Why do capitalists hate full employment? Because it weakens their power over workers.
Anarchy and modern convenience
A major part of anarchy and socialism is the concept of anti-work. An obsession with work is a colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist construct. As such, the anti-work movement—a focus on working less overall and sharing labor more equally—is an important part of decolonization, feminism, and anti-capitalism. A common criticism of this is that reducing the amount everyone works to something like 20 hours a week instead of 40+ means we would have to give up a lot of conveniences.
Anti-work
An obsession with work is a colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist construct. As such, the anti-work movement is an important part of decolonization, feminism, and anti-capitalism. Work is a tool of oppression By anti-work, I don’t mean that no one ever works. That’s preposterous of course. There are things that need to get done, and people need to do them. But this obsession with hard work as a virtue, as a good and righteous thing to do, the glorification of toil and sweat and labor… that’s a tool the wealthy who don’t work for a living use to oppress those who do.
Will capitalism end capitalism? | Steve Loftus | The Critic Magazine
Imagine waking up one morning to discover your job still exists, but your services are no longer required. The work is being done, just not by you, not by anybody. Somewhere, a machine is doing it…
Distinguishing Labor from Work - Aaron Ross Powell
We should get rid of the former, if we can, but we should absolutely keep the latter.
CMV: The labor theory of value is flawed
72 votes, 407 comments. This might be an obscure topic, however, in some—largely Marxist circles— the approach seems to motivate much of the dialogue…
When Does Worker Ownership Work? ESOPs, Law Firms, Codetermination, and Economic Democracy
Denizen
What are some of the fundamental flaws of capitalism? How might we instantiate a market-based economy that is growth agnostic?
Distinguishing Labor from Work · Aaron Ross Powell
We should get rid of the former, if we can, but we should absolutely keep the latter.
1% for the People
Capitalism is the undisputed powerplant of global prosperity. Since Adam Smith first described the “invisible hand” that allows economies to be efficiently self-organizing and self-renewing, every attempt to supplant it with a competing system has failed spectacularly.
Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal
An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal
US Labor & Imperialism Pt. 1: the War Against Communism w/ Jeff Schuhrke
‘What is it actually about?’ Asymmetric mobilisation and the defeat of wage-earner fund policies in Sweden
‘Wage-earner funds’, an ultimately-defeated idea for union-controlled funds to develop stakes in Swedish companies, dominated Swedish politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They are regularly cited as a prominent attempt to introduce economic democracy. However, factors behind the funds’ defeat are often under-analysed, with the sequencing of events particularly neglected. This article corrects for this. It seeks to explain the defeat of wage-earner funds by tracing decision-making processes in the Social Democratic Party. It argues that the funds were defeated due to asymmetries in mobilisation, which were connected to asymmetries in everyday experiences. While capital owners mobilised strongly against wage-earner funds as an existential threat, most Social Democratic leaders, voters and union members saw the issue as detached from their everyday concerns. This points to the importance that asymmetries in experience and mobilisation can have in policy contests, which provides an advantage to capital in contests over investment control.
The Strongest Criticism of Socialism
The most serious argument against socialism isn't about human nature, it's about economic possibilities. Let's dive into what Mises and Hayek have to say.
Work, Justice, and Collective Capital Institutions: Revisiting Rudolf Meidner and the Case for <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Wage‐Earner</span> Funds
ABSTRACT This article makes the case for a specific variety of what we call Collective Capital Institutions (CCIs), by returning to the idea of Wage‐Earner Funds (WEFs) – a 1970s Swedish policy proposal designed gradually to shift ownership and control over parts of the economy to democratically controlled institutions. We identify two attractive rationales in favour of such a scheme and argue that both can fruitfully be transposed to the current worldwide economic situation. The egalitarian rationale is that WEFs could help in the pursuit of equality by giving a wider set of people a stake in collectively owned companies and a right to their profits. The democratic rationale is that WEFs redistribute not only these profits, but also the power over economic decisions made within companies. We then contrast such schemes for collective capital ownership with the similar but much more privatised proposals set out in, for instance, John Rawls's idea of a ‘property‐owning democracy’. We argue that CCIs ultimately are more likely to contribute to the development of the ‘sense of justice’ within society that is needed for a stable just society. We conclude that CCIs deserve a great deal more exploration in academic and political discussions of egalitarian economic systems.
Capitalism Without Humans
As new technologies (not immigrants) replace human labor, "machine breaking" as a tactic of rebellion is taking on a renewed vitality.
if there's one conclusion that the study of both labor history and imperialism converge on, it is that the richest people in the world are happy to burn money on control, power, impunity. and the "everything is about profit" version of anti-capitalism does not survive serious contact with either
Leonard Pierce
Adding to this thread: it’s a common mistake (I’ve made it myself, many times) to think of the motivations of the capitalist elites as essentially mercantilist: that is, that they are largely still motivated *entirely* by profit and loss, selling product, etc. This has not been true for a while.
