turned into large private farms and instead had to seek wage labor.
Earlier 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.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> According to Lafargue, wage labour is tantamount to slavery It does seem to be quite useless way to look at the world. It seems that they are unaware of what slavery actually means or deliberately mislead. Or Wikipedia is inaccurate.
I cannot voluntarily not work, and I don’t get to choose who gets the benefits of my work. And I am in a privileged situation because I could lose my work and still pay rent for long enough to find another one, but this is not the case for a vast class of people in western countries. These people are effectively bound to their employer because losing their job means losing their home and means of subsistence. The wor…
Even in this case it is still significantly better than being enslaved.
Even with the worst wage labour people still have option to leave it. Slave owner can force slaves into mine and never let them out and force them to work in horrific conditions until they die. Happened in many places across history, likely still happens somewhere.
With enough stuff like company scrip, company stores, ensuring that laws outlaw being homeless and deliberate breaking of relationship allowing people to escape you can get situation undistinguishable from slavery.
But just "if I will be fired then I am instantly homeless" is still markedly better than "my owner can force me to work to death in a mine".
> The world is not black and white, and the fact that a situation is not as absolutely terrible as a sex slave in Mauritania should not shut down any discussion. There are shades of involuntary work.
Definitely! I am not claiming that oppression does not exist but "wage labour is tantamount to slavery" is an absurd claim.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> According to Lafargue, wage labour is tantamount to slavery It does seem to be quite useless way to look at the world. It seems that they are unaware of what slavery actually means or deliberately mislead. Or Wikipedia is inaccurate.
It's meant in the sense of "coerced into working." Eg if you don't have a viable alternative to working, did you choose work freely? Everyone using this comparison from that time period knows it's an extreme metaphor and is using it at least partially for the shock value of the comparison, to jar people into seeing the everyday pressures in a different way. They aren't comparing the conditions of slavery to the condi…
In case of slavery one is forced to work (and that is basically the best case).
With enough stuff like company scrip, company stores, ensuring that laws outlaw being homeless and deliberate breaking of relationship allowing people to escape you can get situation undistinguishable from slavery.
But just "if I will be fired then I am instantly homeless" is still markedly better than "my owner can force me to work to death in a mine".
And forces even horrible employees to be better option than begging friends/family/strangers for help. Slave owners have no need even for such bare minimum. To say nothing about less pathological cases where employees at least sort-of compete for workers.