Want to Start the Revolution? Stop Working

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Want to Start the Revolution? Stop Working

Your Sledgehammer: May 10, 2010; Don`t fall asleep, you gotta write for THUNDERDOME

Bob Black posted:

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

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I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is *forced* *labor*, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist of "Communist," work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.

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Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace -- surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn't have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.

Such is "work." Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the "suspension of consequences." This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; that's why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is).

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Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?

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Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families *they* start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.

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To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes' compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life -- in North America, particularly -- but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the west.) The "survival of the fittest" version -- the Thomas Huxley version -- of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book �Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution.� (Kropotkin was a scientist -- a geographer -- who'd had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled "The Original Affluent Society." They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that "hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were "working" at all. Their "labor," as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schiller's definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full "play" to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: "The animal *works* when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it *plays* when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity."

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It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes, except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldn't make them *less* enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.

I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages.

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Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the "tertiary sector," the service sector, is growing while the "secondary sector" (industry) stagnates and the "primary sector" (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That's why you can't go home just because you finish early. They want your *time*, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn't the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the past fifty years?

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There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised haven't saved a moment's labor. Karl Marx wrote that "it would be possible to write a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class." The enthusiastic technophiles -- Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B. F. Skinner -- have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than sceptical about the promises of the computer mystics. *They* work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, let's give them a hearing.

Full essay here (well worth your time)

Here�s a nonviolent revolution for you:

If even as little as 10 or 15 percent of the workforce in the United States were to decide, effective tomorrow, that they wouldn�t return to work until conditions in this country change significantly, the economic landscape and social contract would change almost literally overnight.

Economic inequality would diminish, if not outright vanish.

The everyday power brokers that we all loathe deep down, even when they are �good people�, and even when we refuse to admit our frustration (let�s be honest here, folks) � bosses, bureaucrats, cops � would quite suddenly change their tune.

Large swaths of environmental destruction would cease.

The voice of the masses would matter.

All sorts of social reforms previously deemed �impossible� due to entrenched monied interests would not only be feasible, they�d be incredibly likely. In short, all sorts of really necessary changes would take place.

I�m only half-joking, folks. There�s only one rational objection (unless you truly enjoy spending 40 hours of your week doing something so someone else can buy a yacht, in which case, gently caress off you lucky son of a bitch), and it�s this: you won�t be able to afford food/rent in literally a matter of days. This objection only makes sense if you are one of very few people choosing to not work. If a significant portion of the American workforce decides to up and not work/strike (seriously only like 10% would be necessary, in my opinion), then you�re safe, because the machinery of the whole American industrial enterprise is going to grind to a halt and then the powers that be will be forced to address things.

No, I�m not seriously advocating that you literally don�t go to work tomorrow. However, I�m truly surprised that no political force in American society is even talking about the possibility of a general strike. A general strike won�t solve some of the very serious, entrenched problems of our society, like racism, sexism, and homophobia, but it�ll go a hell of a long way to solving some of the worst economic abuses we are all subject to. On top of all that, I could see Americans building a pretty serious case for a 20 hour workweek being considered fulltime and subject to the same pay as a 40 hour workweek currently is, and that�d just be rad.

I say all of this without even addressing the much more serious and thought-provoking point that Bob Black is making above; namely, that a large portion of the work done in modern society is entirely useless, and that any way you slice it, work is inherently oppressive drudgery, even if it�d be otherwise engaging were it not forced. If modern society can only function if its citizens are subject to a form of repression and discipline that a non-oppressed person would find utterly unimaginable and disgusting, then can any citizen truly call themselves free? If �freedom� means what I think it means, then the answer is assuredly �no.�

Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Jul 22, 2015

# ? Jul 22, 2015 04:14

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# ? Apr 26, 2024 01:45

Your Weird Uncle: Jan 16, 2006; Boneless Rusto Thrash.

here's a plot twist: i like my job, i dont want to not go to my job

# ? Jul 22, 2015 04:20

Willie Tomg: Feb 2, 2006

Your Sledgehammer posted:

If even as little as 10 or 15 percent of the workforce in the United States were to decide, effective tomorrow, that they wouldn�t return to work until conditions in this country change significantly, the economic landscape and social contract would change almost literally overnight.

If "almost literally overnight" takes longer than two weeks to a month then I'm going to die, though, is the thing, here.

The problem with class demonstrations in america is that it's contingent on the tacit support and encouragement of Americans, and, well,

# ? Jul 22, 2015 04:24

Your Sledgehammer: May 10, 2010; Don`t fall asleep, you gotta write for THUNDERDOME

Your Weird Uncle posted:

here's a plot twist: i like my job, i dont want to not go to my job

You are part of a lucky minority.

Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Jul 22, 2015

# ? Jul 22, 2015 04:26

Hollismason: Jun 30, 2007; Feel free to disregard this post.

It is guaranteed to be lazy, ignorant, and/or uninformed.

Yeah how do you do a mass walk out when most Americans don't have more than 400 dollars in their bank account and no savings? How are the people that walk out exactly suppose to live at all?

I've seen that article bandied about and while incredibly liberal and left leaning myself. This would literally have no affect, not even 10% of the workers in the US walking out would cause that kind of problem.

First you have to break down the Labor Force. You've got a couple of types.

1. Full Time Employees
2. Part-Time
3. Unemployed - Seeking Work
4. Unemployed - Not Seeking Work

So what happens when 10% of the work force walks off? Well everyone who is part time picks up some extra work. The Unemployed Gain Work .

It has to be a greater amount than 10%.

10% is nothing, we had 7% Unemployment earlier probably higher and you know what? Society did not collapse.

It'd have to be a greater than 25% and in very specific sectors. Again , no one gives a poo poo if the guy who works at the Kiosk in the mall selling beaded necklaces walks off his job. However , if the nations Pharmacists collectively striked there probably would be some sort of mass panic.

Hollismason fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Jul 22, 2015

# ? Jul 22, 2015 04:40

Your Sledgehammer: May 10, 2010; Don`t fall asleep, you gotta write for THUNDERDOME

Hollismason posted:

Yeah how do you do a mass walk out when most Americans don't have more than 400 dollars in their bank account and no savings? How are the people that walk out exactly suppose to live at all?

I've seen that article bandied about and while incredibly liberal and left leaning myself. This would literally have no affect, not even 10% of the workers in the US walking out would cause that kind of problem.

First you have to break down the Labor Force. You've got a couple of types.

1. Full Time Employees
2. Part-Time
3. Unemployed - Seeking Work
4. Unemployed - Not Seeking Work

So what happens when 10% of the work force walks off? Well everyone who is part time picks up some extra work. The Unemployed Gain Work .

It has to be a greater amount than 10%.

10% is nothing, we had 7% Unemployment earlier probably higher and you know what? Society did not collapse.

It'd have to be a greater than 25% and in very specific sectors. Again , no one gives a poo poo if the guy who works at the Kiosk in the mall selling beaded necklaces walks off his job. However , if the nations Pharmacists collectively striked there probably would be some sort of mass panic.

I see your point, but the math isn't as simple as you're making it out to be. If 10%-15% of the people currently employed at my workplace simply pulled a no-call, no-show, the place would start losing money in short order, especially if the people were from specific departments that are vital. There aren't enough people to cover. What you're also overlooking is that it isn't just a simple snap of the fingers to replace workers. Even in low-skilled jobs, hiring is a process that takes a week or better. It wouldn't be just "welp, 10% of the workforce in America didn't show up today, guess we'll put those unemployed folks to work." It is much, much more complicated than that, and even a relatively small percentage like 10% or so would be enough to overwhelm the system's ability to cope.

The fact that society didn't collapse at 7% unemployment means absolutely nothing about a general strike. Let me put it another way: if 10% of the workforce at the place you work were to just not show up tomorrow, what would happen?

# ? Jul 22, 2015 04:50

OwlFancier: Aug 22, 2013

Your Sledgehammer posted:

Let me put it another way: if 10% of the workforce at the place you work were to just not show up tomorrow, what would happen?

They'd sack them all and hire on new people.

# ? Jul 22, 2015 04:53

Call Me Charlie: Dec 3, 2005; by Smythe

guys if we all don't buy gas for one day ~*fartz*~

# ? Jul 22, 2015 05:02

Kurt_Cobain: Jul 9, 2001

Your Sledgehammer posted:

stuff

Someone already pointed out the slack in our labor force. Our economic system has put us against each other and what you are suggesting is another person's gain. I'd actually like to take a different approach, to you and me the problems of our system are self evident but to the average person things just aren't global climate change lets shut the system down we're totally hosed. The complete failure of recent protests is amazing when you consider the problems we face. People just don't care, or at least care more about that day's pay check.

# ? Jul 22, 2015 05:17

Motto: Aug 3, 2013

The NEET shall inherit the earth.

# ? Jul 22, 2015 05:24

Hal_2005: Feb 23, 2007

Nice try, but the concept of a national strike only works as long as the picket line holds. Historical strikes, such as Malaysia in 2013, Brazil/Argentina/Mexico in the 80's, Venezuela in 2012-2013, and the random Greek/French/Spanish work stoppages, you get about 80 days. Tops.

Revolutions happen two ways

1. A foreign power buys you an army, and you usually agree to give them free reign on a specific sector of your econmy.

2. A velvet coup where everyone has so much information about the systemic corruption that the Army and Police powers turn a blind eye to the revolutions "peaceful" protests, and subsequent legitimate power struggle. Again, bribes are involved.

Global employment conditions will always trend to the worst common denominator. Always.

# ? Jul 22, 2015 05:49

woke wedding drone: Jun 1, 2003; by exmarx; Fun Shoe

Sounds appealing but who will run the shelter if I leave

# ? Jul 22, 2015 05:52

Rent-A-Cop: Oct 15, 2004; I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!

SedanChair posted:

Sounds appealing but who will run the shelter if I leave

The homeless? Not like they have anything better to do.

# ? Jul 22, 2015 05:54

Vincent Van Goatse: Nov 8, 2006; Enjoy every sandwich.; Smellrose

Would you eat the moon if it was made of barbecue spare ribs, OP?

# ? Jul 22, 2015 06:21

rudatron: May 31, 2011; by Fluffdaddy

If you had the organizational capacity to order a general strike of 10% of the population, be able to maintain that without losing sympathy of the majority of the people outside of the strike, and have the necessary force-of-arms/paramilitary groups to repel coercive state strike-breaking actions, you would effectively already be a very strong vanguard party acting out a violent revolution. It would be a civil war in all but name.

# ? Jul 22, 2015 07:04

JcDent: May 13, 2013; Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!

rudatron posted:

If you had the organizational capacity to order a general strike of 10% of the population, be able to maintain that without losing sympathy of the majority of the people outside of the strike, and have the necessary force-of-arms/paramilitary groups to repel coercive state strike-breaking actions, you would effectively already be a very strong vanguard party acting out a violent revolution. It would be a civil war in all but name.

Seeing the reactions to black lives matter and occupy something protests, at least 50% of the country will hate you for being a lazy communist slob anyways. Such is life in America.

# ? Jul 22, 2015 10:09

Venomous: Nov 7, 2011

it worked for Iceland when 90% of all female workers went on strike for better wages in 1975, but considering they had a population of 220000 it was far easier for that to happen

what happened in Iceland will never happen in America, or pretty much anywhere else, because the population is so large and decentralised that a general strike of even that magnitude would be impossible to coordinate properly

# ? Jul 22, 2015 10:25

awesome-express: Dec 30, 2008

I have my own company and do onsite tech consulting for my clients. I like my job

# ? Jul 22, 2015 10:36

Sic Semper Goon: Mar 1, 2015; Eu tu?; Switchblade Switcharoo

awesome-express posted:

I have my own company and do onsite tech consulting for my clients. I like my job

Please tell me this is accurate:

# ? Jul 22, 2015 11:25

Armani: Jun 22, 2008; Now it's been 17 summers since I've seen my mother

But every night I see her smile inside my dreams

Sic Semper Goon posted:

Please tell me this is accurate:

When you work long enough in an office, these become scarily accurate and no longer whimsical: http://youtu.be/flWuvkNWuS4

# ? Jul 22, 2015 11:55

Sephiroth_IRA: Mar 31, 2010

My wife just quit her job a month ago so we're doing our part.

# ? Jul 22, 2015 13:15

Panzeh: Nov 27, 2006; "..The high ground"

Unless you're ready to shoot up scabs and put up barricades it's not gonna work.

# ? Jul 22, 2015 14:23

Radbot: Aug 12, 2009; Can't post for 3 years!

I'm an overpaid rear end in a top hat who likes my job too! Boom, headshot.

# ? Jul 22, 2015 14:37

StarGeezer: Oct 28, 2007; ...timeless, formless...

Not paying taxes is the non-violent revolution. People stop paying in through paychecks, keep more of their earnings, then have more to live on up to that point. No one's gotta be in the streets to accomplish a tax strike. "In the streets," in a country this size, is now to grow awareness, anyway, not get anything actually done.

Tax strike keeps money away from central coffers, brings things to a halt with scary powers trying to fill jails first, then parasitic powers send suits for a sit down for the usual drama sequence, then concessions, rinse, repeat.

The not working part comes after.

New local economies begin -- food, skill, education co-ops.

Funny thing is that the billionaire class has enough money to completely run this country for themselves and not have fuckall to do with the rest of it. While, across 3, 143 counties there will be at least one rear end in a top hat who'll cuff and kill you because.

e: clarity

StarGeezer fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Jul 22, 2015

# ? Jul 22, 2015 14:50

BENGHAZI 2: Oct 13, 2007; by Cyrano4747

StarGeezer posted:

People stop paying in through paychecks

And how do you suggest this happens precious

# ? Jul 22, 2015 14:58

Radbot: Aug 12, 2009; Can't post for 3 years!

Literally The Worst posted:

And how do you suggest this happens precious

I'm guessing declaring exemption on a W-9, precious

# ? Jul 22, 2015 15:03

District Selectman: Jan 22, 2012; by Lowtax

Work sucks, I know

# ? Jul 22, 2015 15:20

Nuclearmonkee: Jun 10, 2009

Hmm yes all of those people who live paycheck to paycheck and would literally be unable to buy food and become homeless should stop working.

Yeah work is generally exploitative drudgery. However the alternative under the system is worse as intended. People as a whole would have to be substantially worse off before they would be willing to risk starvation homelessness and death in order to "change the system".

# ? Jul 22, 2015 15:26

spacetoaster: Feb 10, 2014

Nuclearmonkee posted:

Hmm yes all of those people who live paycheck to paycheck and would literally be unable to buy food and become homeless should stop working.

Yep.

Also, what happens when the food/fuel/water/medical isn't delivered/available/provided? There's a long chain of people working to get that stuff into your hot little hands. Large cities are not self sustaining and only exist because of a constant influx of goods. You mess that up and I hope you own a farm somewhere far away from a city that you can get to.

# ? Jul 22, 2015 15:33

Cakebaker: Jul 23, 2007; Wanna buy some cake?

Reads like something written by a child. 1985 was a hell of a time I guess.

If you want a general strike you first need a pissed off and widely unionized population that gives a poo poo. That takes... work.
"But how will we get money for food during our strike" is not a novel problem. Social democracy and unions and ordinary non-unicorn strikes are not novel solutions.
35 hour work weeks and five weeks vacation and a year off each time you have a kid and being able to tell your boss off without risk of getting fired may not be perfect but at least it's achievable and already reality in places and not dumbshit primitivism. Getting paid to go to Uni means most all people, not just the affluent, can afford to study/do what semi interests them-ish which, forced as later work may be and whatever this guy says, actually does help a whole lot. Paying taxes and contributing back to the society that's given you all this poo poo while you wait for the robots to swoop in also makes sense.

So basically stop reading this poo poo. quit you are work and go do something for Bernie I guess.

And when he inevitably falls through don't go 'oh well gave it me best'

# ? Jul 22, 2015 21:27

Your Sledgehammer: May 10, 2010; Don`t fall asleep, you gotta write for THUNDERDOME

Cakebaker posted:

Reads like something written by a child. 1985 was a hell of a time I guess.

If what Bob Black wrote sounds like something written by a child, then I'll happily exclude myself from whatever you goons deem to be "serious, responsible adulthood." It sounds completely lifeless and soul-sucking. Joking aside, though, a good chunk of what you wrote is pretty good advice and I appreciate it. I'm ready to start contributing in whatever way I can to solving some of these seemingly intractable problems and I realize that change is a long, hard process that is only won bit by bit. The pie-in-the-sky revolution type stuff is fun to think about, though, isn't it? I also think what Black wrote about "fear of freedom" really resonates, though it's a minor part of the essay. I do think it's possible to extricate yourself from a lot of the mess that modern society has become, it's just difficult and can be incredibly terrifying. We're taught all our lives that "go to school then get a job" is pretty much the only way to live and you'll die or be destitute if you don't, and it can be really hard to undo and disentangle all that indoctrination.

Willie Tomg posted:

If "almost literally overnight" takes longer than two weeks to a month then I'm going to die, though, is the thing, here.

The problem with class demonstrations in america is that it's contingent on the tacit support and encouragement of Americans, and, well,

Kurt_Cobain posted:

Someone already pointed out the slack in our labor force. Our economic system has put us against each other and what you are suggesting is another person's gain. I'd actually like to take a different approach, to you and me the problems of our system are self evident but to the average person things just aren't global climate change lets shut the system down we're totally hosed. The complete failure of recent protests is amazing when you consider the problems we face. People just don't care, or at least care more about that day's pay check.

These are good points. The thing is, I think your average American is really feeling that the system is hosed up, they're either just scared to talk about it or they've bought into the nativist, regressive garbage that the Republican party is peddling. I honestly feel like we're on the tip of a counterculture movement that will be comparable to the late 60s, in that a lot of 20-somethings aren't buying all the American Dream bullshit. This country's main narrative is not at all convincing anymore, and once that fully sinks in, you're going to have people casting about in all sorts of directions for an alternative. I think that Occupy and the Ferguson protests were just warm-ups for something bigger, and I really don't see how we could go on much longer without a significant change. People are getting fed up.

# ? Jul 23, 2015 02:40

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

quote:

My minimum definition of work is *forced* *labor*, that is, compulsory production.

quote:

However, I�m truly surprised that no political force in American society is even talking about the possibility of a general strike.

If work is actually compulsory, you can't choose to stop doing it. HTH.

# ? Jul 23, 2015 02:48

Typo: Aug 19, 2009; Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

Your Sledgehammer posted:

These are good points. The thing is, I think your average American is really feeling that the system is hosed up, they're either just scared to talk about it or they've bought into the nativist, regressive garbage that the Republican party is peddling. I honestly feel like we're on the tip of a counterculture movement that will be comparable to the late 60s, in that a lot of 20-somethings aren't buying all the American Dream bullshit. This country's main narrative is not at all convincing anymore, and once that fully sinks in, you're going to have people casting about in all sorts of directions for an alternative. I think that Occupy and the Ferguson protests were just warm-ups for something bigger, and I really don't see how we could go on much longer without a significant change. People are getting fed up.

That's intensely optimistic since the 1960s counter-culture and protest movement existed because high rate of economic growth and easily available jobs, which means protesters/activists didn't have to worry too much about how to pay their bills. And college was much more exclusive and tuition much lower relative to their parent's income than today.

Basically people can't afford to sit around for month without going to work anymore

# ? Jul 23, 2015 03:28

ChairMaster: Aug 22, 2009; by R. Guyovich

Exactly, I'll gladly stop going to work if you've got some idea of how I'm not gonna end up homeless? The world doesn't work like that. Any intelligent person can see that work is one of if not the shittiest thing in North American culture, it's just that there's literally nothing that can be done about it. If you can manage to convince everyone in the country to stop going to work then sure, you could change something, but that's just not a possibility in the world we live in.

# ? Jul 23, 2015 03:42

ronniegardocki: Apr 14, 2012; by Lowtax

this thread sucks

# ? Jul 23, 2015 04:12

down with slavery: Dec 23, 2013; STOP QUOTING MY POSTS SO PEOPLE THAT AREN'T IDIOTS DON'T HAVE TO READ MY FUCKING TERRIBLE OPINIONS THANKS

i quit my office job, moved across the country, gave away my car, and worked as a cook in order to live a more "ethical" life

spoiler alert, it was a giant waste of time

my parents were right when they told me to just "play the game"

you don't get bonus points for suffering. just accept that we as non-1%ers are forced to play within the boundaries of the system. do the best you can, stop reading the news/caring about poo poo you can't change

plus it's way more fun to just tell people "yeah, I make way too much money and need to be taxed more" and just see their jaws drop :programmerproblems:

down with slavery fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Jul 23, 2015

# ? Jul 23, 2015 04:33

Typo: Aug 19, 2009; Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

I think at the end of the day the sad truth is that hoping for some sort of social change to make your life better is playing the lottery: it's possible, just not very likely.

You should just do what makes money and what makes you happy instead. Participating in activism if that's what you believe in. Accepting this seems to be a pretty important part of becoming an adult.

# ? Jul 23, 2015 06:09

Typo: Aug 19, 2009; Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

StarGeezer posted:

Not paying taxes is the non-violent revolution. People stop paying in through paychecks, keep more of their earnings, then have more to live on up to that point. No one's gotta be in the streets to accomplish a tax strike. "In the streets," in a country this size, is now to grow awareness, anyway, not get anything actually done.

Tax strike keeps money away from central coffers, brings things to a halt with scary powers trying to fill jails first, then parasitic powers send suits for a sit down for the usual drama sequence, then concessions, rinse, repeat.

The not working part comes after.

New local economies begin -- food, skill, education co-ops.

Funny thing is that the billionaire class has enough money to completely run this country for themselves and not have fuckall to do with the rest of it. While, across 3, 143 counties there will be at least one rear end in a top hat who'll cuff and kill you because.

e: clarity

So the immediate solution is to refuse to pay taxes and incidentally devoid the government of resources it currently uses to fund the social welfare net.

This sounds like something copy/pasted from free-republic.

# ? Jul 23, 2015 06:12

Typo: Aug 19, 2009; Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

# ? Jul 23, 2015 06:13

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# ? Apr 26, 2024 01:45

America Inc.: Nov 22, 2013; I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even 500 would be pretty nice.

Typo posted:

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Comrade Typo has begun a general strike of the thread I see.

# ? Jul 23, 2015 07:10

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Want to Start the Revolution? Stop Working

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