What? A left wing movement that uses the wrong name to make people understand what they truly mean? Really? Nah, that would never happen!
Adversaries to a movement will split hairs and redefine a movement anyways.
That’s all we are seeing here. Look at now they tried to frame Black Lived Matters, something quite clean cut.
No. We suck at naming things. And communication in general.
“Black Lives Matter Too” would have been more clear.
“Replace the Police” would have been better also.Even mainstream Democrats suck at it. They should be shouting every day, how they’re taking on big corp’s, going after antitrust abuses and unpaid taxes; While refusing to audit anyone making less than $250,000. But instead they just keep saying some variation of “The economy’s great, stupid.”
Leftists can name things appropriately. You just proved that. It’s the “moderate” “liberals” that run the DNC that have the issue. That’s just because they are desperately trying to to convince the right that “there won’t be any significant changes,” while still pandering to the center. They don’t care about the left except to make us shut up and sit down.
If people are trying to make you shut up and sit down then you’re probably the problem.
If that’s the case I’m proud to be a “problem,” and “inconvenience.”
Your time is up weirdo commie.
They would have willfully misinterpreted both of those alternatives and convinced you they were poorly named anyways.
They may have willfully misrepresented, but couldn’t really have an excuse to mistakenly misinterpret them. That was our bad.
Is your argument that a genuine, good faith interpretation of “Black Lives Matter” is “Only Black Lives Matter”?
This isn’t how English works. If I say “I like your mom” to an SO, they wouldn’t interpret it as I don’t like them and instead like their mom. I don’t have to say “I like your mom too”.
Anyone coming back with “all lives matter” proves the ease of confusion over the slogan.
My own immediate response to it was “Yah, of course they do. All lives matter. Why single out Black lives? The police shouldn’t be killing anyone.”
I’m not going to try mind read anyone else.
- 60 seems optimistic
- Plenty of “antiwork supporters” do believe option 1
- Your stance is valid
They may think they believe it, but the lockdowns of 2020 showed otherwise. Unless you’re one of the “lucky” nonneurotypical people with a disorder that makes it possible to just lay around and do nothing, people go stir crazy. Feeling productive may as well be on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. That’s one of the reasons the great resignation happened. Way too many of us are working bullshit jobs, and we got to face that reality head on, and didn’t like it one bit.
Once I saw a guy arguing for pure capitalism because otherwise the state would have to force people to work with threats of incarceration or whatever.
It’s like some sort of trolley problem delusion. It is fine shoving desperate people into whatever jobs they can get, but only if the Invisible Hand does it. It’s fine if the threat is homelessness and starvation, but only if the Invisible Hand does it.
I take issue with all the comments suggesting that the movement should be rebranding into “work reform”, because reforming is absolutely not the point. Speaking as someone who subscribes to the anti-work movement, my problem is not that much with current laboral laws and, in fact, I’d go as far as saying that all jobs I have had so far have been reasonably respectful with me except for maybe one.
My problem with that is that we consider normal that, in order to deserve leading a meaningful life, we must be working for someone richer or for the economy. Our life must be dedicated to constantly providing products and services so that we deserve to enjoy what little is left of it. In more concrete terms, I don’t like that we must get into wage labor in order to have access to fundamental goods such as food, water, housing, amenities or even free time. I believe all human beings living in a society capable of providing these are entitled to them, I also believe that our current society is perfectly capable of that, and that the only reason why the working class only gets conditional access or no access at all to fundamental goods are bullshit “number go up” reasons. I don’t buy for a second that homeless people deserve their status because “they didn’t work hard enough”. Wage labor being such a central axis of our current way of life is what I’m strongly opposed to.
Furthermore, I regard the power balance between employer and worker to be fundamentally broken, and no reform can do away with that. When you sign a contract and accept the terms of a job, are you really accepting them or just avoiding the alternative, the threat of homelessness? For a lot of people who can’t find jobs easily, not signing might mean starving or losing their home. How is that not coercion? Sure, if you don’t accept the terms of your current job, you can just look for another (even though this is not a reasonable posibility for a lot of people), but any job will offer as little pay with as many working hours as possible because, due to the lack of meaningful consent, all employers can get away with that. And we accept it as normal and reasonable.
I also don’t believe that abolishing wage labor will make people spend their whole lives not adding anything to society. If given enough free time, people will get bored of not doing anything and engage in work that they actually enjoy, of their own actual volition. I know I get involved into a lot of things given long enough vacations or subsidized unemployement. Now imagine if we just could get organized to find out what tasks need to be done, and each picked the tasks that they geniunely want to do, without being coerced. Without rich assholes and investors getting involved and often forcing us to work long hours on tasks that won’t add anything to the world, but they make money.
“Reforming” laboral laws is absolutely not enough for this. Sure, I’d appreciate a reduction in my working hours, an increase in my salary, more vacations, etc but even if those goals were met, I’d still be out there protesting for the reasons I’ve just stated. Work, as we understand it today, is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed without it being abolished first.
You may not agree with me, mind you, and have a more moderate position stating that work must not be abolished as it can be meaningfully reformed. But then you are subscribing to a different ideology altogether. Which is legitimate and can be argued for, but it does not match the ideology of the anti-work movement. Sure, under late capitalism, some short term goals may match, but the long term goals are entirely different. My point being, “work reform” would be a terrible rebranding for the movement because it stands for a different ideology entirely.
Is that right? To the average person, “Anti-Work” sounds like you’re straight up against working, and unless you want to explain this to every single person individually, Fox News is going to keep having a field day misrepresenting your movement.
Honestly that mod torpedoing the whole movement with a dumb interview and forcing the rebrand to work reform was probably one of the best things that could’ve happened.
Leftists really suck at marketing. Between that, antifa, and defunding the police, they really don’t seem to know how to put a name to an idea that can’t be misconstrued by an opponent with the maturity of a 5 year old (which, as luck would have it, is most opposition). I’d even argue BLM should be on that list.
Edit to add: global warming.
Black lives matter is the least hyperbolic statement of that movement imaginable. That there was pushback even on that framing speaks more to the vile ess of its opponents than to a failure of marketing.
You might want to put it on your list but it’s the opposite problem to your other examples if anything.
We’re really good at marketing exclusively to other leftists.
Yes, the problem is you create a bubble and look stupid when you talk about anything outside of your bubble.
Yeah, “Work Reform” is much better. There’s this weird trend of massively exaggerating a talking point, as the echo chamber seems incapable of thinking about any kind of optics or moderation
No work reform implies slightly different, which isn’t the point. Any message must make you question the system.
If you’re marketing only to people with critical thinking skills you’ll miss most of the voting population, but you do you.
Yeah, but that interview on Fox News really killed the movement pretty hard lol
Why? An interview with any right wing idiot doesn’t dent their movement
So they lost an argument to Fox and fox are the idiots. Do you realize how stupid you sound?
Behave
It’s hard. I must reply to far left and far right views. Both are the problem.
I mean… probably originally, but that’s not all that it is, nowadays. Some people really do unironically mean the former, in that sub on the social network that shall not be named (though I haven’t checked it for… hrm, almost a year now!:-P).
You mean that sub that saw a huge surge in subscribers, increased bad faith actors, and general chaos ahead of the infamous mod schism that shredded any credibility that might have been hanging on?
As someone who watched it happen in real time, no one will ever be able to convince me that all of that was a coincidence.
Represented by the dogwalker in the famous interview
Lmao it was hilarious. Destroyed all the credibility in one strike
Link to the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCo-OgSC7Ps
I didn’t go into the details, but yeah you got exactly what I meant:-). 💯
Some of them were probably even real.
That was as intentional and obvious as the agent provocateurs that were used to break up and arrest the occupy wall street protests.
They’ve stopped shooting us because MLK Jr became a martyr. Now they just arrest us and make us disappear.
I can’t speak for living like a king but we were able to recently confirmed again the whole lazy proletariat myth is a capitalist fiction. During the COVID-19 lockdown we had furloughed workers with a perfect opportunity to just lounge for months, and they just couldn’t. Healthy adults just can’t couch potato and watch TV for two weeks. When they try, they get cabin fever and start leaning how to
widdlewhittle wood into bear sculptures. The Great Resignation was driven partially by lockdown hobbies that became lucrative,I, personally, can couch-potato out for weeks, but at my worst, I have slept for months, getting up only to eat and excrete. I didn’t sleep always; sometimes I’d lie there awake but my inertia would be so great I couldn’t lift a hand. This is avolition a symptom of mental illness, such as major depression. When doctors noticed that I can make like a log for almost a year, I was diagnosed and qualify for disability.
When all your workers are lethargic or crabby or stealing all the nitrous canisters, maybe your workplace is toxic. Maybe the managers aren’t actually managing but acting like children who need to be handled. Or maybe you’re not paying them enough to get out of precarity, which is a major cause of chronic mental illness like major depression.
leaning how to widdle wood
“Whittle.”
Barring some hobbies both risky and risque.
I do feel like the former or something close to it should be our goal as a society.
Um… you probably meant the latter, as in the second one, right? Eating Doritos while slaves do all the hard work - presuming we aren’t talking about non-sentient robots but actual people - sounds kinda selfish to me:-P.
Edit: to clarify, I’m down with the live like a King 👑 and eat Doritos 🔺 parts, it’s only the pesky slavery 🤕 part that I’m against!
Lol, I did mean the former, but yes, I was imagining automation/etc taking over the role of most jobs.
Oh man, so very many movies would disagree with you there. “I, Robot” and “Terminator” come to mind, and “The Matrix”. But perhaps most important: “Wall-E”, as in those fat fuckers sat down and simply… never stood up again. (yeah, you can tell I am old from my selection:-D)
Don’t get me wrong, Doritos are effing delicious! But also, we need some amount of balance in our lives to help make them worth living. What we gain in comfort there, we lose in autonomy, and that’s not a trade-off I would willingly make, even if I could. I mean, I’m not insane - or Amish - I use technology and I enjoy comfort, but I also value the ability to give something back to society through my work.
What e.g. “made America great” (in the 50-60s) was that people’s work would get them something in return for it - a house, a family, college education for their kids, etc. - as opposed to today where other than rent work only buys the ability to purchase barely some food & weed, and many people have lost all hope of ever owning their own home, or getting healthcare.:-( I get it - that’s beyond fucked up. But what that means is that something was stolen from us (autonomy & freedom), not given (comfort & ease, e.g. look at Google search).
TLDR: When we become reliant upon the machines, that’s when they own us rather than the other way around.
we need some amount of balance in our lives to help make them worth living. What we gain in comfort there, we lose in autonomy,
Is it really inherently a reduction in autonomy to remove compulsory labor from society using automation? Why? IMO the whole, spend your life in a job and get the American Dream in exchange thing, is not really freedom and is not much of a choice, even when the work to reward ratio is favorable. Being able to actually choose how your time is spent beyond picking between various jobs which all require you to live the same general sort of on-rails lifestyle could ideally mean a lot more autonomy than we’ve ever had, and there’s no reason I can see to think the result would have to be a bland culture of Wall-E style consumerist vacationers. Our imagination of leisure is defined by its nature as a brief reprieve from working life. Why should we be limited to that, if we had space to grow past it?
Best I can do is bad AI art and music to take away the hobbies of a lot of people and to stop paying people who do that for a living.
Work as capitalism defines it is alienating. I am very much against unfulfilling drudgery.
