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  • [26]About
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Philosophy

  • [31]Resources: Philosophy of Work
  • [32]Alternatives to Wage Labour
  • [33]The Epistemic Implications of AI Assistants
  • [34]Our Schools Should Teach Communication
  • [35]Voting Regardless of Citizenship
  • [36]Effective Apologies

Programming

  • [37]The Caring Programmer's Manifesto
  • [38]The Hare Programming Language
  • [39]Hare Regex Implementation
  • [40]Peony Game Engine
  • [41]Skeletal Animation
  • [42]clumsy computer
  • [43]Submodule GB01
  • [44]vegvisir
  • [45]pstr
  • [46]Dithering

Languages

  • [47]Japanese Recommendations
  • [48]German Noun Genders

Fun

  • [49]Most Minimal UK Address

Resources on the Philosophy of Work

04 August 2022

Wage labour is when you get paid a salary by a company to do work, thereby
renting out your time. It’s not a good system because it forces employees to be
exploited by manager-owners. This exploitation can be financial, for example if
you get paid less than you produce, but it can also be something more than
that. One often ends up in a situation where one finds one’s work meaningless,
because one cannot connect to, own and direct one’s work in a hierarchical
managerial workplace. Additionally, because wage labour is by far the most
widespread method of organising work, one might feel powerless to attempt to
connect to their work without having someone else own and direct it.

Worse, even when one works 8 hours per day, the remaining hours are often
dedicated to recovering from work and restoring one’s energy so that one may be
productive on the next workday. All of these things come together to form
something called “alienation” — our work is important to us, and we should have
a positive connection to it, but we end up having a deficient and corrupted
connection to it, which is an injustice.

Some might say that this is unavoidable, but this is not true. In fact, the
very idea of this system being unavoidable is a result of a bad way of looking
at things called “reification”, which means taking something that us humans
have made up, such as our economic system, and saying that it is actually real
and inevitably has power over us. This is not the case because it is us who
structured society in this way, and we could have done it any other way.

Indeed, we know that it is possible to be creative without being oppressed.
Most people can contrast alienated wage labour (what some simply sweepingly
call “work”) with playful creation, where someone is compelled by passion and
interest to put a lot of effort into creating something. In fact, we know that,
ironically, we are usually more productive in this passionate state, than when
we are managed and disciplined into doing something we do not care about.

One might object that this view is naïve because it is not possible to simply
do what we’re passionate about — there are many jobs that must be done and that
are simply not fun. But the fact of the matter is that a very large amount of
today’s jobs are entirely pointless and unneccesary. Instead, they only exist
to provide a reason to perpetuate the status quo of wage labour.

Imagine someone doing a job we knew to be completely useless, and receiving a
salary for it every month. How would we respond to the proposal of paying this
person their salary, but allowing them to simply stop doing their work? Many
would react negatively and say that this person would be getting paid for
nothing. But is it not concerning that we would want someone to waste their
life away doing something which is never useful to anyone, just so that we can
feel that they have thereby somehow earned their right to exist?

Gradual change is possible, and a big part of this change is cultural. This
means first realising all the harmful things that gross inequality of income
and power does, then changing our values to say that everyone deserves to
direct their own life and earn a fair living. This does not necessarily mean
that everyone actually will be able to do these things, but the first step is
recognising the current state of affairs as unjustifiable.

Here are some beginner-friendly books and articles on this topic that I have
loved, and are both eloquent and fun to read. I have also included some quotes
that I feel explain these concepts well.

Introductory Essays and Books

[50] “In Praise of Idleness” Bertrand Russell [51] “Bullshit Jobs” David
Graeber [52] “The Tyranny of Merit” Michael J. Sandel [53] “The Abolition of
Work” Bob Black

The absolute best place to start is “In Praise of Idleness”, a short and very
accessible essay by Russell that explains some of the most basic problems with
our conception of work. “Bullshit Jobs” is a classic in which Graeber describes
how many of the jobs we are currently doing are simply not useful to anyone. In
“The Tyranny of Merit”, which I have found life-changing, Sandel describes how
our conceptions of “merit” do not align with reality, and that our blindness to
this affects our lives significantly. Lastly, “The Abolition of Work” is a
classic and emotionally powerful essay by Bob Black in which he very clearly
describes many of the problems with “work”, but this essay can also be too
polemical and antagonising.

More In-Depth Books

[54] “Another Now” Yanis Varoufakis [55] “Talking to my Daughter About the
Economy” Yanis Varoufakis

People often ask me what a system that abolishes wage labour and capitalism
would look like. In “Another Now”, former Greek finance minister Yanis
Varoufakis tells a fictional story that describes what such a parallel world
would look like, and he goes into significant economic detail. Similarly,
“Talking to my Daughter About the Economy” is an easy to read and light-hearted
description of today’s economy.

Philosophical Background

[56] “Alienation” Rahel Jaeggi [57] “Free Time” Theodor W. Adorno

Perhaps you have read the more accessible material above, but would like to get
more into the philosophical details. In “Alienation”, Rahel Jaeggi describes
the history of the concept of alienation, and describes a modern and analytic
way to look at it, which I find very useful. Her description really makes one
wonder about the aspects of alienation that transcend the financial, such as
its impact on our epistemic agency. Adorno’s “Free Time” is an amazingly
insightful look at how work has profound effects on us not only during our time
at the workplace, but also during our so-called “free time”, which the employer
nonetheless deeply affects and controls.

You can also read my somewhat amateurish essay, [58]“Alternatives to Wage
Labour”.

Explanatory quotes

Here are some quotes that I feel explain the ideas I have referenced above
quite well. I do not necessarily directly endorse all of these perspectives,
but rather find it useful to illustrate how philosophers describe these issues.

    We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to
    earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a
    technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of
    today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a
    living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody
    has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to
    Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have
    inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to
    inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to
    school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before
    somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

    — Buckminster Fuller

    The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the
    part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions
    to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be
    the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a
    subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes,
    which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside.
    I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer—deciding, not being decided for,
    self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I
    were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role,
    that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them. (…)
    I wish, above all, to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active
    being, bearing responsibility for my choices and able to explain them by
    references to my own ideas and purposes. I feel free to the degree that I
    believe this to be true, and enslaved to the degree that I am made to
    realize that it is not.

    — Isaiah Berlin

    The fact that the vast majority of the population accepts, and is made to
    accept, this society does not render it less irrational and less
    reprehensible.

    — Herbert Marcuse, “One-Dimensional Man”, p. xliv

    The things of everyday life [must be] lifted out of the realm of the
    self-evident. (…) That which is “natural” must assume the features of the
    extraordinary. Only in this manner can the laws of cause and effect reveal
    themselves.

    — Bertolt Brecht, “Schriften zum Theater” (Berlin and Frankfurt, Suhrkamp,
    1957), p. 7, 9.

The Story of the Mathematician

This is a very short story used as an example by Rahel Jaeggi in “Alienation”
which I find a stunningly good illustration of the problems I refer to.

    A young academic takes up his first position. At the same time he and his
    girlfriend decide to marry. That makes sense “because of the taxes.” A
    short time later his wife becomes pregnant. Since large apartments in the
    city are expensive and hard to find, they decide to move to a suburb. After
    all, life outside the city will be “better for the child.” The man, a
    gifted mathematician, who until then has led a slightly chaotic life,
    oscillating between too much night life and an obsessive immersion in work,
    is now confronted with a completely new situation. All of a sudden, and
    without him having really noticed it, his life is now, as it were, “on
    track.” One thing seems to follow ineluctably from another. And in a
    creeping, almost unnoticeable process his life acquires all the attributes
    of a completely normal suburban existence. Would he, who earlier ate fast
    food most of the time and relied on convenience stores for picking up milk
    and toilet paper as the need arose, ever have thought that he would one day
    drive every Saturday morning to the shopping mall to buy supplies for the
    week and fill the freezer? Could he ever have imagined that he would hurry
    home from work on Friday because the lawn needed to be mowed before the
    barbecue? At first he and his wife hardly notice that their conversations
    are increasingly limited to their child and the organization of household
    chores. Sometimes, however, he is overcome by a feeling of unreality.
    Something is wrong here. While many envy him for the beautiful suburban
    house he lives in, he is not really at home in this situation. The life he
    leads, which, as it seems to him, has so suddenly tightened around him—one
    could almost say “rearranged” him—seems, in a strange way, not to be his
    own life. Everything is as if it could not be any other way; everything
    happens with a certain inevitability. And in spite of this—or perhaps
    precisely because of it—it remains in a crucial respect alien to him. To
    what extent is this life “not really” his own? To what extent is he, in
    this life that he leads, alienated from himself?

    Each individual aspect of his life (…) has not really been decided on.
    Thus, his situation is in fact “out of control” in a certain sense, and (…)
    it is a situation for which no one can genuinely be held responsible. This
    does not merely mean that he has not acted, or has not availed himself of
    his possibilities for acting, but that he has not even understood his
    situation as one in which action is called for or possible; it does not
    merely mean that he has not decided something for himself, or has not led
    his life himself, but that he has been incapable of understanding or
    regarding it as something he can or must lead.

    — Rahel Jaeggi, “Alienation”

[59] XXIIVV webring © 2010 Vlad-Stefan Harbuz. Article text and media is [60]
CC-BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise specified. All other rights reserved.

References:

[1] https://vladh.net/
[2] https://vladh.net/about
[3] https://vladh.net/music
[4] https://vladh.net/photos
[5] https://vladh.net/books
[6] https://vladh.net/index.xml
[7] https://vladh.net/wage-labour-resources
[8] https://vladh.net/alternatives-to-wage-labour
[9] https://vladh.net/the-epistemic-implications-of-ai-assistants
[10] https://vladh.net/our-schools-should-teach-communication
[11] https://vladh.net/voting-regardless-of-citizenship
[12] https://vladh.net/apologies
[13] https://vladh.net/manifesto
[14] https://vladh.net/hare
[15] https://vladh.net/implementing-regular-expressions-in-hare
[16] https://vladh.net/peony
[17] https://vladh.net/game-engine-skeletal-animation
[18] https://vladh.net/clumsycomputer
[19] https://vladh.net/submodule
[20] https://vladh.net/vegvisir
[21] https://vladh.net/pstr
[22] https://vladh.net/dithering
[23] https://vladh.net/japanese-recommendations
[24] https://vladh.net/german-nouns
[25] https://vladh.net/most-minimal-uk-address
[26] https://vladh.net/about
[27] https://vladh.net/music
[28] https://vladh.net/photos
[29] https://vladh.net/books
[30] https://vladh.net/index.xml
[31] https://vladh.net/wage-labour-resources
[32] https://vladh.net/alternatives-to-wage-labour
[33] https://vladh.net/the-epistemic-implications-of-ai-assistants
[34] https://vladh.net/our-schools-should-teach-communication
[35] https://vladh.net/voting-regardless-of-citizenship
[36] https://vladh.net/apologies
[37] https://vladh.net/manifesto
[38] https://vladh.net/hare
[39] https://vladh.net/implementing-regular-expressions-in-hare
[40] https://vladh.net/peony
[41] https://vladh.net/game-engine-skeletal-animation
[42] https://vladh.net/clumsycomputer
[43] https://vladh.net/submodule
[44] https://vladh.net/vegvisir
[45] https://vladh.net/pstr
[46] https://vladh.net/dithering
[47] https://vladh.net/japanese-recommendations
[48] https://vladh.net/german-nouns
[49] https://vladh.net/most-minimal-uk-address
[50] https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
[51] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36531574-bullshit-jobs
[52] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50364458-the-tyranny-of-merit
[53] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work
[54] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49098225-another-now
[55] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36490332-talking-to-my-daughter-about-the-economy
[56] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/19144936
[57] http://xenopraxis.net/readings/adorno_freetime.pdf
[58] https://vladh.net/alternatives-to-wage-labour
[59] https://webring.xxiivv.com/#vladh
[60] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/