I really soured on the related idea of "fully automated luxury communism" when I thought more deeply about the fact that labor is the primary relationship between human beings and the non-human environment (an idea that's latent in some of Marx's writings, if not explicit). If we automate away that social relationship, we basically guarantee that very few people have a meaningful understanding of the impact their actions have on the environment. They might use their leisure time to go on hikes or grow vegetables, but almost definitionally they won't be doing so at a scale that actually supports meaningful levels of consumption, and thus the relationship between the machinery that supports their lives and the natural world remains obscure.
Also, automating everything so that we can live Eloi-like lives of pastoral idleness seems like a great way of ordaining a priestly caste of technicians in charge of the machinery that supports everyone. And thus society itself in the long run. As socialists we're often fond of pointing out that wealth makes people lazy, disconnected, and disdainful of their fellow human beings. Why we'd want to universalize that no longer makes any sense to me.
I feel like that piece was about getting rid of bullshit jobs and tasks not freedom from productive labor. Maybe I’m guilty of seeing what I want to see here.
Have to disagree a bit here. I understand that some work will remain necessary. However, as the late David Graeber contended - and the pandemic demonstrated - a significant number of jobs are BS jobs that shouldn’t exist. Even a lot of seemingly productive labor is BS and only exists because of planned obsolescence and other deliberate corporate inefficiencies.
I think old school leftist analysis still has much to offer, but this isn’t the 20th century, and there’s no longer much - if any - inherent dignity or value in a large percentage of jobs. Democratizing and socializing said jobs would certainly be an improvement, but wouldn’t remedy what Graeber called “spiritual violence.”
One other factor in the cult of business is the decline of the idle rich. There are rich people still, more than ever before, but they tend to work, often in lucrative occupations. That has a two fold impact. It increases income inequality when you’re a management consultant that also has $250k in trust income. It also reduces support for redistribution as obviously idle rich people are less in evidence.
As a banker I’ll always be able to sleep easy while supposed “leftist” politicians and activist refer to the the actual muscle of their movement as “deplorable”.
How many online “leftist” perform manual labor for work? Or are even friends/relatives of people who perform manual labor for work?
Anarchists fought specifically for less work. Working with socialists, this led to the 8 hour workday and 40 hour work week.
I would imagine more American working class people work at fast food restaurants and Walmarts than they do at, like, factories that make cars. If the fast food and retail industry went on strike it would have much less impact than dockworkers or miners. But most people are not doing that kind of labor anymore.
The conditions of work are very different than they were in the 1850s or 1920s. I'd argue that most workers do work that is both unnecessary and demeaning and boring. Which sucks. And anyone who has worked minimum wage in retail or at a restaurant can tell you that most people do not feel solidarity with them or even empathy for their condition, partly because if every fast food restaurant in the country disappeared tomorrow, most people wouldn't even think about it a week later.
I think we might be in semantic territory here; in America, "work" is defined essentially as the virtue of laboring to make someone else richer.
I'm not so sure we should conflate the value of the worker with the value of work. A person is no less deserving of dignity because they are employees.
Likewise, I see no problem with the vast majority of manual labor being performed by robots.
I have a fantasy of a sizeable chunk of society devoting its time and resources to the care of other people - not just doctors, but also trainers, physical therapists, bureaucrats running government services, etc etc.
I am generally a chill person, but my blood boils since I stumbled onto these Substack-for-the-white-liberal-elites.
Who the f*** has enough leisure time and is so removed from having to keep a roof over your heads and food in your children's belly to even think that work is an option...? You living on trust-funds or just have easy-from-cafes, bull*** jobs?
No wonder Latinos are flocking to the Republicans.
You rich, White people debate the most ridiculous crap.
As for "communism" and "socialism" -- we Latino immigrants know all about that. Just ask us. We have dragged ourselves through oceans on a raft and crossed the desert with rapist coyotes running away from people like you in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia.
If the choice is between Democrats debating the benefits of bulls***, no wonder my Latino immigrant neighbors now want to vote Republican.
And, that is the scariest thing in the world -- we came all this way, suffered so very much -- for you white people to yank the American Dream away from us?!! FU and your "socialist" friends -- go live in Venezuela or Cuba (like the people, not the govt & their friends) if you want socialism.
You probably "cancel" people for "wrong-speak", too. Yeah, we know about that, too. We got "cancelled" back home. Lost our jobs because we didn't want to parrot bulls""" .
Good piece. I think some people have attributed all the annoyances of their life to "capitalism." As you said, there's tons of poor working conditions in our system that we don't need, but, ultimately sometimes work sucks just because working sucks
This is one of the most interesting topics in the discourse today. Less than 5 day work weeks to does anyone really need to work, etc. Love the topic.
It does point to the hard “workforce policy” challenge about why it’s difficult to fill vacancies (pre-COVID and now). Speaking as someone who works on this stuff, we operate in a low information environment - we don’t really know specifically why it’s hard to succeed in this area. Sure, we know the list of potential reasons (employer failures, other societal challenges, barriers, etc), but we still offer programs and often wonder why it doesn’t really result in filling enough positions. It’s not an area of precision in data or knowledge.
To me - it gets to the question of who in “the workforce” is a candidate for full time work, for whatever reason, and who is not. Sometimes, as your comments suggest, a different question is raised - who should be? Baffling and challenging stuff.
I think the critique of anti-work is basically correct but I also think it shows how dead Marxism is as a paradigm. It made some sense in a Dickensian world up through the 1920s and 1930s. However, at least in the West, the labor side of these fights, to varying degrees depending on the particular country, got yes for an answer. Maybe it was only to prevent communist threats, and of course there are a thousand caveats about outsourcing exploitation to developing countries in the subsequent decades and giving as little as the capitalist class of the day could get away with, but it happened.
So looking for some kind of revolutionary solidarity among low paid, poorly treated service workers is a fool's errand and I'd imagine even their appetite for it is relatively low. But we can (and need to) start reconsidering how this work is compensated and generally raising the floor for what is considered appropriate treatment. Nevertheless there will be no revolution of the Wal-Mart workers and fast food cooks and CNAs and housekeepers and even if there was I'm not sure what it would accomplish.
I really soured on the related idea of "fully automated luxury communism" when I thought more deeply about the fact that labor is the primary relationship between human beings and the non-human environment (an idea that's latent in some of Marx's writings, if not explicit). If we automate away that social relationship, we basically guarantee that very few people have a meaningful understanding of the impact their actions have on the environment. They might use their leisure time to go on hikes or grow vegetables, but almost definitionally they won't be doing so at a scale that actually supports meaningful levels of consumption, and thus the relationship between the machinery that supports their lives and the natural world remains obscure.
Also, automating everything so that we can live Eloi-like lives of pastoral idleness seems like a great way of ordaining a priestly caste of technicians in charge of the machinery that supports everyone. And thus society itself in the long run. As socialists we're often fond of pointing out that wealth makes people lazy, disconnected, and disdainful of their fellow human beings. Why we'd want to universalize that no longer makes any sense to me.
"Somebody still has to keep the sewage system working, even after the revolution."
Somebody also has to keep cool water running over the spent plutonium rods - https://youtu.be/fibDNwF8bjs&t=48
Fantastic.
I feel like that piece was about getting rid of bullshit jobs and tasks not freedom from productive labor. Maybe I’m guilty of seeing what I want to see here.
If Marxists don't trade labor for money, what do I get for my labor?
Have to disagree a bit here. I understand that some work will remain necessary. However, as the late David Graeber contended - and the pandemic demonstrated - a significant number of jobs are BS jobs that shouldn’t exist. Even a lot of seemingly productive labor is BS and only exists because of planned obsolescence and other deliberate corporate inefficiencies.
I think old school leftist analysis still has much to offer, but this isn’t the 20th century, and there’s no longer much - if any - inherent dignity or value in a large percentage of jobs. Democratizing and socializing said jobs would certainly be an improvement, but wouldn’t remedy what Graeber called “spiritual violence.”
One other factor in the cult of business is the decline of the idle rich. There are rich people still, more than ever before, but they tend to work, often in lucrative occupations. That has a two fold impact. It increases income inequality when you’re a management consultant that also has $250k in trust income. It also reduces support for redistribution as obviously idle rich people are less in evidence.
As a banker I’ll always be able to sleep easy while supposed “leftist” politicians and activist refer to the the actual muscle of their movement as “deplorable”.
How many online “leftist” perform manual labor for work? Or are even friends/relatives of people who perform manual labor for work?
I definitely agree, even as someone who has put down "the social reproduction of labor" as my job for a while.
Anarchists fought specifically for less work. Working with socialists, this led to the 8 hour workday and 40 hour work week.
I would imagine more American working class people work at fast food restaurants and Walmarts than they do at, like, factories that make cars. If the fast food and retail industry went on strike it would have much less impact than dockworkers or miners. But most people are not doing that kind of labor anymore.
The conditions of work are very different than they were in the 1850s or 1920s. I'd argue that most workers do work that is both unnecessary and demeaning and boring. Which sucks. And anyone who has worked minimum wage in retail or at a restaurant can tell you that most people do not feel solidarity with them or even empathy for their condition, partly because if every fast food restaurant in the country disappeared tomorrow, most people wouldn't even think about it a week later.
I think we might be in semantic territory here; in America, "work" is defined essentially as the virtue of laboring to make someone else richer.
I'm not so sure we should conflate the value of the worker with the value of work. A person is no less deserving of dignity because they are employees.
Likewise, I see no problem with the vast majority of manual labor being performed by robots.
I have a fantasy of a sizeable chunk of society devoting its time and resources to the care of other people - not just doctors, but also trainers, physical therapists, bureaucrats running government services, etc etc.
I am generally a chill person, but my blood boils since I stumbled onto these Substack-for-the-white-liberal-elites.
Who the f*** has enough leisure time and is so removed from having to keep a roof over your heads and food in your children's belly to even think that work is an option...? You living on trust-funds or just have easy-from-cafes, bull*** jobs?
No wonder Latinos are flocking to the Republicans.
You rich, White people debate the most ridiculous crap.
As for "communism" and "socialism" -- we Latino immigrants know all about that. Just ask us. We have dragged ourselves through oceans on a raft and crossed the desert with rapist coyotes running away from people like you in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia.
If the choice is between Democrats debating the benefits of bulls***, no wonder my Latino immigrant neighbors now want to vote Republican.
And, that is the scariest thing in the world -- we came all this way, suffered so very much -- for you white people to yank the American Dream away from us?!! FU and your "socialist" friends -- go live in Venezuela or Cuba (like the people, not the govt & their friends) if you want socialism.
You probably "cancel" people for "wrong-speak", too. Yeah, we know about that, too. We got "cancelled" back home. Lost our jobs because we didn't want to parrot bulls""" .
Good piece. I think some people have attributed all the annoyances of their life to "capitalism." As you said, there's tons of poor working conditions in our system that we don't need, but, ultimately sometimes work sucks just because working sucks
This is one of the most interesting topics in the discourse today. Less than 5 day work weeks to does anyone really need to work, etc. Love the topic.
It does point to the hard “workforce policy” challenge about why it’s difficult to fill vacancies (pre-COVID and now). Speaking as someone who works on this stuff, we operate in a low information environment - we don’t really know specifically why it’s hard to succeed in this area. Sure, we know the list of potential reasons (employer failures, other societal challenges, barriers, etc), but we still offer programs and often wonder why it doesn’t really result in filling enough positions. It’s not an area of precision in data or knowledge.
To me - it gets to the question of who in “the workforce” is a candidate for full time work, for whatever reason, and who is not. Sometimes, as your comments suggest, a different question is raised - who should be? Baffling and challenging stuff.
I think the critique of anti-work is basically correct but I also think it shows how dead Marxism is as a paradigm. It made some sense in a Dickensian world up through the 1920s and 1930s. However, at least in the West, the labor side of these fights, to varying degrees depending on the particular country, got yes for an answer. Maybe it was only to prevent communist threats, and of course there are a thousand caveats about outsourcing exploitation to developing countries in the subsequent decades and giving as little as the capitalist class of the day could get away with, but it happened.
So looking for some kind of revolutionary solidarity among low paid, poorly treated service workers is a fool's errand and I'd imagine even their appetite for it is relatively low. But we can (and need to) start reconsidering how this work is compensated and generally raising the floor for what is considered appropriate treatment. Nevertheless there will be no revolution of the Wal-Mart workers and fast food cooks and CNAs and housekeepers and even if there was I'm not sure what it would accomplish.