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Yes to all but a right to a job. People shouldn’t have jobs. It’s not natural.
I think it could be argued that you have a right to a "purpose". For some people that may be a job. And some may choose to not have a purpose. But no one should be denied a purpose if they want one - even if it involves goals they will never succeed at.
Almost as if that mazlow guy had a point or something
That sounds like a hobby, not a job
IMO hobbies are different. I do a hobby because I enjoy the activity, but it doesn't necessarily give me purpose. A job (or more specifically a career) gives me purpose even if I don't always enjoy the day to day work. At a higher level I do enjoy my job, and it gives me a reason to get up each day and tackle problems I otherwise wouldn't seek out.
I've often said if I won't the lottery and didn't need to work to survive, I'd still take a job (or at least full time volunteer) because it's not natural to sit around and just do whatever activities attract your attention each day. It's important to be challenged and pushed to do things you otherwise wouldn't tackle.
I dropped my IT career to work at a hardware store. That was my retirement plan, and I'm in no shape to quit working, but I had to do something to get out of my rut. Depression was killing me, body and mind. Pay sucks, and no I'm not dying to get dressed and go in, but my physical and mental health is quickly improving.
Also, I'm learning new skills, learning more about how the world works, and best of all, learning from talking to customers about their projects. Hell, I can wander over to lumber and my coworkers will school me all day long on the projects I need to build.
LOL, my manager and I, in our 50s, are literally throwing rocks while the 20-something pudgy kids stand around staring. Guess who's moving up, getting respect and perks?
It's great that you're doing better, but your survival and mental wellbeing should never have been conditioned on employment in the first place. What you did - switching to a new career that gave you a sense of fulfillment - is something that countless others have extreme difficulty doing because the threat of homelessness and destitution is held over our heads like a sword of Damocles.
You shouldn't have had to take a pay cut to find happiness.
Lots of hobbies have times where you don't enjoy the work, or you screw something up, or something just won't work and you walk away in frustration. Video games are basically designed to be frustrating so you feel accomplishment.
If we didn't need to work we could have bigger, more complicated hobbies, with more opportunities for frustration.
But if we didn't have to do them in the first place why would we call them jobs?
Yep. These dumbasses that think no one should have to work should be stranded on a tropical island, à la "Lord of the Flies". LOL, they'll either be working a "job" or they'll get their asses beat or thrown in a volcano.
You replied to the wrong comment, but you're totally wrong about how the Lord of the Flies actually panned out in real life. Turns out the children worked together to divide the work needed to survive between each other, so nobody did too much. The kids survived for fifteen months and even cared for one of them when they broke a leg.
I don't disagree that some work needs to be done: If I want a snack I'll need to walk to the kitchen. But it should be as little as is necessary. If someone can automate themselves out of a job they should get their salary for life and a million dollar prize, because it means nobody has to do that work anymore.
Plus the only thing most political parties agree on is more jobs and that makes it immediately suspect to me.
If you haven’t read it already, a book for the idler:
https://files.libcom.org/files/[Tom_Hodgkinson]_How_To_Be_Idle(Bookos.org).pdf
I will have read it soon, thanks for the tip!
I developed complex alarm systems.I bought a timer plug, and set it to turn on my coffee maker and also the record player, on which I had placed my loudest record, It 's Alive by The Ramones
This is me but it was "Stunt" by Barenaked Ladies, which opens with this
You're contesting by posting the real-life version of events vs. the fiction I posted? One of these things is not like the other.
Yes, I posted in the wrong thread. Sorry.
Jobs are fine. It’s for-profit companies that’s the problem. Why does a company need profits (outside of maybe emergency capital)?
No company needs to profit by billions/trillions.
Jobs are fine
For you maybe
Actually yes. I love my job. ❤️
I love mine, too.
I'd still rather not be doing it. Why else do they give us vacation time?
Okay, then why weekends? Why ever leave our jobs if we love them so much?
You need jobs to have public services, public infrastructure, and both essential and nonessential goods. The overexploitation of workers and the lack of democratic ownership of the workers in businesses is the problem. Profit can still be made and go towards wages and back into the business, even better when subsidies and workers protection/rights are guaranteed federally. We can't have a functioning society without jobs
Government can do a lot of that and the workers there are still exploited and hate their jobs
Public refers to government, yes. The difference is a socialist mode of production where the workers own, in a democratic organization, all the decisions of the business. In this kind of organization the workers decided democratically what they are paid, what trajectory the business has, and everything else. The goal is not one of maximizing profit year over year as in the capitalist mode of production. That's why I differentiated exploitation and over-expoitation. I'm using the marxian definition of exploitation. Here, Richard Wolff has a comprehensive explanation of the different modes of production and how that impacts the workers.
Humans find jobs for themselves and their community all the time, but not fucking bullshit jobs like data entry technician or call center technician.
I fucking hate cleaning, but I will happily help a friend or family member clean their house or their apartment because we thrive in a community.
Not getting the humanity squeezed out of us for a few cents more.
Those are chores, and caring for your loved ones. They are not "jobs."
You are right, my definition of job is wrong.
Someone has to grow the food. That's a job.
Farms are actually one of the industries seeing some of the most automation. The biggest issue right now is just harvesting.
Gardening is totally something people do for free.
Subsistance farming is not what I would call gardening. The amount of planting, tending, harvesting and canning required to feed a family of 4 is a full-time job during the growing season. Nevermind all the other homemaking chores.
So get robots to do it. I never said anything about subsistence farming. But if we keep up with the idea of everyone needing a job we’ll never get to a place where nobody has to work.
We’ve already automated so much of it that just 1% of the population farming grows more than enough food for everyone.
I'm with you, and I agree. But the 1% doing all the hard work are going to have a real problem with the communists choosing "art therapy" as their activity. I think automation is the future.
Okay, so reduce it by another order of magnitude and everybody does a long weekend farming every ten years
Either nothing humans do is natural, or everything is.
Democracy and human rights aren't natural. Capitalism isn't natural. Or they both are.
People do like to work, the caveat being that they generally don't want to work with virtually nothing to show for it. The modding community is massive, and they almost never get paid. People love to bake, or draw, or garden, or volunteer, all without fiduciary compensation.
But when people make it where they have to "get a job" to survive, the love of the labor disappears.
Costco has a low turnover rate because they’re paid a living wage. Hell, even (ugh) Chick-fil-A pays their teenage employees decently.
I agree that most people absolutely want to work; the two most important factors are choice of labor and not being treated like shit - either by compensation or other mistreatment.
Those are hobbies, not jobs. That’s why they recommend them to retired people.
You're so close to to the point.
So are you.
This. As automation increases, fewer of us should have to work. A significant issue with the Soviet Union and their legendary inefficiency is that every one had the right to a job even if there were no jobs to be done. Leading to them creating unnecessary intermediary positions at every level of the system.
Basic income, sure. And people should be educated. But beyond that, encourage the people who don't need to work to pursue art or other ends. Get them involved in community activities. But work towards a society of leisure if possible.
They would have been far, far more efficient if they weren't so anti-computer. The first attempts at creating a computer system actually dates back to the 1930s during the Stalin era, but Stalin didn't like it and shut it down (in the West computers were just starting to be invented) and in the early 60s they could have let OGAS be aggressively developed. This would have resulted in an economic boom for the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s instead of a downturn. On top of that, the internet as we know it would have been a hell of a lot more different AND better developed if that was the case.
Do you remember on how Sputnik and the Soviets sending a man into space sent the US into a massive tizzy to try to outdo the Soviets in space? Can you imagine if the Soviets also made the first internet and networked computer system that actually ran well? Imagine the pace and the priority given to that instead of the bullshit that was the Vietnam war at the time.
Imagine decentralised, computerised economic planning 😭😭
The flip side of Soviet “everyone must work” inefficiency was the prediction of American economists that we’d have so little work to do thanks to automation that our biggest problem would be filling our free time.
Instead we found more and more work to do, and now work even longer hours. And it’s because people didn’t want to do the hard work of figuring out a new way to run society and just stuck with what they knew.
We see the same thing happening with remote work. It causes some problems, yes, but it’s way better for a lot of reasons. But instead of moving forward and solving those problems organizations are just insisting on doing things the traditional way.
And it’s really sad how many people in this thread can’t see that they’re doing the same thing.
If you're interested on a brief analysis of the "Soviet inefficiency" you may be interested in reading my previous comment in this thread
Nah
Fair enough, but then maybe consider not discussing things you don't care learning about as factual
I was talking about the stupid capitalists who insist on people working though, not the stupid communists who insist on people working.
And also throw them into gulags.
But also distribute work as much as is reasonable so everyone contributes maybe a few hours to the necessary work and not just a few thousand randos working 140hr/week
Exactly. I studied coding and I could have been interned and further taught whatever the hell they needed me to learn. But nope, gotta have 10 years experience for a language that only existed for 5.
the Soviet Union and their legendary inefficiency
You said it yourself: the soviet union's inefficiency is largely that, a legend. What's more efficient, to have full employment including most women, or to keep a potential third of your workerbase unemployed? This isn't to say there weren't problems in the USSR or that it was almighty, but there's no serious study or metric by which it was more inefficient than capitalist countries. In fact, the post-soviet republics, 34 years after the dismantling of the country, struggle to regain on average the GDP levels of the communist era, with some countries like Russia barely managing to equal it, and others like Ukraine not being able to recover (including pre-war).
even if there were no jobs to be done. Leading to them creating unnecessary intermediary positions at every level
Again, not historically accurate. The soviet union didn't need to make up positions, because it ran under permanent labour shortage. When labour becomes a useful resource for society, it gets optimised and used up as much as any other, and allocated according to very calculated plans, which while imperfect, for the most part didn't create jobs out of a need to create employment. There was chronical labor shortage that reached close to 10% in the 70s (one in ten positions being open for lack of workers). This has to do with leftover mindset from the Stalin years of the soviet economy in which extensive investment in order to mobilise as much of the workforce as possible, massive investment in capital created enormous economic growth, which proved to stagnate as a model after the 70s for a variety of reasons, including literally running out of people to work all the jobs you created. If you want some numeric and nuanced analysis I highly recommend "Farm to Factory" by Robert C. Allen, great book as an overview of the history of the Soviet economy.
I think we view work with disdain because we live in capitalism and 1) working in capitalism sucks 2) not working in capitalism arguably sucks harder. People should have shorter workweeks doing things that help their communities and the society as a whole with their basic needs guaranteed, I'd love to work in such a society
Who's going to provide your food, shelter and clothing if no one is working?
Yes, if you want to live in a society, you must contribute. Even if you live in a village with no government or economic system, people have to haul water, catch fish, grow crops, make charcoal, weave baskets, 1,000 other jobs.
And to care for the people too elderly or disabled to care for themselves, you must work harder than merely providing for yourself.
Oh, were you thinking rich people could just give us money? Where do you think they get that money? Hint: It comes from our labor, which you propose shouldn't exist.
If you don't like any of that, go homestead. Dick Proenneke left for Alaska in his 50s, single-handedly built a nice cabin and lived there alone for 30 years.
Ol' Dick didn't have a filthy job, unless you count survival. If a middle-aged man can do it with 60s tech and gumption, so can you!
Who’s going to provide your food, shelter and clothing if no one is working?
It's amazing humans were able to build civilization without anyone providing food, shelter, or clothing. We're so lucky we evolved on a planet full of microwave TV dinners and polyester pant suits and ranch homes with durable vinyl siding.
If you don’t like any of that, go homestead.
That's the plan.
They did all that by completing jobs. Explain how to do all that with no one working as was the request.
They did all that by solving problems. As any gamer knows, solving problems is not necessarily work.
They weren't forced to be somewhere, at some time, to complete a task dictated to them by someone else, with no say in how it's done or when it's done, or any reward for figuring out how get the same result automatically, under threat of not being able to feed, house, or clothe themselves.
And I'd have a lot less of a problem with all of this if they'd let me feed, house, and clothe myself without needing to own property.
Don't forget the magical machines we found to shitpost! I found mine in a creek, all natural PC and software to go with it.
Free internet too! OK, there were some guys to lay the cable line, and admin the network, and handle customer service, and pull permits so we're not living in anarchy, and... I can't go on.
It's a miracle! No one worked to provide any of this! And if they did, I'm sure they loved every moment of it.
Signed: Guy who broke his ass bringing y'all the first cable internet installs and updated software for Y2K so you can laugh about it being no big deal.
Given enough time nerds would have invented the internet just to argue with each other, with or without financial compensation
Neither is the Internet or the computer you are using, or the highly developed efficient language you are speaking, nor the clothes on your back, the medical care you've received, the worldwide logistics that enable you to have a nice miso soup, or maybe a slice of cheese every once in a while, or even the engineering, math, and, science that allow anything and everything to exist in our world, yet people throughout history have worked very hard to make those things for you.
If you don't want to contribute back, that's totally fine, just know that the rest of humanity is working hard to keep you alive even if you don't.
Someone has to dispose of your trash, and it doesn't seem like it's gonna be you.
Do not assume I am here because I wish to be
Yeah sure, but unlike a job, the Internet and computers are the en vogue method of communications, access to which is absolutely essential.
Who do you think built all of it? It didn't just magically appear for us to consume. Throughout history people have worked hard to make all of this.
People work without being exploited. Nice things can be done without money exchanging hands.
Is that the argument? Because the person I responded to said 'people shouldn't have jobs'
If you are arguing for an anti capitalist (or what appears to be an anti commerce) position, it's almost entirely irrelevant.
No matter what, people will have to work, whether it is homesteading or a global network of logistics, food has to be grown and since we have a generally global society, goods and services need to be provided all around the planet, regardless if people are getting paid or exploited to do so.
I'm arguing that we have rights to our collective infrastructure. You seem to be incorrectly correlating infrastructure existing to infrastructure being owned or something? Or having to require some specific person to create or maintain it?
Work can and will get done without remuneration.
We don't need servitude to an organization, which is what a job is.
Sooo, what do we call the thing that is a collection of work in which someone is expected to complete it? Maybe a jobby instead?
I mean I don't really get what the argument is here, are you mad at the word job? No matter what, the role of 'farmer' will exist and will be a full time [collection of work that the person in the role is expected to complete] in which other people will be dependant on them doing. You can call it a shmackadoodle if you want, it doesn't change it's existence.
A job is a collection of work, sometimes for pay, sometimes not, but really this is idiotic pedantry, if the argument that op was making is that communism is great, or, I don't want to work, or people should not have to work to survive, then they should have stated that. But claiming jobs aren't natural is just stupid, conceptually, they are just as natural as anything else humanity has developed since basic agriculture.
And besides all of that, the point doesn't make sense anyway, the right to a job is a great thing, rights are not obligations, fundamentally the right to a job doesn't mean you have to have one.
We don't need to designate specific people to specific work, there's no real reason for that except to assume that the person with the job is qualified. This is detrimental, qualifications can be maintained without jobs.
I know a dozen people that would be excited to drive heavy equipment and crush things, I don't think garbage collection would be as hard to staff as you think.
People would also have the opportunity to skill up and become qualified for a larger range of work if they were not committed to a single role as well. It seems like jobs reduce labour liquidity.
Garbage collection, sure, what about the engineers that designed the garbage truck, the manufacturing process, the miners, the chemical engineers figuring out how to properly handle it the mechanics repairing it, the planners designing routes, the mangers coordinating between the many many people that it takes to do this etc.
However that is irrelevant to the conversation at hand, which is, that of a right to a job and whether or not a job is natural and should exist. Collecting garbage is a job by any reasonable definition, whether you are paid to do it or not, or if you do it every single day or not. That's why we have words for those scenarios such as 'paid full time job'.
If you want to engage, I would ask that you actually respond to my statements instead of of just responding with non sequiturs.
I don't even know what your point is, because you haven't stated it clearly, at first you claimed that you are arguing for rights to collective infrastructure, which is completely and wholly unrelated to that of a right to and the existence of the concept of a job (again, the topic at hand), and now you seem to be arguing against something that doesn't exist (at least not in the United States) which is that people are committed to a single role. I have changed careers multiple times, cross trained, and have degrees in different fields. Part time, contract, and freelance jobs exist. It isn't illegal for you to hop between jobs, or work multiple jobs at once there are no obligations for you to have a specific job.
If your point is about the money attached, i again would argue that it's irrelevant, the concept of a job is fundamentally divorced from any payment, charge, reward, or punishment. Jobs will always exist, because collections of work need to be accomplished (someone will always have to take the trash) and the right to a job is a good thing because it allows, but does not obligate, an individual to make a choice about their contribution while guaranteeing both outcomes are available, which is giving a person freedom. So I ask again, what would you call a collection of related work and tasks that need to be done?
My point is, jobs and work aren't the same thing. We can organise and complete work without it being a job.
It seems like you are using the term job to mean only a collection of work, and I'm using it to describe not that, but the ownership and employment paradigm that people think of when they "get a job"
The ownership of work stops being a "job" when it's a collective responsibility.
