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Antiwork

I think people are missing the point of this sub

Reason number one: I constantly see posts and comments on here about how someone's employer is doing something horrible, and we'll get this flood of comments talking about how they need to switch careers or report them to HR or report them to a labor board or something like that. That is an individual LEGAL solution to a systemic problem. There is often no real individual solution to these problems, because as the working class, the deck of cards is stacked against us. And these so-called “solutions?” Much of the time what the company is doing is either legal (especially in at-will states) or de-facto legal because either it's not enforced, the people supposed to be enforcing it are purposefully heavily underfunded, or because the cost to an individual finding an individual solution is so great that almost no one does it. This is by design. You are probably a…


Reason number one: I constantly see posts and comments on here about how someone's employer is doing something horrible, and we'll get this flood of comments talking about how they need to switch careers or report them to HR or report them to a labor board or something like that. That is an individual LEGAL solution to a systemic problem. There is often no real individual solution to these problems, because as the working class, the deck of cards is stacked against us. And these so-called “solutions?” Much of the time what the company is doing is either legal (especially in at-will states) or de-facto legal because either it's not enforced, the people supposed to be enforcing it are purposefully heavily underfunded, or because the cost to an individual finding an individual solution is so great that almost no one does it. This is by design. You are probably a worker in a liberal capitalist democracy where the right to property is enshrined into law. The odds are infinitely against you, and this is not an accident nor because the system is broken. Ever since the dawn of capitalism, since the dawn of States, the dawn of money, of hierarchy, it has been like this. But it doesn't always have to be that way

I am not saying that individual solutions do not exist, but that the majority of the time they do not, because it's not unions or worker's councils who are writing these laws, it's capitalists. After all, why would they write laws that aren't in their interest? So what is to be done, you might ask? Organizing, striking, unionizing, stealing (in Minecraft), , and other forms of direct action are the only real hope for most people. Most people don't work in a highly-specialized tech job that pays $350k a year where a single worker leaving could have catastrophic consequences for the employer. They work fast food, or as a janitor, or as a trucker, or at a grocery store, stuff like that, where the power is very firmly in the hands of the capitalist.

Reason number two: it has to be said, but there is a severe amount of liberalism in this sub. This is probably a done deal and if you don't already get what I'm saying, you're not going to get it anyway. This used to be a subreddit about actually abolishing work. About a future where capitalism, bosses, landlords, money, private property, didn't exist. Where work didn't exist, because we only did what we needed to to live happy lives in as much harmony with the natural world as possible, and where we only labored to provide for our needs, and distributed resources according to need. In other words this was originally an anarchist/communist sub, and it saddens and angers me deeply that this has changed. But I guess that's what happens to all big-tent far-left communities, they start off with a small far-left group and then as the community expands it inevitably gains liberal and reactionary followers, and the liberals water down the original message until it has been completely neutered and is now controlled opposition. It happened to BLM, it happened to Occupy Wallstreet, it happened to feminism, environmentalism, anti-police brutality veganism, LGBT+, almost everything save for extremely overt and decentralized far-left groups, to the point where modern environmentalism is “don't use plastic straws” and where “Abolish the Police” in Summer of 2021 became “Defund the Police” became “Reform the Police” became “Make them wear body cameras or something eh fuck it.” And here on Reddit, the greatest example is LateStageCapitalism, which got co-opted so hard anything further left of American social democracy (basically centrism) gets mass downvoted.

tl;dr people miss the point of this sub and keep trying to find legal and individual solutions to systemic problems. They also miss the point by not even actually being antiwork, let alone abolishing work. We should just change the name of this sub to “moderately reform work” at this point.

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