The exploitation part of Capitalism isn’t just that your boss profits by taking most of the results of your labour (you know, the ‘having to bake a loaf of bread in order to be able to afford a slice of bread’ thing) but also because your boss carries no responsibility for depleting your resources (energy, health, joy, etc).
Your boss can assign you a job that drains you physically and emotionally and how and whether you recover is not his concern. If you need to use your weekend to work a second job to pay the rent, that’s not his concern. If the weekend isn’t actually long enough to overcome the intense stress of your job, that’s not his concern. Even the most basic physical safety rules had to be fought for tooth and nail.
Your boss doesn’t just exploit you by taking what you make and taking time from your life, but also by exhausting and damaging your body and mind and taking no responsibility for it’s recovery.
This last thing is something we often overlook and as a result we reproduce it in our own community and activism. Think about it: how often have you done physically and emotionally draining activist work and not talked at all about the recovery after that action or taken responsibility as a group for the recovery of the bodies and minds that you use?
reminder that the 8 hour day is no longer necessary due to advances in production (most people get a day’s worth of work done in four hours anyway) and a lengthy work day is designed to prevent poor and working people from having the means to fight back, organize, and improve their working and living conditions.
The 8 hour day has never been necessary. It was what unions could achieve at the time and as a huge step forward it was hard won but ‘necessary’ had nothing to do with it.
thinking this also applies nowadays to white collar corporate frontliners working unofficial 60 and 70 hour weeks exempt, who might potentially decide to utilize their strategic and executive skills to push back if they weren’t fed lies about passion and kept in a routinely exhausted and depleted state.
Absolutely. White collar workers, especially in creative jobs, are told a flattering individualist narrative about how lucky they are to be able to ‘do what they love’ no matter how draining it is.
Working 70 hours a week coding video games and have no energy left to do anything? But you’re doing what you love! Organising your whole life around working for that NGO and still can’t make rent? But you’re doing what you love! Accept that unpaid overtime, skip lunch to meet that deadline, cancel dinner plans, abandon all quality of life, you’re the lucky few who do what they love! And nothing else matters.
This is of course bullshit. The ‘do what you love’ workers are not lucky, they’re just exploited through a different narrative.
As someone who works for a nonprofit, this is 10000000% true and accurate and no matter how “radical” your nonprofit is, none of them actually want to talk about labor. Ever.
TRUUUUUUUUUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
Non-profits are some of the worst in the “do what you love sacrifice your whole life and yhour mental health to us for shit pay and still answer to a boss like every other worker” game.
QueerAnarchism 