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.
The new place for c/[email protected]
This server is no longer working, and we had to move.
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Date Created: June 21, 2023
Library copied from reddit:
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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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 idea presented is that people are shopping regularly, and obtaining most of the goods and services, at small businesses whose owners have listed their homes as collateral, in order to contribute generously to their community.
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.