The Romans are really… familiar. They invented the blueprint for western civilization and there are lots of things about the people that feel very modern. With a few tweaks and lucky chances, the Industrial Revolution could have happened more than 1000 years earlier.
To get a sense of this go look up translations of Roman graffiti, especially at Pompeii.
Ahem.
The debate between Mary Beard and Boris Johnson convinced me it was the Greeks.
Actually, you may be on to something there.
Romans saw work as servile and debasing. One reason they had slaves was so they could be insulated from it.
It’s hard to see that attitude leading to the Industrial Revolution.
It's easy to see that attitude leading to the Industrial Revolution.
The Marxist response was that capitalists weren’t estranged from their labor in the same way. A CEO might work 90 hours, but it isn’t 90 hours on the assembly line. It’s 90 hours building all parts of the business.
The former CEO of Yahoo took two weeks maternity leave and promised to work 9-5 for all of it.
Modern history is filled with capitalists complaining about their lazy children.
I was in downtown San Francisco not long ago. There’s a Classical style statue in praise of the workers who built downtown. You won’t find anything like that in a pre-capitalist society.
Edit: in many capitalist countries, left wing party is called Labour. I can’t imagine a serious conservative political party called the Leisure Party.
More like 90 hours "supervising" the people actually building all parts of the business (or, more commonly, supervising one or more intermediate layers of supervisors who then supervise the people actually building all parts of the business). And that's taking the implication of 90 hour CEO workweeks being even common (let alone representative of most CEOs) at face value.
More importantly, the Marxist response didn't/doesn't revolve around the nature of the work; rather, it revolves around the ownership of the profits from that work. Specifically, the Marxist argument is that the workers are the ones actually creating the vast majority of the company's value, yet do not typically receive commensurate compensation (i.e. wages + benefits + ownership stake). Ownership stake in particular is the main point of contention: the difference between "value created by this worker" minus "compensation paid to this worker" (which is necessarily a number greater than zero if executives/managers are getting salaries) would in any honest accounting be an investment - yet rarely do workers receive shares of the companies they build, and when they do it's typically a small fraction of what they "paid in". Likewise, employees rarely have any control over who their executives and supervisors even are; if their CEO spends 90 hours a week "working" on golf courses and in fancy restaurants with CEOs of other companies, employees rarely have any ability to fire that deadbeat and hire a replacement who actually provides value to their company.
That, if you remember from your Marxism classes, is the estrangement of workers from their labor. They work, but are denied commensurate ownership/control over the results of that work. This is what cooperatives and unions seek to resolve "within" a capitalist system - whether by creating companies which do give workers commensurate ownership or by pressuring existing companies to address their employees' needs/wants.
> Modern history is filled with capitalists complaining about their lazy children.
History in general is filled with New Money's descendants becoming Old Money. New Money complaining about said descendants becoming Old Money ain't exactly unique to capitalism.
> I can’t imagine a serious conservative political party called the Leisure Party.
Nor can I imagine one called the Racism Party, yet my country manages to have multiple parties for whom such a name would be quite apt.
For the worker, estrangement isn’t about losing out on profits, but the fact that they lose the object of their labor as soon as it is produced.
A worker uses tools they do not own to manipulate raw material they do not own to create products they do not own.
The more the worker works, they less valuable and important they become.
I spend hours every day writing programs on a laptop I don’t own, run on servers I don’t own, for companies whose services are unknown and foreign to me.
The company I work for may or may not be profitable (startups, right?), but the alienation is there nonetheless.
Marx certainly wrote about profit. But alienation/estrangement is a very different thing.
The profits are the object of their labor. It's the entire reason they're hired in the first place: to produce profit.
> The company I work for may or may not be profitable (startups, right?), but the alienation is there nonetheless.
And the profit is there nonetheless. Whether or not a venture is profitable does not change the fact that profit motivates it.