6 ms·

Does Work Really Work?

• AnimalMuppet 12y ago
  Sure wish I could downvote an article. All employment is inherently slavery? That's just male cow droppings.
  • sjafri5 12y ago
    would the adjustment of 'most employment is inherently slavery' satisfy your pedanticism? economic enslavement is ubiquitous and not at all how it must be.
    • AnimalMuppet 12y ago
      No. It's still a claim grounded in rhetoric rather than reason. It's the lack of anything but rhetoric that bugs me, not the specific wording. I mean, look, one could perhaps make such a claim, and make a reasoned case for it. The article doesn't do that. It doesn't even try. It merely defines work to be slavery, and quotes some people who agree. That's not proof, not evidence, and not very convincing. It's just rhetoric. So the author dogmatically makes an assertion. That and a buck will get you a Coke at McDonald's. If you want me to listen, though, you're going to have to do a lot better than that. [Edit: The article did give some reasons. They're dogmatic generalizations that are so far removed from my experience of work that I completely dismissed them as mere rhetoric.]
      • ThomPete 12y ago
        What non-dogmatic evidence have you provided to the contrary? The article lays out a perspective. You dont have to agree with that perspective but you sure need to do better than keep saying its not true.
        • TulliusCicero 12y ago
          True slaves can't quit. While most people do need SOME form of employment to provide income, changing jobs or working for yourself are both options that are available.
          • comrh 12y ago
            > changing jobs or working for yourself are both options that are available. To SOME. available to SOME.
      • fmblwntr 12y ago
        if you work as a software engineer pretty much by definition you are part of a tiny, tiny minority of workers in the world, so perhaps you should try thinking about the experience of workers in the third world via empathy?
  • TaylorAlexander 12y ago
    Funny, for a load of bullshit the article offered a much more detailed explanation of their thesis than you have of yours. Don't you understand that we all inherently have blind spots based on where we come from? The idea that work has to be alright because everyone does it is exactly what people used to say about slavery and overt subjugation of women. People still say it's bullshit that we should concern ourselves with the environmental impacts of what we do. It's easy to call something bullshit, but philosophers for centuries have suggested that wage labor is better described as wage slavery. It is a legitimate idea and one worth considering. You're quick to dismiss the idea but slow to provide alternative suggestions for how we might be able to end the forced misery of the working class.
    • AnimalMuppet 12y ago
      > Don't you understand that we all inherently have blind spots based on where we come from? I sure do. You might have them, too. > philosophers for centuries have suggested that wage labor is better described as wage slavery. I'm sure they have. That doesn't make it "a legitimate idea and one worth considering". Philosophers have said lots of other things over the years, too, many of them patently absurd. You need a better proof than "(some) philosophers have said it". Can we make work better than it is? Probably yes. Does over-the-top rhetoric make it more likely to happen? No, it makes it less likely. It just gets you classified as a Marxist shill, and regarded as already discredited. If you want anything to actually change, screaming out absurd overheated rhetoric isn't a path likely to succeed. Instead, it gets you ignored.
      • comrh 12y ago
        Marx and Engels are hugely influential and popular philosophers. The idea of "wage slavery" is a pretty common and legitimate one. Just because you think it is "over the top" doesn't make it not a legitimate view.
        • SiVal 12y ago
          Without a doubt, Marx and Engels have been hugely influential in the deaths and enslavement of countless millions over the past century. They have indeed been among the most popular philosophers for several of the most murderous tyrants in human history. A member of my immediate family learned about the evils of "wage slavery" in "classes" taught by Marxists at the Chinese work camp where he was a slave without wages. I don't know that the term "legitimate" has any real meaning, but when it comes to making a useful contribution, I suspect that Marxist theory will make about the same contribution to employment that it has made to agriculture, industrial production, journalism, civil liberties....
  • heurist 12y ago
    Most people have to work to survive. That's the "slavery" part of it, and it is currently inherent to employment. Let me choose whether to work or not while retaining the same quality of life as anyone else and I won't think of it that way.
• jprince 12y ago
  This is probably the dumbest thing I've read today. The difference between a worker and a slave is clearly at the end of the day, the worker has more money than at the start, and can exercise buying power over whatever he or she wants to do, including retiring and leaving the company. This is basically just communism re-wrapped as "changing work."
  • stegosaurus 12y ago
    'at the end of the day, the worker has more money than at the start, and can exercise buying power over whatever he or she wants to do' This is only true for the subset of workers that have disposable income, mind. Imagine a graph of 'work-related expenses' against 'hours worked'. Simplified example for a general job. Say a bus driver. At zero hours, it's nil. At one hour, it would rocket (you need to either live close to, or commute to your workplace). Then it remains fairly static for a while. As the hours creep up, your ability to manage your life outside of work decreases and so convenience purchases enter the equation as a work-related expense. Imagine you own a car. Previously you might have been able to learn and work on it yourself. Or just not fix it if it breaks. With a job, you may now need to pay for a mechanic. And so on and so forth. "Whatever you want to do" is fairly limited in the case that you have barely any disposable income. It's true that you might be better off than not working. But not really in the monetary sense. More that your preferences* (i.e. location) and the employers's preferences happen to align and you can gain something.
  • comrh 12y ago
    What if debt means they don't have more money then the start? What if they can't possibly retire or leave due to financial burdens? Surely you can be a slave without the threat of violence, by just not having any other option to survive?
  • stegosaurus 12y ago
    As a tangent to my other post; 'more than the start' can take other forms than money and often does. It might be that your employment requires that you own a car, and that without the employment you wouldn't need one and couldn't afford to run one anyway. So the car can be considered a cost of employment. A business expense (though not tax-deductible). The side benefit is that you now have use of a car on the weekends. That doesn't really help you with retiring, though it perhaps improves your quality of life.
• flint 12y ago
  The US economy has never had a strong demand for lazy people. You work for a wage because you are to lazy to figure out for your self how to build something or sell something. "But how are you supposed to pay the rent?" - Well now you are starting to think...
• stegosaurus 12y ago
  "The only major differences between a slave and a worker is that a worker is only a slave at work while a slave is a slave twenty-four hours a day" I'm not a fan of the slave comparison in this context because the word has meaning beyond 'loss of self-determination'. Moving beyond that, though - it is certainly untrue that a worker only loses self-determination while at work. What you do, and where you are, during the most productive hours of your life fundamentally shapes you as a person. It impacts on where you live. It impacts on activities outside of work, because units of time are not fungible. You're less rested, you're restricted to things that can happen after 5pm, etcetera.
  • zenogais 12y ago
    "nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power...[this] is clearly the result of a past historical development..."
• maxk42 12y ago
  I don't understand how this could've got to the front page. It was written in 2011. Why front page today? Is this genuinely a popular idea or is HN being manipulated somehow?
  • maxk42 12y ago
    Hacker News is a site full of entrepreneurs extolling the virtues of hard work and doing four years' work in one year's time -- how can this be so popular?
    • zenogais 12y ago
      Perhaps Hacker News is more diverse than you suspect.
    • proksoup 12y ago
      The people working for those entrepreneurs are perhaps less keen on those virtues.
    • michaelchisari 12y ago
      Because Hacker News is also filled with software engineers, and we know better than most that automation is going to force us all, as a society, to philosophize about work and the nature and purpose of it all.
    • dreamfactory2 12y ago
      An entrepreneur by definition doesn't believe in being a wage slave
• m0llusk 12y ago
  A Universal Basic Income could change the relationship to work so that people had the free time they needed to get educated, practice, and then come to markets with real value to contribute. We are transitioning to an excellence oriented society that tolerates gaps so that bursts of socially valuable creativity might be captured.
• proksoup 12y ago
  I did not know wage slavery was a controversial term. Money is a tool of control, how do you earn money without being controlled by others and following their standards? How do you spend money without controlling others? Like you donate someone a blanket, that's their burden now and they can be fined for littering if they don't take care of it properly. We are tightly controlled and tightly control others. The consequences range from minor inconveniences to death. Death and violence are less frequent per capita, but the threat and control remains. Freedom and control are both illusions. I'm free to quit and starve. All the food and land is owned.
  • krapp 12y ago
    The term is not controversial, but taking it seriously is, unless you're an anarchist and already assume that all societal constructs are attempts at coercion or slavery to begin with.
    • proksoup 12y ago
      I am. I do assume that. What else would they be? How do you have a societal construct that isn't coerced? Voluntary participation of 100% of participants ....
      • krapp 12y ago
        I would argue that such a definition dilutes terms like 'slavery' or 'coercion' to the point that they become nearly meaningless. Is this discussion we're having right now really worth considering a form of slavery? Am I attempting to control you, or are you attempting to control me? In this context, can it even be argued that language itself is an act of violence, or that there is even anything wrong with slavery, if it defines human interaction at so many fundamental levels? After all anarchy itself is a societal construct, with commonly accepted norms, accepted practices, attitudes, cults of personality. What would happen in a perfect anarchist society when someone inevitably questioned anarchy?
        • deleted 12y ago
• dionyziz 12y ago
  The article is nice. But the point about bartering is wrong. The argument seems to go like this: - Each thing has a different value based on the person judging it. - Therefore, we cannot barter. This is unfounded: The subjectivity of value does not make bartering impossible. Bartering is possible if one judges their own work to have less value or equal value to some other work that they are willing to exchange it for; and vice-versa. However, I agree with the article that bartering may be undesirable; but the value argument is incorrect.
  • cortesoft 12y ago
    This was one of the worst parts of the article (there were lots of bad parts). The fact that different people place different values on the same object is WHY bartering works at all. If there was a specific value for every object, and everyone agreed on exactly what that value was, then no one would ever trade anything. I feel like the author of this post does not understand basic economic theory.
• Zigurd 12y ago
  This sure stuck a stick in this hive of libertarianism! A better-argued, and far less earnestly argued position is Ellerman's, from "The Libertarian Case for Slavery."
• jlangenauer 12y ago
  If work (in a capitalist system) isn't slavery, couldn't you just choose to not do it?
  • TulliusCicero 12y ago
    You can indeed choose to not work. But you might, like, starve.
  • SiVal 12y ago
    If eating isn't slavery, couldn't you choose to not do it? Needing to do a thing for practical reasons does not automatically make you a "slave".
    • zenogais 12y ago
      Needing to do a thing for another person for "practical reasons", however, could make you a slave.
• squozzer 12y ago
  Interesting article but it fails to answer the basic question, "why do anything at all?" The obvious answer is that one must do something to stay alive, such as gather food. It's how animals, or more accurately, heterotrophs, live. They find things to eat and try to eat them. Humans lived like this for a long, long, time. But then people specialized in things, some learned to grow plants and domesticate animals, others built structures, some specialized in warfare, and so on. Specialization, which allowed people to become more proficient at a smaller set of activities, came with a price - peole now had to work together because they were no longer self-sufficient. This meant either banding together consciously, for example a tribe, where duties could be allocated somewhat equally, or trading one's specialties for those of another's. Barter was a worthy first stab at trade, but eventually people found using a proxy - a medium of exchange - much easier. A purse full of coins was much handier than dragging around one's flock of sheep. Then came things such as contracts, courts, and all the other baggage of a money-oriented society. This is not to say I agree with the conflation of one's job with one's identity - and maybe in a society that doesn't need everyone to hold a job such questions may become passé or perhaps even become categorized as "too personal", as we consider questions about one's politics or religion. But back to my original question - the writer didn't seem to consider the trivial case of those who choose to do nothing beneficial for others or themselves. Again, maybe in a world where work is optional that might be moot - but I know several people who would do nothing but eat, drink, sleep, play video games, and breed like rabbits. It's hard to imagine any society being able to produce enough food to keep a rapidly multiplying cohort of parasites fed. And then what?
  • dreamfactory2 12y ago
    And yet we have hospitals full of health workers, schools full of teachers, and penniless artists and musicians - none of whom chose to maximise their earning potential on wall st or wherever but rather to contribute to society in some way that they felt drawn to
• squozzer 12y ago
  I promise to shut up after this. The writer also has a false idea about value and worth. I say the answer is very simple - the value of a thing lies in how much someone is willing to pay for it. That seems circular, but recursive might describe it more accurately. We use a construct known as a market to describe the process. 1) someone (whom we'll call the producer) brings a thing to the market, offering it for a price. Usually the price equals what it cost to produce the things plus a little extra, which we'll call "profit" because it sounds cool. 2) if someone else (we'll call them the consumer) pays the price, then maybe the price of the next item will rise, or maybe it won't. 3) if no one pays the price before the producer runs out of patience, then the producer might lower the price or maybe they'll leave. 4) steps 1-3 continue until everyone is satisfied or runs of of patience.
  • squozzer 12y ago
    My promise extends only to the original post.
• blakehaswell 12y ago
  > We can understand our own unhappiness as workers not as a psychological problem that demands Prozac, but rather as a human response to domination. As someone who has struggled to find enjoyment at a job working on products I didn’t believe in, I found this line particularly poignant.
• markhahn 12y ago
  cheesy old-left blather. it seems to offend some people that value is defined by whatever the market will bear, rather than something inherent.