Abolish work.
The Philosophy of Work [pdf]
11–20 of 85 posts
Re: The Philosophy of Work [pdf]
#12Abolish work.
And replace it with?
Perhaps we can create a system whereby one exchanges skills for products and services? But then how do we scale such a system... money might work, unless you're advocating for communism
Re: The Philosophy of Work [pdf]
#13I was again, arguing about work on reddit. Someone said that even animals "work" to survive. I found that the comparison was not really good. Food and shelter are abundant. Technology improved the human condition, but it made humans be much much less social, which is the main cause of inequalities. The individual car/kitchen/living room/bathroom generate exclusion. I'm an introvert, I want to have my safe space, but…
"Food and shelter are abundant." Only because somebody made them by working Monday to Friday. That somebody could make less by working Monday to Tuesday. Food and shelter would be less abundant and the person currently working a full week to produce the surplus would instead have the rest of the week to themselves. The productivity, and the free time, would accrue to those expending the effort of production - as mora…
the wealth piled up with people like elon musk and jeff bezos indicate this is not what is being solved or handled here. The 188b$ of Bezos and 264b$ of Musk are clearly not dedicated to providing me with hamburgers and sleeping quarters.
If I divided those 452b$ amongst 334m americans, I'd get around 1300$ per head.
Though net worth is not the same as yearly income,
I note that Musk's 264b$ represent 5.600 times the average american's yearly income.
As I see it, a lot of that "necessary work to provide food and shelter", that you refer to, is not spent doing that, but instead spent piling money on top of people like Musk and Bezos.
I agree with the people that think we could still handle the work required for 'food and shelter', without all the necessary work yielded to enrich our billionaires.
What we currently have, and have had for most of human history, is feudalism
under many different names. We may currently have a much more humane treatment
of our thralls, but we have an entitled 'nobility' profiting off the work of others, as much as at any time.
It is much like peasants 500 years ago, who could handily themselves live off what their farms produced, but for some reason had to pass on the major part of what their work produced, so that the lord could 'protect' them against being beaten up by the neighbour lord (and, incidentally, against being indiscriminately beaten by his own men, too).
Currently we organise our Lords through capitalism.
Re: The Philosophy of Work [pdf]
#14I really like this line of investigation. The problem of work is much more complicated than thinking about what can be automated or just deciding to work as little as possible.
Re: The Philosophy of Work [pdf]
#15Abolish work.
What about the people who want to work?
Re: The Philosophy of Work [pdf]
#16I was again, arguing about work on reddit. Someone said that even animals "work" to survive. I found that the comparison was not really good. Food and shelter are abundant. Technology improved the human condition, but it made humans be much much less social, which is the main cause of inequalities. The individual car/kitchen/living room/bathroom generate exclusion. I'm an introvert, I want to have my safe space, but…
“The managers tell us that the swimmers, crawlers, walkers, and fliers spent their lives working in order to eat. These managers are broadcasting their news too soon. The varied beings haven’t all been exterminated yet. You, reader, have only to mingle with them, or just watch them from a distance, to see that their waking lives are filled with dances, games, and feasts. Even the hunt, the stalking and feinting and leaping, is not what we call Work, but what we call Fun. The only beings who work are inmates like us.”
- Fredy Perlman, Against Leviathan
Re: The Philosophy of Work [pdf]
#17I was again, arguing about work on reddit. Someone said that even animals "work" to survive. I found that the comparison was not really good. Food and shelter are abundant. Technology improved the human condition, but it made humans be much much less social, which is the main cause of inequalities. The individual car/kitchen/living room/bathroom generate exclusion. I'm an introvert, I want to have my safe space, but…
Would you mind sharing the link. I often think about efforts of primitive~ survival vs efforts in societies. It seems there's something egotistic about survival (like animals) that satisfies a sense of self (nobody ever said no to hunting when they're hungry)
I’m currently reading “Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots” [0] and it’s an anthropological exploration of these topics. I don’t know if I recommend it to all yet, but if you often think about the philosophy of labor, it might tickle your brain in the right way.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0525561757/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch...
Re: The Philosophy of Work [pdf]
#18"Because people typically spend eight hours or more of each weekday at work and another eight or so hours sleeping, it is where they spend about a third of their waking hours." Actually, half of their waking hours
A week has 7*24 = 168 hours.
40/168 ~= 1/4
Hours awake 7*16 = 112
40/112 ~= 1/3
Re: The Philosophy of Work [pdf]
#19Re: The Philosophy of Work [pdf]
#20I was again, arguing about work on reddit. Someone said that even animals "work" to survive. I found that the comparison was not really good. Food and shelter are abundant. Technology improved the human condition, but it made humans be much much less social, which is the main cause of inequalities. The individual car/kitchen/living room/bathroom generate exclusion. I'm an introvert, I want to have my safe space, but…
> In earlier times, in hunter gatherer societies, food was scarce and work was important. But today, you cannot tell people that working in fast food or in customer support is mandatory to eat and have a roof on your head.
Just a note: hunter gatherers exist today, it's not something that humanity has given up completely, you've given it up, but it might be temporary (it seems that many current hunter gatherers went back to it in order to flee from disease and slavery brought by the westerners). Moreover, we now know that many hunter gatherers "work" less on average than those working in agriculture or - following your example - in customer support.