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Antiwork

Can we get liberals and libertarians off this sub

Before it blew up, r/antiwork was a leftist sub. Anti-capitalist, anti-wage labor, anti-privatization, anti-landlord, pro-socialist. Now it just seems like people here only want to complain about shitty jobs/wages but think that we can solve these problems by having a nicer version of capitalism, or just nicer capitalists. They think that capitalism is just when you learn a skill and get compensated for it, and they treat it like an immutable law of nature and not a politically/historically contingent legal construct. There is no nicer version of capitalism. You can try to rein it in with regulation, and social democracy would definitely be an improvement, but our entire political economy relies on private ownership of production and separating profit from the labor that produces it. Wages, no matter how high, are a fractional compensation for the value we provide as workers. The structural violence of the state that defends the…


Before it blew up, r/antiwork was a leftist sub. Anti-capitalist, anti-wage labor, anti-privatization, anti-landlord, pro-socialist. Now it just seems like people here only want to complain about shitty jobs/wages but think that we can solve these problems by having a nicer version of capitalism, or just nicer capitalists. They think that capitalism is just when you learn a skill and get compensated for it, and they treat it like an immutable law of nature and not a politically/historically contingent legal construct.

There is no nicer version of capitalism. You can try to rein it in with regulation, and social democracy would definitely be an improvement, but our entire political economy relies on private ownership of production and separating profit from the labor that produces it. Wages, no matter how high, are a fractional compensation for the value we provide as workers. The structural violence of the state that defends the rights of owners but not of workers is coercive to people who have nothing to sell but their labor (read: the vast majority of us) and will literally imprison you if you are poor.

It's just fucking obnoxious when people come on here who don't actually understand the system we're living in but feel informed enough to comment on it. Anti-work doesn't just mean you don't like working. We all hate working, it sucks. Being anti-work means you have a political vision where that can change, where wage labor can become a thing of the past, and we don't have time to deal with people who run defense for what is obviously a broken system.

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