Ask Lemmy

Back then all you had was the clothes on your back an half a sack of grain at the store. There's more free time if you don't produce anything.

A lot of it is cultural. Capitalism continues to exploit people not just because of the machinations of a few people at the top, but also because there are many people who have so deeply internalised the logic of capitalism that they are reinforce and perpetuate their own oppression.

A phrase that I've found really useful in understanding this is "cultural hegemony". This theory was originally developed in the early 1900s by the Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci. It's a pretty dense bit of political theory that I don't feel like I understand well enough to explain well, but I'll attempt to give the gist of it

The key thing about cultural hegemony is that it makes the dominant political ideology seem like it's natural and inevitable. We see this when people recognise the awfulness of their working or living conditions, but then shrug it off by saying "that's just life". They can't imagine any alternative. I see it a lot in my daily life when people see the crafts I make and say "wow, that's so good, you should sell those" — people are conditioned to only see value in terms of monetary value.

What other choice is there?

1. Because living is more expensive now than before. In medieval times, you had a 30m² wooden house on your farm that you probably built yourself, no heater, no car, no brand clothes, no washing machine, no electricity at all, no water pipes, etc.

2. Because when you work on a farm for yourself, you keep 100% of your work. When you work for a company, it keeps most of your work for itself and gives you some compensation in return that depends on a combination of "how much do you need for living" and "how easily could you find another job".

Compared to pre-WW2 era, the work week and day has decreased from 12 hours/day, 6 days per week, thanks to the more militant labor movement.

In more recent decades, productivity has increased significantly, so we should be able to produce the same amount as before, with less labor: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

But I'll let you guess who is cashing in the extra profit from your work. Tip: it's not you.

Being self employed helps. My workday doesn't end at set time - it ends when I'm done. Sometimes that's 10am, sometimes 7pm. Then if I feel like I've worked too much and could use a vacation I just don't schedule any work for the rest of the week/next few weeks.

Now don't get me wrong, I do work a lot but it doesn't feel like work really because I have total control of everything I do and I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. What also helps is that I manipulate the physical world - not bits on a computer. When I'm done I can see what I've built and on top of all that I get genuine gratitude for it. Lots of it actually - people are awesome.

The concept of 9-5, 5 days a week is exclusively from Unions and organized labour.

As are the ideas of workers rights, any kind of safety regulation, minimum wages, paid days off(holidays and vacation).

These ideas are going away because we forgot that Unions are critical to the idea of a middle class.

Capitalism

Yeah, but the trade off was that you were bound to the land and social hierarchy was much more rigidly enforced. Your pay was mostly in food and accommodations unless you were in a trade, nobility, or the clergy.

Why do people work more? Because in an industrial setting, the methods of compensation and employer responsibilities are vastly different. Employers are incentivized to treat labor as any other good and will try to lower that cost where possible. In contrast, if you're a form of bondage, your employer is more likely to treat you like capital.

Farms had a lot more work than just 9-5. Labor unions fought very hard, and many paid with their lives, to get work hours restricted to 9-5.

Man, I get where you're coming from, it all seems endless and stupid.

I was just thinking about this the other day in fact, but then imagined what life was like as a hunter gatherer. The search never stops for food, there is rarely an abundance, and nothing to keep that abundance from rotting away when you have it.

Every creation we've ever made is to simplify our lives and/or to protect them. Building those things increase abundance and leisure time for awhile, but then the birth rate goes up and we need to build more. Building better communication (to simplify our lives) meant that more people from farther away need stuff, so we need to increase production, so more workers are required. It's a feedback loop.

Some world events pause or reverse this loop for awhile, but it never stops. If you want these things that help around the house so you don't have to do them, that costs money, so you work.

I've seen stories of people who just move out to the woods for decades, but though they are 'independent' from the man, they're still struggling day to day and often end up stealing stuff that others bought so they can get by, or relying on common taxpayer services when things go awry.

I think it's simply a part of the universe. I learned once that life isn't the opposite of entropy, it's a small opposing force that itself decays. Something something rage against the dying of the light. Anyway, /rantoff

We "live to work" because our corporate overlords demand that we be productive for production's sake.

Regarding work before industrialization, it's more complicated than that. Slavery was abolished in the 19th century, so a lot of people, especially enslaved Africans, were literally worked to the death and received severe physical punishment if they didn't work properly. For free people, they didn't have to do the amount of work we do in order to afford food safety, though "worker rights" didn't exist for them, either. Abusive boss? Shut up and fuck off. Stolen pay? Too bad.

One of the biggest differences, however, is that people tended to socialize a lot more, and having friends to watch your back when things get hard is one of the best survival mechanisms. Out of food? Good thing my neighbor is willing to spare some of his while I fix some boards on his home. Maybe he's not asking for anything in return this time because he feels like this is paying back for a favor I did 3 months ago.

Interesting fact: the first indigenous tribes that the Spanish enslaved once they started colonizing Central America were completely unprepared to the European work brutality forced upon them and would often kill themselves if being captured for slave labor was inevitable. Before that, they had never needed to work so hard to sustain themselves.

Companies need to make line go up. You could increase productivity by using more tech (computers, tools, etc), but you can also do it by working longer. So the people in charge said "why not both?!" And here we are.

I feel like some of it also is "work until you're done" still. Hourly jobs pay per hour. But salary jobs typically pay you for work accomplishments, not time. Unfortunately I feel like a lot of tech improvements and processes have oversold their productivity improvements... example: AI will make you go code 10x as fast! So managers hear that (typically upper management, not middle/lower management who actually see it) and thus expect people to instantly do 10x the work. So you now have to bust your ass off working longer hours to meet that expectation. Good middle management will push back and reset expectations, but often the damage is done when they can half their work force with the assumption that they're going to be so much more productive now that this new magical tool is in place.

Subsistence farming is a lot of work. Apart from that, the wealthy have always acquired their wealth by theft, usually from the less wealthy. So we've always been living to work, because the ruling class needs us to steal from.