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Wage labor itself is founded on unpaid surplus labor with the express purpose of valorizing capital. The increased intensity never works its way to your pockets.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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Antiwork
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We're trying to reduce the numbers of hours a person has to work.
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We talk about the end of paid work being mandatory for survival.
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Well, yeah.
Maybe if you own the business and keep a big chunk of the profits. But for the standard "you get a salary" job? Yeah you're being robbed. That's capitalism.
"A worker pulls into the parking lot at work, and the boss pulls in right after in a new sports car. The worker says, 'wow what a car! How did you get it?'
The boss says, 'Tell you what. You work hard this quarter, hit all your numbers, put in some overtime, and I can buy a new one next quarter.'"
Hard work will let you survive. It won't get you a good life. A good life is mostly done by luck and happenstance.
a good life is mostly done by living in a place with good social safety-nets, and not being a complete idiot and still messing it up somehow.
that's definitely one way to say "luck and happenstance"
If a days wages isn’t enough to get room & board for the night, then what the hell are we working for?
Why, to serve America's Job Creators! They're just better than we are.
I worked hard and my bosses noticed so I got rewarded with more work. I took pride in it at the time but eventually burned out hard and when I changed jobs they didn't even do an exit interview with me. I'm embarrassed by how much of a sucker I was.
We were all that sucker at some point
That matches my experience. I was in school when i learned that doing homework faster (we had a week to do it and i had it done in a day) doesn't get you an advantage, it just means that the teacher decides that we can handle more homework.
There are now studies (I/you need to look up the references since I'm now in a hurry) which posit that, especially in bigger organisations, 80% of the work gets done by 20% of non-managing individuals - because of exactly this phenomenon.
Meh experienced the exact same thing, worked my ass off at a job was doing school on the side, the only thing I asked of my bosses was that I get one day a week off for school. They repeatedly kept giving me shifts on that day because I was one of the hard workers. One day I just got pissed and quit. Idk most jobs fucking suck.
Recent history has taught that lying, cheating, stealing and then bribing lawmakers is what leads to a better life. And a small loan of $35million from your dad.
The scam isn't 'hard work'
The scam is the 'a job gives you(r life) purpose' narrative.
Nope, times a thousand. Meaningful relationships, having realistic (but still challenging) goals, self-expression, responsibility for the well-being of others and engaging in meaningful initiatives, among many others, do.
The fact that the Hawk Tuah girl made bank on a crypto scam is a great example of why this is the case.
she can hire some else to spit on it now, instead of doing the dirty work herself
Hard work for its own sake or for self-fulfilment is not a scam and can be very rewarding. Hard work as a means to escape systemic inequality and poverty cycles absolutely is.
Hard work for self fulfillment, yeah I agree with you. Hard work for the sake of hard work, uh,
Hard not to feel that way about it.
I dunno, I think there's an argument to be made that a life without some challenge, striving, and failure isn't a well lived life, but I also absolutely think that societally mandated toil for 1/3 of one's waking hours in order to survive is not the way to build a healthy relationship to that idea.
Someone actually just posted this to a German sub https://feddit.org/post/15034301
It says that 75% of billionaires have inherited their wealth
I'm curious about that rate for millionaires. I suspect it is lower, but not by much.