> No labor is dignified except by the way people talk about it and the people who do it. People talk about farming and farmers with greater levels of dignity than they do call-center drones. I can even call them "drones" in this argument and it doesn't seem at odds.
A great point, and well written. The more I think about this the more arbitrary the aesthetics seem. What is your hypothesis is to what guides aesthetic judgements here? Why do left and right agree?
For me, it doesn't matter if you work at McDonald's or as a janitor or whatever. All work is respectable and so is anybody who provides for themselves or their family. In that sense a job is a job.
The way that blue collar labor is denigrated by PMC types is insanity. And what's especially grating is that blue collar labor tends to be much more difficult and demanding than the white collar variety.
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.
“ 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.”
Most people won't interact with nature, they'll spend all of thier time staring at a screen. How many people with free time don't ultimately do that? If nothing else, our health would suffer dramatically.
I personally dont care if someone spends all day jerking off, but unless you think a society of depressed shutins is a goal worth working towards, i dont see why you think 18 hours a day of screen time is a good thing.
For one thing, people in that condition are easier to exploit and abuse. If nothing else, self-preservation suggests that it's a bad idea to let yourself get too passive. There have always been, and probably always will be, people who are happy to take what you've got if you are too weak or aimless to protect it. Even if we get everyone in our society to cooperate and care for one another, that doesn't exclude the possibility that the 21st-century equivalent of Vikings will show up at some point to trample our utopia and take the spoils. If that sounds overdramatic, well, just look at history; it's happened many times before. There are plenty of people who will never be content to just look at screens or tend their gardens all day, and not all of them are nice.
I truly don't think we have any way to know what people would do. My supposition is that part of the reason why people currently spend so much time watching tv/on their phone/whatever is because they're tired. If you don't have to exchange labor for money, then... who knows?
Like, if I take a week off work, I get bored and antsy if I don't go anywhere or do anything. I bet most people would, like, find stuff to do.
Youre replacing what you do with what weve seen people actually do. Bmi has soared in kids and adults due to the pandemic, and people were not walking in the woods and planting gardens but logging enormous hours on netflix.
I personally focused on doing hobbies and things because I'm like you; i have to do something or i go insane. I didnt gain any covid weight either. But people's reaction to lots of free time has been to meld with the couch.
I think we've both got some confirmation bias going on here. Like, yeah, people watched a lot of tv, but... the sourdough thing? People starting herb gardens during the pandemic? There was a run on lumber because people were doing so many home improvement projects?
Agreed. Lots of people kept having normal lives or ones filled with activity. But studies show that many people did not do hobbies, they simply vegetated. The jump in bmi is due to a very significant part of the population not being active. People can chose to do whatever, but from a societal and physical and mental health standpoint, many people dont default to great choices.
I think BMIs increased during the pandemic because so much of the things that brought us out of the house got shut down. Many people aren't going into the office anymore, so any walking involved in your commute, going to grab lunch, or even walking down a long office hallway to go to the bathroom disappears. Gyms, sports teams, fitness classes (or other things that aren't necessarily fitnessy but still get you off the couch) -- shut down or people less willing to do them for two years. I filled my time with sedentary hobbies like painting, or experimental baking (which I then had to eat). And I also am much more prone to snacking when I'm working from home.
A great way to see how a truly post-scarcity society might not fully work is how much less enjoyable (for most people) video games are with cheats enabled. The fun is in overcoming obstacles, and if all obstacles are eliminated, you can fart around a bit playing God, and then get bored.
I don't believe this for a second. People have hobbies. They volunteer. They take care of loved ones, both human and animal. This is all work.
Saying that there is no obstacle to overcome via work if you don't have the threat of starvation and homelessness hanging over your head is a very grim way to look at the world.
My comment seems to have been eaten? I'll try again.
You're strawmanning me here. I didn't say that humanity needs the threat of starvation to make life meaningful. I said that most humans need to have the sense that their labor is helping to overcome some sort of obstacles to make "doing things" worthwhile.
I mean, let's consider food here. Imagine a Star-Trek like replicator which could print out any food you like. Many people would use it all the time, but it would not lead to happiness for many who like to:
1. Grow their own food.
2. Cook for themselves or others.
3. Go to a restaurant.
4. Go shopping in a market.
All of these involve labor. Even being a customer involves labor of a sort, as you need to go to the place you buy products, socially engage with the worker, etc. To a large extent supermarkets and the like became profitable in part because they convinced the customer to work for free, traveling a longer distance to buy a wider variety of things and dealing with the "last mile" issue in logistics.
Regardless, the point is people derive pleasure out of simple acts of problem solving in their everyday lives, and if it were possible to remove all effort from the process, life would indeed feel empty for many people. That does not imply we need a boot on our neck to be content, that just implies that as creatures which evolved for survival, we're constructed to expend physical and mental energy in order to meet our needs.
People still work too. Star Trek is pretty explicitly a world where nearly everyone we ever see on camera works a full-time job despite apparently not getting paid and having access to free shit through the replicator. It's post-scarcity, and arguably post-capitalist, but it's explicitly not an anti-work setting.
Honestly though, the presence of waiters in Sisko's Creole Kitchen always confused the hell out of me. It's a hard job to see anyone doing for free.
I'm currently doing some really annoying and difficult physical unpaid volunteer work and I've been doing it for 2 years with no end in sight, and I still enjoy doing it despite it not being fun in any meaningful sense of the word.
It's a TV show that comes out of a few thoughts by Gene Roddenberry when communism was at the height of popularity and production values didn't allow for landing ships so he made up a transporter.
It just doesn't make sense but we can try to pretend such a society exists anyway for entertainment and deconstruction purposes.
But the whole idea of "post-scarcity society" is nonsense. There will always be scarcity. Most people will strive to have more. Even assuming unlimited energy and goods, there will always be limits on things like space and human attention.
Even looking at the most iconic example of post-scarcity society, Star Trek, it's clear there are some things that are limited or rationed. I'm sure not everyone has access to a palatial estate on a beautiful vineyard like Picard does.
As food and energy shortages mount and supply chain problems continue to worsen, it doesn’t look like we have to worry too much about what we’ll do in a post-scarcity society.
The problem with Star Trek is that the civilian side of things has never really been fleshed-out all that well. Obviously not everyone on Earth can have a chateau, but there are also a lot of human colony worlds in the Federation.
I remember people complaining that Raffi in Star Trek: Picard doesn't fit the Star Trek universe, because she's living in a shack in the desert. Man, if everyone that was currently homeless had a "shack" like that...
The fact that colonization exists shows there must be some cracks in the economic system. People don't generally leave the safety of home to work the land in the wilderness unless there's something they can't get where they are now.
On the one hand, it's no more fair to expect Trek writers to explain exactly how the highly advanced economic system of the Federation works any more than we would expect them to deliver the plans for a functional warp drive. Maybe some Stephen Hawking level person in economics figured out how to do it some time in the 22nd century.
On the other hand, it points out that this part of the Trek universe is just as much handwaving as phasers and transporters.
When *The Orville* had the chance to explore or deconstruct this, and just said "fuck it, we're doing it all the way: yes, money doesn't exist" I was a little disappointed, but on later thought impressed that they just decided to go with it.
They want to tell stories in a classic Star Trek universe even if it doesn't make sense, and more power to them.
Agreed. I stopped supporting the idea of total socialism, once I realised that it essentially meant giving the Morlocks a universal kill switch. If we're all plugged into alcoves like so many Borg drones, then all anyone would need to do to kill us, is cut the electricity.
The goal should be to oppose the Khan/Harrison Bergeron imperative, not to achieve a state of technologically enabled, perpetual infantilism. The irony is that the latter would ultimately condemn us to a far less humane fate than even what Khan's spiritual brethren have in mind for us anyway.
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.
I thought it didn’t make an especially coherent argument - sometimes it was about freedom from productive labor, sometimes it was about freedom from any job that isn’t enjoyable and inspiring. It kind of went back and forth.
I can't hear "bullshit jobs" without hearing "I don't have to work at my bullshit white-collar job, but *you* have to work at your non-bullshit blue-collar job."
I don’t know that May totally be the case but I’m a teacher and my spouse is a nurse and we both have a lot of bs and if you took it away you wouldn’t be left without work to do.
It would just be more the socially useful stuff and not documenting gratuitously.
Maybe I'm missing your point, but are you suggesting the love, sacrifice, and selflessness that parents exhibit for their children is scalable to society at large?
It sure does! Which leads to the question, in opposition to Freddie's above: if it were not your child - if it were some random adult stranger for example - would you clean up their shit for free?
I thought you previously had an essay saying Marxists were fine with people getting paid for labor and even getting paid very unequal wages for labor. I thought you were going to say "you misunderstand Marxism."
Love, which does not scale to the level of a whole society. It is humanly impossible for me to love an anonymous fellow citizen who lives 2000 miles away the way I love my mother.
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.”
Yeah, sometimes there are no easy answers. However, I don’t think forcing non-essential workers to toil in BS jobs out of a sense of fairness is a notion leftists should endorse.
So, again, what's the alternative? They simply don't work but get cared for by the government? And the essential workers get to both do the labor that matters and foot the bill? I don't understand how any of this works.
And who gets to decide what's essential? I thought working and having a purpose were a good thing. It will be better for people who may be doing a job that, at the end of the day, isn't that important to tell them to their face that their contributions are meaningless and to just go home? That's how we're going to help them? Tell them they are worthless and provide literally no value in the modern world?
Facilitating this transition in a manner that ensures essential workers aren’t exploited won’t be easy. I would like to see worker co-ops, work sharing, and heavy taxation of rentiers.
Regardless of how it’s done, it needs to happen. If the left is as serious about fighting climate change as it claims, then significantly curtailing work will have to be a big part of that. I understand the fairness and solidarity angle, but there have to be better ways to respect that than maintaining BS jobs.
“Tell them they are worthless and provide literally no value in the modern world.”
They already recognize this on some level, hence why Graeber’s BS Jobs article in an obscure leftist magazine became such a sensation. Maintaining the pretense that such jobs actually have value is part of the spiritual violence Graeber documents.
Actually, yes. He notes that contrary to cynical mainstream beliefs, humans are not naturally lazy deadbeats who need to be coerced into doing productive tasks. People who no longer work BS jobs could pursue hobbies like painting, writing, music, and so on. People have many ways to contribute to society besides working a job. He even cited the example of The Beatles, who got their start while on welfare.
Agreed, many jobs in America are BS jobs. However, I'm definitely convinced that it isn't a matter of Americans having no useful work to do, but that they've either outsourced much of the useful work, or that much of the useful work is being done by a dwindling number of old technicians. From my perspective within a power company, we very much do not have a transition plan for when a small number of key people die of old age. Our only plan for those key people retiring is to pay them more money as part-time contractors. Newly minted electrical engineers are doing electronics, software, or data analysis, not maintaining 100-year-old electrical power infrastructure. Which is a bit of an issue since none of that other stuff is possible without electrical power.
I suspect without firm evidence that an awful lot of bullshit jobs(tm) are white collar jobs, makework for the PMC.
For example, since my company is fairly large and has a cat in it, I have to have a feline resources department, which is a way to say "people whose job it is to document lawful excuses for firing cats without running afoul of antidiscrimination laws" which is utterly useless since I am the only cat in the company and I am one of the owners so I can't fire myself.
Otherwise, they pester me about pronouns and want me to show up at diversity training seminars, even though we already look as much like the cast of "Up With Humans!" as it is possible to do in this here burb.
Yeah most BS jobs are surely white collar administrative bureaucratic nonsense. The blue-collar BS jobs, ironically, are probably the ones that could have been (or were) automated but which continue to exist thanks to union requirements. In both cases the people doing the BS jobs are the ones fighting for the BS jobs to exist.
Not to mention we can actually automate a ton of things that we don’t, from physical labor to white collar jobs. Needing a job makes the workers Luddite’s, and for the owners it’s cheaper to exploit someone in a developing economy than pay for someone like me to come in and write code and/or build robots. Not to mention the power trip people get from having someone under them…
If you automate cashiers and fast food employees out of jobs, what is the benefit? Do you think someone working at mcds has to work there because of an obligation for people to get happy meals? Or is it because that's the type of labor they can do and have no other options if that is taken away?
“ because that's the type of labor they can do and have no other options if that is taken away” is more what I’m saying.
The benefit is that people aren’t forced to do something they don’t want to do, and don’t need to do, simply because they are required to have a job to survive.
I’ve never heard anyone complain about the invention of the washing machine. The cash register itself cuts down on labor, it’s a machine. Cars and busses are pretty cool. Why should automation be thought of any differently? It lets us get more done with less manual input. That is a good thing.
How do we pay people when we take jobs away? If you're saying first we sort out payment, fine, but how do people get paid so we can automate all the things without mass poverty?
And who determines who has to work and where? I mean those machines will need maintenance and troubleshooting. We'll still need plumbers and ditch diggers and cess pit cleaners. Who has to do those jobs? Do some people have to clean cess pits while others dont have to work because they lack skills? Who determines that?
That was my entire point, the reason we don’t automate those things is because of the current economic structure and its incentives, not because it doesn’t make sense to do it.
Graeber didn’t actually demonstrate this, he believed it and then used some really shoddy data to push it as a theory: essentially, he counted jobs as bullshit if people didn’t think they were “extremely meaningful” most of the time. The empirical evidence says that most people don’t think their jobs are bullshit. However, most people who think their jobs are bullshit are...probably the people interested in lefty anarchism rather than Marxism or socialism. I’m not saying this to cast out anarchists from a coalition that pushes for better working conditions, or even a UBI (as Graeber argues for in the book). But FDB and Graeber disagree on first principles, like most Marxists and anarchists.
Just ask yourself what would happen if certain categories of workers decided to call it quits and go on strike? How would society be impacted? Graeber does juxtapose an NYC garbagemen strike with an Irish banker strike, and notes that the latter had to be called off because Irish society found a way to get by without them. Putting that example aside, it’s safe to say that there are many white-collar jobs that could disappear in the blink of an without society being any the wiser.
I’m not actually an anarchist, by the way. I do, however, think that much of the left - not necessarily you - maintains an outdated, romantic attachment to labor in and of itself, and doesn’t recognize that the nature of many modern jobs has changed.
There's a decent Chesterton's fence argument about the idea of bullshit jobs -- a lot of those jobs probably have value you simply do not understand, because you don't really understand why they are there in first place. Many of them exist to deal with shit you'd rather not have your most valuable positions burdened with. For example, if you're a software company and you have knowledgeable technical people building, supporting, and implementing your products, you'd probably rather not have them spend their time on customer relationship management. It's not their best skill, and every hour they spend on that is an hour they spend not making the products better, supporting the customers who have problems, or implementing new customers. HR is similar.
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.
Yeah a common misconception on the left is that the poor are working 80 hour work weeks while the fat cats sit on their asses and get richer. That was true for most of human history but now it’s the opposite. The poor in America are generally working significantly less than anyone else while the wealthiest are putting in absolutely insane hours. Im not sure at all why the poor are working less or whether “anti work” ideas have anything to do with it so I’m not going to speculate on that. I think in the past people got rich off of natural resources, so those who owned the mines can get super rich off of the economic rent. People today are mostly getting rich off of “ideas” that can be taken and improved upon by other entrepreneurs, so competition is fierce. Only one person could have the mine, but everyone has ideas.
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?
Outside progressive circles, none. I bet most have never worked retail or even low level service work. Straight from HS to college to consulting/IB/law/NGO work. They despise the values, culture and mores of the manual labor class.
I meant the elite progressives. AOC working as a bartender in Union Square doesn't count in my opinion. There is a social difference between being a waiter at Dos Caminos and a cashier at McDonalds.
That seems like you’re kind of defining working class leftists away, though. Obviously most elites on both sides of the political aisle do not spend their time doing manual labor; if they did, they wouldn’t be elites.
Maybe I should make the distinction between educated and uneducated working class. Having a BA or even an associates and then working at Starbucks is not the same as a HS grad working as a gas station attendant.
Fair point on elites, though the left elites are incredibly condescending to those they purportedly represent. Bitter clingers and deplorables.
“ From 1992 to 1994, Pressley attended the College of General Studies at Boston University, but she left school to take a full-time job at the Boston Marriott Copley Place to support her mother, who had lost her job. ”
Lol. Lmao. Google that location and look at the pictures. Low income people, myself included at a very long time in my life, would have knifed people to work there as a maid.
It’s actually deplorable to be a ironic fascist or a white supremacist, which was a large part of the context of that (very stupid) political statement. And Clinton is a neoliberal who most leftists hate. But as the highly educated sibling of a guy who works as a plumber, hates the Democrats and loves Bernie, I can tell you that neither he nor his Trump loving coworkers really care much at all about what an elitist working for the NYT thinks. The problem is that the union organizers in his profession (and in my own space, education) are too online and too worried about what an elitist at the NYT thinks. So they do stupid virtue-signaling stuff during union meetings that probably alienates some people who’d otherwise join my brother’s union or mine, and one example of a stupid virtue-signaling thing is saying something like “well, we all hate work.”
If you sell your labor power to someone else in exchange for a wage or salary and you don't control the conditions in which you labor, you are working class. End of story. It doesn't matter if you sell your labor power to be a fry cook at McDonald's or a telemarketer in a cubicle, or a PR assistant at swanky firm in NYC. Your work experiences are not more real or more valid or more important or more "leftist" if they involve pruning shrubs rather than teaching fourth graders. The phrase is "Workers of the world unite!" not "Manual workers of the world unite!"
It is a bit odd to say, "End of story." If it were end of story, we would already be living in the communist utopia.
I was born into a working-class household and belonging to a union was a good deal for my mom. But I have no desire to join a union. If I had a different job, I might feel differently, but I don't feel anything akin to working class solidarity with every other person who gets paid on a W-2. You could accuse me of false consciousness or call me a simp for capital, but all I'm going to do is nod, take your pamphlet, and dump it as soon as I'm down the block.
I'm not mentioning this because I want to appear edgy. I'm reading this comment section and it occurs to me that there is a lot of unresolved tension around these issues. American politics has a way of compressing complicated interactions into simplistic binary oppositions. For instance, a lot of people equate unionism with socialism when the two have been historically antagonistic. The American trade union movement was founded by socialists, but the trade unions that thrived and achieved the biggest gains for workers explicitly rejected international socialism in favor of a kind of American Exceptionalism. They wanted the capitalist economy to thrive, so they could agitate for a bigger share of the profits.
I don't claim any inside knowledge, so maybe I'm wrong. But unions today seem a bit torn between how much they want to be focused on worker action and how much they want to be pursuing big political changes. Someone is going to pop up and tell me that they're the same thing, but they're not. Time and money and energy are limited. You have to make choices about how to spend each. I think that service sector unions are going to have a hard time, because they exist at an awkward middle point between being advocates for working-class solidarity and being service-oriented membership organizations.
Repubs are as much or more passionate about abortion and gun rights than dems are. Very few understand calculus well enough to see the relationship between public policy and inflation—they’re more concerned with biblical stuff and the shooty-toy power fantasy.
Youve apparently been spending too many nights at those fancy restaurants, Slaw ;)
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.
There's a LOT less labor required to provide those material necessities than there used to be. Productivity gains are real, leaving those extra people free to pursue jobs of less critical importance, but (hopefully) greater value overall.
That's sort of my point. It's nice the 19th or early 20th century anymore. We don't need to throw humans at a problem anymore because of things like automation.
The problem is the second thing you mentioned. People who would have been a factory worker making cars or extruding steel or whatever are now working at amazon warehouses, Arby's, or Walmart.
And those jobs pay significantly worse, offer no benefits, and provide people and society less value, both economically and in terms of personal meaning.
I don't really know what benefits are offered by Amazon, Arby's, or Walmart, but I'm willing to bet it's not "no benefits." I'd also argue that retail, food service, and warehouse jobs do not have to offer little personal meaning. I'm no fan of Amazon warehouses operations because they seem to treat people like robots.
However, plenty of warehouses out there still serve very important links in the supply chain. They are not merely places to store, then deliver consumer goods to their final destinations; they are links between the equipment and products used by other businesses to build valuable machines and infrastructure. The pay is not terribly different from Amazon, but the working conditions are typically better.
I'm not trying to suggest that these are great jobs that everyone should love. I'm suggesting that pretending these are somehow soul-crushing in a way assembly line manufacturing jobs were not seems highly suspect to me.
And that’s why they have zero power. My wife had a high-end retail job with a labor union, know what the union did for the workers when the company went bankrupt and out of business? Not a damn thing.
I think you vastly underestimate the degree to which people rely on fast food. They wont die without it, but for many, its an integral part of day to day life.
Grabbing food for lunch, feeding kids on the way home, eating cheap while traveling, affordable food for people with long commutes, ect.
Im disagreeing with your point that people would have forgotten about fast food within a week of it disappearing. And my opinion, one shared by basically everyone ive talked to about it, is the garbage treatment comes from people who never worked a similar job.
Most people think retail / fast food work of a year should be a requirement of citizenship. (Slight exaggeration there.)
I've worked retail and restaurant jobs both. I'm still a pretty staunch supporter of well-regulated capitalism.
Seeing the casual cruelty of customers is certainly a thing, but my experiences with customers were far more commonly positive experiences. Neither retail nor restaurant jobs are necessarily miserable experiences (though like all jobs, there are times when it's unpleasant). I worked as a stock clerk at a hardware store and a busboy at an IHOP. I would do either of those jobs again if I had to, and I'd still enjoy the work (though I wouldn't choose them over my current profession because I like what I do now and the pay is much better).
I've become convinced that a lot of the "unnecessary and demeaning and boring" work is a form of welfare. In the 1960's, there was a lot of talk about the forthcoming further shortening of the workweek (down to 32 or 30 or 24 hours), due to all the forthcoming labor-saving tech. Well the labor-saving tech arrived on schedule, but the shorter workweek did not.
I believe that how much people "should" work is a social construct, and that we all go through an elaborate charade to give most people just about that amount of (what we will agree to call) work. Going below 40 hrs/week just didn't feel "right" to too many of us, and so we've settled on that, quasi-permanently.
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.
Read the piece I linked to on r/antiwork, please, and this goes for many of you. Read the document I specifically included to demonstrate that in fact a great deal of the antiwork movement is oriented towards the abolition of productive labor entirely. READ.
That piece that Trace wrote was one of the most interesting pieces of journalism I've ever read. It explained things I had been doing and things I had been feeling and let me put them into a wider context.
OK, I read the piece. r/antiwork may be a dysfunctional environment, and there's clearly a split between the anti-capitalist old guard and people just there to vent about their jobs, or demand better working conditions. But I'm not sure "abolition of productive labor entirely" is an accurate description of either group, and I'm not sure where you're getting that from. She said in the Fox News interview "we want to put in effort, we want to put in labor". She said she works as a dogwalker and likes it, and that she would like to teach philosophy. To me it sounds like a consistent position of "we want to be productive, just not while work is defined as alienated wage-labor under capitalism". Maybe a specific quote would be helpful?
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""" .
A somewhat ambiguous response. Although the emoji suggests perplexity, I can't imagine that you are unfamiliar with this general line of argument. It is especially pervasive among those who have emigrated from self-styled Socialist countries.
Fairly or not, those who advocate for Marxist approaches to political economy have a steep hill to climb in rebranding their politics to honestly account for the conspicuous failure of "their" program in various nations. The typical response that I've heard, that those failures can be ignored or discounted because they weren't sufficiently faithful to true Socialism or Marxism or Maoism, sounds suspiciously like a No True Scotsman argument.
I think it warrants more than a Comments debate (or one emoji) to respond to those concerns. It seems clear that your readers are on a fairly broad spectrum from committed Marxists to strident defenders of free-market capitalism. Given your commitment to seeking to enlarge the political community that identifies as leftist, perhaps you would be willing to put together a post on why we shouldn't worry about these kinds of concerns in evaluating Marxist/Socialist political programs.
It's more than that. It's also mindset. The last time my father ever saw his brother was when he went to visit him to tell him that he was leaving for the United States. My uncle was literally carrying his life savings around in his pocket (there is poverty, and then there is third world poverty) and gave every cent he had in the world to my father for the trip. That was when they were both young men--they never saw each other again.
I was raised with that story and I cannot for the life of me comprehend the entitlement that seems endemic to leftist PMC "movements". Of course you have to work, because the alternative is starvation. People who believe that the wolf is always at the door are not going to view concerns like land acknowledgements or anti-work as anything but insanity.
There's also the irony that people who wave away the concerns of people who literally floated across the ocean on a sheet of plywood to get away from an oppressive political regime spent 2016-2020 screaming from the rooftops about how oppressed they were for having to live through the Trump presidency.
"those failures can be ignored or discounted because they weren't sufficiently faithful to true Socialism or Marxism or Maoism, sounds suspiciously like a No True Scotsman argument"
It is exactly that, but it's even worse.
I'm willing to grant that "true socialism" has not been tried, PROVIDED that I get a copy of the rules for "true solialism". How is it going to work, exactly?
For example, my go-to question (among a zillion other similar questions): how will housing be allocted?
Socialists like Freddie have NO ANWSERS to these very legit questions from us non-believers.
And therefore "socialism" is nothing more than a utopian slogan. It's pure vaporware.
I'm pretty sure Freddie was taking a decidedly anti- anti-work stance, and not promoting some sort of leisure-class, upper-bourgeois attitude where being lazy is some kind of virtue. I'm not sure why you're railing against him about not working, he's very pro-work.
So I'm guessing it's the socialist/Marxist angle you are working here. Okay, that makes sense because of where you're from. Just keep in mind that the usual sort of 'socialism' that many left-of-center Americans support has very little to do with the sort of Chavez/Maduro dystopias you speak of, and a lot more to do with your average Western European democracy.
In America the word "socialism" does not mean what it does in most of the rest of the world. I mean things like fire departments, national parks, and Medicare are some easy examples of this, and most are very good...despite not ever explicitly being 'named' socialist. The rest of the civilized world just calls this normal government. What you're talking about is the soul-crushing kind of Soviet/Maoist autocracy that no one here is advocating for.
~edit: this was supposed to be in response to liz perez, not Freddie...
Does anyone set out for the soul crushing kind? And yet, it it continues to happen. My guess is you're going to have to explain to Liz, in exceedingly good detail, precisely how you can ensure that we would get the one but not the other.
How do all those pseudo-social welfare states in Europe do it? They seem to have done exactly that, gotten one (various degrees of socialism in their government) without the other (autocratic state).
And I'm not saying they are perfect, they all have some problems. But they are certainly no where near the China's or Venezuela's of the world.
All I'm saying is, if you're going to try and convince someone who has seen the starvation, poverty and misery of Venezuela up close and personal, you're gonna have to do better than, "Trust us, that's not what we're gonna do, we're gonna be like Sweden."
1) In the modern era, net-positive states like Sweden are the rule and net-negative states like Venezuela are the exception. Most modern states with strong democratic traditions simply do not go down that path. It happens but it's rare.
2) If one has to make that conviction on the Left, then one should also have to make that conviction on the Right. One could just as easily argue that sliding into a fascist state needs to be somehow promised NOT to happen as well.
Neither extremes are guaranteed to be avoided no matter where you go, but that doesn't mean that just because you came from one extreme means the other extreme can't happen either. Or is somehow better. Or even that certain elements of either extreme are guaranteed to precipitate that slide as well.
So do some of us white people. I love the line below. How do communists and socialists believe they will eat, build homes and fix things? By forcing others to give them their labor for free. My blood boils every time I hear someone talk about the wonders of socialism and communism. Both sides of my family had to flee the evil that is communism, those left behind went into labor camps and people almost starved to death. Funny that doesn't get mentioned here. Instead you hear lies about being freed from the vagaries, as if people living under socialism and communism weren't subject to other vagaries.
You would never hear anyone extol the virtues of Nazism but somehow communism and socialism get a pass. The blood of my family members was spilled fighting this destructive ideology, people were tortured and killed and families taught to snitch on each other. You want socialism or communism, leave the US and go to Cuba and Venezuela.
Indeed, one of the most exciting aspects of a socialist future is that once people are free from having to labor in bad jobs that don’t make them safe, their productive capacities will in fact be unleashed for the betterment of society. We can build a future that frees people from the vagaries of our current system of work while unlocking new reserves of productivity.
Folks, if the choice is between a Maduro/Castro/Bernie/AOC or Orban/Trump/Tucker Carlson, a lot of Latinos will pick Orban (and, good luck Dems, winning without Latino votes. Blacks & White liberals do not a majority make). Horrible fate we are all heading in to....because of theoretical bull***
It's not just Latinos. I'm a lily-white 66-year-old former Democrat who now votes straight Republican because of the neo-racism and (especially) neo-miscogyny of today's Democrats.
You seem to assume that supporting the policies of Bernie and/or AOC lead inexorably to the authoritarian Socialism/Communism of Maduro and Castro and not, say, social democracies like those found in Europe. I think your assumption is wrong, or at least not at all obvious like you seem to assume it is.
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.
How much is caregiving figured into the analysis? Childcare and elder care are a big deal for people and hugely determinative of what kind of work the able bodied can commit to, especially those who aren’t wealthy.
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.
> No labor is dignified except by the way people talk about it and the people who do it. People talk about farming and farmers with greater levels of dignity than they do call-center drones. I can even call them "drones" in this argument and it doesn't seem at odds.
A great point, and well written. The more I think about this the more arbitrary the aesthetics seem. What is your hypothesis is to what guides aesthetic judgements here? Why do left and right agree?
For me, it doesn't matter if you work at McDonald's or as a janitor or whatever. All work is respectable and so is anybody who provides for themselves or their family. In that sense a job is a job.
The way that blue collar labor is denigrated by PMC types is insanity. And what's especially grating is that blue collar labor tends to be much more difficult and demanding than the white collar variety.
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.
“ 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.”
Why is that a problem?
Most people won't interact with nature, they'll spend all of thier time staring at a screen. How many people with free time don't ultimately do that? If nothing else, our health would suffer dramatically.
So? If that’s what people want to do, let them.
Haven’t you seen Wall-E? That won’t end well.
Won’t end well as in?
We’ll all end up in a spaceship with soft bones.
Having a society of obese people who never leave the house or interact with others will not end well.
So your objection is that people will chose to live in ways you don’t approve of?
I personally dont care if someone spends all day jerking off, but unless you think a society of depressed shutins is a goal worth working towards, i dont see why you think 18 hours a day of screen time is a good thing.
No, the objection is that it would lead to outcomes that, in sum, would be undesirable to any society *as a whole*.
For one thing, people in that condition are easier to exploit and abuse. If nothing else, self-preservation suggests that it's a bad idea to let yourself get too passive. There have always been, and probably always will be, people who are happy to take what you've got if you are too weak or aimless to protect it. Even if we get everyone in our society to cooperate and care for one another, that doesn't exclude the possibility that the 21st-century equivalent of Vikings will show up at some point to trample our utopia and take the spoils. If that sounds overdramatic, well, just look at history; it's happened many times before. There are plenty of people who will never be content to just look at screens or tend their gardens all day, and not all of them are nice.
"the 21st-century equivalent of Vikings will show up at some point to trample our utopia and take the spoils"
Its happening today in Ukraine
If I had to guess, I'd name the 21st-century Viking-equivalent society "China."
China is acting like the 21st century Mongolians, taking over vast territory.
Russia does little hit & run raiding on their weakling neighbors.
I truly don't think we have any way to know what people would do. My supposition is that part of the reason why people currently spend so much time watching tv/on their phone/whatever is because they're tired. If you don't have to exchange labor for money, then... who knows?
Like, if I take a week off work, I get bored and antsy if I don't go anywhere or do anything. I bet most people would, like, find stuff to do.
Youre replacing what you do with what weve seen people actually do. Bmi has soared in kids and adults due to the pandemic, and people were not walking in the woods and planting gardens but logging enormous hours on netflix.
I personally focused on doing hobbies and things because I'm like you; i have to do something or i go insane. I didnt gain any covid weight either. But people's reaction to lots of free time has been to meld with the couch.
I think we've both got some confirmation bias going on here. Like, yeah, people watched a lot of tv, but... the sourdough thing? People starting herb gardens during the pandemic? There was a run on lumber because people were doing so many home improvement projects?
Agreed. Lots of people kept having normal lives or ones filled with activity. But studies show that many people did not do hobbies, they simply vegetated. The jump in bmi is due to a very significant part of the population not being active. People can chose to do whatever, but from a societal and physical and mental health standpoint, many people dont default to great choices.
I think BMIs increased during the pandemic because so much of the things that brought us out of the house got shut down. Many people aren't going into the office anymore, so any walking involved in your commute, going to grab lunch, or even walking down a long office hallway to go to the bathroom disappears. Gyms, sports teams, fitness classes (or other things that aren't necessarily fitnessy but still get you off the couch) -- shut down or people less willing to do them for two years. I filled my time with sedentary hobbies like painting, or experimental baking (which I then had to eat). And I also am much more prone to snacking when I'm working from home.
I invented inflatable couch pants during the pandemic, so I got both my productivity and my sofa melding done.
A great way to see how a truly post-scarcity society might not fully work is how much less enjoyable (for most people) video games are with cheats enabled. The fun is in overcoming obstacles, and if all obstacles are eliminated, you can fart around a bit playing God, and then get bored.
I don't believe this for a second. People have hobbies. They volunteer. They take care of loved ones, both human and animal. This is all work.
Saying that there is no obstacle to overcome via work if you don't have the threat of starvation and homelessness hanging over your head is a very grim way to look at the world.
What does that have to do with what I said?
I misread your comment. Thanks for being gracious about it. :/
Sorry bud, there's a lot of edgelord commenters here and I usually have to come out strong.
My comment seems to have been eaten? I'll try again.
You're strawmanning me here. I didn't say that humanity needs the threat of starvation to make life meaningful. I said that most humans need to have the sense that their labor is helping to overcome some sort of obstacles to make "doing things" worthwhile.
I mean, let's consider food here. Imagine a Star-Trek like replicator which could print out any food you like. Many people would use it all the time, but it would not lead to happiness for many who like to:
1. Grow their own food.
2. Cook for themselves or others.
3. Go to a restaurant.
4. Go shopping in a market.
All of these involve labor. Even being a customer involves labor of a sort, as you need to go to the place you buy products, socially engage with the worker, etc. To a large extent supermarkets and the like became profitable in part because they convinced the customer to work for free, traveling a longer distance to buy a wider variety of things and dealing with the "last mile" issue in logistics.
Regardless, the point is people derive pleasure out of simple acts of problem solving in their everyday lives, and if it were possible to remove all effort from the process, life would indeed feel empty for many people. That does not imply we need a boot on our neck to be content, that just implies that as creatures which evolved for survival, we're constructed to expend physical and mental energy in order to meet our needs.
People still cook in the Federation.
People still work too. Star Trek is pretty explicitly a world where nearly everyone we ever see on camera works a full-time job despite apparently not getting paid and having access to free shit through the replicator. It's post-scarcity, and arguably post-capitalist, but it's explicitly not an anti-work setting.
Honestly though, the presence of waiters in Sisko's Creole Kitchen always confused the hell out of me. It's a hard job to see anyone doing for free.
I'm currently doing some really annoying and difficult physical unpaid volunteer work and I've been doing it for 2 years with no end in sight, and I still enjoy doing it despite it not being fun in any meaningful sense of the word.
It's a TV show that comes out of a few thoughts by Gene Roddenberry when communism was at the height of popularity and production values didn't allow for landing ships so he made up a transporter.
It just doesn't make sense but we can try to pretend such a society exists anyway for entertainment and deconstruction purposes.
But the whole idea of "post-scarcity society" is nonsense. There will always be scarcity. Most people will strive to have more. Even assuming unlimited energy and goods, there will always be limits on things like space and human attention.
Even looking at the most iconic example of post-scarcity society, Star Trek, it's clear there are some things that are limited or rationed. I'm sure not everyone has access to a palatial estate on a beautiful vineyard like Picard does.
As food and energy shortages mount and supply chain problems continue to worsen, it doesn’t look like we have to worry too much about what we’ll do in a post-scarcity society.
The problem with Star Trek is that the civilian side of things has never really been fleshed-out all that well. Obviously not everyone on Earth can have a chateau, but there are also a lot of human colony worlds in the Federation.
I remember people complaining that Raffi in Star Trek: Picard doesn't fit the Star Trek universe, because she's living in a shack in the desert. Man, if everyone that was currently homeless had a "shack" like that...
The fact that colonization exists shows there must be some cracks in the economic system. People don't generally leave the safety of home to work the land in the wilderness unless there's something they can't get where they are now.
On the one hand, it's no more fair to expect Trek writers to explain exactly how the highly advanced economic system of the Federation works any more than we would expect them to deliver the plans for a functional warp drive. Maybe some Stephen Hawking level person in economics figured out how to do it some time in the 22nd century.
On the other hand, it points out that this part of the Trek universe is just as much handwaving as phasers and transporters.
When *The Orville* had the chance to explore or deconstruct this, and just said "fuck it, we're doing it all the way: yes, money doesn't exist" I was a little disappointed, but on later thought impressed that they just decided to go with it.
They want to tell stories in a classic Star Trek universe even if it doesn't make sense, and more power to them.
Mormonism has solved this problem by removing women from the inheritance equation and giving all faithful men their own planet.
Agreed. I stopped supporting the idea of total socialism, once I realised that it essentially meant giving the Morlocks a universal kill switch. If we're all plugged into alcoves like so many Borg drones, then all anyone would need to do to kill us, is cut the electricity.
The goal should be to oppose the Khan/Harrison Bergeron imperative, not to achieve a state of technologically enabled, perpetual infantilism. The irony is that the latter would ultimately condemn us to a far less humane fate than even what Khan's spiritual brethren have in mind for us anyway.
"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.
I thought it didn’t make an especially coherent argument - sometimes it was about freedom from productive labor, sometimes it was about freedom from any job that isn’t enjoyable and inspiring. It kind of went back and forth.
I can't hear "bullshit jobs" without hearing "I don't have to work at my bullshit white-collar job, but *you* have to work at your non-bullshit blue-collar job."
I don’t know that May totally be the case but I’m a teacher and my spouse is a nurse and we both have a lot of bs and if you took it away you wouldn’t be left without work to do.
It would just be more the socially useful stuff and not documenting gratuitously.
If Marxists don't trade labor for money, what do I get for my labor?
What did your parents get for their labor when they raised you?
Historically kids were the one and only retirement plan.
Maybe I'm missing your point, but are you suggesting the love, sacrifice, and selflessness that parents exhibit for their children is scalable to society at large?
What do I get when I go out on my block and pick up trash?
A love that they would say is worth more than all their worldly assets.
But who's going to work in an office or factory for love?
It's incredibly perverse to suggest parenting is "labor" in the same way that keeping the sewage system running is labor.
Heh. Caring for a young child who is not yet toilet trained actually has a lot of overlap with toxic waste disposal, if you follow my drift.
That being said, yes, caring for your child, whom you love, has a very different emotional/psychological impact than doing wage labor.
It sure does! Which leads to the question, in opposition to Freddie's above: if it were not your child - if it were some random adult stranger for example - would you clean up their shit for free?
No, I would not.
Apparently under the future Marxist utopia you would though.
I thought you previously had an essay saying Marxists were fine with people getting paid for labor and even getting paid very unequal wages for labor. I thought you were going to say "you misunderstand Marxism."
Love, which does not scale to the level of a whole society. It is humanly impossible for me to love an anonymous fellow citizen who lives 2000 miles away the way I love my mother.
Hundred percent agree - Marxism / Communism works best in small, heterogenous, tightly nit groups.
That's a good description of a family
thats_the_joke.gif ;)
Nada.
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.”
I agree that bs jobs are plenty and drain the workers of time for no reason.
But what about the non-bs jobs? Who has to keep working those? That sounds like a form of exploitation, of the essential workers by the non-workers.
Maybe a work-sharing agreement? But even then not all labor can be shared, and some will end up having to work more than others.
I genuinely don't know the answer to this.
Yeah, sometimes there are no easy answers. However, I don’t think forcing non-essential workers to toil in BS jobs out of a sense of fairness is a notion leftists should endorse.
So, again, what's the alternative? They simply don't work but get cared for by the government? And the essential workers get to both do the labor that matters and foot the bill? I don't understand how any of this works.
And who gets to decide what's essential? I thought working and having a purpose were a good thing. It will be better for people who may be doing a job that, at the end of the day, isn't that important to tell them to their face that their contributions are meaningless and to just go home? That's how we're going to help them? Tell them they are worthless and provide literally no value in the modern world?
Facilitating this transition in a manner that ensures essential workers aren’t exploited won’t be easy. I would like to see worker co-ops, work sharing, and heavy taxation of rentiers.
Regardless of how it’s done, it needs to happen. If the left is as serious about fighting climate change as it claims, then significantly curtailing work will have to be a big part of that. I understand the fairness and solidarity angle, but there have to be better ways to respect that than maintaining BS jobs.
“Tell them they are worthless and provide literally no value in the modern world.”
They already recognize this on some level, hence why Graeber’s BS Jobs article in an obscure leftist magazine became such a sensation. Maintaining the pretense that such jobs actually have value is part of the spiritual violence Graeber documents.
I highly doubt that is who was reading that article.
Does Graeber have anything to say about the "spiritual violence" of telling people they have literally no role to play in the modern world?
Actually, yes. He notes that contrary to cynical mainstream beliefs, humans are not naturally lazy deadbeats who need to be coerced into doing productive tasks. People who no longer work BS jobs could pursue hobbies like painting, writing, music, and so on. People have many ways to contribute to society besides working a job. He even cited the example of The Beatles, who got their start while on welfare.
I think fairness and solidarity should be considered.
Who gets to decide what's fair?
Agreed, many jobs in America are BS jobs. However, I'm definitely convinced that it isn't a matter of Americans having no useful work to do, but that they've either outsourced much of the useful work, or that much of the useful work is being done by a dwindling number of old technicians. From my perspective within a power company, we very much do not have a transition plan for when a small number of key people die of old age. Our only plan for those key people retiring is to pay them more money as part-time contractors. Newly minted electrical engineers are doing electronics, software, or data analysis, not maintaining 100-year-old electrical power infrastructure. Which is a bit of an issue since none of that other stuff is possible without electrical power.
I suspect without firm evidence that an awful lot of bullshit jobs(tm) are white collar jobs, makework for the PMC.
For example, since my company is fairly large and has a cat in it, I have to have a feline resources department, which is a way to say "people whose job it is to document lawful excuses for firing cats without running afoul of antidiscrimination laws" which is utterly useless since I am the only cat in the company and I am one of the owners so I can't fire myself.
Otherwise, they pester me about pronouns and want me to show up at diversity training seminars, even though we already look as much like the cast of "Up With Humans!" as it is possible to do in this here burb.
Yeah most BS jobs are surely white collar administrative bureaucratic nonsense. The blue-collar BS jobs, ironically, are probably the ones that could have been (or were) automated but which continue to exist thanks to union requirements. In both cases the people doing the BS jobs are the ones fighting for the BS jobs to exist.
Also, bullshit jobs = headcount = management clout.
Not to mention we can actually automate a ton of things that we don’t, from physical labor to white collar jobs. Needing a job makes the workers Luddite’s, and for the owners it’s cheaper to exploit someone in a developing economy than pay for someone like me to come in and write code and/or build robots. Not to mention the power trip people get from having someone under them…
If you automate cashiers and fast food employees out of jobs, what is the benefit? Do you think someone working at mcds has to work there because of an obligation for people to get happy meals? Or is it because that's the type of labor they can do and have no other options if that is taken away?
“ because that's the type of labor they can do and have no other options if that is taken away” is more what I’m saying.
The benefit is that people aren’t forced to do something they don’t want to do, and don’t need to do, simply because they are required to have a job to survive.
I’ve never heard anyone complain about the invention of the washing machine. The cash register itself cuts down on labor, it’s a machine. Cars and busses are pretty cool. Why should automation be thought of any differently? It lets us get more done with less manual input. That is a good thing.
How do we pay people when we take jobs away? If you're saying first we sort out payment, fine, but how do people get paid so we can automate all the things without mass poverty?
And who determines who has to work and where? I mean those machines will need maintenance and troubleshooting. We'll still need plumbers and ditch diggers and cess pit cleaners. Who has to do those jobs? Do some people have to clean cess pits while others dont have to work because they lack skills? Who determines that?
I'm virtually certain on who will not be signing up for those jobs. The commenters on this substack.
That was my entire point, the reason we don’t automate those things is because of the current economic structure and its incentives, not because it doesn’t make sense to do it.
Sorry, i misunderstood what you were saying.
More than a few subway systems have tried to automate away the train conductors but not been allowed to do it by political pressure.
lmao nice. next do cars, running water, and telecommunication
Graeber didn’t actually demonstrate this, he believed it and then used some really shoddy data to push it as a theory: essentially, he counted jobs as bullshit if people didn’t think they were “extremely meaningful” most of the time. The empirical evidence says that most people don’t think their jobs are bullshit. However, most people who think their jobs are bullshit are...probably the people interested in lefty anarchism rather than Marxism or socialism. I’m not saying this to cast out anarchists from a coalition that pushes for better working conditions, or even a UBI (as Graeber argues for in the book). But FDB and Graeber disagree on first principles, like most Marxists and anarchists.
Just ask yourself what would happen if certain categories of workers decided to call it quits and go on strike? How would society be impacted? Graeber does juxtapose an NYC garbagemen strike with an Irish banker strike, and notes that the latter had to be called off because Irish society found a way to get by without them. Putting that example aside, it’s safe to say that there are many white-collar jobs that could disappear in the blink of an without society being any the wiser.
I’m not actually an anarchist, by the way. I do, however, think that much of the left - not necessarily you - maintains an outdated, romantic attachment to labor in and of itself, and doesn’t recognize that the nature of many modern jobs has changed.
> However, as the late David Graeber contended - and the pandemic demonstrated - a significant number of jobs are BS jobs that shouldn’t exist.
Which ones? The US unemployment rate in 2021 was the same as 2015.
> Democratizing and socializing said jobs would certainly be an improvement, but wouldn’t remedy what Graeber called “spiritual violence.”
lmao
There's a decent Chesterton's fence argument about the idea of bullshit jobs -- a lot of those jobs probably have value you simply do not understand, because you don't really understand why they are there in first place. Many of them exist to deal with shit you'd rather not have your most valuable positions burdened with. For example, if you're a software company and you have knowledgeable technical people building, supporting, and implementing your products, you'd probably rather not have them spend their time on customer relationship management. It's not their best skill, and every hour they spend on that is an hour they spend not making the products better, supporting the customers who have problems, or implementing new customers. HR is similar.
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.
Yeah a common misconception on the left is that the poor are working 80 hour work weeks while the fat cats sit on their asses and get richer. That was true for most of human history but now it’s the opposite. The poor in America are generally working significantly less than anyone else while the wealthiest are putting in absolutely insane hours. Im not sure at all why the poor are working less or whether “anti work” ideas have anything to do with it so I’m not going to speculate on that. I think in the past people got rich off of natural resources, so those who owned the mines can get super rich off of the economic rent. People today are mostly getting rich off of “ideas” that can be taken and improved upon by other entrepreneurs, so competition is fierce. Only one person could have the mine, but everyone has ideas.
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?
Outside progressive circles, none. I bet most have never worked retail or even low level service work. Straight from HS to college to consulting/IB/law/NGO work. They despise the values, culture and mores of the manual labor class.
I’m not sure what you mean? Tons of leftists are bartenders, waiters, baristas, etc.
I meant the elite progressives. AOC working as a bartender in Union Square doesn't count in my opinion. There is a social difference between being a waiter at Dos Caminos and a cashier at McDonalds.
That seems like you’re kind of defining working class leftists away, though. Obviously most elites on both sides of the political aisle do not spend their time doing manual labor; if they did, they wouldn’t be elites.
Yeh, exactly.
Maybe I should make the distinction between educated and uneducated working class. Having a BA or even an associates and then working at Starbucks is not the same as a HS grad working as a gas station attendant.
Fair point on elites, though the left elites are incredibly condescending to those they purportedly represent. Bitter clingers and deplorables.
“ From 1992 to 1994, Pressley attended the College of General Studies at Boston University, but she left school to take a full-time job at the Boston Marriott Copley Place to support her mother, who had lost her job. ”
Does that count?
Lol. Lmao. Google that location and look at the pictures. Low income people, myself included at a very long time in my life, would have knifed people to work there as a maid.
Huh? Did I miss a sarcasm tag?
I honestly don't know. Is there an influential progressive writer in any of the major outlets with a strong blue collar background?
It’s actually deplorable to be a ironic fascist or a white supremacist, which was a large part of the context of that (very stupid) political statement. And Clinton is a neoliberal who most leftists hate. But as the highly educated sibling of a guy who works as a plumber, hates the Democrats and loves Bernie, I can tell you that neither he nor his Trump loving coworkers really care much at all about what an elitist working for the NYT thinks. The problem is that the union organizers in his profession (and in my own space, education) are too online and too worried about what an elitist at the NYT thinks. So they do stupid virtue-signaling stuff during union meetings that probably alienates some people who’d otherwise join my brother’s union or mine, and one example of a stupid virtue-signaling thing is saying something like “well, we all hate work.”
If you sell your labor power to someone else in exchange for a wage or salary and you don't control the conditions in which you labor, you are working class. End of story. It doesn't matter if you sell your labor power to be a fry cook at McDonald's or a telemarketer in a cubicle, or a PR assistant at swanky firm in NYC. Your work experiences are not more real or more valid or more important or more "leftist" if they involve pruning shrubs rather than teaching fourth graders. The phrase is "Workers of the world unite!" not "Manual workers of the world unite!"
Yes.
It is a bit odd to say, "End of story." If it were end of story, we would already be living in the communist utopia.
I was born into a working-class household and belonging to a union was a good deal for my mom. But I have no desire to join a union. If I had a different job, I might feel differently, but I don't feel anything akin to working class solidarity with every other person who gets paid on a W-2. You could accuse me of false consciousness or call me a simp for capital, but all I'm going to do is nod, take your pamphlet, and dump it as soon as I'm down the block.
I'm not mentioning this because I want to appear edgy. I'm reading this comment section and it occurs to me that there is a lot of unresolved tension around these issues. American politics has a way of compressing complicated interactions into simplistic binary oppositions. For instance, a lot of people equate unionism with socialism when the two have been historically antagonistic. The American trade union movement was founded by socialists, but the trade unions that thrived and achieved the biggest gains for workers explicitly rejected international socialism in favor of a kind of American Exceptionalism. They wanted the capitalist economy to thrive, so they could agitate for a bigger share of the profits.
I don't claim any inside knowledge, so maybe I'm wrong. But unions today seem a bit torn between how much they want to be focused on worker action and how much they want to be pursuing big political changes. Someone is going to pop up and tell me that they're the same thing, but they're not. Time and money and energy are limited. You have to make choices about how to spend each. I think that service sector unions are going to have a hard time, because they exist at an awkward middle point between being advocates for working-class solidarity and being service-oriented membership organizations.
This is really cool!
I am really rich and work for a hedge fund, but I don't own that fund, so I'm working class!
This is definitely not what Marx thought. He did not think that the middle class / bourgeoisie was working class, but you do.
As a not left-wing Democrat, I applaud the way you redefine leftism, as it guarantees Democrats will never meaningfully raise my taxes. Nice work!
John Kraashaur:
- Democrats are becoming the party of upscale voters concerned more about issues like gun control and abortion rights.
- Republicans are quietly building a multiracial coalition of working-class voters, with inflation as an accelerant.
Repubs are as much or more passionate about abortion and gun rights than dems are. Very few understand calculus well enough to see the relationship between public policy and inflation—they’re more concerned with biblical stuff and the shooty-toy power fantasy.
Youve apparently been spending too many nights at those fancy restaurants, Slaw ;)
I didn't say that, I'm quoting an article.
https://www.axios.com/2022/07/14/republicans-democrats-hispnanic-voters
So you agree that theyre wrong?
"They" meaning Ruy Texeira, David Shor, Michael Lind, etc.? That's a lot of experts to disagree with.
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 that was more relevant during the pandemic when all restaurants were closed, including many grocery stores, etc.
You may be right though, and I'd be happy to be wrong.
But I still think the power of labor has a lot to do with its proximity to material necessities that keep the broader economy/society functioning.
There's a LOT less labor required to provide those material necessities than there used to be. Productivity gains are real, leaving those extra people free to pursue jobs of less critical importance, but (hopefully) greater value overall.
That's sort of my point. It's nice the 19th or early 20th century anymore. We don't need to throw humans at a problem anymore because of things like automation.
The problem is the second thing you mentioned. People who would have been a factory worker making cars or extruding steel or whatever are now working at amazon warehouses, Arby's, or Walmart.
And those jobs pay significantly worse, offer no benefits, and provide people and society less value, both economically and in terms of personal meaning.
I don't really know what benefits are offered by Amazon, Arby's, or Walmart, but I'm willing to bet it's not "no benefits." I'd also argue that retail, food service, and warehouse jobs do not have to offer little personal meaning. I'm no fan of Amazon warehouses operations because they seem to treat people like robots.
However, plenty of warehouses out there still serve very important links in the supply chain. They are not merely places to store, then deliver consumer goods to their final destinations; they are links between the equipment and products used by other businesses to build valuable machines and infrastructure. The pay is not terribly different from Amazon, but the working conditions are typically better.
I'm not trying to suggest that these are great jobs that everyone should love. I'm suggesting that pretending these are somehow soul-crushing in a way assembly line manufacturing jobs were not seems highly suspect to me.
And that’s why they have zero power. My wife had a high-end retail job with a labor union, know what the union did for the workers when the company went bankrupt and out of business? Not a damn thing.
I think you vastly underestimate the degree to which people rely on fast food. They wont die without it, but for many, its an integral part of day to day life.
Grabbing food for lunch, feeding kids on the way home, eating cheap while traveling, affordable food for people with long commutes, ect.
People will adapt much more easily to no fast food than they would to no steel or oil.
That's my point.
Im disagreeing with your point that people would have forgotten about fast food within a week of it disappearing. And my opinion, one shared by basically everyone ive talked to about it, is the garbage treatment comes from people who never worked a similar job.
Most people think retail / fast food work of a year should be a requirement of citizenship. (Slight exaggeration there.)
I agree with the requirement that people work in retail/restaurant.
I think having had a job where you need to wear a nametag and experiencing the casual cruelty of customers would change the way people view work.
I've worked retail and restaurant jobs both. I'm still a pretty staunch supporter of well-regulated capitalism.
Seeing the casual cruelty of customers is certainly a thing, but my experiences with customers were far more commonly positive experiences. Neither retail nor restaurant jobs are necessarily miserable experiences (though like all jobs, there are times when it's unpleasant). I worked as a stock clerk at a hardware store and a busboy at an IHOP. I would do either of those jobs again if I had to, and I'd still enjoy the work (though I wouldn't choose them over my current profession because I like what I do now and the pay is much better).
I've become convinced that a lot of the "unnecessary and demeaning and boring" work is a form of welfare. In the 1960's, there was a lot of talk about the forthcoming further shortening of the workweek (down to 32 or 30 or 24 hours), due to all the forthcoming labor-saving tech. Well the labor-saving tech arrived on schedule, but the shorter workweek did not.
I believe that how much people "should" work is a social construct, and that we all go through an elaborate charade to give most people just about that amount of (what we will agree to call) work. Going below 40 hrs/week just didn't feel "right" to too many of us, and so we've settled on that, quasi-permanently.
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.
Read the piece I linked to on r/antiwork, please, and this goes for many of you. Read the document I specifically included to demonstrate that in fact a great deal of the antiwork movement is oriented towards the abolition of productive labor entirely. READ.
That piece that Trace wrote was one of the most interesting pieces of journalism I've ever read. It explained things I had been doing and things I had been feeling and let me put them into a wider context.
OK, I read the piece. r/antiwork may be a dysfunctional environment, and there's clearly a split between the anti-capitalist old guard and people just there to vent about their jobs, or demand better working conditions. But I'm not sure "abolition of productive labor entirely" is an accurate description of either group, and I'm not sure where you're getting that from. She said in the Fox News interview "we want to put in effort, we want to put in labor". She said she works as a dogwalker and likes it, and that she would like to teach philosophy. To me it sounds like a consistent position of "we want to be productive, just not while work is defined as alienated wage-labor under capitalism". Maybe a specific quote would be helpful?
Working also makes yourself richer, by enabling you to earn money.
Not rich enough to pay for both rent and food, let alone medical care - not for most, anyway.
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""" .
🤔
A somewhat ambiguous response. Although the emoji suggests perplexity, I can't imagine that you are unfamiliar with this general line of argument. It is especially pervasive among those who have emigrated from self-styled Socialist countries.
Fairly or not, those who advocate for Marxist approaches to political economy have a steep hill to climb in rebranding their politics to honestly account for the conspicuous failure of "their" program in various nations. The typical response that I've heard, that those failures can be ignored or discounted because they weren't sufficiently faithful to true Socialism or Marxism or Maoism, sounds suspiciously like a No True Scotsman argument.
I think it warrants more than a Comments debate (or one emoji) to respond to those concerns. It seems clear that your readers are on a fairly broad spectrum from committed Marxists to strident defenders of free-market capitalism. Given your commitment to seeking to enlarge the political community that identifies as leftist, perhaps you would be willing to put together a post on why we shouldn't worry about these kinds of concerns in evaluating Marxist/Socialist political programs.
Why not ask them directly? My guess: raised by immigrants.
There's a Norman Mailer anecdote about this
I think he's reasonably curious why someone would pay just to comment and then accuse Freddie of things that he's argued against.
Whatever that is, I wouldn’t call it snide.
It's more than that. It's also mindset. The last time my father ever saw his brother was when he went to visit him to tell him that he was leaving for the United States. My uncle was literally carrying his life savings around in his pocket (there is poverty, and then there is third world poverty) and gave every cent he had in the world to my father for the trip. That was when they were both young men--they never saw each other again.
I was raised with that story and I cannot for the life of me comprehend the entitlement that seems endemic to leftist PMC "movements". Of course you have to work, because the alternative is starvation. People who believe that the wolf is always at the door are not going to view concerns like land acknowledgements or anti-work as anything but insanity.
There's also the irony that people who wave away the concerns of people who literally floated across the ocean on a sheet of plywood to get away from an oppressive political regime spent 2016-2020 screaming from the rooftops about how oppressed they were for having to live through the Trump presidency.
"those failures can be ignored or discounted because they weren't sufficiently faithful to true Socialism or Marxism or Maoism, sounds suspiciously like a No True Scotsman argument"
It is exactly that, but it's even worse.
I'm willing to grant that "true socialism" has not been tried, PROVIDED that I get a copy of the rules for "true solialism". How is it going to work, exactly?
For example, my go-to question (among a zillion other similar questions): how will housing be allocted?
Socialists like Freddie have NO ANWSERS to these very legit questions from us non-believers.
And therefore "socialism" is nothing more than a utopian slogan. It's pure vaporware.
I'm pretty sure Freddie was taking a decidedly anti- anti-work stance, and not promoting some sort of leisure-class, upper-bourgeois attitude where being lazy is some kind of virtue. I'm not sure why you're railing against him about not working, he's very pro-work.
So I'm guessing it's the socialist/Marxist angle you are working here. Okay, that makes sense because of where you're from. Just keep in mind that the usual sort of 'socialism' that many left-of-center Americans support has very little to do with the sort of Chavez/Maduro dystopias you speak of, and a lot more to do with your average Western European democracy.
In America the word "socialism" does not mean what it does in most of the rest of the world. I mean things like fire departments, national parks, and Medicare are some easy examples of this, and most are very good...despite not ever explicitly being 'named' socialist. The rest of the civilized world just calls this normal government. What you're talking about is the soul-crushing kind of Soviet/Maoist autocracy that no one here is advocating for.
~edit: this was supposed to be in response to liz perez, not Freddie...
Does anyone set out for the soul crushing kind? And yet, it it continues to happen. My guess is you're going to have to explain to Liz, in exceedingly good detail, precisely how you can ensure that we would get the one but not the other.
How do all those pseudo-social welfare states in Europe do it? They seem to have done exactly that, gotten one (various degrees of socialism in their government) without the other (autocratic state).
And I'm not saying they are perfect, they all have some problems. But they are certainly no where near the China's or Venezuela's of the world.
All I'm saying is, if you're going to try and convince someone who has seen the starvation, poverty and misery of Venezuela up close and personal, you're gonna have to do better than, "Trust us, that's not what we're gonna do, we're gonna be like Sweden."
I would argue that:
1) In the modern era, net-positive states like Sweden are the rule and net-negative states like Venezuela are the exception. Most modern states with strong democratic traditions simply do not go down that path. It happens but it's rare.
2) If one has to make that conviction on the Left, then one should also have to make that conviction on the Right. One could just as easily argue that sliding into a fascist state needs to be somehow promised NOT to happen as well.
Neither extremes are guaranteed to be avoided no matter where you go, but that doesn't mean that just because you came from one extreme means the other extreme can't happen either. Or is somehow better. Or even that certain elements of either extreme are guaranteed to precipitate that slide as well.
They are all capitalist at the core.
So do some of us white people. I love the line below. How do communists and socialists believe they will eat, build homes and fix things? By forcing others to give them their labor for free. My blood boils every time I hear someone talk about the wonders of socialism and communism. Both sides of my family had to flee the evil that is communism, those left behind went into labor camps and people almost starved to death. Funny that doesn't get mentioned here. Instead you hear lies about being freed from the vagaries, as if people living under socialism and communism weren't subject to other vagaries.
You would never hear anyone extol the virtues of Nazism but somehow communism and socialism get a pass. The blood of my family members was spilled fighting this destructive ideology, people were tortured and killed and families taught to snitch on each other. You want socialism or communism, leave the US and go to Cuba and Venezuela.
Indeed, one of the most exciting aspects of a socialist future is that once people are free from having to labor in bad jobs that don’t make them safe, their productive capacities will in fact be unleashed for the betterment of society. We can build a future that frees people from the vagaries of our current system of work while unlocking new reserves of productivity.
Folks, if the choice is between a Maduro/Castro/Bernie/AOC or Orban/Trump/Tucker Carlson, a lot of Latinos will pick Orban (and, good luck Dems, winning without Latino votes. Blacks & White liberals do not a majority make). Horrible fate we are all heading in to....because of theoretical bull***
It's not just Latinos. I'm a lily-white 66-year-old former Democrat who now votes straight Republican because of the neo-racism and (especially) neo-miscogyny of today's Democrats.
You seem to assume that supporting the policies of Bernie and/or AOC lead inexorably to the authoritarian Socialism/Communism of Maduro and Castro and not, say, social democracies like those found in Europe. I think your assumption is wrong, or at least not at all obvious like you seem to assume it is.
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.
How much is caregiving figured into the analysis? Childcare and elder care are a big deal for people and hugely determinative of what kind of work the able bodied can commit to, especially those who aren’t wealthy.
Huge barrier. Benefits cliff issue for people on public assistance, and different budgetary challenges for others.
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.