It is unfortunate that this anti-work rhetoric often comes off as outrageous, when in reality it isn’t. I don’t know if the people doing it are intentionally trying to be controversial, or if they just are not good at communicating.
When we complain about work, this doesn’t mean that we are asking for a world where we lounge all day at home, and expect that food, shelter and entertainment are magically delivered to us without any regard to how it happens. No, anti-work is not about a blind sense of entitlement. But that is how a lot of these posts come off as, even if their authors don’t intend it.
Anti-work is a recognition that the working class works way too damn much; so much more than we need to to have a functioning society with everyone living happily and having their needs met. There’s so much inefficiency in capitalism, with aims to drive more capital to the wealthy, and working around other stupidities of capitalism (check out the book “Bullshit jobs” for examples). The ruling class holds hostage the world’s resources, and requires you to give them a large portion of your life to get even the minimum needed to sustain your living. Now that is outrageous.
I think a lot of people have trouble understanding the difference between “I don’t want to contribute anything to society” and “I don’t want to spend half my waking life laboring for peanuts so that my boss can get rich”.
Obviously, we should contribute according to our means, but we need to be compensated for those contributions accordingly.
…but we need to be compensated for those contributions accordingly.
This is the part they object to, thanks to the proliferation of Econ 101 thinking. Market wages are, after all, competitive by definition. For someone that hasn’t gone beyond basic economics, what you’re paid for the work you do is fair compensation.
The anti-work rhetoric is, first of all, incredibly misleading for people who take things at face value. But more important, the underlying theory for why market wages aren’t fair is different for each person you talk to. There is no coherent, rhetorically forceful reasoning for why people should be paid more. And separate messages that arrive at the same conclusion aren’t really effective at scale.
Getting paid better would be nice, but that will just bring the middle class closer to poverty. I’ve been a part of this community for a few years now and I have been fighting for better wages this whole time. But the biggest pain to me is inflation. Things keep costing more and more, but I keep making the same amount of money. Wouldn’t price regulations be a better solution to all of this to all of this? Not trying to start a fight, but looking for a slight skew from the topic.
You are responsible for negotiating your compensation. You allow yourself to be paid peanuts.
I was born in a comunist society and can wholeheartedly tell you (I presume you are from US or a western country): you don’t even know or can imagine what inefficient is :)
A good start might be not calling the movement Anti-work, as that seems to be an all or nothing type of negative name, to those who feel everyone should put in their fair amount of work to earn the rewards from society.
Perhaps smart-work or fair-work or right-work would have been a better name for the movement, less of a blockage / hurtle for others to get over.
The thing of such names is they cannot be hijacked as fas as I know. You simply can’t do anti-work-washing or create yellow anti-work union. Distorted anti-work is worse for capitalism than real anti-work because supporter of distorted anti-work will not agree to work at all.
You have a good point. Although I doubt it’s worth the trade off. I think pirate party movements vs environmental movement is a good comparison. Pirate party-ism kind of died. Environmentalism lives on. Not saying it’s necessarily because of naming. But, I don’t think sounding like you’re “pro theft” helped.
The thing of such names is they cannot be hijacked as fas as I know. You simply can’t do anti-work-washing or create yellow anti-work union.
Actually that’s usually the number one way if somebody combating you where they want to “kill the messenger”, they hijacked a term and make it mean something different than it should be.
For example being a liberal used to mean one thing and then conservances painted it in a different light, and now it has a negative connotation in our society to centrists.
Distorted anti-work is worse for capitalism than real anti-work because supporter of distorted anti-work will not agree to work at all.
I honestly read this four times, and just literally do not understand the point you’re trying to make.
If you can elaborate on it so I can see what you’re trying to tell me I’d appreciate it.
Fundamentally the point I was trying to make is that “anti-work”, when people hear that they think “this person doesn’t want to work for their living and carry their weight in our society”. It’s a very strong negative connotation, and usually it shuts somebody down from listening to you and to your ideas right at the start.
If your goal is a fair work philosophy then you should state that in the tldr name for it. If otherwise you truly mean no work, then ‘anti-work’ has a tldr name that matches that philosophy better.
I certainly agree. I never liked the term anti-work at all. I prefer to just cut to the chase and explain what I’m about. Or call myself a socialist. That may have its own baggage to unpack as well, but at least its not a core semantic flaw in the term.
Anti-work is extremely unfortunate. We really named a movement after a strawman criticism of leftists by boomers.
