this post was submitted on 08 Oct 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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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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I have the argument I am paid less than the value I create. That sounds like some idiotic communist BS where everyone had nothing and they tried to flee the country in mass.
I will make about 500K this year. Depends on what the economy does over the next three months. I feel that is fair pay for what I do. I have no qualms with my pay, my benefits, the way I am treated, the hours that I work or really anything other than the job is boring. I work maybe twenty hours a week and I wish there was more to do since that would mean more money for myself.
I never claimed the company cared about nor would I even want that. Maybe that is important to you but it isn't important to me. I have friends and family who care about me. work is about producing an income to do the things I want to do in life.
lol one of my product reps was doing just as well as you, and he got the ax is some restructuring with the minimum notice allowed.
He's amazing, and went to work for a competitor basically instantly, but the interruption in cash flow made half a year extremely stressful.
You represent the top 0.5%, but you still aren't immune to life changing events. A union would still benefit you, by increasing the stability of your income.
The interruption of cash flow is a pain but that is why we save. If they laid me off and I couldn't find work. I have enough savings to last me at least 60 years. I don't see myself living to 110.
All businesses exist for the purpose of generating profit for their owners.
Without workers providing labor to a business, the business could not operate. All value generated from the operation of a company is generated by the labor of workers.
Profit is the value generated by the labor of workers minus the wages paid to them.
If the wages paid to workers were not less than the value generated by their labor, then the business could not generate a profit.
The reasoning is so simple that a child could understand it, and you could understand it too, if you were not so pigheadedly anchored to your narrative about "idiotic communist BS" and "everyone had nothing".
Unless your friends and family would be willing to pay you as much as your income from your job, you profoundly misapprehended the meaning of my comments.
The very instant conditions change such that your labor is no longer profitable for a company, you lose.
The reasoning is idiotic.
A business owner takes a risk. They supply the capital to run the company. I sell my labor for what I consider a fair price. I take no risk. If the company does not produce a profit, I am still paid. If the company does not produce a profit, the owner loses his whole investment and possibly his home.
The whole the value of your labor is just some weird communist motto that isn't well thought out.
Business owners don't "supply" capital. Business owners own capital.
Anyone who has access to capital is far less vulnerable generally than workers, who have no capital.
Workers live under continuous precarity.
What is the net worth of the owner of your company? What is the motive for being a business owner? Do you really think you are less likely to become homeless than him or her?
The whole the "business owners take all risk" is just some tired neoliberal apologia that is intended to mislead.
They supply the capital. That is why they are the owner.
WOrkers have capital. Who do you think money, car, homes, etc are?!?!? I am a worker and I have a fair amount of capital saved up.
The company I work for is about 28 billion. My share is about 1 million. The company I own is worth about 28 million. I started with the capital from my day job and grew it and in the beginning, I was taking on a lot of risk.
The owner/shareholders are the ones who take all the risk. The worker has zero risk. If times get bad, they can go get another job. The company I work at could go bankrupt tomorrow and I would be fine.
That's not capital, that's just things. Capital is material wealth that gives you bargaining power on a larger scale. You don't have that bargaining power just because you "own" a car or a house. In most cases, the bank essentially owns those things, and lease them to you for the interest rate it charges.
If you think that's true, you haven't been paying attention to the job market at all.
And ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the shareholders and owners will be fine as well. They'll have insurance, or backup plans. Or they'll foist all the debt onto the workers. The only time they'd truly feel it, is if they'd make monumentally stupid financial decisions.
That is what capital is. You may not like the definition but it is how the word is used. I own my three homes. I still have mortgages but I can use them as capital to start a business.
I am very aware of the job market. I have several positions pursuing me heavily now. The job market is always good for those with skills in demand.
Now sure you understand a BK. The shareholders lose all their money. Insurance doesn't cover that. I am not sure you understand how money works well because you don't understand capital and you don't realize the average American is a shareholder. What do you think a 401k is? It is buying stock, bonds, etc which would make you a shareholder.
Owning is not supplying. Owning is holding. Supplying is transferring possession to another party. When you hold ownership of a business, you maintain control of the business, as it operates, and you collect profit from its operation. You never deplete the supply of the business you own as a natural consequence of its operation.
Capital is assets that have productive value, such as businesses or rented properties. Cars and homes that are used by their owners are not capital, and neither is cash deposited in a bank. Most capital is owned by a very small cohort of society.
Business owners own capital. Workers own essentially none.
You have very deep confusion about extremely basic concepts, a condition that is not being helped by your snarkiness and hostility
I can see you have no business experience. You're just trying to make up terms that do not meet the definitions in the real world.
Capital is money, care, etc are capital. So is cash.
I am not being snarky or hostile, I am enjoying your limited knowledge of a topic where you think you are right but are wrong.
I am not confused about the topic at all. I am using real words and not some made up vocabulary. As you will see personal savings is right there on the list.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capital.asp
Ok. Capital is just cars and cash.
The article you referenced explains (emphasis added)...
I think my time is better spent now supplying my capital to a local drinking establishment.
Enjoy ranting.
Yes, you supply the money to the business. That is the investment. That is what the owner is risking, their cash, their car, their home, all the things you have to be willing to tie as collateral back to the business.
The act of investment is purchasing (or exchanging) capital using cash or other assets.
A business may acquire funding from investment, but in such a case the investor is trading cash for equity, bonds, or some other investment asset representing the present or future value of the company, or generated by the company. The investor is not supplying capital, but rather purchasing capital (or trading capital).
The idea that the investor is supplying capital to the company is only a metaphor.
Someone may lose money from an investment, but most capital is owned by immensely wealthy individuals, whose situation is vastly removed from that of ordinary workers, who actually do face the risk of losing their only home or their only car.
Even small businesses are owned by individuals who have chosen to become business owners in order to profit from others' work. Any risk they assume is through an attempt to enrich themselves from gains not shared with workers. By not sharing their gains with those who are working to create them, business owners, large or small, are not helping workers, but rather preventing workers from advancing.
It isn't a metaphor. It is how it works.
The gains are shared with the workers; it is called a paycheck, insurance, etc.. The workers do not share the losses. When I had my first business, my house was at risk if I did not repay the loan. The worker lost nothing if it failed. They would just go on to the next job. When I gave them the company, they had as much knowledge as you did and bankrupted it in three months. They didn't get the basics of accounting or finance either.
You don't seem to grasp the basics. You seem to think the average business owner was given the company and has nothing at risk, which is purely mythical thinking. That is why our tax code heavily rewards people who own companies that create jobs. It is because they're taking a risk which rewards the community.
Even on a larger scale, if Twitter does not do well, Elon loses billions. The workers don't lose anything. If the company does well, the workers can gain millions in their stock grants.
It isn't the company preventing you from advancing. It is your mythical thinking of how things work. You are free to go start your own company and pay the workers their real value. Nothing stops you from doing that. You will be BK in very short order as you will have no reserves, if something breaks you will have no cash to repair it, you won't even be able to pay your PO at the end of the month but you are free to give it a swing.
If you chose to use your house as collateral in order for the opportunity to enrich yourself, then no one owes you any gratitude. You are not a hero. You acted in your own interests, not for helping others.
If workers provided labor, and you only paid them wages, then you profited from their labor, and prevented them from advancing by realizing the full value of their labor.
The only reason your house was at risk was because the bank hoards capital, using lending as a device to augment its own wealth.
If capital were shared by everyone, then all the problems you describe would not occur. No one would lose houses or cars, no one would be a tens of millions of times richer than anyone else, and everyone would be paid fully for their labor, without distinction of owner versus worker.
No, it meant I knew how to manage risk and run a business. When they took their full value, they ran it right into the ground.
Of course they wouldn't lose their house or car in your fantasy world. They never had one to start with. Communism has always provided a lower standard of living for the people living under it. There is reason they have to build walls to keep the people in.
You are not understanding.
The risk is artificial.
Those who have the most wealth, the most capital, are not facing risk, compared to everyone else. Someone who has $10 billion in assets and loses $2 billions has not lost in the same way as a poor person who loses a car. The billionaire is completely insulated from the precarity faced by most of the population, because the billionaire privately controls the vast wealth of society. The losses suffered by the billionaire owe to the instability of the business and the business cycle, not to the trials of life.
Those who are most wealthy face the least risk, and in fact impose the genuine risk on everyone else.
If control over capital were shared, then no one would be precarious, nor need to use a home as collateral for a loan.
No I understand just fine. Unless you want to cite something, stop saying I don't understand something when you clearly don't understand.
The risk is not artificial. That is one of the strangest things I have every heard. Small business is a large part of the economy.
There are 33.2 million small businesses in America, which combined account for 99.9% of all U.S. businesses. Small businesses are credited with just under two-thirds (63%) of the new jobs created from 1995 to 2021. In 2021, a record breaking 5.4 million new business applications were filed in the U.S.
You have some weird fascination with billionaires when the average company or employer is a small business that has nothing to do with billionaires.
The average person takes out a loan, uses their cash, put their car or home as collateral to start a business. These are not billionaires, and they're the heart of our economy. Yet you are babbling about billionaires which I am not nor are most people who run a company.
https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/state-of-small-business-now
You are being incredibly dishonest.
You mentioned Elon Musk.
I simply observed that most of the capital is owned by a tiny cohort of society. Small businesses, especially businesses worth approximately the same as a house, comprise a relatively small valuation of capital (which is not the same as the number of businesses, or the number of jobs).
There is no reason why economic activity needs to be tied to someone risking becoming homeless. Such a relationship is a consequence of the system, the way that wealth is hoarded by the few and made available to the rest only under conditions that serve the private interest of the wealthy. A different system would not need to carry the same feature.
No, it isn't. I just proved to you otherwise. Every day people fund most. That is how most companies get started and most companies are risky ventures. Most large corporations are heavily leveraged as well. People hear profit and they think the company is swimming in cash when they have billions in debt.
Now I agree it shouldn't be this hard to start a business. People should not have to risk all their savings, house, etc and that is something that could be easily solved. We need better incubator loans from the SBA. No collateral, no risk to your credit but heavily supervised. I would fully support that. I would like to see most of the megacorps fail and instead of a Starbucks on every corner, a small coffee co-op or a small co-op chain of restaurants.
I will take a wild swing but your best meal has never been at a McDonalds.
How did you prove that ownership of capital in terms of its valuation is not extremely heavily concentrated?
You only gave the statistics relating to the count of small business and jobs in them.
One business can be worth more than a thousand others.
I suggest you review statistics on wealth distribution in various countries. Learn how much wealth as a share of the total is owned by various cohorts, and investigate questions such as how many individuals own half the wealth.
Wealth distribution is something people who don't understand wealth bring up. Elon has a lot of wealth. That doesn't stop me from having lots of wealth.
People need to stop worrying about the billionaires and focus more on their own journey. I don't use reddit, facebook, Twitter or any of that crap. If everyone stopped using them, a lot of the billionaires would vanish since it's funny money.
Yes, the wealthy have more wealthy but that doesn't stop you from having wealth. This is about as far as I get into any social media platform as I don't want to give people like Zucker money.
Economies of scale mean that Walmart out-competes local small business general supply stores, and the corporate profits are then taken out of the community instead of being spent locally. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/walmart-effect.asp#:~:text=Walmart's%20insistence%20on%20procuring%20products,choose%20to%20sell%20through%20Walmart.
So one party having a lot of wealth absolutely impedes other parties accruing wealth.
You are being evasive and dishonest.
Indeed. The narrative being presented is that people are shopping regularly, and obtaining most goods and services, at small businesses whose owners have listed their homes as collateral, in order to contribute generously to their communities.
It is a fantasy.
Neither the owners of big box retailers, or the owners of banks that are giving loans to new businesses, are "taking all the risk".
Life is good if have hoarded capital, and the reason is because everyone else depends on it to survive.
Your are being evasive and dishonest.
I am not evasive at all. You're not poor because Elon has billions. That is a tough cookie for some people to swallow.
If you want to end people like Zucker, stop using facebook. If enough people stop using it then he will lose billions.
When claims you previously made become challenged, instead of engaging the challenge, you dismiss the relevance of your own claims, by hurling meaningless and derisive assumptions.
You must feel quite strongly about your convictions, if you cannot defend them more effectively than by insultation.
I have defended them well. I even cited which is something you’ve yet to do.
Your answer is billionaires are why you are poor which is incorrect.