>I saw a fascinating tweet by BloomTech CEO Austen Allred the other day that stirred up a lot of thoughts here.

>“Of the Silicon Valley founders I know who went on some of the psychedelic self-discovery trips, almost 100% quit their jobs as CEO within a year,” Allred said, adding, “Could be random anecdotes, but be careful with that stuff.”

>Allred tweeted this in response to writer Ashlee Vance sharing that he’d been told by a venture capitalist, “We’ve lost several really good founders to ayahuasca. They came back and just didn’t care about much anymore.”

>There’s some very useful information in those words. They reveal a lot about the insane mess our species finds itself in in today’s world, and provide insight into how we might find our way out.

Two Cloudflare-free tor-reachable articles:

① Australia gives millions of workers 'right to disconnect' ② Australia gives workers right to ignore bosses’ after-hours calls, emails

Those links are also popup-free (at least in my config). But note that ② is a little more junked up and has some video (but my image and autoplay blocking config seems to work).

The wording of the new law sounds flimsy.. leaves it to employers to define whether an interruption is “reasonable”. But nonetheless it’s a step in the right direction.

Youtube link

Alternative Youtube Link

>kill the rhetoric that americans are so lazy that they won't take farm jobs. americans take labor intensive jobs all the time. the reason no americans will take farm jobs is because agricultural work is exempt from the vast majority of labor laws and labor protections, including the use of child labor. so only immigrants - people who have little to no protection from the law or other options for work - take most of these jobs. we have created a permanent underclass of labor and then say that americans are just lazy for not volunteering to be part of the underclass.

And what do you do on your commutes?

Alternative Youtube Link

https://bsky.app/profile/brenthor.bsky.social/post/3krzc7fs77k2i

> Best job i ever had was maintenance guy at a nursing home. Loved it. Rewarding. Fulfilling. Paid only $10.75/hr so i left it and 'developed my career' and now im 'successful' but at least once a week i have dreams where im back in the home hanging pictures, flirtin with the ol gals, being useful. > > So when people ask 'who fixes toilets under communism?' my answer is a resounding 'me. I will fix the toilets.'

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2488210

> I saw this thread in my Reddit feed: public hygiene in a communist society . I thought about replying there, but I think I'd rather post it here. > > --- > > I think, if we are to consider ourselves Marxists, we should first take a look at not only the material history of sanitation workers, but look at how current societies handle the task of public hygiene. > > Some related information about the USSR: > > * How the USSR created the world's best sanitary-epidemiological service > * These ‘sweepers’ and ‘sprinklers’ kept Soviet streets clean (PHOTOS) > > Public hygiene, in my opinion, includes things like Public Health. From the first link, we can get a sense of how the USSR tackled the task of ensuring the health of its citizens. It was clear as well that there were people involved in the task of keeping the streets clean, and they were using mechanized solutions for that task. > > Japan is a notoriously clean country. When I visited several years ago, it was impossible to imagine how they kept it so clean, but it's not magic. > > * What Japan can teach us about cleanliness > > There are no public trashcans in Tokyo and mostly throughout Japan as well. This is a result of the Tokyo bombings in the mid-90s, which resulted in a ban on public trash bins. This obviously forces you to have to carry your trash with you to the next available trash bin, which you likely will find at your destination, be it work or a store. > > But more interestingly, Japan attempts to instill in its young people a sense of cleanliness. Maybe this isn't a universal truth among all schools in Japan, but the essence of this thinking is sound. Having students clean their school, as part of the day-to-day ritual of learning, seems to instill in them a cleanliness mindset. > > But let's look elsewhere \[treehugger.com\] > > * The sidewalks in Norway's relaxed capital city are known for being quite clean. Visitors might be puzzled, then, by the complete absence of trash cans around parts of the city. Mystery solved: Many Oslo neighborhoods are connected to the city's automatic trash disposal system, which uses pumps and pipes to move trash underground to incinerators where it is burned and used to create energy and heat for the city. With a city center that is almost completely free of fossil fuel cars and has the highest number of electric cars per person in the world, Oslo residents embrace the clean city lifestyle. The city has replaced hundreds of parking spaces with bicycle lanes and pedestrian areas. > > * Singapore's impeccably clean streets reflect some of the strictest littering laws and best public services in the world. Littering is a finable offense in Singapore. Steep taxes for owning a car and a useful public transportation system mean that the air is quite clean in this Southeast Asian city-state as well. Clean & Green Singapore is the city’s program to reduce trash and encourage residents to adopt a hygienic lifestyle. In an effort to become a zero-waste city, Singapore has created educational resources to teach residents how to recycle properly, use fewer disposables, and waste less food. > * Already quite clean by world standards, Denmark’s capital city has taken steps to decrease littering and create trash and recycling schemes that make it easier to sort individual items. Copenhagen residents recycle electronic, garden, and bio waste in addition to the standard paper, plastic, metal, glass, and cardboard items. Copenhagen also stands out because of its air quality. It has reduced emissions by 42 percent since 2005 and is on track to be carbon-neutral by 2025. The city also has a number of impressive green traits, including a long-term plan to make itself the world's most bike-friendly city. > * Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, frequently ranks among the world’s most livable cities for its cleanliness and quality of life. The city’s layout includes a tremendous amount of parkland and wide avenues lined with greenery. British surveyor and colonist William Light designed Adelaide in 1837 with the goal of creating a city that was compact and user-friendly, but also had an abundance of green spaces. City residents participate in the annual Clean-Up Australia Day event by removing debris from the 1,700 acres of parkland that surround the central business district. > * A clean and sustainable city is part of the culture in New Mexico’s capital, where the annual Recycle Santa Fe Art Festival is dedicated to art made with at least 75 percent recycled materials. Keep Santa Fe Beautiful, a volunteer program, aims to prevent litter and boost awareness through educational programs. The city also holds volunteer trash pickup days, and many of the buildings in the main tourist areas, including the famous Santa Fe Plaza, are kept pristine as part of the aggressive historic preservation efforts that have helped this city retain its timeless appearance. The state of New Mexico, including the city of Santa Fe, has some of the nation’s strictest emissions laws. > * While some cities' organizations sponsor once-yearly cleanup days, the Waikiki Improvement Association holds quarterly cleanups of its famous beach. Honolulu has also enacted strict litter laws. Severe penalties are imposed on those who violate these laws, including picking up litter as part of community service requirements. > > So what do we see here? > > * State run events that encourage citizens to clean up their city. > * Technological solutions to centralize and automate trash collection from pedestrians. > * Cultural solutions that instill a cleanliness mindset in students that carries with them as adults. > > But what causes a city or town to be uncleanly? Well, San Francisco has a poop problem, and wouldn't you know it, it also has a huge houseless problem. One of the ways that you tackle this Public Sanitation issue, is to ensure the source of the problems are solved, too. Remember, Marxism is a system of dialectics, which basically states that all things impact and shape all other things. Or more simply, nothing happens in a vacuum. If you're thinking, "Well, who is going to clean up the poop?" You're not thinking like a Marxist. You have to ask "Why is there so much poop?" which brings you to the houseless problem, which should then have you asking "So how do we solve this houseless problem?" > > Tackling houselessness and taking a housing first approach, or doing something extreme like the USSR's communal flats, would obviously go a long way to easing the issue of public sanitation. Obviously, tackling the houseless issue will be shaped by the material conditions of the area in question. If there was some kind of, socialist revolution in America tomorrow, I see no reason why these massive, mostly vacant, office complexes in nearly every city couldn't be converted into housing-first epicenters. > > Houselessness is only one of the things that can cause a Public Sanitation issue, there could be countless reasons why a given town or city has a Sanitation issue. You have to investigate these issues, and understand the conditions that create them, and change those conditions. > > Another question we need to be probing too, however, is where do we even get this concept of "Janitorial" work? Is this just a social construction developed over time that we need to try and understand dialectically? I think it might be. > > Let's see what this has to say: The History of Domestic Workers and Janitors. > > >Prior to the Industrial Revolution, a lot of people lived on farms, where everyone in the household did the work. The Industrial Revolution drove people to move to big cities and get jobs outside the home. In these gendered times, the man was the breadwinner and the wife cared for the home and children. Kids weren’t little workers like they were on the farm.  > > Consider the theory of primitive accumulation in this context as well. As Feudalism succumbed to Capitalism, and land became privatized, peasants no longer had access to the land for their own subsistence, a work typically done by the women, as the men were converted in to wage laborers, and the family now required wages for food > > >But there was too much work for the women at home to do on their own. Between childcare, cleaning and cooking, it was too much. All of these newly domesticated wives wanted help.  > > >But bringing another adult into your home to help is complicated. They’re in your personal space–even your sexual space. They’re in your bedroom. The thinking was, we don’t want to bring in someone who’s our equal, someone from our own community. We’ll bring in someone who, by status, is below us. It could be an enslaved woman. On the East Coast, it was often a poor Irish immigrant working on a labor contract. On the West Coast, it was often an indigenous child, kidnapped from their own family and forced into domestic bondage.  > > Here we can see, at least in the American context, how the requirement for free labor, not only of the women in the reproduction of the worker, also required it for the women, due in part to their alienation and isolation from the commons, the need for more unpaid labor in the form of servants or slaves > > >The reasoning was, When this servant is in our home, they don’t really count because they’re our social inferior. That’s why from the start, domestic work depended on social hierarchy, and the invisibility of the help. > > This requirement of invisibility ultimately engenders disdain for this kind of domestic work. That disdain is developed and transformed over time into a classist point of view of domestic labor and janitorial labor. > > This article goes on, and outlines how "the help" eventually was transformed into domestic cleaning and janitorial work we know today. You can see the social remnants of this development in the classist view of janitorial work that many people have. It also outlines how, through policy in the United States, domestic workers were kept behind the typical gains of the average worker. > > >For context, the Roosevelt Administration passed the New Deal in the 1930s. This reform gave workers the right to form unions and work shorter days. But the New Deal exempted domestic and agricultural workers. So those laws made a ton of jobs for white people work better. But because domestic work didn’t get fixed, it was the most marginalized people who were forced to stay domestic workers.  > > >Here’s another example: In 1950s Detroit, the minimum wage and 40-hour workweek were already in effect. But many black workers didn’t get these rights, unless they were in an autoplant with a union. Many black people in Detroit had jobs that were invisible: housecleaner, car wash attendant, laundress, dishwasher in a restaurant. Yes, you earned minimum wage, but you worked 70 hours a week. > > This eventually leads us to where we are today: > > >Being a domestic worker in 2021 is much better than being one in 1870. People have more leverage now. What’s unfortunately stayed the same is that domestic and janitorial work is still largely invisible and low wage. And it’s still a profession that’s performed largely by poor women, people of color, and immigrants. In recent times, we haven’t seen another round of much-needed reforms.  > > So this is where the heart of the question comes from. Your friend is effectively asking: "Who will be the invisible help who cleans up after me in a Socialist arrangement of the economy" and also saying, "No one wants to be a Janitor because, look at how we treat them. God help me if that becomes me." > > This is why the question of "Who does the dishes after the revolution?" is such a farce. It assumes that we will still have the class structures we have today, and that we would still have these backwards views on this type of work. It also exposes the individual, showing you what they really believe, which is that there should be an underclass who keeps everything clean for the upper class. > > What we've seen in our current context above is that we can solve many of these Public Sanitation issues in many ways that don't involve an underclass. > > * Japan has students keep their school and classroom clean, and instills in their students a cleanliness mindset. > * We can take Japan's model for students and apply it to the workplace. Workers spending a portion of their day ensuring the workspace is clean. We know this is already done in places like Grocery Stores, but it should be extended to all workspaces. > * Norway uses a complex system to collect and incinerate trash placed into public bins, generating heat to be reused by citizens and automating the process of trash collection and disposal. > * The USSR created a public sanitation organ of the state for tackling infectious diseases. > * Solving the houseless crisis will lead to fewer people living without shelter, and consequently not leaving their trash in public or having to defecate outside. > * Cities and States can organize citizen lead cleaning efforts regularly to not only clean the space we all live in, but also build community around keeping our space clean. > > What we've seen in our historical context below is that our views on domestic and janitorial work are rooted in patriarchal and racist world views, world views that developed from the transformation of the peasant to the wage laborer, the subjugation of women under the demands of capitalism, and capitalism's exploitation of free labor, in the form of slaves and the domestic work of women. There is a dialectical connection between our views on Janitorial Labor and Domestic Labor, Patriarchy, and White Supremacy. > > So to answer the question of "Who will do the dishes after the revolution?" The answer should be "All of us."

Very much inspired by the recent post about what anti work actually means. If you were free from the “work or starve” paradigm, what would you do with your time? No wrong answers.

Personally, I would like to spend more time outside cultivating food and fiber. (Fiber here meaning growing flax for linen, raising angora rabbits or even goats or sheep for their fiber, etc. I am big into textiles)

This is a goal I pursue even now, because my current job is high paying and 4 days a week and I want to use that relative privilege to gain skills that help my communities. Speaking of, I’m also a big fan of community organising, which is another thing I’d want to keep doing post-work.

But like I said, no wrong answers! You don’t have to have a plan for how you’d serve your community. Some of us wouldn’t. And most of us don’t have the time to even think of what we could do for our communities. For that last case, I hope this discussion can be inspiring!

Alt text:

Boss made a dollar I made a dime that was a poem from a simpler time

Now the boss makes a thousand and gives us a cent while hes got employees who cant pay rent

So when boss makes a million nd the workers make jack thats when we strike and take our lives back

<sarcasm>Yes, it's true: before work was invented everyone lived in their own filth and starved all the time because work hadn't been invented yet. </sarcasm>

Beyond jokes, my intention here is to clarify what is meant by antiwork. Antiwork does not mean that a world that has abolished work would see people live in filth and starve. In a world that has abolished work, people will still farm, clean, teach, provide medicine, take out fires, et cetera. Antiwork means the revolutionary abolition of the world of work and all that entails: a waged-labor, a division of labor between waged work and house work, alienation, bullshit jobs, a division between leisure and waged work, compulsion to work or starve, et cetera. Some people call this degrowth, others communism, still others anarchy.

So:

What is work?

Work is a lot of things. For starters, it developed historically from feudal times and had since evolved in its current form in the capitalist mode of production. Within the context of the capitalist mode of production work is waged-labor or reproductive (or house) work and is defined by divisions and alienations. These include a division of labor between waged work and house work, alienation, a division between leisure and waged work, and a compulsion to work or starve. That last one is important. Working people today are free to not work, or starve. This is the freedom that work grants us.

Will people starve and live in filth?

No. Antiwork does not mean that a world that has abolished work would see people live in filth and starve. In a world that has abolished work, people will still farm, clean, teach, provide medicine, take out fires, et cetera.

Will people be bored without work?

I think it's more accurate to say people will be bored by work. A world that has abolished work will still see people that keep themselves busy. Historically speaking, during the Age of Enlightenment, it was the leisure class that didn't do work that was able to make all sorts of exciting and revolutionary ideas about science and art. They won the right to not work because they were privileged due to their wealth. If everyone was able to free themselves from the drudgery of work, what wonders could they achieve?

I expect this post to be a sort of living document. Please feel free to ask questions and I'll try to answer it in the post. ___

From CrimethInc., allegedly.

Caption: Hand these out right before a vote to unionize

Description: A black baseball cap with a white star and white lettering beneath. There is a line of Chinese, followed by the translation "Whole day I'm fucking busy only get few money".

> So that this potentiality becomes realized, there needs to be a surplus and this surplus would need to be more than a simple reserve (of food, notably): a useful surplus is necessary to liberate a member of society from the obligation of producing for themselves, thus allowing this member to produce for other members. Work is a form of human activity taken when work creates a surplus which escapes it. Work is a relation between necessary work and surplus labor : there is a separation between the expenditure of energy necessary to maintain the worker, and the expenditure of energy beyond this maintenance, which creates a surplus. Workers only exist for as long as a non-worker is making them labor for their benefit. Work, an activity whose product recurs to others, implies (and maintains) the division of groups within a society with opposed interests. Society is divided among workers and non-workers, where non-workers are reaping the production of workers. The worker may maintain some control of their means of production and organize them themselves, but the result of his labor does not belong to them. Work is a class relation.

Gilles Dauvé – Getting Rid Of Work

>Also I’m gonna make a thread of every lift the bucket meme I could find: > >“I won’t learn anything during the three month probationary period,” referring to the first three months of training at a factory job. Implication is you get hired, slack off for three months, then quit. > >“Sooner or later, the workers on the assembly line at an evil factory will all become bucket lifters,” implying that eventually everyone will quit their jobs rather than continue working. > >A proletarian poem: > >“The soul chasing and life stealing assembly line, \ >The dark and ghostly shop floor, \ >The difference between life and death lies between two shifts \ >Run off with your bucket tomorrow.” > >“I GIVE UP, I’m dying on the assembly line!” > >a list of complaints: > >“Rocket speed assembly lines, have to wear space suits [ie protective gear for semiconductors], shitty management, pig slop for food, whole days standing upright — I’m taking my bucket and running back to Sanhe [labor market]!” > >A glossary of migrant worker slang > >“Another fucking evil factory! Run away!” > >黑厂, an evil or dark factory, a job that is consistently not worth the trouble > >A huge list of all the things wrong with the factory: 14 hour workday, bad food, bed bugs, no air conditioning, confiscate your cell phone, etc… > >Factory boss says to dying Sanhe temp worker: “Dashen, what’s wrong with you! We only have 10k units left to finish!” > >Looking for work after the new year? Here are the top five WORST factories in guangdong! “Everyday they have more people picking up the bucket and running away.” > >if you'd like to read a post on this topic from a few years ago > >Scaling the Firewall, 1: #LiftTheBucket

> A workerist is any person who advocates for ideologies, systems and lifestyles that revolve around work. This includes every liberal, rightist, democratic socialist, social democrat, centrist, communist and fascist in the world. These are all staunchly workerist, industrial ideologies that strive to sell us the idea that humans and other animals exist to work on the assembly line, to extract resources and manufacture goods for the market, to be loyal servants to the revered productive forces. They all see the world through the same productivity-oriented, industrial lens, only with the tint slightly adjusted.

[…]

> The entire labor movement — the unions, the socialist parties, the academics and Twitter theorists, are all wholly dedicated to building the load-bearing walls of their power-base: the ideology of work. Without workers and workplaces, there is no endlessly rotating left versus right race and everything both sides of the aisle depend on to satisfy their power and wealth machinations crumbles into rubble. Leftist organizers who try to redefine anti-work to mean “work-but-with-bigger-unions” are opportunistic weasels. > > Likewise, anti-work is not a program to build stronger welfare states with universal basic incomes that subsidize the work-industrial complex and thus calm the growing urge to revolt; prolonging The Economy’s pillaging of our ecosystems and making us depend on the managers of productivity even more than we do now. > > Being anti-work is desiring to bulldoze the offices, warehouses, farms, construction sites, restaurants and supermarkets that hold us all captive, push it all into a giant pile of glittering rubble, light a brilliant bonfire and sing and dance and fuck all night as the sweet fumes of a million copiers and filing cabinets fill the air. > > Anti-work is the wholesale rejection of an obscenely traumatic and perverse way of life that we’ve been collectively conditioned into accepting as normal almost from birth, when we were pulled from our mother’s tit and thrown into a preschool so she could get back to the office

[…]

>Anti-work is the pursuit of happiness in your own terms. A life you actually desire, choices you make as an individual, unhindered by the suffocating demands of mass society. > >Anti-work is the refusal to accept the authority of bosses and economists, even if you have to make do with simpler meals and uglier furniture than the working stiff next door. It’s seeing the macabre construct of a work-based existence for what it really is and reaching out to reclaim your uniqueness before your brief existence on this planet ends. It’s unleashing your long-buried feral fighting spirit and finding out who you really are under the decades of rigid indoctrination by tie-wearing yesmen. > >Anti-work is the urge to smash every temple of The Great and Mighty Economy (hallowed be his name) and kill all his clergy before our bodies and minds start to fail and it’s our turn to be sacrificed to him.

Kill The God of Work & All His Clergy