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No one is forcing you to work
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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Antiwork
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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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This server is no longer working, and we had to move.
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Date Created: June 21, 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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No. Capitalism requires that we 'work'. I.e. provide output that is valuable to the capitalists. In a normal society, there are other forms of value that merit the person existing.
But also, we're human. One of the reasons I want people to not starve is that I'm not a sociopath. So sometimes the value a person provides to society is that they're not starving in the middle of the street. There's value in that.
What's a normal society? Is this a no true scottsman argument? It'd be my perspective that in the vast majority of societies people generally have to work to live.
Good point! Let's start with a definition that's something like... a society of humans that are treated like humans, and not treated like 'human capital', and go from there.
This is false. You need to provide output that is valuable to your consumers
No, the owner needs to do that to stay in business. You need to provide output valuable to the owners. The owner can decide whether you need to provide value to the customers or not.
Example: Nepotism.
Because unethical acts that are bad business practice are such a great example.
Nepotism isn't unethical. The owner of the company has every right to do what they want with their capital. There is nothing that says the owner must act in a rational or profit seeking way. A CEO must act in a profit seeking way, but that's because he is accountable to the owner.
It's also not necessarily bad business practice. You seem to be suffering under the misconception that the world is a meritocracy, and the 'best' person for a job should get it. That's not how any of this works in the real world.
Regardless, you seem like a creative chap. You can come up with other examples of when a business owner might keep someone on payroll that wasn't directly to extract value for the customer and instead to provide value for other reasons. I believe you can do it.
I can think up all sorts of things, but that doesn't make those things good business practice.
What's "good"? Maximized growth? Maximized returns? Having your face on the TV the most times you can? Making a name for yourself in your town? When you're the owner, you choose what 'good' is because it's your business.
And to my point, since the owner picks what is good, they will employ people whose output is valuable to the owner.
"good business practice" would be behaviors that are good for the long-term health of your business. These are objective, not subjective. You might want your face on the news but if it hurts, rather than helps, it's poor business practice (just ask Papa John).
You're still assuming that long-term health of the business is the 'good'. You may think that's good, and when you're a capitalist, you can choose that as your goal. It may even seem like the most obvious goal. But it's not the only one. "Good business practice" is whatever achieves the goals of the owner of the business. Otherwise, it's not a good business, because a business exists to serve the owner.
Scenario: A business owner chooses to liquidate his entire company and shut down so he can retire. This is a good business decision, for him. But it is clearly not good for the long-term health of the business.
This is false. There are many types of work that the market fails to value accurately. An example of this would be economic public goods. A producer of these will not be rewarded anywhere near the social value of what they produce
I didn't say you're rewarded commensurate to value brought, but rather that workers produce output valuable to consumers.
In some cases, the valuation of work by the market due to it involving economic public goods can be insufficient, so people producing valuable public goods are forced to take on another job. In the case of public goods, there is nothing for the employer to appropriate and exclude others from to charge consumers for access, so employers don't value it despite it being valuable to consumers. I don't believe they were mis-attributing what work is under the current economic system