Responding to Second Thought's "Why Work is Getting Worse"

 So second thought had a video on "why work is getting worse", and I ended up responding to it on a forum. I figured my post would make a good blog post, so let me give me thoughts here:

Ugh, let me just say second thought is kind of a socialist hack who often pisses me off (see: video claiming Yang was a" "bonapartist"). BUT...this is a pretty good video, and I do have strong opinions on this.

My honest opinion? WORK WAS NEVER GREAT! WORK. ###ING. SUCKS! In the early days of the industrial revolution, people were forced into the cities by the enclosure movement and forced to take jobs as wage slaves. Their conditions were brutal and inhumane. And they knew it was wage slavery. Around the time of abolishing literal slavery, there was actually a debate about whether literal or wage slavery was worse. Arguably literal slavery IS worse as in theory people can leave under wage slavery, but we all know in practice that they cant. That's why frederick douglass wanted 40 acres and a mule. The purpose of reparations was to ensure freed african americans ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE. If they had their own land and their own farm equipment, they could take care of themselves, whereas being poor and propertyless often forced them to go back to work for their former slave owners as "employees."

Second thought is right that reformism isn't the answer. We had the labor movement from the late 1800s through the mid 1900s. They did wonderful things to balance power via unions and improve working conditions, and eventually with FDR we did. But, as he pointed out, things declined. Why? Is it "capitalism" as he says? Well...yes...but also no.

The problem is again...work. let's look at what liberalism and social democracy did. They merely REGULATED work. They had the government step in and say, you have to have higher wages, you have to have decent safety conditions, you cant fire people for being in a union, you have to negotiate with a union if available. And while all of this stuff...helped. It never really solved the core problem. The problem being work itself.

I would agree with second thought that all liberalism, at least traditional liberalism does, is regulate an unjust one sided relationship.

But...and this is what's important, I would fundamentally disagree with the left and second thought on the solutions. For a lot of people the answer is "socialism." Workers owning the means of productions and democratically making decisions. THis can help, but the devil is in the details.

First of all, let's just write off any form of socialism a la countries like the USSR and China. Can we just admit that those suck and have horrible records? Clearly autocratic governments should not be given quarter here, because all they did was replace one unjust hierarchy with another.

But, that, to me, is the problem with most forms of socialism, especialyl ones tied to the state owning the means of production. Think about how well our actual democracy works. Think about how we're currently being force fed joe biden again. Is democracy necessarily the answer? Is our democracy actually responsive to peoples' needs? Doesnt it become muddled down in unelected bureaucracies and power structures that control the process while still seemingly delivering on paper? Do you not think socialism would end very much the same?

I dont trust people to be educated and informed enough to make the right decisions. Especially given half the country are still in the mind set of HURR DURR YOU WORKED 60 HOURS A WEEK AND THINK YOU HAD IT BAD? I WORKED 80 HOURS, QUIT BEING SUCH A BABY.

Such mentalities would continue to proliferate even if we had socialism.

Even in market socialism, I dont see a solution. Look at valve, the gaming company. Like that's supposed to be a flat organization without bosses outside our lord and savior, gaben (sorry, PC gamer here). But you know what? People who have left valve HATE working at valve and go on about how it's full of informal hierarchies. Yeah that's what happens.

I dont think the mode of production really matters a ton, because all of them are subject to the same two flaws: coercion, and people. As long as people are forced to participate in work, and are subject to institutions in which others rule over them in some way, and yes, socialism would still have that in their organizational structures, IMO, then people are not free.

So I say we address the actual problem here: work itself. More specifically, coercion to work. The problem with capitalism, socialism, and everything in between is that they all rely on coercion to work. As Bob Black would say they might quibble over hours and who's in charge, but they dont question the idea of work itself.

So how do we secure peoples' freedom? Well, remember how discussed Yang and how second thought hates him? Yang discussed this week that he got a lot of his ideas from scott santens. And scott santens leads the UBI subreddit. A subreddit I've also frequented for years. Yeah, you can see why Im rocking the mah flair here. Heck to go further, I was yang gang before Yang was yang gang. SO let's talk about UBI.

UBI is actually seen by some, as liberating. It's intended to liberate people from forced work. Phillipe Van Parijs was one of the first philosophers to discuss this in the 1980s, he was a marxist trying to reinvent the left in an age of neoliberalism, and he decided to embrace the freedom rhetoric and say, hey, if we give people a UBI, we can free them to live as they want.

Karl Widerquist, an American scholar, goes even further IMO. He argues that UBI gives people the right to say no, not just to any job, but all jobs. While freely chosen employment is not necessarily evil, employment under capitalism, or often socialism for that matter, is not freely chosen.

I would argue with a UBI, capitalism could live up to its promises, because under a UBI oriented capitalism, people could tell their bosses to F off. Bosses wouldnt be able to push them around at all. Because if they felt bullied, they could just tell their bosses to shove their job where the sun doesnt shine and go home.

Ya know? THe ultimate equalizer under capitalism is to give the working class their freedom to not work in the first place, and to make all work voluntary cooperative enterprises.

We should also give people free healthcare, education, and help subsidize housing costs to bolster this to ensure people remain as free as possible.

Now, before people say this can't be done because we need people to work, well, I disagree. Second thought mentioned all of that productivity in his video right? How line on chart went up? Well, what if we took all of that productivity, and instead let people choose fewer working hours? I mean if we have an economy 3x the size of what it was in 1950 per person, we could instead have an economy the size that we did in 1950 per person but work 1/3 the time. Or 13.3 hours a week. Ya know?

Or look what we did during covid. We just decided to close like a third of our economy as it was "nonessential". We really dont need to work as much as we do. Full employment and emphasis on GDP growth is why we do.

Which brings me to my last point. Yang in 2020 ran on human centered capitalism, the idea that humans are more important than money, the idea that the unit of value should be each person, and not each dollar, and that we should move away from GDP as the end all be all measure of the economy.

I know second thought and other "leftists" scoff at the idea, "rawr, capitalism cant be made human, read theory", but in this case, I AM THE FREAKING THEORY.

Because again, if yang got his ideas on UBI and human centered capitalism from scott santens, and scott santens moderates the UBI subreddit, and i participated in that subreddit for years and interacted with the dude, well....wanna hear MY take on human centered capitalism?

My own iteration of the idea starts with a simple premise. That the economy is made for humans, not humans for the economy. If we are made for the economy, then we are slaves to it. No, the economy exists for us, to serve our purposes. We should not be beholden to it as a money making machine. Rather, it serves our needs. This comes from a deep commitment to the ideals of secular humanism in my political thought. No gods, no masters. Our social structures exist to serve us, not the other way around.

I also muse a lot about the nature of work itself in my own form of human centered capitalism. Why work? In protestant christianity, people work for work's own sake or for the glory of god. America's work fixation is arguably a secularized version of that. We treat work and suffering almost as a religious rite, and it's quite counter to my ideology. No, we dont live for work, work exists to serve us. And honestly? We should be spending as little time working as we possibly can IMO. If work sucks and is an evil, and in my worldview it is, then we should strive to eliminate and abolish work over time. I'd be willing to settle for merely making it as voluntary as possible and allowing people to make their own choices though.

But yeah, the second premise to my iteration of human centered capitalism reflects that. Work is a means to an end, not an end in itself. There's nothing special or glorious about work. Existing ideologies fetishize the concept too much. People keep going on about how work gives people meaning and direction and structure in life, and I say let's do away with the pateralism. F work, work sucks, let's work as little as possible. We need a new ideology that instead of thinking about how to organize work, we talk about about liberating people from the concept altogether.

And yeah, that's what human centered capitalism means to me, as someone who has embraced it since 2013-2014 or so. I only pull this card because of how misguided second thought is on the concept of yang and human centered capitalism. He has entire videos crapping on yang and his ideology and as someone who believes similar it drives me nuts. So I just wanted to give MY take on this video as this is a topic im super passionate about.