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.
There do exist jobs that require full time sacrifice of oneself to the job, but those are raising children or livestock. Working too hard damages your ability to work in future, reducing net work ability. Don’t. Do not
You’re making some thinking errors here:
–
‘jobs that require full time sacrifice’can be separated into smaller work loads with shared responsibilities
– while it is true that working too hard
damages your ability to work in future, it is far more important to note that
working too harddamages your ability to have a life that is worth living, now and in the future. We don’t live to work. Our quality of life is far more important.
– telling workers ‘Do not’ give their all to the job isn’t worth much, because the reality is that workers have no control over how much they work. ‘Know that this is exploitation even if you work in a creative field’ and ‘unite with other workers to collectively resist this’ would be better advice by far.
Telling employers that they are damaging future assets is an effective way to reduce their damaging behaviour. Change their thinking and they will change their behaviour. Examples of jobs that require full time sacrifice and cannot be further subdivided reasonably includes running a family farm in a community of similar farms. You will potentially be called on by or calling on a neighbour at three in the morning because your cattle are having calving troubles or something is on fire. Once hay season starts, you don’t stop working each day until you have no light, and you pray to any gods that are in the neighbourhood that the rain doesn’t come in. In winter you have to check the animals, clean the pens and yard, and feed the animals. And gardening is a perpetual war against weeds and vermin. Could you hire help? Sure! Then all of you work that hard anyway.
Telling employers that they are damaging future assets is a useful thing to do if you are talking only to an employer and want to change nothing about his worldview except for the immediate effect of shorter working hours for employees.
In every other context, you are reinforcing the incredibly damaging idea that workers are ‘assets’ defined by their productivity instead of human beings forced to sell most of their lives, physical and mental health to survive under capitalism and employers are making money of our stolen lives.
The idea that a family farm is a life of full time sacrifice is true only in the context of capitalism, where farmers are extremely underpaid for their product and are forced to work themselves to their limits to get by. The family that works themselves close to collapse every harvest is a family that has been forced by capitalism to work far beyond their capacity.
Popular images of the past tell us that we used to work much harder but this is a lie. Before the pressures of capitalism, farmers had an abundance of leisure. Medieval farm work was interrupted by meals, naps and rest breaks even at the height of harvest seasons and holidays were plentiful. The medieval worker worked less than 8 hours a day and had a lot of resting days and holidays, having far less working days in total than workers today. http://queeranarchism.tumblr.com/post/171513139023/one-of-capitalisms-most-durable-myths-is-that-it
If we got rid of capitalism, no one would have to sacrifice their life to a job. We need to call this what it is: exploitation, the theft of our very lives for profit.
QueerAnarchism 