So you want no one to work? What do you think will happen to the world if everyone stops working?
Not sure if this is the original intent, but I personally see it as not requiring individuals to work a standard work week to survive. None of this nuance is here so I can't say for sure, but those wanting a minimal life can spend time on skills development, personal endeavours, teaching, volunteering*, occasional gig work, or just vibing with little and being content with getting by.
Those who want more than getting by, which I can only speculate is a lot of people, and those driven to work, can work. The value proposition of work would change drastically, though, as value for types of labour change drastically.
Right now, many of the most well paid jobs are the cushiest. People want them not just because they are the highest paid with best benefits, but because they are low physical labour, flexible, "clean". Meanwhile the jobs people argue nobody would do - customer service, waste management, line work (which very well might be mostly replaced with automation in the next 20 years) - the incentive would need to be way higher because now you aren't working it to live, you're working it to live better.
I know it isn't apples to apples by any stretch, but some of the biggest software used today was made by volunteers working alongside their jobs. A huge part of university teaching is done by contractors with terrible wages and precarious conditions because they just love teaching (and of course other pretty awful reasons for many).
A combination of flipping to worker owned co-operatives to minimize administrative/BS-job waste and give labourers ownership over their labour to keep them invested, alongside a minimum income and regulations to flip wages so that the less desirable the job, the higher the financial incentive, forcing companies to actually cut waste and reduce excess production because labour won't be as ubiquitous, firm regulations to prevent mass wealth accumulation and ensure fair wealth distribution among labourers and allocate funds to industries that meet basic human needs, and embracing automation rather than rejecting it to make up the labour shortage.
All this said - I have no idea if this will work out positively, highly doubtful it could happen at a large scale, recognize there is likely 1000 holes here and new problems to arise, and don't fully believe it's feasible nor that I'm remotely intelligent enough to claim this has any real grounding. Speculative, hopeful, a worthwhile thought experiment to mine for ideas, a place to avoid black-and-white thinking on issues like a 0 hour workweek.
Edit: oh yeah, I asterisked volunteering because many of the volunteer efforts we have now are really extremely valuable for survival and I can't imagine what we see as volunteering now would still be freely provided labour, but I have no ideas what industries would and wouldn't be volunteer driven (I mean, we likely didn't anticipate the biggest and most ubiquitous software projects being entirely volunteer based)
good post. two notes:
Not sure if this is the original intent, but I personally see it as not requiring individuals to work a standard work week to survive.
that is what antiwork — and thus the meaning of this community — is: the critique of work, where work refers to wage labour and performative toil, as this wholly separate sphere of/from life, and its origins as a system of control, and the psychological, physical and environmental harms it brings. it is not against labour conceptually; it is fundamentally anticapitalist.
this community has a way of ragebaiting bad faith, law-and-order liberals browsing All; who don't read the sidebar, who have fully internalised the Protestant work ethic, and who think 'work' refers to both 'all labour' and 'wage labour', and who think dispossession and wage labour are necessary to prevent everyone from getting depression or turning into Fallout raiders.
All this said - I have no idea if this will work out positively, highly doubtful it could happen at a large scale, recognize there is likely 1000 holes here and new problems to arise, and don't fully believe it's feasible nor that I'm remotely intelligent enough to claim this has any real grounding.
political imaginaries don't need to be completely fleshed out ten steps in advance. it's enough just to identify a problem. it's more than enough to start imagining the first steps to solving those problems. you don't need anyone's permission to imagine.
the implementation details are not important at an abstract level. those would reveal themselves as a natural consequence of implementation, and the details would be unique to every social and cultural environment.
everyone would have more time to support each other, pursue their interests, and do other things that really matter.
don't conflate 'work' with 'labour' or 'doing literally anything'.
All the replies remind me of the WKUK anarchy sketch
Lmao, brilliant video!
And yeah, it's exactly what will happen if op gets their way
Life will be amazing. Please go away
I'd be happy with several times that much
You kids and your identity properties.
I work smart, not hard
Edit: This was a lie, I'm an idiot and I work my ass off
Several? Hell id do thousands of times.
First of May today. Good timing!
- Stop exploitation!
- Basic income world wide!
- Abolish bullshit jobs!
- Save the planet from corporate greed!
- Tear down the prison industry!
- Tax billionaires!
- Cooperation instead of competition!
- Stop promoting warfare!
bUt ThE eCoNoMy
That’s what you think you want, but sooner or later you’d be bored out of your mind
Yeah because if people don't work, they sit with their thumb up their ass while looking at the wall.
