For some people maybe, but this is meant to address the idea that if we didn’t force people into “shitty” jobs through capitalist wage slavery, they wouldn’t get done. It’s extremely common to hear that retort whenever anyone suggests that our economic system that impoverishes the vast majority of the human race might be bad actually.
It would certainly be harder to get people to do bullshit jobs, which are defined by David Graeber as jobs which the person doing them agrees have no meaningful purpose, which is a shockingly large number of jobs in modern society.
Weirdly, they tend to be the jobs that are highly paid, as opposed to the really necessary jobs that are low paid. That could even suggest that money is inversely correlated with the value of a job because it is in fact easier to get someone to do a job that is obviously needed.
While I believe some are driven by the idea of them being needed, sanitation or cleaning is one aspect I’d expect to see less interested workers in because to many those are just very unpleasant jobs. Not to mention mining or other physically demanding or dangerous jobs. So in a completely voluntary system you’d probably have hard time to fill out the ranks of such jobs. Mind numbing jobs like assembly line work might be tough one too.
I wonder what the society would look like in such a system. Would be interesting
You can get a clue of how it might work from modern cooperative workplaces where the employees are the owners. They elect their managers and can recall them, so everything is done on a voluntary basis but it still gets done. People have to do multiple jobs because nobody will accept doing only menial work and not having a say in the running of the place, and management is selected from the workers, not a separate stream of professionalised managers.
I think a lot of factory style work would vanish in favour of more localised, more custom production. We wouldn’t be as “productive” but then we probably wouldn’t be killing the planet either. Fundamentally people would understand that necessary jobs are necessary. We’re not morons, we don’t need some special owner class to tell us what’s good for us and dictate the movements of society according to what makes them the most money. It clearly isn’t working for us anyway as it is.
I think it’s easier to get working in small scale but on a country or global level it might be interesting to see.
I think a lot of factory style work would vanish in favour of more localised, more custom production. We wouldn’t be as “productive” but then we probably wouldn’t be killing the planet either.
Productivity and efficiency can be good too, wastes less time and can waste less resources. Factories can be much more efficient compared to the more localized smaller scale industry. Logistics being just one aspect. But I suspect in this voluntary model, if things are scaled down, we’d just have to do with less. Especially in the Western world. Which is a big ask for a lot of people. A lot of machinery and pharmaceuticals are one aspect where efficiency would be necessary, since a downgrade there could have disastrous consequences.
We’re not morons,
Agree to disagree.
we don’t need some special owner class to tell us what’s good for us and dictate the movements of society according to what makes them the most money. It clearly isn’t working for us anyway as it is.
Some sort of democratic model could work. I imagine sometimes do need to be compelled to make sure things are actually done. But then it’d need a way to compel people, which might be the downfall of the whole thing.
Okay, so you basically just called me a “moron”, along with every person you hold in too much contempt to trust them with running their own lives.
Congratulations on being such a smart and clever boy that you can shit on everyone else with your big dicked brain and you don’t need anyone. You’re a real life Rick Sanchez.
We have no common ground, but I’m sure that doesn’t matter to someone like you.
I’m sure you have an explanation why it doesn’t work “at scale”, unlike literally every other basic asshole I’ve heard say that who had absolutely no way to back it up. They just say the word “scale” and that’s enough. I’m sure your explanation would fly right over my stupid dumb moron head.
We just haven’t as a species made the best decisions, barreling towards making the planet inhospitable through our actions as we speak. It’s not personal.
I’m sure you have an explanation why it doesn’t work “at scale”, unlike literally every other basic asshole I’ve heard say that who had absolutely no way to back it up. They just say the word “scale” and that’s enough. I’m sure your explanation would fly right over my stupid dumb moron head.
Do you mean when I said that it’d be interesting to see the system at scale? I didn’t say it wouldn’t work, I said it’d be interesting to see because one workplace is one thing but a whole society or a country running on a voluntary system would be something different and pose new challenges. And I don’t think we’ve really seen such societies in modern times, so would be something new.
Okay, I’m sorry, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today apparently and also left my reading comprehension behind. I’ll try again to answer in good faith. I appreciate you not hitting back in the same way, even though you might’ve been justified in doing so. Sorry this is a long comment, I don’t quite have the energy to edit it down.
My issue with saying people are morons is that we as a group haven’t been the ones making the decisions that are destroying the planet. It’s the way our society is designed to let a handful of dominators make the decisions instead of us. It’s not that we can’t be allowed to run our own shit, it’s that we aren’t allowed to. The solution to this is horizontal power structures, that are structured to prevent hierarchies from developing. I don’t think representatives, no matter how well-run the elections are, can ever do this job properly.
And the “at scale” thing set me off because I keep hearing people talk about “at scale” literally as a way of dismissing any kind of horizontalist organising. Two good examples of societies that operate this way, on the scale of moderate-sized countries (ie: millions of people), are the EZLN in Mexico and Rojava in Syria. They are both horizontally-organised power structures that have weathered enormous abuse from state actors and still flourished. A lot of people thought Rojava would be gone by now after being left to the wolves by the US and being steadily attacked by Turkish and Syrian forces, and they did a lot of the heavy lifting in fighting ISIS at the same time.
I know less about the EZLN, but they have been consistently attacked and pressured by the Mexican government. Neither region is officially recognised by international organisations.
As for the productivity thing, well, we already create far more than we need and destroy something like half of everything. I think we could stand to reduce productivity in general, especially if we got rid of things like planned obsolescence, which forces us to keep producing and consuming and wasting, and it robs us of being able to find good quality products in general. Plus without globalisation of production we could for instance produce clothes domestically rather than ship them internationally, and then a huge amount of carbon-producing global shipping would be eliminated. Apply that logic across all the industries - obviously excluding anything that genuinely cannot be produced locally, which is a vanishingly small number of low-volume and nonessential items - and a huge carbon source would just be removed.
The only reason we get things like that produced overseas is because the labour is cheaper, which is a situation that was engineered by capitalist imperialism and maintained through brutal neoliberal structural adjustment policies, which are themselves backed by the threat of military action. Oh yeah, another thing that has a massive carbon footprint is war, so getting rid of the structures that cause forever wars is also a really good idea.
For some people maybe, but this is meant to address the idea that if we didn’t force people into “shitty” jobs through capitalist wage slavery, they wouldn’t get done. It’s extremely common to hear that retort whenever anyone suggests that our economic system that impoverishes the vast majority of the human race might be bad actually.
It probably would be a lot harder to get some jobs done. A lot of those jobs might be more or less unnecessary but not all.
It would certainly be harder to get people to do bullshit jobs, which are defined by David Graeber as jobs which the person doing them agrees have no meaningful purpose, which is a shockingly large number of jobs in modern society.
Weirdly, they tend to be the jobs that are highly paid, as opposed to the really necessary jobs that are low paid. That could even suggest that money is inversely correlated with the value of a job because it is in fact easier to get someone to do a job that is obviously needed.
While I believe some are driven by the idea of them being needed, sanitation or cleaning is one aspect I’d expect to see less interested workers in because to many those are just very unpleasant jobs. Not to mention mining or other physically demanding or dangerous jobs. So in a completely voluntary system you’d probably have hard time to fill out the ranks of such jobs. Mind numbing jobs like assembly line work might be tough one too.
I wonder what the society would look like in such a system. Would be interesting
You can get a clue of how it might work from modern cooperative workplaces where the employees are the owners. They elect their managers and can recall them, so everything is done on a voluntary basis but it still gets done. People have to do multiple jobs because nobody will accept doing only menial work and not having a say in the running of the place, and management is selected from the workers, not a separate stream of professionalised managers.
I think a lot of factory style work would vanish in favour of more localised, more custom production. We wouldn’t be as “productive” but then we probably wouldn’t be killing the planet either. Fundamentally people would understand that necessary jobs are necessary. We’re not morons, we don’t need some special owner class to tell us what’s good for us and dictate the movements of society according to what makes them the most money. It clearly isn’t working for us anyway as it is.
I think it’s easier to get working in small scale but on a country or global level it might be interesting to see.
Productivity and efficiency can be good too, wastes less time and can waste less resources. Factories can be much more efficient compared to the more localized smaller scale industry. Logistics being just one aspect. But I suspect in this voluntary model, if things are scaled down, we’d just have to do with less. Especially in the Western world. Which is a big ask for a lot of people. A lot of machinery and pharmaceuticals are one aspect where efficiency would be necessary, since a downgrade there could have disastrous consequences.
Agree to disagree.
Some sort of democratic model could work. I imagine sometimes do need to be compelled to make sure things are actually done. But then it’d need a way to compel people, which might be the downfall of the whole thing.
Okay, so you basically just called me a “moron”, along with every person you hold in too much contempt to trust them with running their own lives.Congratulations on being such a smart and clever boy that you can shit on everyone else with your big dicked brain and you don’t need anyone. You’re a real life Rick Sanchez.We have no common ground, but I’m sure that doesn’t matter to someone like you.I’m sure you have an explanation why it doesn’t work “at scale”, unlike literally every other basic asshole I’ve heard say that who had absolutely no way to back it up. They just say the word “scale” and that’s enough. I’m sure your explanation would fly right over my stupid dumb moron head.Edit: well this was uncalled for.
We just haven’t as a species made the best decisions, barreling towards making the planet inhospitable through our actions as we speak. It’s not personal.
Do you mean when I said that it’d be interesting to see the system at scale? I didn’t say it wouldn’t work, I said it’d be interesting to see because one workplace is one thing but a whole society or a country running on a voluntary system would be something different and pose new challenges. And I don’t think we’ve really seen such societies in modern times, so would be something new.
Okay, I’m sorry, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today apparently and also left my reading comprehension behind. I’ll try again to answer in good faith. I appreciate you not hitting back in the same way, even though you might’ve been justified in doing so. Sorry this is a long comment, I don’t quite have the energy to edit it down.
My issue with saying people are morons is that we as a group haven’t been the ones making the decisions that are destroying the planet. It’s the way our society is designed to let a handful of dominators make the decisions instead of us. It’s not that we can’t be allowed to run our own shit, it’s that we aren’t allowed to. The solution to this is horizontal power structures, that are structured to prevent hierarchies from developing. I don’t think representatives, no matter how well-run the elections are, can ever do this job properly.
And the “at scale” thing set me off because I keep hearing people talk about “at scale” literally as a way of dismissing any kind of horizontalist organising. Two good examples of societies that operate this way, on the scale of moderate-sized countries (ie: millions of people), are the EZLN in Mexico and Rojava in Syria. They are both horizontally-organised power structures that have weathered enormous abuse from state actors and still flourished. A lot of people thought Rojava would be gone by now after being left to the wolves by the US and being steadily attacked by Turkish and Syrian forces, and they did a lot of the heavy lifting in fighting ISIS at the same time.
I know less about the EZLN, but they have been consistently attacked and pressured by the Mexican government. Neither region is officially recognised by international organisations.
As for the productivity thing, well, we already create far more than we need and destroy something like half of everything. I think we could stand to reduce productivity in general, especially if we got rid of things like planned obsolescence, which forces us to keep producing and consuming and wasting, and it robs us of being able to find good quality products in general. Plus without globalisation of production we could for instance produce clothes domestically rather than ship them internationally, and then a huge amount of carbon-producing global shipping would be eliminated. Apply that logic across all the industries - obviously excluding anything that genuinely cannot be produced locally, which is a vanishingly small number of low-volume and nonessential items - and a huge carbon source would just be removed.
The only reason we get things like that produced overseas is because the labour is cheaper, which is a situation that was engineered by capitalist imperialism and maintained through brutal neoliberal structural adjustment policies, which are themselves backed by the threat of military action. Oh yeah, another thing that has a massive carbon footprint is war, so getting rid of the structures that cause forever wars is also a really good idea.