So you want no one to work? What do you think will happen to the world if everyone stops working?
Not sure if this is the original intent, but I personally see it as not requiring individuals to work a standard work week to survive. None of this nuance is here so I can’t say for sure, but those wanting a minimal life can spend time on skills development, personal endeavours, teaching, volunteering*, occasional gig work, or just vibing with little and being content with getting by.
Those who want more than getting by, which I can only speculate is a lot of people, and those driven to work, can work. The value proposition of work would change drastically, though, as value for types of labour change drastically.
Right now, many of the most well paid jobs are the cushiest. People want them not just because they are the highest paid with best benefits, but because they are low physical labour, flexible, “clean”. Meanwhile the jobs people argue nobody would do - customer service, waste management, line work (which very well might be mostly replaced with automation in the next 20 years) - the incentive would need to be way higher because now you aren’t working it to live, you’re working it to live better.
I know it isn’t apples to apples by any stretch, but some of the biggest software used today was made by volunteers working alongside their jobs. A huge part of university teaching is done by contractors with terrible wages and precarious conditions because they just love teaching (and of course other pretty awful reasons for many).
A combination of flipping to worker owned co-operatives to minimize administrative/BS-job waste and give labourers ownership over their labour to keep them invested, alongside a minimum income and regulations to flip wages so that the less desirable the job, the higher the financial incentive, forcing companies to actually cut waste and reduce excess production because labour won’t be as ubiquitous, firm regulations to prevent mass wealth accumulation and ensure fair wealth distribution among labourers and allocate funds to industries that meet basic human needs, and embracing automation rather than rejecting it to make up the labour shortage.
All this said - I have no idea if this will work out positively, highly doubtful it could happen at a large scale, recognize there is likely 1000 holes here and new problems to arise, and don’t fully believe it’s feasible nor that I’m remotely intelligent enough to claim this has any real grounding. Speculative, hopeful, a worthwhile thought experiment to mine for ideas, a place to avoid black-and-white thinking on issues like a 0 hour workweek.
Edit: oh yeah, I asterisked volunteering because many of the volunteer efforts we have now are really extremely valuable for survival and I can’t imagine what we see as volunteering now would still be freely provided labour, but I have no ideas what industries would and wouldn’t be volunteer driven (I mean, we likely didn’t anticipate the biggest and most ubiquitous software projects being entirely volunteer based)
good post. two notes:
Not sure if this is the original intent, but I personally see it as not requiring individuals to work a standard work week to survive.
that is what antiwork — and thus the meaning of this community — is: the critique of work, where work refers to wage labour and performative toil, as this wholly separate sphere of/from life, and its origins as a system of control, and the psychological, physical and environmental harms it brings. it is not against labour conceptually; it is fundamentally anticapitalist.
this community has a way of ragebaiting bad faith, law-and-order liberals browsing All; who don’t read the sidebar, who have fully internalised the Protestant work ethic, and who think ‘work’ refers to both ‘all labour’ and ‘wage labour’, and who think dispossession and wage labour are necessary to prevent everyone from getting depression or turning into Fallout raiders.
All this said - I have no idea if this will work out positively, highly doubtful it could happen at a large scale, recognize there is likely 1000 holes here and new problems to arise, and don’t fully believe it’s feasible nor that I’m remotely intelligent enough to claim this has any real grounding.
political imaginaries don’t need to be completely fleshed out ten steps in advance. it’s enough just to identify a problem. it’s more than enough to start imagining the first steps to solving those problems. you don’t need anyone’s permission to imagine.
the implementation details are not important at an abstract level. those would reveal themselves as a natural consequence of implementation, and the details would be unique to every social and cultural environment.
I’m a professor so I caveat quite a bit when I’m outside my domain out of habit, I appreciate the notes here and definitely see how folks could come in with highly skewed perspectives against what’s possible or what’s meant there. The terms here help, thank you!
Alright, I see what you don’t want as a community, but what do you want then?
Let’s assume for a moment that nobody has to work, so my guess is that most people won’t work. How is that society designed? I’m not saying it isn’t possible, I personally can’t imagine it… mainly because I have never put too much thought into the matter. But I see you have, so I’m curious to learn how you imagine that society.
What are some of the biggest software that we use today that was produced for free?
Do you mean FOSS? Where is that used as a top contender?
Linux powers the majority of servers, supercomputers and embeddeds. Apache HTTP Server and nginx power over 70% of websites, and used to account for almost 100% of all web servers. PHP is used by 80% of websites. MySQL is most likely the datastore for those websites. Git, Subversion, and Mercurial make up the majority of version control systems used for software and research. Python is the language of choice for machine learning and other data sciences. chances are that most websites you connect to via HTTPS are using OpenSSL. Hadoop and Kubernetes powers ‘big data’. core protocols like DNS, HTTP, SMTP, TCP/IP were developed as FLOSS. in their respective industries, there’s also Android, Audacity, Blender, Firefox, GIMP, InkScape, Krita…
i’m going to preëmpt your use of the word ‘free’ here. all of this required a great deal of time, effort and infrastructure. developers still need to eat, and that means the money came from somewhere. it is ‘free’ in the sense that: it is given, not sold; that it was a collaborative volunteer effort; and that you can do whatever you want with it. just because some developers receive some sort of compensation — or work a dayjob and have to survive in a capitalist system — does not mean we need fixed-schedule, ass-in-seats, top-down hostage wage labour to accomplish anything valuable at scale.
Sure, Linux is used in super computers, but there’s only around 500 of them.
Linux only has around 4% install base compared to Windows.
And I disagree on the not needing ass in seats metaphor you used; plenty of people who create FOSS do so because of a need/desire, yes, but also because that knowledge helps them make money afterwards.
Would you work your whole life to just create FOSS?
Making free software is a means to an end, and that end means recognition and eventually a well paying job.
Would you work your whole life to just create FOSS?
yes, if it has social value and brings meaning to my life.
you can drop the word ‘just’: i wouldn’t just do any one thing, and neither would most people if given the opportunity to do more than just their 9 to 5.
there is more to life than feeding the mute compulsion for private wealth and fame. the driving force of most people is to be comfortable and to belong, and the two are intertwined. in our current society, private wealth and fame are the path to comfort (it’s debateable whether the wealthy have any sense of ‘belonging’).
a lot of people really do want to do things just for the joy or intellectual stimulation of doing it, and to do so without having the joy sucked out of it by economic imperatives enforced from on high by a nepotic sadomasochist in a suit. there is nothing more humiliating than being forced to play a game you had no part in making, that you can’t say say no to, and that exists only as a form of power imposed on you.
I agree that most of us are used and abused by the rich pricks, it’s why I joined this community in the first place.
But it’s taken to an aburd extreme here where it seems people want to live a care free happy life without burdens, yet at the same time expect life to continue as it currently is with all the benefits we all receive.
Fact is, it won’t. If people don’t bust their ass, and get paid well for it, most would not do anything of value (I know you said you would work for free, but you’re a very very small minority).
But it’s taken to an aburd extreme here where it seems people want to live a care free happy life without burdens, yet at the same time expect life to continue as it currently is with all the benefits we all receive.
this is a strawman. you do yourself a disservice by fighting with scarecrows.
anyone but the ignorant or deeply unserious who want a world without work fully expect to labour to make that happen and to keep it running. the difference is they don’t want to be forced to do things — usually things no one but Moloch asked for, and that they don’t want to be doing — and then threatened with precarity and social murder because the skills they have aren’t profitable, or a machine has made them obsolete (when it should have freed them to do something else), or they have a ‘disability’, or the job they’re filling isn’t needed anymore (or, more likely, is eliminated to bolster the end-of-year profit numbers).
i think you’ll find people still want to do stuff and help each other when they’re not being atomised and forced to compete for scraps. if food and housing were a right, just as many nations in the economic core enshrine a right to life: the ‘rich pricks’ would lose their leverage. people could choose the type of work they want to do, and could do socially beneficial and necessary work that is ‘unprofitable’, because they’re no longer threatened with precarity for failing to bolster someone else’s already comfortable life.
i have never had a job i wanted to do, because i grew up in precarity and the types of things i want to do wouldn’t pay the bills, or pays too little to live on, or is too expensive to certify for, or there’s more than enough people doing them already. i can’t spend too much time looking for jobs, because i gotta eat, so i take the best of the first few of a handful of options, and the jobs (plural) are usually something that only exists to serve rich pricks and their extravagent, imperialist lifestyles, or to serve a need that only exists because everyone is too busy with their bullshit jobs to organise something better. then, when i have a job, that’s all i have time and energy left to do. i don’t have time left over to look at another job, or to learn a new skill, or take a course, or get to know my neighbours, or meet new people at all, or work on my mounting health issues. i don’t have time left over for my hobbies or my interests or to take care of my loved ones or make something useful for my community, because it’s 12 hours of attendance for work that could be done in four, or i’m expected to do more work than is reasonable in a single day and so most of it’s rushed and done to the minimum. and for everything i don’t have time to be doing, that’s more money i have to make paying someone else to do what i could already be doing for myself but i can’t because i’m not a fucking farmer and my apartment has no space for a balcony garden and zoning laws prohibit community gardens and the food banks only take the completely destitute or people willing to convert to their religion.
so imagine i work myself to the bone and now i’m practically disabled, but — and i’ve been thru this and i take care of people who’re going thru this — to be elligible for welfare i need to act like i’m borderline ascetic living at below-subsistence, and then i get to work a different fulltime job: the fulltime job of filling out all the paperwork, keeping an accurate accounting of all my activity, dealing with ‘lifestyle inspectors’ and housing audits, trying to comply with ever-increasingly complex living requirements, renewing my diagnoses several times per quarter and having monthly status calls to answer the question ‘so why aren’t you working’ for the millionth time. all while an entire government apparatus fulfils its primary purpose of making me feel like a parasite and a fuckup because i should be out there affording some guy his fifth yacht with my lifeforce. all that, and the cheque doesn’t even pay the rent.
meanwhile, i still do have time and skills to offer, but not in a way that makes someone else a 30% markup, or that fills an entire 8-hour workday with bullshit. and everyone around me is so taken by their own temporal enslavement to notice me, offering my services for a little bit of food. and the few who hear me are so brainrotted by money that they reject this lowly, mangy beggar, and because no one ever does a good job for no less than two digits of currency. and if it’s ever found out that i do anything with my life other than sleep and feel sorry for myself, or that i’m getting help from a neighbour, a friend, or a loved one: they take the money away and force me into a work programme on an assembly line that i’ll fail out of into homelessness, and refusal means i go homeless, or get put in jail for ‘welfare fraud’ so i can be released three years later into homelessness. in every case i end up homeless: i end up back in jail anyway because being homeless in public is illegal.
how much we could all collectively fucking save — on commuting, on groceries, on equipment, on time — if we shared responsibilities, brought the ‘work’ closer to home, and came together to ask “what does everyone need, and who can do it?”. when Marx borrowed the phrase ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’, he intended there to be a second part: ‘what one person can’t do can be done by another; what no one wants to do can be done by everyone.’
so, when you said in another comment:
[…] where everything works as it currently does with no one needing to bust their ass.
the way everything works now is that it doesn’t. if it works for you: great. it’s not working for me, and it doesn’t work for 6 billion other people. you talk about working plumbing and electricity; i didn’t have that for most of my life.
what a bad faith take, to look at this forum or this thread and come away from it thinking that the dispossessed are just too uneducated to get it, that they don’t expect a fundamental shift in our way of thinking and the way society is organised. you see an effortful comment and you superimpose the strawman over it. ‘they’re just lazy,’ the WASP cop in your head says. ‘they just want everything for nothing. they’ll just live like pigs, and worse yet they’ll like it!’ you give selective, low-effort retorts. you claim they don’t ‘understand’, but then ignore real examples of a different way of living because ‘that’s not how it works in the here and now’ (no shit!). you’re given ideas of how it might work, and then say ‘well if it’s so great why aren’t we doing that already?’.
not everything constructed under capitalism is capitalist; just as a book written in a café isn’t a sandwich. capitalism doesn’t get to take credit for everything just because the person who put in the labour ate at McDonalds for lunch that day, or because someone’s expressive art can sell for $100 on eBay. people can want to do things for more than one reason, and people can have multiple priorities, and those priorities aren’t always the same as yours, and we know that people can be motivated by things other than money when the money isn’t essential to unlocking the hierarchy of needs.
if you really care about improving anything more than the shit-eating grin on your shitty boss’s face: you might want to stop fighting scarecrows and make a real effort to engage your imagination for once. if you just came here to say ‘i like capitalism; i don’t want anything to change’, you could just say that instead of pretending to care. if you only care about keeping your treats and ‘valour’, and dangling them over everyone else: your time would be better spent JAQing off to a mirror. reproducing shitty beliefs because ‘well that’s what everyone believes’ and purity testing every idea for change against the majority is circular reasoning that ensures the shitty belief and associated shitty behaviour continues unopposed by deliberately shutting off your heart and mind to the idea for irrational reasons. your majoritarian nonsense is cowardice, and you deny others as much as yourself the possibility of a better society.
if you want there to be tokens and prizes for extra effort: great! that’s fine. but don’t lock belonging and love in a storage closet, and don’t put essential food and shelter on the same fucking shelf as the teddybear and the bouncy ball.
Linux only has around 4% install base compared to Windows.
So you’re including supercomputers and desktops. What about servers and embedded devices? No kernel is more ubiquitous than Linux.
Enterprise servers? Use Unix, which isn’t free
Go ahead and Google server OS market share. Educate yourself, I’m not interested in arguing with someone who isn’t interested in reality over winning an argument. Sincerely, fuck off.
Nodejs is a great example of FOSS and a good part of the modern internet is built on that.
Linux as well. You can pay for support, but the software itself is FOSS. It might not have a big share of desktop use, but it’s a mainstay on servers.
Well if you’re going to pay, might as well use Unix server os
That’s the thing though, you don’t have to pay, but you have the option on certain distro to have a professional support for your business.
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People can finally work on things that interest them! No more corporate overlords telling you what to produce.
No one WANTS to clean toilets or pick up trash every day, and yet it still needs to be done.
Too bad we don’t have any millionaire toilet cleaners or garbage collectors, even though we NEED them.
But that’s an entirely different premise than “nobody needs to work”…
Who said “nobody needs to work”?
The actual premise is that your labor shouldn’t be exploited to produce products for the sole purpose of producing products, which make a few people rich while you get nothing. If we’re working to keep necessary services functioning, thats a different story. We can all do that as a society without a business/corporation telling us to do it.
Who said “nobody needs to work”?
Literally the post.
Can you screenshot and circle that quote in the OP?
I guess if nobody wants to do it, the market would have to price that labor much higher to make that happen due to a low supply for a high demand service.
The problem is that companies have more leverage than individuals. How many minimum wage protests have we seen over the years, and they are still getting paid for that. A company is probably going to find someone desperate enough to fill any gap. A person needs to survive, and without an income they become desperate enough to fill any gap.
Usually people with high salaries can bargain and use leverage because they aren’t desperate to get a job to survive.
But that’s what these antiwork posts are about. If people weren’t desperate to survive a lot of problems would sort themselves out.
everyone would have more time to support each other, pursue their interests, and do other things that really matter.
don’t conflate ‘work’ with ‘labour’ or ‘doing literally anything’.
Um… You wouldn’t be able to enjoy anything, you know that right?
Your electricity? Wouldn’t work. Your water? Would stop functioning or be poisoned within a week. Uber eats? Lmao, forget about it.
EVERYTHING would grind to a halt.
I don’t know why you are being downvoted - the world doesn’t magically turn over from volunteering.
Seems people don’t understand how the world works and instead believe in a fantasy bubble world where everything works as it currently does with no one needing to bust their ass.
Ive only ever used Uber Eats while working. Without work I’d have more time for gardening
Your water wouldn’t work so your garden would die
Can you garden a cow?
Can you garden a doctor?
You’d be surprised … but cows actually do grow on fields. Just like a lot of medicinal herbs.
Uber eats
oh no! my treats! /s
so, if people don’t have the conditions of life held hostage by labour-buyers, the world would end? …why would the water be poisoned? what did i say about conflating ‘work’ with ‘labour’ or ‘doing literally anything [at all]’?
there would still be people who want to operate public utilities[0]. there would still be electricians. and plumbers. and what about microgrids?
this also wouldn’t happen overnight, which you make it sound like it would. or is this like when someone suggests phasing out fossil fuels? and some lemmy.world username says ‘if we suddenly abruptly instantly instantaneously directly rapidly CTRL+A-CTRL+X’d all oil in the world right now it’d be just like in the Mad Max!’
less than 27% of paid labour is serving real needs[1]. there is a lot of shit that we don’t need, that provides no social value, and that we could do without[2]. the individualist ratrace separates us from our communities, which are perfectly capable of taking care of us, even and *especially* in a crisis[3],[4],[5]. a managerial class is not necessary to operate public utilities[6].
if people want electricity, or running water, they will arrange for it. if absolutely nobody in the community knows how, they find someone who does and they make a deal.
most ‘work’ would probably be automated. automation is really more viable in a postcapitalist setting because there is no profit incentive getting in the way of the time for innovation to make reliable, longevous systems that aren’t intentionally cheap and intended to break within 2 – 5 years.
so, i don’t really see how ‘EVERYTHING would grind to a halt’ unless ‘EVERYTHING’ is ‘precisely the way things are now in whatever the present moment is’.
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if your argument is ultimately ‘i don’t want anything to change’, you could’ve just opened with that instead of JAQing off.
🙄
How is Uber Eats up in there next to electricity and water?
All the replies remind me of the WKUK anarchy sketch
Lmao, brilliant video!
And yeah, it’s exactly what will happen if op gets their way
Life will be amazing. Please go away
I’d be happy with several times that much
You kids and your identity properties.
I work smart, not hard
Edit: This was a lie, I’m an idiot and I work my ass off
Several? Hell id do thousands of times.
First of May today. Good timing!
- Stop exploitation!
- Basic income world wide!
- Abolish bullshit jobs!
- Save the planet from corporate greed!
- Tear down the prison industry!
- Tax billionaires!
- Cooperation instead of competition!
- Stop promoting warfare!
bUt ThE eCoNoMy
That’s what you think you want, but sooner or later you’d be bored out of your mind
Yeah because if people don’t work, they sit with their thumb up their ass while looking at the wall.
