The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
marxists.org
marxists.org
"The manufacturers have lost their bearings and know not which way to turn. They can no longer find the raw material to satisfy the lawless depraved passion of their laborers for work. In our woolen districts dirty and half rotten rags are raveled out to use in making certain cloths sold under the name of renaissance, which have about the same durability as the promises made to voters. At Lyons, instead of leaving the silk fiber in its natural simplicity and suppleness, it is loaded down with mineral salts, which while increasing its weight, make it friable and far from durable. All our products are adulterated to aid in their sale and shorten their life. Our epoch will be called the “Age of adulteration” just as the first epochs of humanity received the names of “The Age of Stone”, “The Age of Bronze”, from the character of their production"
Even the food is probably better now.
It's not perfect, but modern products are pretty amazing. A shirt can sell for $2 and last 20 years in some cases.
Of course sweatshops and pollution are still awful.
I'm not sure this is cheaper.
Apparently the average is $300 a year for an average man, but it's possible to spend much less.
In another life, I did wear a uniform so these things might be linked.
This piques my curiosity as it's definitely not the case where I live. Can I ask what sorts of places?
Anyway, there is an environmental price as well as a $$$ price to clothing production. What you pay might not be the true price (eg. aquifers getting drained, soil erosion, CO2 emission etc, possible deforestation).
Even ignoring my point about non-fiscal cost "that can be bought new for a day's or even a week's wages" is great if you're rich, even relatively speaking. From wiki: "...which found roughly 734 million people [in the world] remained in absolute poverty [circa 2015]". I guess you grew up not having your parents unable to buy except as a last resort and having to patch everything repeatedly.
You're moving the goal posts in your rebuttal by adding environmental concerns.
Absolute poverty has been dropping dramatically as a fraction of the growing world population. Look at the trends, not the snapshot. Show some fricking gratitude for the world of plenty in which humanity exists.
Maybe depends upon how you own the choice. You react negatively to snide or snark: you lose power and social standing.
You shrug neutrally then move on unaffected, and only when pressed do you explain you save time making decisions over unimportant clothing that you put to turning a profit: you're hailed a visionary and VC's clamor to be let into your Series A's.
I wouldn't mind spending the time and money on Ship-of-Theseus-replacing what wears out on a few items of extremely high-quality high-durability clothing, except I have not been able to establish suppliers for replacements. For example, I was excited about American Giant when they first came out. Until I determined I cannot purchase from them swatches of the same fabric, thread, and hardware they use to repair whatever I get from them, much less offer a pay-to-repair option.
As a personal preference, I do not mind paying 50% or more (even >100%) for a tailor to repair my clothing than I can "buy new", and if there are repair options in other possessions I also pursue prioritizing repair over buy. "Trash" is shorthand for, "my civilization is not scientifically literate enough and/or too energy-poor to re-structure diffused baryonic matter up the energy gradient sufficiently to use it again".
Are you familiar with Gomez Addam's wardrobe?
Interestingly, he may have also had a few ideas on social acceptance.
What complaining, and what kind of complaining is it?
Yes, I believe I did read the correct comment that they replied to. However, here, it is not always possible to be 100% certain to whom or from whom one is replying to or from and/or which specific comment in any given paragraph is being referenced (unless specified/re-quoted) - hence my quote and question. And I am very open to being corrected. Thank you.
So yeah, perspective. Your take seems to defend companies, my take wants people to have more leisure time. Guess you already picked your poison.
The world has not changed that much since then. We are still the same apes and are still motivated by the same things (getting food, status, power, or accomplishment, in various orders of priority depending on your social position).
Of course, some people will want and take more than "decent", some people are disabled so its unreasonable to expect and unfair to demand for them to contribute the same amount, some people genuinely like to work all sorts of jobs (including hard labor), and speaking of, there are different jobs and no one way to quantify their "work".
But this is a good starting point to answer the question: how much work is "enough"? With modern knowledge and medium-scale factories, can people spend 15-hour weeks producing enough to live comfortably, or do you need the average person to work 20-hour weeks of hard labor (or have 1/3 of the population work 60-hour weeks)?
You might claim that this status seeking is irrational or unhealthy or whatever, but that's a moot point. It's fundamental human nature and will never change.
i think it's also worth pointing out that work is perhaps not so connected to status as may be assumed. there is plenty of work that provides no status, and it seems to me that higher-status people work less.
That something is malleable doesn’t imply that it is infinitely malleable.
Also yes, more work does not correspond to higher status in any monotonic way like that. This doesn’t cause any problem for the claim that some people would opt to do more work in order to gain more status?
Is it? It turns out it's usually easier to tackle "fixed" characteristics coming from biology or physics. Cultural / social aspects are usually near-impossible to change by any single person or group.
I’m unable to avoid thinking back, again and again, as Shohreh Aghdashloo voices Avasarala in The Expanse talking about how they have UBI (Basic) because they can’t provide enough jobs-and if you take it you can’t work.
We’re heading directly there, not as we produce things off-world (for now), but as we automate and head more and more towards post-scarcity. Our current models of microeconomics (and maybe macro, I can’t say) only hold up under a scarce amount of resources. If we somehow let a combination of “not-scarce-resources” plus a level of centralization over control of production and delivery of those not-actually-scarce-to-produce resources, but which cuts out people who don’t do “X” (whatever “X” is), we’re going to have an especially nasty problem.
Different treatment from other people.
It turns out people have to work harder for that than they do working under a free market system, where they get to keep what they earn.
And 'earn' what they're allowed -- 'earn' is kind of a weasel word in that sentence.
It's under a non-free market system where the government sets your non-negotiable pay, i.e. what you're "allowed".
A more interesting question is: how should we as a society set wages to best benefit society? Your answer, I gather, is to leave it to the market. I'm not sure what my answer is, but I do believe the current state of affairs ain't it. For one, I believe the guys that pick up the garbage (an essential and incredibly unpleasant, dangerous, and physically demanding job) should make at least as much as a software developer. If the market disagrees, then that's a small hint that maybe markets aren't the end-all-be-all of economic organization.
Try to transcend for five seconds the decades of propaganda you've sustained -- capitalism is not a law of nature hits bong.
BTW, you're free to donate whatever you feel is just to your garbageman.
> Try to transcend for five seconds the decades of propaganda you've sustained
Are you sure I'm the one affected by decades of propaganda?
For one thing, you appear to subscribe to the Labor Theory of Value, where someone's effort and time determine their wage, rather than what actually happens is what one produces that determines their wage. The LToV has been thoroughly discredited. It's pretty easy to discredit:
Consider someone digging a hole in the ground. He works hard, sweat pouring off his body. Then, he fills it in again. What value has he produced? Nothing. What would you pay someone to do such a thing? Nothing. I bet you pay for results, not sweat, when you pay someone to do something for you.
But I also live in the real world and I think there's just a gigantic number of people who are paid something different from what they ought to be paid.
We may just be seeing the beginnings of it now in the UK, with lots of strikes about to happen.
I'm also well read enough to have heard all the arguments, sadly. It's the same over and over. "It's not a real free market" as the counterpart to "communism has never been tried". "People get paid their marginal product" is another one.
"If you don't like it, why don't you just pay the guy/government yourself" is another wiseass answer I've seen in these debates.
The orthodox economically literate answer somehow to me is not satisfying and needs some reassessment.
There is a deeper point to that - that people tend to be free with money as long as it doesn't cost themselves. People behave very differently w.r.t. what is "worth" spending money on when it is their money, as opposed to someone else's.
> what they ought to be paid
How do you propose to determine that amount?
> is not satisfying
Nothing human is perfect. But in trying to get that last step towards perfection often just makes things worse. There's no such thing as a perfect free market. Nor would a perfect free market produce perfect results. It's just that, so far, nobody has devised anything that works better. The solutions I see people propose have all been tried before. If they worked, we could point to them.
This is typically where people drop in their Milton Friedman video/meme: "With my own money... with someone else's..."
Which has a grain of truth to it, just no nuance.
> How do you propose to determine that amount?
Certainly the answer isn't "whatever the machine spits out". Which at the bottom of it is what free market fanatics are saying. At least we should work on the machine so that the inputs are something sensible.
I see it in action all the time. In the small, parents know that kids are sloppy with money given to them. When they earn the money, they suddenly get careful with it. In the large, politicians play on the "tax the rich" theme because that means someone other than the bulk of voters will be paying the bill.
> free market fanatics
This sort of thing discredits your postings. It isn't necessary to be a fanatic to study economic history and see how well it works. The evidence is pretty compelling - far more than a "grain" of truth.
Personally, I’d us to take care of those folks like they took care of us. The market works okay, but isn’t perfect and can miss a number of negative externalities that it doesn’t always account for - and yet the bill always comes due.
I'm not (necessarily) suggesting that the government decide everyone's wages. Leaving it to the market is just another way for society to determine wages.
> you appear to subscribe to the Labor Theory of Value, where someone's effort and time determine their wage
That's not what the LToV says. To start, a wage is a price, and Marxists draw a distinction between price and value.
But that's also not even the point I was trying to make. My point was: "one keeps what they earn" is a truism under any system, if "what they earn" is taken to mean "what they're paid". If, instead, "what they earn" is taken to mean "the price of what they produce", then that's obviously false under capitalism wherein companies make profits, so I assume that was not your intended meaning.
Otherwise, the worker could do the work outside of the company and get it all.
That might total the equivalent of $50/week in consumption and $20K in sunken costs per person in the developed world. Much less in developing nations.
You're thinking in terms of tens of hours when we could get by on minutes of work per day, if we optimised for comfortable survival. At the cost of stagnation. But not a bad trade-off to consider.
"I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that's news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When I say business doesn't know this, I mean the structure of business doesn't reflect it.
Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for working: travailler. It has an English cousin, travail, and what it means is torture.
This turns out not to be the last word on work, however. As societies get richer, they learn something about work that's a lot like what they learn about diet. We know now that the healthiest diet is the one our peasant ancestors were forced to eat because they were poor. Like rich food, idleness only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't."
This is certainly not a new perspective; it's what I was taught growing up.
It sounds profound, but I take some umbrage with it, because it stops short. What kind of work? How much? For whom? It's a terribly convenient thing to promulgate the idea that "we were designed to work" without further clarification when you own capital and reap the value of others' labor, and it's an easy thing to say when you derive healthfulness from the work that you personally happen to do. By "work" do you mean activity that's deemed productive to modern society? Otherwise, why not say people need to spend some time being focused, exerting mental effort, being creative, having long-term goals or engaging in long-term endeavours, &c, if that's what you really mean?
I don't mean to sound suspicious or to insinuate some dark motivation on PG's part, but it (ironically) seems lazy to not bother to scrutinize the modern conception of work – to take something for granted because it's all that most of us living have ever known.
We need exercise, but we can get that running for our lives or playing a sport, and the latter is less dangerous (and preferable unless you're a thrill seeker). We need work, but do we need to get that by doing the things that we call "work" today?
(As a total aside: this reminded me of [1], shared some time ago on HN, which tenuously suggests that we were also designed to be idle. I took "designed" in PG's comment to mean "evolved", and my assumption is that small, pre-industrial societies are more representative of the conditions of the past few hundred thousand years in which modern humans evolved.)
Edit: @kergonath also replied to the idea of too much idleness elsewhere in this thread [2].
[1] https://twitter.com/mnvrsngh/status/1510978995269029888 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931427
Self-fulfillment?
PG's statement [1] seemed to be about individuals, so the point is that doing x, y, z is beneficial to the individual.
I may have misunderstood, but the only other interpretation of his statement I can think of (besides "we were designed to work, and somone will feel bad if they don't") is "we were designed to work, and if we don't work enough, something will happen to our society or our environment, and then that something will cause most of us to feel bad", and that's a bit of a leap.
[1] i.e. "I think we were designed to work, ..., and we feel bad if we don't."
———
> Also, PG is explicitly talking about people doing things that they enjoy at least to some extent.
I think it's somewhat beside the point, or at least it's not enough, to find some amount of enjoyment in one's work. Is it how you would choose to spend your time? Are there ways you can spend your time that would be better for you? Those are more important questions, I think.
And notably, PG is implying that we wouldn't choose to work enough, that the motivation we have is insufficient to get us to work as much as we'd need to not feel bad. After all, if we enjoyed working enough, we'd work as much as we needed, and there wouldn't any reason for PG to suggest that people need to be forced to work (by making an analogy with the claim that "the healthiest diet is the one our ancestors were forced to eat").
It's possible that for us to feel good, we need to be forced to do things, and that left to our own devices, as individuals, we'd never muster the cleverness to overcome our ill-serving desires or aversions. In fact, if we evolved in the constant presence of scarcities and abundances that our desires and aversions precisely counteract, it seems likely! [2] But why should we trust the business owners, who control their workers, or the wealthy or politically powerful, who want to maintain the status quo, to be the ones to force us? Why can't each of us pick who it is we want to help us by imposing structure in our lives?
[2] I actually don't believe this in the case of "not feeling bad", although I believe it for health. There is natural selection for behaviors promote healthiness, almost definitionally, but I can't think of any compelling reason for there to be evolutionary pressure for us not to suffer or not have contradicting desires that can't be simultaneously satisfied. In fact, designing intelligent life to be perpetually dissatisfied and wanting improvement seems like an excellent strategy for ensuring its perpetuation.
PG isn't suggesting this. He's saying that people are already forcing themselves to work, with rather dismal results (later in the same piece, he argues that this might define the real-world ethic of "professionalism") while suggesting there would be less need of this if business reoriented itself more towards work that can be enjoyable and fulfilling.
Definitely an interesting way to look at the world.
Doesn't seem like a privileged argument. If the needs of a society can be met with 3-4 hours of work a day and automation for the rest, fighting to work only 8 hours a day does seem to miss the mark. Whether 3-4 hours of work a day is actually enough is a separate discussion worth having. There is good evidence supporting the idea that with more free time employees could get done in 30 hours a week what they are currently doing in 40. But he's been demonstrated to be absolutely right with regards to where the spoils of increased productivity go. It rarely if ever materializes as less work or better pay for the masses and always seem to be funneled to the moneyed class instead. I hardly think it's privileged to believe that the progress and advancements made in a society should benefit everyone instead of a handful of already extremely wealthy people.
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/teams-become-more-productive-...
That's a very subjective question. Suppose we could have maintained a 19th century standard of living for everyone with reduced work, but without the scientific and technological advancements that we got by using that time to do even more work. Would you prefer a society where everyone works 15 hr weeks but the internet was never invented?
How is that even a question have you seen the internet recently. Slamming YES so hard the button breaks.
It is highly misleading to compare lifestyles between different centuries like that.
> It is highly misleading to compare lifestyles between different centuries like that.
Not really, there are measurable facts. What it seems you are doing is comparing relative wealth. A king is richer than a peasant, therefore his life is better than a welfare-recipient 150 years later, because there are kings in 2022 richer than the welfare-recipient.
Because of course, 5 > 1, and 50 > 10, therefore 5 > 10. It's all relative etc etc. People quickly forget how much worse everything was even decades ago, much less centuries.
> Palaces 150 years ago sucked in comparison to modern apartments with isolation so good you barely have to heat, modern plumbing, hot water on demand, showers and electric toothbrushes.
I'd much rather live in Versailles or Neuschwanstein in their then-valid state than in an 1960s-era social-built flat, thank you very much.
I really don’t like this, because it is a moral view with no real justification (someone gets to decide what a vice is, which is historically a tool of oppression). For example, not that long ago lower-class people having outrageous hobbies such as reading or participating in politics was considered morally unacceptable.
However, there is a kernel of truth in that we need to have some meaning in our lives otherwise we just wither psychologically and then physically. Sometimes being forced to do something (“work”) helps us getting some of that. But the amount of stuff we need to do to live somewhat happy lives varies from person to person. Ultimately, this should be the absolute criterion: the right amount of activity is that which makes us live satisfying lives. Some people need a lot, some do not.
I think "ocio"/being idle is some older quotes has a meaning of doing absolutely nothing with oneself (not working, not studying, not having any interests). Interpreted in this light it makes more sense, to me at least.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idle_hands_are_the_devil%27s_...
Obviously, this is just my personal experience.
A non-owner worker doesn't benefit in the same way, but many still value work in the same way the bourgeoisie do. Workers don't benefit like owners do and so they shouldn't want to work like owners do. That's the point being made.
That's still the definition used in Marxist circles today.
Before Marx, the bourgeoisie only meant the middle, or upper-middle, class as opposed to the proletariat on the one side (which, despite its contemporary Marxist connotations, dates from Ancient Rome's proletarii) and the nobility on the other.
After the rapid industrialization and social displacement of the 19th century that saw the middle class' rise, it was Marx who coopted the term to mean the owner class.
Outside of Marxist circles today, I think the original upwardly mobile meaning is still more common, as in bougie.
It is not logically consistent (a variation of ad hominem arguments).
It is counter productive because having a range of opinions helps avoiding echo chambers and have a broader outlook and understanding, and ultimately find better solutions and strategies.
It opens the door to no true Scotsman sterile arguments that are very easy to use in bad faith against people you disagree with.
It creates counter-productive dissent when people who actually agree on an idea or policy don’t work together for ideological reasons.
Don’t do it.
It does seem to be quite useless way to look at the world.
It seems that they are unaware of what slavery actually means or deliberately mislead. Or Wikipedia is inaccurate.
They aren't comparing the conditions of slavery to the conditions of wage labor, just that the force that compels a proletarian worker to work is on the same continuum with the force that compels a slave to work.
Obviously, the legal system no longer supports outright slavery outside of prison, and the tactics and conditions are consequently less severe than historic chattel slavery in the US.
But the opposite conclusion - that all labor is voluntary - has to use a specific sense of the word 'voluntary', more similar to the IRS definition than the picking-from-a-menu sense.
In case of slavery one is forced to work (and that is basically the best case).
With enough stuff like company scrip, company stores, ensuring that laws outlaw being homeless and deliberate breaking of relationship allowing people to escape you can get situation undistinguishable from slavery.
But just "if I will be fired then I am instantly homeless" is still markedly better than "my owner can force me to work to death in a mine".
And forces even horrible employees to be better option than begging friends/family/strangers for help. Slave owners have no need even for such bare minimum. To say nothing about less pathological cases where employees at least sort-of compete for workers.
The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve". It's also easy to draw parallels between the commodification of ones labor and slavery.
It's a term that is not new, is widely used, and debated plenty. The incorrect response is to say, "that's a useless way to think". Show some intellectual curiosity - why do people believe that, what values do they hold, what are their reasons, which arguments do I disagree with, etc.
I'm a socialist, I don't think capitalists have a "useless way to think about the world", I have fundamental critiques of specific policies and different values on certain social behaviors.
Serious question: If you aren't doing wage labor, how are you going to live? Subsistence farming? Welfare? How?
Wage labor was imposed upon people hundreds of years ago with the enclosure and privatization of common lands that people had relied on for centuries to provide for themselves. It was imposed because people voluntarily chose not to become wage laborers, as they preferred their lifestyles as is. To rectify this, a landless class of people was created, that could only rely on selling their labor to survive, through the enclosure of the land they had relied on in the past. People did not freely accept becoming factory workers, for example, they were forced into situations where it was the only option, and in many places, those that chose not to work were arrested and forced to work anyway.
Worker ownership is at least a respectable alternative. But it has a problem with capital-intensive industries. The workers typically don't have the resources to pool their funds and build a semiconductor fab.
This sounds like you're saying: It's all the fault of them. Not our own choices, not even structural forces pushing us this direction. It's them.
That is, without further credible details, this sounds like paranoid conspiracy-theory stuff.
You have something you want to do (and get paid for) that investors won't pay you to do? Can you get customers to pay for it? Then just go do it. Nobody's stopping you.
However meager is their lifestyle, it's better than what it would be under the alternatives. That's what people are slaves of: consumption. People engage in wage labor because it sustains a certain level of consumption that alternative activities wouldn't.
The material suppliers and toolsmiths also own the fruits of their labor, and don't owe them to you.
Capitalism exists because individual worker ownership doesn't scale beyond simple trades. If a worker gets enough wherewithal to scale his or her operation to just a small shop, there are going to be workers there, who are either wage labor, or else customers who pay to use the shop.
It seems that most workers prioritize a steady wage without the risk of being an owner. And it's difficult for worker cooperatives in capital-intensive industries to attract outside investors; investors who put in significant amounts of money quite rationally want some control over the enterprise rather than leaving the decisions up to workers.
One of the most prominent examples of employee ownership was with United Airlines. Employees gained majority ownership in 1994. That kind of worked for a while but ultimately failed, ironically partly due to labor union disputes. It seems the workers had trouble deciding how to share the fruits of their labor.
We've set up our society to make it difficult for worker owned businesses.
In short, worker-owned businesses are rare because individual workers are poor (relative to the capital that's needed) and they can't get external funding because the investors want control in return, which labor management can't provide.
That's why most large-scale worker-owned businesses are part of a federation supported by a bank - e.g. Mondragon's Caja Laboral. Institutional design indeed does matter.
Talk about founding a workers co-op that's democratically run? With shares issued to each worker? There's just no template for it. It's days of work to get it over the line.
"Ownership is so easy, imagine if you not only have to work, but also have to deal with ownership problems such as maintenance, insurance, business and real-estate, logistics, marketing, depreciation, and management. - and, best of all, you don't own any of it if you stop working!"
They don't exactly choose.
If a person wants to live by hunting and gathering, or by subsistence agriculture, he first has to acquire fertile land. And all that land is taken. In the United States, you don't even have the Right to Roam. Nor, on the public rights-of-way, do you have any right to so much as a sidewalk.
The ability to live an "indigenous" lifestyle no longer exists. The whole place has been terraformed.
You are trapped by the actions of everyone else. Mathematically, it's some kind of game theoretic equilibrium. But what it feels like is a prison.
I think a typical Amish family farm is nowadays worth $1-2M, maybe more. And I believe their children have been moving to new places in recent years, in search of more affordable land.
> farming without buying the land
Illegal cannabis farms apparently operate in national forests. There are surreptitious irrigation systems, and there's a whole cat-and-mouse game to find and destroy them.
> We are lucky in the US- we still have quite a bit of wilderness, plenty to lose yourself in, and live a hunter gatherer lifestyle.
You're right though. Particularly, I would bet, up in Alaska.
Maybe I was confusing amish with Quaker? I think it was a quaker village near where I grew up, they still use horses to plow fields and stuff like that.
Either way, they're obviously not all living like that, but whichever one it is, they have communities here and there where they live old school
> Illegal cannabis farms apparently operate in national forests
This is a million times easier to do than grow crops. Of course it's possible people could get away with growing crops in national forests, but the risk/reward just isn't there like it is(was?) for weed.
We’d just end up with tribes defending their land because isolated people are vulnerable. It won’t solve the issue of involuntary labour, if anything it would make it worse for quite a lot of people as it is easier for leaders of smaller groups to exercise absolute control. We’ve been there before and there is a reason why we ended up in our current situation. The life of the average urban dweller is still better than that of a medieval serf.
In developed countries at least, most labor is voluntary. There are certainly cases where people have been trafficked and essentially held as slaves, and we should do everything possible to stop those, but such cases are rare.
Not exactly, all good hunting land was terraformed into farmland/cities or become closed off areas or at least hunting was banned.
There are last scraps, but except narrow exceptions general public is not free to hunt there.
Slavery usually includes ownership and force. I believe "wage slavery" is mostly used today because of the connotations of slavery that the user wants to hang their idea on to, but also clearly knows that it's not really it. Like "chicken holocaust" isn't really a holocaust, even though some chicken farms are terrible places, but it's really not the same.
You wouldn't talk of nutritional slavery even though you're not free not to get nutrition, because you'll die. "Wage slavery" very much falls in the same corner, I think. Take away everything else, and imagine an individual being alone on earth. There's fruits to eat and wood around to build a shelter. If the individual doesn't reach for those fruits, and doesn't use the wood, they'll be hungry and cold, and eventually they'll starve. Are they a slave?
Ownership applies very specifically to chattel slavery, and does not apply to the vast majority of extant slavery today.
> I believe "wage slavery" is mostly used today because of the connotations of slavery that the user wants to hang their idea on to, but also clearly knows that it's not really it.
No, it’s a much more sincere concept than that, from an analysis that workers are forced to do labor which enriches others—in an involuntary exchange for a disproportionately small fraction of the fruits of that labor—rather than doing either the direct labor which would satisfy their own needs or the collective labor whose fruits would be shared by all.
The force is rooted in private property; importantly: private in this usage is jargon, meant as ownership of productive means, not as individual personal ownership of arbitrary stuff. To the extent productive property ownership is concentrated and pervasive, which is a nearly total extent in most of the world, this force is practically unavoidable for the vast majority of workers.
Your likening, along with several others, of waged labor to basic labors like nutrition or shelter is not wrong but misses the point. For “wage slaves” (quoted not to dismiss its validity but to indicate I’m still engaged with clarifying the term), the only options available to acquire food and shelter are:
- work to enrich others in exchange for a fraction of their productive output
- become an owner of productive private property and an employer of other “wage slaves”
- become an owner of some productive private property and voluntarily share it with others (to the extent that’s achievable, practical and sustainable)
- reject productive private property claims (which itself may be punishable by more explicitly forced labor! but in any case is a high risk to other aspects of one’s autonomy however limited)
If there truly are fruits to eat and woods around from which to build a shelter, from which anyone could freely choose that lifestyle rather than wage labor, then the term “wage slavery” would definitely be as sensational as you suggest. But for, well, nearly everyone who works for wages, that isn’t true. The options above are the only ones available, and acquiring private productive property is an exceedingly limited pursuit regardless of how one wants to use or share it. For the nearly everyone else remaining, they must toil so others profit or they must do crimes.
You say that, but that's not at all how it worked when that very thing has been tried by groups like the Khmer Rouge. Who, incidentally, took people from their homes at gunpoint in Phenom Penh, forced them to work for nothing, and even stole their kids from them. You can claim that's an implementation detail, but when you point out that workers collectives have trouble working on a very small scale, that's an indictment of the idea that this idea could work on a national scale, because organizational problems only get harder the bigger you are.
And despite the Khmer Rouge ostensibly doing that for the "collective good", being marched out of your home to farm rice at gunpoint seems to me to be a lot closer to what most people think of as "slavery" than choosing an employer, choosing what type of work to do, being able to obtain free education online for nearly anything, being able to start a business of one's own (including worker collectives, if you wish), and being able to get loans to start that business. All of which are regular activities for us "wage slaves" here.
Is a self-employed black smith who owns everything downstream a slave? He'll mine the ore, smelt the iron, produce his own coal for his fire etc etc. Still, he'll have to sell his product at a fraction of what it's worth it to his customers. Like your "wage slaves", it'll be a very large fraction of it, but it's a fraction, they wouldn't buy it if it cost more than it's worth to them. Is the black smith a slave?
This is the baseline for basically pretty much all life on earth. You will die unless you perform labor to interrupt death. Your body itself must perform labor in order to generate the energy and to allocate the resources you provide it to survive as well. If you expand the definition of slavery to encompass labor, then all living things are inherently enslaved until they die. Philosophically that might be interesting in its own right but it's not actually a very cogent critique of labor nor does it justify the use of the word, "slavery."
If you want to make an argument from history and nature, you can't ignore that early human societies didn't have wage labor, nor were there asset owning classes that didn't work and depended on the labor of others. Those kind of relations eventually erupted with the advent of agriculture that allowed people to settle and accumulate assets.
Yeah, but for a person coming into it, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just earn a wage and buy existing goods, rather than be self-sufficient and grow your own crops, plant your own trees to harvest lumber and mine your own ore to make steel.
Nor is the shift back to hunting/gathering even possible at this point. The population of the planet is such that we would consume all animal and plant matter within months, if it were not replenished in highly structured ways on farms.
Labor having value is in fact wholly arbitrary, which is why its value fluctuates depending on various market conditions. Fundamentally, it depends on people valuing living, which is why what I'm saying is not unnatural.
"Wage labor" is just "labor."
> If you want to make an argument from history and nature, you can't ignore that early human societies didn't have wage labor, nor were there asset owning classes that didn't work and depended on the labor of others.
Asset owning people do work, though. This notion falls apart under minute scrutiny. There's of course people that inherit wealth that only ever exchange it for consumption of goods or services, but those people are still inheriting labor from people that chose to give them it.
The general argument as laid out in Capital vol 1 is highlighted in the working day[1]. This section introduces the contradiction between laborer and capitalist, namely, that a laborer is paid for his or her time, while the capitalist in turn receives the product of creation.
The point is that this is a rather strange exchange. Instead of the laborer's product of creation being bought as a commodity, the capitalist pays the laborer for their time. The capitalist makes a profit (in their subsequent transactions[2]) because the the money gained by reselling what the laborer produces nets a profit[3]. Were that this was a fair trade, there would be no profit to make.[4]
Extending this to all labor is evidently disingenuous as the argument is contingent on the exchange of money and I hope at this point, given the above, you can see why. All life on earth doesn't participate in economy of labor and earn wages. If you agree, and I hope you do, that such a proposition is absurd, then I kindly refer back to the first sentence of this comment as we're now on the same page.
1. Vol 1 Chapter 10. Section 1
2. The C-M in the M-C-M circuit.
3. Yes, even when accounting for raw materials and the investment in the instruments of production.
4. If you're yelling at the screen, "But that's the point!" then yes, we're also in agreement. This maybe one of those "so so so close" moments.
> 3. Yes, even when accounting for raw materials and the investment in the instruments of production.
Even if you just presume this to be true, which is ridiculous, it fails to acknowledge that 1) resources are a finite and scarce, 2) supply and demand are variable, and as such, so is the value of labor and goods (money is a representation of labor), and 3) that the "capitalists" in this situation are performing labor by performing transactions (but also probably many other things as well).
Your argument basically hinges on the notion that the value of goods is static and that certain types of labor have zero value.
Be assured though, if you take the time to read Capital, your criticisms are addressed. I'd encourage you to read it. It's a much better way to understand the argument than a HN comment section. Good luck!
This is like me telling you to go read a textbook on economics. Obviously it's a better way to learn about economics than from me, but that's not really the point, is it?
> Extending this to all labor is evidently disingenuous as the argument is contingent on the exchange of money and I hope at this point, given the above, you can see why.
In order for me to agree with your assertion, I'd have to agree with the basis for it, which was Marx's writing. I made a point as to why I think it's wrong because I think Marx is fundamentally wrong. Asking me to read Das Kapital or talk to Marx is non sequitur.
Similarity: people are forced to do things which they would not choose to do. (Different form would be preferable or for some none).
Difference: level of freedom. Wage slave can choose a lot (whom to slave, what to do with the wage, if to change occupation or if to invest). Sex trafficked person has far fewer options.
I am saying that extending the definition of slavery to simply include any process that is being thrust upon a living being is idiotic. All living beings are required to perform labor to live. Performing labor for wages is an extension of that that fits within a human framework. Rather than individually performing all the requirements to live by creating your own shelter, making sure that you stay warm, hunting other animals or gathering edible berries, nuts, and the like, we've figured out a way to more efficiently divide the labor and abstracted away the notion of labor into something called money (or wages). It enables human beings to use their time more efficiently and is why we are such a successful species.
No, you're not enslaved because you feel like you have to work for a wage. Unless you are being coerced by another person into performing labor for them (with or without compensation), you are not being enslaved. External natural forces like going hungry or going cold are not acts of coercion. That is simply life.
> This is like saying that sex trafficking isn't conceptually important because species must reproduce to survive.
I'm not sure how you extrapolated this, either. To quote you, "It's so wildly beyond the pale that it's difficult to categorize it as a particular breech of logic other than simply and fundamentally confused."
1) a way that doesn't resort to name calling?
2) in a way that instead of simply rebutting, attempts get more curious instead.
The response simply isn't very hacker newsy and it's coming across that you simply don't like Marxism so I must be wrong. Please take the emotional reaction out of it. Thanks.
Your original comment was worthwhile responding to, but the rest have largely been performative rhetoric. If you don't have any actual refutations to my ideas, then please refrain from responding at all.
It doesn't add anything to the conversation. others are trying to discuss ideas.
You should read Marx more so you can argue his ideas better if you really want to double down on his take.
It seems strange now that wage labor is so normalized, but at the start of the industrial revolution, many subsistence farmers were forced off of the land they had farmed for generations as it was turned into large private farms and instead had to seek wage labor.
> [E]xperience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other
From Wikipedia[1]:
> Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market: "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper"
I agree, but claiming that it applies to all wage labour is ridiculous.
> It gives the shopkeeper a customer who can trade with no other storekeeper, and thus leaves the latter no motive for fair dealing except his own moral sense, which is never too strong. While the laborer holding the orders is tempted by their worthlessness, as a circulating medium, to get rid of them at any sacrifice, and hence is led into extravagance and consequent destitution.
> The merchant puts him off with his poorest commodities at highest prices, and can say to him take these or nothing. Worse still. By this means the laborer is brought into debt, and hence is kept always in the power of the land-owner. When this system is not pursued and land is rented to the freedman, he is charged more for the use of an acre of land for a single year than the land would bring in the market if offered for sale. On such a system of fraud and wrong one might well invoke a bolt from heaven red with uncommon wrath.
> It is said if the colored people do not like the conditions upon which their labor is demanded and secured, let them leave and go elsewhere. A more heartless suggestion never emanated from an oppressor. Having for years paid them in shop orders, utterly worthless outside the shop to which they are directed, without a dollar in their pockets, brought by this crafty process into bondage to the land-owners, who can and would arrest them if they should attempt to leave when they are told to go.
I can think of modern power relations this reminds me of, but an ordinary job in the U.S. is not one of them.
Your alternatives are to be independently wealthy, own your own business, to be a subsistence farmer, to work in a co-op, to be on welfare, or to work for wages. Those who trot out this line never specify which option they think is better. Either they haven't thought that far, or they're thinking we're all going to work in co-ops, or they're thinking the rest of us should support them. But that just turns into more slavery for everyone else...
(I will give the more thoughtful ones the credit that they seem to want co-ops, or full-on communism, which could be considered co-ops on a larger scale.)
The world is not black and white, and the fact that a situation is not as absolutely terrible as a sex slave in Mauritania should not shut down any discussion. There are shades of involuntary work.
Even in this case it is still significantly better than being enslaved.
Even with the worst wage labour people still have option to leave it. Slave owner can force slaves into mine and never let them out and force them to work in horrific conditions until they die. Happened in many places across history, likely still happens somewhere.
With enough stuff like company scrip, company stores, ensuring that laws outlaw being homeless and deliberate breaking of relationship allowing people to escape you can get situation undistinguishable from slavery.
But just "if I will be fired then I am instantly homeless" is still markedly better than "my owner can force me to work to death in a mine".
> The world is not black and white, and the fact that a situation is not as absolutely terrible as a sex slave in Mauritania should not shut down any discussion. There are shades of involuntary work.
Definitely! I am not claiming that oppression does not exist but "wage labour is tantamount to slavery" is an absurd claim.
Your liabilities include rent, food, and clothing.
In the assets column, include various sources of income or capital gains, like dividend stocks.
In a HCOL place like the United States, the columns balance around $1 million, which is effectively "zero". That's the point where you start being able to afford a frugal lifestyle in that built/social environment, without work. And that's not without sacrifices.
So in that sense, most people are debt-slaves for most of their lives.
Good example to consider when reasoning about the current AI wave
Few things need long work days if we are happy to sacrifice some convenience. Supermarket hours can be fewer for example.
Jobs like police, doctors etc. maybe not but we should probably reward them more accordingly.
Luckily, I'm stretching some work from Wednesday with sawdust ;) so no worries
Remote work really has been a game-changer this last decade. I've gotten effectively paid to have fun more than to work.
I think I'll go work on an art project I've been putting off now..
Yes, very much agree. If I get sucked into HN and blow a big chunk of the day on stuff like this, I feel quite terrible at the end. I feel so much better when I can look back on my day and see accomplishments.
There's a funny line in "Analyse This" where Bully Crystal's character says innocently to Robert De Niro...
"What are you going to do this summer?"
"About What?!"I have no duty towards life. I didn't choose to be born, did I? In fact, I vegetate waiting to have enough strength to suppress my fear of death and kill myself.
Yes, I've tried therapy in the last 15 years. Yes, I've tried exercise, meditation, journaling, workaholism, idleness, religion, philosophy, science and so on and on. I just want to be done. Every evening I pray to deities I don't believe in: "Have mercy on my suffering, do not make me wake up".
So, no: there is no duty towards anything, just the futility of existence in itself.
According to the Bardo, Veda, Platonic Phaedo and Tibetan Book of the Dead, yes you did. You just don't remember why your immortal soul chose this adventure.
> Every evening I pray to deities I don't believe in: "Have mercy on my suffering, do not make me wake up".
And every night s/he answers your prayer.
Try it with a different twist. "Have mercy on my suffering, help make me wake up and remember"
― Robert Heinlein
It would be nice if I could just walk out of my job for 2 weeks and get rested and refreshed and then come back like it was nothing without first having to make an appointment for said vacation and possibly take calls and deal with issues remotely the whole time, you know?
To me, this is one of those things that is designed to be provocative while employing weasel words to great effect. In trying to type out a critique of it, I realize that "not always" and "let alone necessary" can be used to dismiss claims that this is anti-work. Despite the fact that it is highly critical of the "need" to for work.
Not being lazy enough is also not good; you burn out or lose perspective.
Honestly, being Doreen seems like a nightmare and we should aspire to be better.
It's almost like it isn't safe to be lazy now, your downtime attention is fought for so hard by groups with so much resources then you can ever fight back with.
From there, a hierarchy of power would also be nice-to-have, since it can help with conflict resolution and efficient organization of resources, but we could argue at that point, it's starting to resemble capitalism somewhat.