this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Ok cool, I liked antiwork better, because in the beginning it wasn‘t about "lets just reform it a little bit", that is just what it turned into cause I guess most people can‘t see anything between being forced to labor and not moving at all aka lazy shits.
Abolition of work is an interesting text which imagines something else entirely, a world in which the absence of money and hierarchy could lead to replacing all work with a voluntary and playful version of it, where people may still choose to spend their time doing various activities mainly for the community and the results of their labor vs just getting someone or themselves more money. Similar to how most firefighting places and other charitable organisations or open source projects are already run, despite all capitalist logic saying we shouldn‘t give our labor for free.
That‘s what it was about before it got snuffed out and turned into a harmless "lets change nothing on the hierarchy but maybe unionise to get more money and vote for little bit better" movement anyway. It‘s not like I think I can convince you or anyone anymore, so have your work reform and your politicians and fight the good fight for workers, you‘re certainly not alone with it, most everyone seems to enjoy all these conflicts to get wrapped up in just fine. I even support it to an extent, I‘m in the union too out of practicality.
I just enjoyed having a space where I could talk about this theory and the hypothetical world I would enjoy instead and am lamenting it‘s loss, that‘s all.
Not attacking that or anything but I guess I struggle to undertstand how a world without “work” would work?
It‘s ok, I struggle with that too, for some things people ask me when I bring this up I have an answer, for others I don‘t. I guess it‘s as if you asked a tribal hunter/gatherer person to imagine a world where all of the food is delivered to them in a store, they couldn‘t imagine it and if they try they‘d get a lot of it wrong.
I do think as automation gets rid of more and more production labor and the majority are pushed into service labor or bullshit jobs, it becomes more important that people at the losing side of that equation try to imagine it differently though, cause I don‘t think those at the top will and otherwise.. well my username says it, I feel like I‘m caught in a storm of massive proportions trying to tell it to please stop, slow down, and look at what we could all do if we changed this or that. I keep coming back to the open source though, cause it‘s what I work on sometimes in my free time and has shown me what people can accomplish even in absence of a profit motive.
So roughly I imagine it like this: voluntary organisations replacing involuntary ones and a shared purpose to get rid of unpleasant and unnecessary work and for the results to be shared with their community. I think luxuries would be less abundant, but we could manage to make what we need and perhaps we‘d value more the things someone does make for us voluntarily.
Now that you bring up Automation, I definitely think that once AI and such are capable of running the world without need for human effort there will be some sort of restructure of how things work. Thanks for replying!