Hey all,
I was a big fan of this sub from like 2019 through to some time in the middle of last year. I actually left just before it blew up and was on Fox News and stuff.
Anyhow the reason I left was because it started to get dominated by what seemed to me traditional anti-capitalist left wing posts about 'billionaires are bad' etc, which is often true but always boring.
Soon after i would increasingly notice people saying things like 'we're not against work, but against exploitation' or something, which diluted the focus of the sub, which for me was a deep reflection on the value system around work, which ties into deeper questions of morality:
Do we have intrinsic value as human beings, or do we have to earn a place in the social order?
Given there is no wilderness into which we can escape, how is that fair?
If you try that your biggest concern will be park rangers, cops, security guards, etc, herding you back into the property rights system and the formal economy.
What is presented as a system based on consent is in fact ubiquitously coersive. If you want to sleep somewhere, or take a shit, you need permission from some kind of property rights holder. To get that permission you must perform certain tasks, as determined by the state and holders of capital. These tasks are often degrading and pointless and thankless (most jobs I have had have involved me bothering and pestering people, making cold calls, not providing them with anything they were already desiring).
Most of these questions are actually orthogonal to traditional left wing narratives of class conflict and redistribution, but I was seeing these two streams conflated here, and being called a bootlicker by people who clearly switched on to politics some time years after the Iraq war (which I helped organise protests about on my university campus at the time, having grown up steeped in left wing thinking, while also being a union delegate in the call centre where I worked).
And so I just fucked off for a while, but the thoughts kept going round in my head and I was sad to have lost a community where I could explore them.
Then today I saw a notification that Bernie Sanders (who I phone-banked for and follow on Facebook because I admire him a great deal) was going live at an event with Starbucks workers.
And I couldn't help thinking, 'so at the end of this revolution, they will still be Starbucks workers, just better paid'. Like best case your US Starbucks workers will be more like the Starbucks workers here in Australia or Europe where the minimum wage is just enough to keep you out of poverty (and temporarily and provisionally safe from the coercive forces I discussed above).
So where does that put Starbucks workers in Australia? At the end of history, achieving their full human potential and the maximum possible human freedom?
Of course as soon as they stop being Starbucks workers, they lose any purchase in the standard leftist philosophy – in which the only possible moral protagonist is the exploited worker (or some other victimised social group).
The western left outside the US is at an ideological dead end. If the US catch up (I hope they do) then they will be in a less bad position than they currently are. But so what?
As someone who has been employed in this kind of dumbshit work for non-poverty pay, fuck that. It's only a good option compared to poverty, which is a low bar to jump. But hey maybe if we all get really worked up we can get a 3% pay rise next year instead of 2.5. sure. Go for it. I am with you.
But. So. Fucking. What?
Are we all Fukiyama's now, agreeing that the end of history has arrived and this is the final and perfect social arrangement?
Marginal improvements are not what great social movements are mobilised about.
That's why to me being antiwork boils down to being in favour of as generous a basic income as possible. Paid work is, in this view, seen as a necessary evil something which we wouldn't do without an externally impose incentive. The higher the basic income is (in real not nominal terms) the less pressure there is to work for others. An anti-work society would incrementally raise the basic income untill it started to loose efficacy in this regard (which would mean we weren't doing enough work to maximise our overall happiness, and the 'cost' of increased leisure time in terms of lost productivity was becoming too great).
In my vision, there are no Starbucks workers and very few cafes. If people want a coffee they can make one. If they want to hang out with people, they invite them to their home or to a public space like a park or plaza. They get coffee from a machine and carry it to the table themselves.
In our current system we use violence (enforcing property rights) to drive down the cost of labor, then when it is cheap we waste it (people's time attention and energy) on fucking bullshit. If people had the power to say no, everything about the labor market would change.
But many on the left don't like this because, they say, it leaves too much of the market system in place, it's a trick to a trap they say. When you push them on how giving people money and therefore greater freedom to say no to the boss could possibly be hurtful to workers, they end up admitting (in less honest language) that what they are worried about is that workers, because they are suffering less, will have less use for the left and its revolution (which will never come, because it's not meant to). It is a path to liberation which sidelines the social democratic counter-establishment that exists around unions, academia, the publishing industry and NGOs. That is why they block it.
Yanis Varoufakis (the left wing former finance minister of Greece, who resigned rather than cosign the neo-liberal reforms imposed by the EU and IMF) likes to say we no longer live in capitalist societies but have progressed to something he calls techno-feudalism. This is an interesting line of thought to pursue. In Varoufakis's account, the new aristocracy are the financiers and tech billionaires. That makes sense, at least as an analogy.
Who then, are the (mostly 'progressive') intelligentsia, like him?
I contend they are the clergy, who have some revolutionary and destabilizing impulses and rhetoric ( 'harder for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven than a camel to pass through the head of a needle') but who are overall a force for stabilisation and defenders of the status quo.
They hold your hand while you suffer and tell you beautiful stories about the day of judgement in the future, when all will be made right and the powerful will be made to pay for their sins. That day is always close. But it is never today.
Marxist derived leftist ideology is not antiwork, it is pro-worker. That doesn't mean it is bad or useless but it cannot help us move to a world where the institution of employment, fades like the institution of serfdom has, into the distant past.
Paid overtime is better than unpaid overtime, but maximum human liberation is the goal.