this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Antiwork/Work Reform
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A community for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.
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Date Created: June 15, 2023
Date Updated: July 17, 2023
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The Anti-Work Library 📚
Essential Reads
Start here! These are probably the most talked-about essays on the topic.
- The Abolition of Work by Bob Black (1985) | listen
- On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2013) | listen
- In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1932) | listen
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The thing is, unfettered capitalism is basically regular capitalism brought to you by Adam Smith & his successors. Bernard Mandeville, who arguably also described capitalism prior to Smith, called it out for its faults and said that it may only be to the public benefit through careful regulation, whereas Smith thought that greed would somehow regulate itself.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Smith is the one more may have heard of today over Mandeville.
Smith described capitalism, he didn't idolize it.
He's often misquoted, but skim through the wealth of nations. It most certainly does not say unregulated capitalism just works out magically.
It describes how capitalism works, and heavily implies the situations where it doesn't. It's not subtle about it either
On review, you're right, but I do think there is a notable ambiguity regarding whatever Smith's trying to describe with his "invisible hand" concept, which is more of what I was referring to than any sort of magic. An ambiguity which, I think it may be fair to say, is among those misquotings and employed as an argument to defend deregulation and unregulated capitalism.
I'd have to do some further reading to get a better sense of what Smith may have been trying to say with that idea, but at least at a glance it seems I'm not alone in finding it questionable. At best it appears to be the notion of incidental good produced from self-interested endeavors in circumstances of good governance, and to which I think you raise a good point in Smith's articulation of what prudent governance might look like, e.g.
Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, emphases & bracketed insertion mine for clarity, drawn from earlier portions of the paragraph. Ctrl+F and search this section to verify if concerned.
What he described by the invisible hand was the idea of systematic forces - essentially emergent properties of a system.
They're patterns in a system that emerge not from individual actors, but from the interaction of many actors. No one has to enforce the behaviors - hell every individual actor in the system might be against it - but the system itself creates certain forces
Smith approaches the concept awkwardly and very cautiously - he probably was afraid he'd sound like a lunatic, or that the concept would be controversial