Does Work Really Work?
theanarchistlibrary.org
theanarchistlibrary.org
I'm not a fan of the slave comparison in this context because the word has meaning beyond 'loss of self-determination'.
Moving beyond that, though - it is certainly untrue that a worker only loses self-determination while at work.
What you do, and where you are, during the most productive hours of your life fundamentally shapes you as a person.
It impacts on where you live. It impacts on activities outside of work, because units of time are not fungible. You're less rested, you're restricted to things that can happen after 5pm, etcetera.
This is basically just communism re-wrapped as "changing work."
This is only true for the subset of workers that have disposable income, mind.
Imagine a graph of 'work-related expenses' against 'hours worked'. Simplified example for a general job. Say a bus driver.
At zero hours, it's nil. At one hour, it would rocket (you need to either live close to, or commute to your workplace).
Then it remains fairly static for a while.
As the hours creep up, your ability to manage your life outside of work decreases and so convenience purchases enter the equation as a work-related expense.
Imagine you own a car. Previously you might have been able to learn and work on it yourself. Or just not fix it if it breaks. With a job, you may now need to pay for a mechanic. And so on and so forth.
"Whatever you want to do" is fairly limited in the case that you have barely any disposable income.
It's true that you might be better off than not working. But not really in the monetary sense. More that your preferences* (i.e. location) and the employers's preferences happen to align and you can gain something.
It might be that your employment requires that you own a car, and that without the employment you wouldn't need one and couldn't afford to run one anyway.
So the car can be considered a cost of employment. A business expense (though not tax-deductible).
The side benefit is that you now have use of a car on the weekends. That doesn't really help you with retiring, though it perhaps improves your quality of life.
Even the Stoics regarded working for money as a form of slavery
You say this like we'd expect the Stoics to be especially unlikely to regard something as a form of slavery. I don't know that to be true. Is it?
[1]: http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/04/13/stoicism-101-a-practi...
You say that like it's a bad thing. Anarchism historically has always been libertarian communism. It was Marx who paired authoritarianism and communism into the ideology that drove almost all the worst despots of the 20th century.
Marx most certainly did not pair authoritarianism and communism. Ever. You speak of a mythical version of Marx's conception of the state in particular, and Marxist theory in general. This mythical yarn was spun by Soviets--and other despots and their followers--who were desperate to dress themselves in Marxist garb, as well as Western powers desperate to discredit Marxist theory and drum up national opposition in response to feeling threatened by it.
As far as the split goes, it was a lot more involved than just one issue. The problem you are referring to, however, had more to do with using politics of the time in order to motivate workers which they both understood in many parts of Europe were not ready for what they wanted. Marxist were ok with participating in politics, Bakunin was not. They both agreed though that real change would come from an uprising of people and not through political action.
Marx was--in his political theory, as well as his political activity--focused on defending and advancing the idea of democratic authority of the general interests of the masses. He did not, unlike Bakunin and others, view the masses as mere cannon fodder--Bakunin actually called them this--to throw at standing power to succeed in revolutionary overthrow. Moreover, Marx ardently and unfailingly argued and advocated that the ultimate end, with regard to the masses, was to teach them to walk by themselves, eschewing the bureaucratic regulation through which they are taught from childhood onward to believe in and acquiesce to the authority of those set over them. Workers are to engage the process of self-emancipation through taking charge of and reorganizing society--through bottom-up democratic means. Bakunin and others, on the other hand, argued that teaching the people anything was stupid, and they should merely be convinced to revolt. To this, Marx once wrote that inciting workers without offering them any guiding ideas or constructive self-emancipatory doctrine was "equivalent to vain dishonest play at preaching which assumes an inspired prophet on the one side and on the other only the gaping asses."[1]
Writing during his time of participating in the International, Marx believed it “the business of the International Working Men’s Association to combine and generalize the spontaneous movements of the working classes, but not to dictate or impose any doctrinary system whatever.”[2] He vehemently opposed the moves by Bakunin and others to create secretive, autonomous groups within the International, because such a group “is opposed to the development of the proletarian movement because, instead of instructing the workers, these societies subject them to authoritarian, mystical laws which cramp their independence and distort their powers of reason.”[3] Marx explained to Wilhelm Blos that when he and Engels joined the Communist League, they “did so only on condition that anything conducive to a superstitious belief in authority be eliminated from the Rules.”[4]
The dictatorship of the proletariat is a bottom-up democratic seizure of power. Marx did not have any problem playing politics. He just wanted to see the workers in control of politics, instead of it residing in the hands of capitalists and their elitist servants who would use political power to perpetuate the alienation and division of workers, thus preserving the privileged status of those with capital within the social and political system. Of course, this is also heavily integrated with taking control of the means of production and placing it into the hands of the working masses, as tarentel mentions in a sibling comment. Nevertheless, you are imbuing Marx's notion of "dictatorship of the proletariat" with post-Marx, 20th-century infused notions of dictatorship--that is, authoritarian rule of one (or few) over all.
Feel free to say if you are still convinced of the rightness of your inaccurate understanding and I will offer more explanation.
[EDIT]: For full disclosure, the particular arc and inclusion of quoted items 2-4 is borrowed from David Adam's "Marx, Bakunin, and the question of authoritarianism"[5]. It got directly to the bits I wanted to cover, and saved me the time of having to comb back through my own library to find the relevant quotes I was looking for.
[1]: Francis Wheen's Karl Marx: A Life, 104.
[2]: Marx's "Instructions for Delegates to the Geneva Congress" in Political Writings Vol 3, 90.
[3]: Marx's "Speech on Secret Societies" from Collected Works Vol 22, 621.
[4]: Marx to Blos in Collected Works Vol 45, 288.
[5]: http://libcom.org/library/marx-bakunin-question-authoritaria...
- Each thing has a different value based on the person judging it. - Therefore, we cannot barter.
This is unfounded: The subjectivity of value does not make bartering impossible. Bartering is possible if one judges their own work to have less value or equal value to some other work that they are willing to exchange it for; and vice-versa.
However, I agree with the article that bartering may be undesirable; but the value argument is incorrect.
I feel like the author of this post does not understand basic economic theory.
The obvious answer is that one must do something to stay alive, such as gather food. It's how animals, or more accurately, heterotrophs, live. They find things to eat and try to eat them.
Humans lived like this for a long, long, time.
But then people specialized in things, some learned to grow plants and domesticate animals, others built structures, some specialized in warfare, and so on.
Specialization, which allowed people to become more proficient at a smaller set of activities, came with a price - peole now had to work together because they were no longer self-sufficient. This meant either banding together consciously, for example a tribe, where duties could be allocated somewhat equally, or trading one's specialties for those of another's. Barter was a worthy first stab at trade, but eventually people found using a proxy - a medium of exchange - much easier. A purse full of coins was much handier than dragging around one's flock of sheep.
Then came things such as contracts, courts, and all the other baggage of a money-oriented society.
This is not to say I agree with the conflation of one's job with one's identity - and maybe in a society that doesn't need everyone to hold a job such questions may become passé or perhaps even become categorized as "too personal", as we consider questions about one's politics or religion.
But back to my original question - the writer didn't seem to consider the trivial case of those who choose to do nothing beneficial for others or themselves. Again, maybe in a world where work is optional that might be moot - but I know several people who would do nothing but eat, drink, sleep, play video games, and breed like rabbits. It's hard to imagine any society being able to produce enough food to keep a rapidly multiplying cohort of parasites fed. And then what?
Money is a tool of control, how do you earn money without being controlled by others and following their standards?
How do you spend money without controlling others? Like you donate someone a blanket, that's their burden now and they can be fined for littering if they don't take care of it properly.
We are tightly controlled and tightly control others. The consequences range from minor inconveniences to death.
Death and violence are less frequent per capita, but the threat and control remains.
Freedom and control are both illusions.
I'm free to quit and starve. All the food and land is owned.
What else would they be?
How do you have a societal construct that isn't coerced?
Voluntary participation of 100% of participants ....
Is this discussion we're having right now really worth considering a form of slavery? Am I attempting to control you, or are you attempting to control me? In this context, can it even be argued that language itself is an act of violence, or that there is even anything wrong with slavery, if it defines human interaction at so many fundamental levels?
After all anarchy itself is a societal construct, with commonly accepted norms, accepted practices, attitudes, cults of personality. What would happen in a perfect anarchist society when someone inevitably questioned anarchy?
1) someone (whom we'll call the producer) brings a thing to the market, offering it for a price. Usually the price equals what it cost to produce the things plus a little extra, which we'll call "profit" because it sounds cool. 2) if someone else (we'll call them the consumer) pays the price, then maybe the price of the next item will rise, or maybe it won't. 3) if no one pays the price before the producer runs out of patience, then the producer might lower the price or maybe they'll leave. 4) steps 1-3 continue until everyone is satisfied or runs of of patience.
I mean, look, one could perhaps make such a claim, and make a reasoned case for it. The article doesn't do that. It doesn't even try. It merely defines work to be slavery, and quotes some people who agree. That's not proof, not evidence, and not very convincing. It's just rhetoric.
So the author dogmatically makes an assertion. That and a buck will get you a Coke at McDonald's. If you want me to listen, though, you're going to have to do a lot better than that.
[Edit: The article did give some reasons. They're dogmatic generalizations that are so far removed from my experience of work that I completely dismissed them as mere rhetoric.]
The article lays out a perspective. You dont have to agree with that perspective but you sure need to do better than keep saying its not true.
To SOME. available to SOME.
Don't you understand that we all inherently have blind spots based on where we come from? The idea that work has to be alright because everyone does it is exactly what people used to say about slavery and overt subjugation of women. People still say it's bullshit that we should concern ourselves with the environmental impacts of what we do.
It's easy to call something bullshit, but philosophers for centuries have suggested that wage labor is better described as wage slavery. It is a legitimate idea and one worth considering. You're quick to dismiss the idea but slow to provide alternative suggestions for how we might be able to end the forced misery of the working class.
I sure do. You might have them, too.
> philosophers for centuries have suggested that wage labor is better described as wage slavery.
I'm sure they have. That doesn't make it "a legitimate idea and one worth considering". Philosophers have said lots of other things over the years, too, many of them patently absurd. You need a better proof than "(some) philosophers have said it".
Can we make work better than it is? Probably yes. Does over-the-top rhetoric make it more likely to happen? No, it makes it less likely. It just gets you classified as a Marxist shill, and regarded as already discredited. If you want anything to actually change, screaming out absurd overheated rhetoric isn't a path likely to succeed. Instead, it gets you ignored.
I don't know that the term "legitimate" has any real meaning, but when it comes to making a useful contribution, I suspect that Marxist theory will make about the same contribution to employment that it has made to agriculture, industrial production, journalism, civil liberties....
Marxism has influenced so many fields wherever it has gone, and if you like what it has done to these fields, it's reasonable to assume that it could have a similar impact on paid employment arrangements.
For me, though, that's not an encouraging thought. I've seen enough of the destruction that results when Marxist theory is applied to real people to conclude that whatever the problems with paid employment, good answers will not come from Marxism.
1) The argument that an employee is a 'slave' and 'dominated' by the employer would work the other way, as well. The author says "A worker must obey the boss, or ultimately lose the job." You could say this about the reverse, too: "A boss must obey his worker, or ultimately the worker will quit" If the boss fires the worker, the worker has to find a new job. If the worker quits, the boss has to find a new worker. Now, there are a lot of good arguments as to why the power dynamic is not equal between a worker and a boss, but it isn't an a priori fact like this author makes it seem.
2) The ideas about value are non-sensical. No one argues that things have a universal agreed upon value, nor does economics rely on that idea. Yes, the value of something varies from person to person, but that very fact is what allows an economy to function at all! If everything had equal value to everyone, then no one would ever make any transaction. The value of something TO A PARTICULAR PERSON is exactly equal to what they would be willing to trade for it. The idea that "In a barter system, for an exchange to be fair, the value of the exchanged goods and services must be equal. However, value is unknowable, therefore barter falls apart on practical grounds" is totally not true. Each person knows exactly what they are willing to trade for some good r service. In fact, this idea is non-sensical just from observation; obviously barter does not fall apart on practical grounds, because every single society on earth practices it. Put a group of people together with some goods, and a barter economy will develop. See any prison for an example.
These are just two examples of the ridiculousness of the author's argument. There are countless more.
As someone who has struggled to find enjoyment at a job working on products I didn’t believe in, I found this line particularly poignant.
It was written in 2011. Why front page today? Is this genuinely a popular idea or is HN being manipulated somehow?