Remember that capitalism is designed to force you to work under threat of death by starvation. You never had freedom to choose what to do with your lives it was chosen for you.
Plenty of other economic systems also made people to work under threat of starvation.
Unless the Romans and Greeks were capitalists, too.
Not like capitalism. It has a marketing scheme where it gives you the illusion of free will and choices.
that’s cool. we live under none of those systems. focus on the one we are beholden to and don’t distract as if there is some sort of contest.
I’m just trying not to replace this with something worse.
But since I know history I get to watch humans make the same mistakes over and over again.
Fun fact: not questioning capitalism inevitably leads to EXTRA awfulness added as the people at the top use their outsized wealth and influence to remake society based on their stupid and/or selfish ideas.
Capitalism sucks ass, for its own unique reasons and for reasons it shares with other economic systems.
If it’s replaced with another system with clocks and pants and jobs I’ll hate that one too.
Capitalism sucks ass
Yup. You can stop there.
No need to tack on the whataboutism in a transparent attempt to argue in favor of it without being seen doing so.
I will not have my honor impugned by suggesting I support a system with pants.
We should work on replacing then, it’s clear that the way things are has to go
Unless the Romans and Greeks were capitalists, too.
Nope, just slavers, not wage slavers. The dynamics of power are eternal, merely the forms change. One hopes at some point we evolve.
“Nooo!! We need hierarchy!!! If there’s no one to tell me what to do I won’t know what to do!” - everybody every time I bring up hierarchy as the cause of many of humanity’s problems
It’s not just economic systems. Every animal works under the threat of starvation.
Just watch a nature documentary. Grazing animals have to eat for hours a day just to eat enough to avoid starvation, and they have to constantly be on the lookout for predators. Predators need to take down one of those grazing animals on a regular basis or they starve.
There has never been a way of living that didn’t involve working to avoid starving. When humans developed agriculture, it finally meant that when things were going well starvation was something that might be months away instead of weeks away.
There has never been an economic system where everybody could just be creative and rest all day and not work. That may be true of some elites at the top, but it will always be a small minority of people while everyone else works.
You can always hope that that work will become more pleasant, or that there will be less of it. Work used to be sun-up to sun-down, 6 days a week. Our ancestors fought and died for laws that reduced this to only 8 hours a day and only 5 days a week. Work these days is mostly done indoors, mostly in heated or air-conditioned spaces. It doesn’t tend to maim you, or require repetitive movements that eventually cripple you.
People should definitely keep fighting for more. They should join unions so they’re not having to fight on their own. But, nobody should be deluded into think it’s abnormal to have to work to live.
no clocks. Or pants.
Flavor Flav and MC Hammer would never make it as aardvarks.
animal behaviorists are finding that what they first perceived as lack of functional importance often has dazzling significance after all.
the sand scorpion seems to emerge from its burrow and just stand around waiting for a meal to happen by. But Oregon State University zoologist Philip Brownell has discovered that the scorpion has receptors on its feet that sense approaching insects from several inches away by detecting minute disturbances of the desert.
The polar bear often naps next to a seal’s breathing hole with one paw cocked for a lethal swipe. Alligators have floating slumber parties beneath heron rookeries during nesting season, waiting for hapless fledglings and jostled eggs. The female fence lizard, which is “at rest” 98 percent of the time, spends that time in the energizing sun within a tongue’s dart of smorgasbord rest stops for passing insects.
The African lion, which University of Minnesota zoologist Anne Pusey says can eat 66 pounds at a sitting and then lie around on its back for several days digesting the meal, is another strategic loafer: It does most of that lying around in the shade, near a waterhole, with one eye open to potential next meals.
So is there anything at all to animal laziness? Do wild creatures ever just plain loaf? Not, says Cornell biologist Paul Sherman, from the point of view of evolutionary biologists.
Maybe read the whole thing.
Zoologist Herbers, who readily acknowledges that such discoveries lead to questions “so much more sophisticated than they were ten years ago,” still maintains that animals like to loaf. “Sure, there are good excuses for lounging around at a certain time and place-like the lions in the shade at the waterhole, where they can keep cool and jump a warthog at the same time,” she says. “But make no mistake; some of these animals are relaxing. They’re there because they would prefer to lie around in the shade on a hot day than to work for a living.” She is particularly intrigued by rest as a reward for efficiency. “A quick kill,” she says, “equals a nice long nap.”
And among those most studied of animals, the social insects, division of labor determines whether they’re on active duty or just standing by. Doctoral candidate Susanne Kuhnholz of Cornell University is almost certain that some bees, for instance, are designated water carriers whose job is to cool or heat the hive and brood as need dictates.
“Most of the time it looks like they’re just hanging around the hive,” she says. “But if it gets too hot, they become very busy, distributing water. And if it gets too cold, they uncouple their wings from their flight muscles and shiver to generate metabolic heat.”
Or read this lovely article about lazy ants
Or find something that shows animals desire clocks and pants and constant motion.
Animals don’t want pants. Humans want pants and netflix and adult colouring books. If humans were willing to spend 8 hours a day, every day, lounging on a rock instead, then they could get by with doing a lot less work for money.
More evidence that I am not human.
I guess that’s just life, isn’t it? I mean people in stone age also lived under the threat of starvation if they just hang out in their caves. Of course, capitalism is the industrialized professional version of this, but I don’t think this is inherently capitalistic.
The difference is that we have all the tools and resources to not live like caveman nowadays. We could feed everyone if we wanted to, but the government would rather fire another barrage of missiles at impoverished people
People are not living like cavemen nowadays. They want iPhones and pickup trucks and air conditioning.
If you’re willing to spend your free time living the way a caveman did, you can probably get by working a lot fewer hours.
Being homeless is essentially criminalized in most countries. So where do you propose we do that?
Iphone $800 Ford F350 $45,000
A year of average US rent $25,000 which you have to keep paying every year and it goes up AT LEAST 8% every year.
The truck will let you pay it off over 5 years so your monthly payments would be like 750. Not nothing for sure but still not even half of rent.
You’re not including monthly service for your cell phone, the accessories you need to buy (including a case), the electricity to charge it, and so-on.
For the truck, you also need to include the gas, insurance and maintenance.
where?
Okay, where?
Hunter/gatherer and early farming societies typically had a lot more leisure time than we do today. Some researchers estimated they only ‘worked’ 15-30 hours a week, and a lot of that was dependent on seasons. In addition, their egalitarian structure and lack of pursuit for excess material goods meant no pressure for long work hours.
Hunter/gatherer and early farming societies typically had a lot more leisure time than we do today. Some researchers estimated they only ‘worked’ 15-30 hours a week
That figure is both not a consensus, and it’s a number of hours that’s referring to time spent on food procurement only, nothing else of what’s needed to live/survive.
And they just accepted that only a fraction of their babies would live to become infants, and only a fraction of their infants would reach adulthood.
Are you suggesting that the 40-hour work week has a causal connection with the infant morality rate?
There’s an indirect one. The 40 hour week is the result of strikes from unions that are the result of factories which are the result of the industrial revolution which also led to improvements in medicine that massively reduced child mortality.
I agree with you to a degree, the issue now is that a lot of jobs only exist to provide value to shareholders while being neutral to or even hostile to society.
As opposed to nature where you are forced to hunt for food under threat of starvation.
Most species have better social safety nets than capitalism does, though.
What we’ve been trained to identify as “work” under this power hierarchy is more definitively “toil”. The definition has been overridden so that we cannot differentiate the bait and switch.
Work is labor that benefits the person doing it, is self-actualizing, is voluntary, and is an overall positive experience.
Toil is labor without clear benefit. It is not fun. It is repetitive and draining. It is often involuntary or coerced.
For most who labor under capitalism, the labor they perform is not actually work, but toil.
/the ghost of Ammon Hennacy grins
I picked up the idea through Bookchin but I have no doubt he got it from other libsocs like Hennacy.
thank you for that; what a life!
Yeah, this unfortunately. Truth nuke, a person who does a honest day’s work deserves to be paid a honest day’s wage
ITT: tons of people defending capitalism by forswearing the last 200,000 years of social progress.
To quote Bernie, who might have been quoting someone else: poverty isn’t an inevitability. It’s a policy choice.
Just plain inaccurate. There are no staunch capitalists on this website.
That being said, getting to do work and gain access to goods through that can provide a sense of safety as you are able to sustain yourself. But there are loads of caveats to every part of that sentence.
I have several hobbies that could make bank if I wanted to put in time and effort.
That requires treating executive dysfunction, which can’t happen unless I have money. In order to get money I have to work jobs I absolutely hate, and that suck all energy and will to live out of me, and I don’t want to do anything with my hobbies.
If I didn’t have to worry about food, housing, and whether I have electricity or not, I could sell a handful of things a month and be just fine on utilities and a luxury purchase every so often.
If we wanted to perform labor, we wouldn’t have invented machines or fantasize about robot butlers.
When I was like 13, 14 when my parents were really pushing me to get a job, I already didn’t want to work. Decades later, I still don’t want to work, and I like what I do. There’s a reason I play the lotto, it’s the only way I’m getting out of this shit-cycle. I’d like to spend more time hanging out with my nieces and nephews, who are growing up so fast. My grandparents only have a few years left at best, I’ve already missed out on spending the best years I could with them. Saw my dad last year, probably the first in nearly a decade in of itself. I want to spend time just sitting at a beach watching the waves come in. Or seeing a mountain for the first time.
I don’t want to work. I’ve never wanted to work. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t do nothing, I don’t want to be lazy. Like, my ideal “job” is working in engineering on the Enterprise with Geordi. But that can’t happen. So really I just want enough money so if I do work, I have enough money to tell upper management their plans “aka shit they saw on LinkedIn” is fucking stupid. What you going to do fire me, I’d be rich, that’s not a threat! Eat shit you overpaid worthless peices of shit… (I might have some things to work on…,)
Honest work is just fine. What I don’t like is high pay for bullshit work and bullshit pay for honest work.
Yeah, same here honestly. It’s that the Epstein class refuses to pay the workers for their labor and refuses to pay the workers a living wage and refuses to pay them and refuses to give them a raise
am unemployed and volunteer my time to help the community, have never been so busy. will have more time to rest once I get a job
I have some bad news for you
I was less busy when I did a postdoc.
People do want to work! Loads of people build all sorts of things for the joy and satisfaction of the craft. Plenty of people volunteer to help people - literally the definition of doing something you don’t have to do! Anyone that says that isn’t work is delusional.
We need a new word for what we call “work”. No one wants to be exploited for their effort, but most people have always had the desire to do some sort of work.
I just want the freedom to eat cheese in foreign places, without the need to pay thugs at borders to get to the next place with cheese.
is also a dream of mine, though I don’t much like cheese :)
Reading an article in the FT yesterday, an 80 yr old woman who was ardently opposed to Magyar and pro Orban because he’ll let in swathes of immigrants and help Ukraine in the war, leading to an unbearable and unlivable Hungary.
Just when I think Australia is the only country with truly horrible people, it’s “nice” to see other nation states are also burdened with them.
They said, I just wish Australia would join the EU. I worked just go live in Hungary :)
People want to be useful. What people don’t want is to have the surplus value of their labor stolen from them. People are cool with working and helping out others as long as they actually get to reap what they sow and not have it stolen from them.
On the flipside of that…
There are tonnes of jobs that need to be done but that nobody likes to do. Take garbage disposal. Very few people are willing to do this, and the people that do this surely don’t get paid even nearly enough.
There aren’t jobs you’ll find many volunteers for. Sometimes there is just work to be done and somebody has got to do it
Honestly, I bet there’s people who would step up and do it because it needs to be done. Especially when whatever stinky thing in question isn’t Their Job For The Rest Of Time™ and they don’t have to keep going back to it every day.
– Frost
Rotating volunteer positions go a long way in distributing the burden of unpleasant jobs. Volunteers gain the personal satisfaction and social clout of having performed a service, without having to put up with it for any longer than they actually want to. It’s just like rotating chores at home on a larger scale.
Garbagemen save more lives than doctors.
Does my desire to rot mean nothing to you, ma’am? (Rest is different than that, for those who don’t understand and are haters)
Im fearing that this might be true
