So, I decided to talk about work from the three sociological paradigms, to get some thoughts out on paper on this matter.
The three sociological paradigms are:
Symbolic interactionism- this looks at the shared cultural meaning some social structures provide. While I will look at work a little from this perspective, I'm going to be honest, my rational "question everything" mentality does not particularly play well with this worldview, and I generally view the world more from a combination of the other two paradigms.
Structural functionalism- this looks at social structures from the actual function they provide. Laws against murder prevent murder. Police enforce laws, etc. I think understanding the core functions of work in society are essential here, as at the end of the day, one of the big questions we gotta ask is "why do we work in the first place?"
Conflict theory- this looks at how social structures benefit the rich and privileged groups of society. I will likely be focusing a lot on this one, given my perspective is super relevant here.
Without further ado, lets get into it.
Symbolic interactionism
So, I'm going to be honest, in our modern society, work does seem to provide a lot of social functions, and people seem attached to those functions. It tends to give some people a sense of purpose, due to its association with the protestant work ethic. It tends to give people social validation, as work is an important rite of passage and we tend to see people as lesser without it. Jobs are associated with access to goods and services, which may affect relationships with others, etc. Those without jobs are often seen as social outcasts and viewed negatively by society. Work ethic is associated with one's character, and it considered a virtue, with laziness being considered a vice. And the social contract seems to make work an important part of the social contract, where everyone is expected to work and pay one's own way.
Due to us breaking away from Europe, which was under feudalism, in America, we view the ability to work and provide for oneself as an important aspect of freedom. Rather than being under the thumb of an oppressive noble or king, in America, people could rise and fall by their own talents and accomplish their American dream. Work also is associated with property, and people see moral value in work, as justifying someone owning things. We tend to look down on people being given "handouts" or the idle rich of Europe.
As such, we tend to place significant cultural value on work. I will come back to many of these points later on, as I do believe questioning and debunking them is important, but I do want to at least address the other two paradigms before I come back to this.
Structural functionalism
From a structural functionalist perspective, I think society needs to answer two questions about economics: "who does what?" and "who gets what?" The fact is, we need stuff. By stuff, I mean, goods and services that people want and need. But stuff doesnt always grow on trees. Sure, before we had property and our current system, we were hunters and gatherers and I will come back to that in the next section, but for society to grow beyond that, we need organization. We need a division of labor. We need people to grow food. We need people to take that food to grocery stores. We need people to put it on shelves. We need more to check people out and make sure they pay for said food. We need factories to make stuff. We need call centers for customer service. We need people to build roads. people to repair stuff. The fact is, to enjoy modern society, we need stuff done, and there is a certain amount of labor that has to be done to maintain our way of life.
Now, at the same time, do we need everyone working all the time? Arguably in the past, pre capitalism, we did, but since the creation of capitalism and the introduction of economic growth, I'd argue that technological inventions that bring society forward and save people from labor give us two choices, we can either work the same amount for more stuff, or work less for the same stuff. While working hours gradually reduced through the 19th and early 20th century, eventually we ended up going with a paradigm to just go full on growth growth growth, more more more stuff. I'll come back to this a bit in the conflict section.
But yeah. Arguably, as society becomes more advanced, our labor needs theoretically go down. We can afford to work less. We can afford to have not everyone working. Sure, we need some people working, but how much work we need to maintain society is debatable. Some would question stuff I support like say a UBI, because it would stop some people from working.Well, if they choose to, and society can sustain that, that's up to them. Most arguments against working less or people not working don't come from a material need for everyone to work, but some of the soft fancy cultural nonsense about work I discussed in the previous section (yeah im not very objective here). It's people evading their societal obligations, without questioning how much we need them.
Anyway, we do have evidence on how much basic income reduces work ethic. It depends. The amount likely plays a role, with small amounts like say, the CTC having no significant effect. But if you gave people say $50k a year, not many people would work, at least not unpleasant jobs. i think many would still work in some form, but they'd be doing something like blogging like I'm doing now, or something that isnt necessarily societally useful, but fulfills them. But at the end of the day, someone needs to do the unpleasant work, unless we can automate it. I do support heavily automating work, btw, and reducing how much of it we actually need, taking the necessity part off the table, and then taking on the soft cultural aspects directly.
Another thing that impacts labor rates would likely be tax rates. The lower the taxes, the greater incentive there is to work. The higher, the less incentive. We can probably maintain incentives up to about a 70% tax rate, after which, people start losing any incentive to work because there's no rewards attached to it.
Which is why we link work with money. Like property isnt just a feel good thing. Property being tied to work is a motivator. I would argue that the extent of the motivator is too strong, and that it functionally enslaves people given their basic needs go unmet unless they work due to "those who dont work do not eat sentiments" (I mean, such sentiments make sense pre capitalism when actual material scarcity was a real thing, they don't make sense in a modern context). However, we do need it to some extent. As the conservative capitalists will point out, if we just took all the money and distributed it back to people as a UBI, we would have ZERO incentive. And that's what a lot of people say was wrong with communism. Sure, communism didnt work like that, but we do know they replaced market incentives and weaponizing self interest as a motivator with sheer despotic force, and I can't say that that's actually a positive change. THe market system is the lesser evil. I just think we should change the motivators, given we no longer need everyone working all the time, and we should, ultimately, do away with work over time. I mean, unlike the cultural crap, which again, I'll eventually come back to, I don't romanticize work. I think work sucks. I think the less of it we have to do the better, and I think that working less over time is a good thing.
Now, before I move on, I do wanna address a few more things. How much work disincentive can we get away with? Well, with COVID, we suddenly had a crisis where we had to eliminate as much work as we humanly could to avoid in person interactions, and while GDP dropped, everyone could still meet their needs. We had unemployment at around 14.7%, higher than the great recession, and GDP dropped by a third. Lefties like myself noted that, gee, its as if we can just change our whole system and stop doing things as we can on a dime if we want to, but people don't want to. At least certain people dont want to. We'll discuss that in conflict theory. But yes, we could probably get rid of 1/3 of the jobs, or work 1/3 less overall, and still have a relatively advanced lifestyle. Not saying that that would be ideal. There were sacrifices during covid. No going out to restaurants. No recreational events like movie theaters, or amusement parks, or vacation. We worked from home. We had school over zoom, not everything was perfect. But did we get by? yes, we got by. Did we have to rush back to normal? No, the right waged a culture war to make sure we got back to normal, and wealthy interests wanted to go back to normal. Again, cover that in the conflict theory section.
One more thing. Is growth functional? To some extent, yes. Growth can mean higher living standards, which means more well being an happiness. Can all of the human experience boil down to growth? No. I think it needs to be offset by the cost of work. I dont think work is positive, and just as stuff improves the human experience, I'd argue a lifetime of hard work degrades it. I do think that there is a balance there, and I don't think we always get it right, even if more stuff is helpful.
I also think growth could, long term, be harmful to the environment. Capitalism and the growth mindset is what's driving climate change. I don't think what we're doing is sustainable, and in the long term, if we don't moderate our impulses willingly, nature could moderate them for us through backlash from overconsumption and overproduction. Not everything about capitalism and growth is all sunshine and rainbows.
At the same time it's possible we need to grow in order to maintain military readiness. Since the industrial era, having a large economy with a large industrial base meant you had a large capacity to produce the weapons of war. Our massive production capabilities, as well as being out of range of bombing is what propelled the US to be the major superpower after WWII. We simply had massive infustrial might backed by massive economic might while maintaining our own continent away from enemies. It's possible we grow like we do to maintain military superiority, especially over rivals like russia and china. However, seeing russia, it seems obvious we far outclass them. And china, while a threat, we still maintain significant superiority there. Do we need to grow as much as we do? Unknown, it's possible, but at the same time, idk, maybe we're going a bit overkill and maybe we can take it a little easier.
As such, do we still need work? Yes. Do we need work as much as we did in the past? No. Will we need work as much as we do now and in the past in the future? Hopefully not. Technology should free us from work over time, but due to cultural BS and due to conflict theory style oppression, I'd argue we never really move away from it. With that said, let's FINALLY look at conflict theory.
Conflict theory
Hoo boy. Okay, so now we're gonna see how deep this rabbit hole goes. I would argue the entire reason our economy looks as it does, is because of the wealthy controlling society, and basically enslaving us all for profit. Yeah, I said it.
Capitalism was always that system. It was introduced in the late 1700s/early 1800s in Europe, and it was often done so by force. We have a system in which we basically took all the land, privatized it all, so none of that hunter gatherer crap of just getting your food off of trees. Someone now owns all those trees and that is STEALING. What you need to do now is get a job, working for some employer, so you can earn money, and buy an apple from the person who owns those trees.
We inculcated work ethic into people. When capitalism was spread ti Ireland in the 1840s, it led to the great potato famine, where the british basically considered potatoes a "lazy" crop, and forced people do to labor intensive crops in order to develop a work ethic.
Overseas, we engaged in colonialism, spreading this system to the far reaches of the planet. originally, we would give people fertilizer to grow more crops, but instead, people worked less, and we had to basically beat the work ethic into them too. If it's any surprise most people live paycheck to paycheck and on the edge of precarity and desperation, it's to keep them in line. If workers were too comfortable, they might not want to keep working as much.
We developed a system of policing that functionally hunted the homeless and imprisoned them if they were poor and propertylessness, so people were forced to work. We designed a system to make people so miserable if they did not work, that they had to work.
And yet, unemployment existed. While there are functional reasons why unemployment exists as per the phillips curve, marx noted the "reserve army of labor" and how we had unemployed people basically existing to scare people into line where they would be obedient to bosses.
Yet despite how oppressive this system clearly is, we still left it open enough that through philosophical weaseling, we act like this is freedom. Work is technically voluntary. You dont technically have to work (we just basically make you so miserable if you dont that you functionally have to). All that nonsense about how work provides purpose and fulfillment? it's all BS. And even in america, as we industrialized, the american dream narrative became propaganda. originally the american dream was about self sufficiency, owning land, and living an agrarian or frontier life, but due to economies of scale, capitalism came here too. And I dont think it's much of a coincidence that our industrial revolution seemed to really take off shortly after we abolished slavery. After all, wage labor under capitalism used to be known as wage slavery, where the key difference is renting a person vs owning them. is it any surprise that we treat bosses as "superiors" while employees are "subordinates?" Is it any surprise the entire process of looking for a job is more about what value you provide to an employer, not what they provide to you? Because you're just supposed to work for them.
Let's be honest about what jobs are. Rich people paying poor people to do things. Rich people wanna make as much money as possible. They want to spend the least on labor, while getting the most work done. As such, they'll inherently overwork and underpay employees. Eventually, worker protections limited abuses in this regard, but quite frankly the only thing keeping us from living in a 19th century gilded age hellhole is stuff that survived from the new deal from now, unions, and stuff like that.
Hence why I'm so pro UBI. I believe the only way to truly liberate and empower workers is to give them a UBI. Obviously there are pragmatic limits to how much work refusal that can be allowed, but my ideal is that of a true free market, where workers are free not to participate and employers have to get workers to show up. They can't just demand them.
After all, a system where everyone has to work only favors the rich. it keeps workers in a state of desperation. It keeps them looking for jobs in a rigged economy of musical chairs where there are never enough jobs, and many jobs are unpleasant and pay poorly. Everything wrong with the american economy is just how capitalism always was. The new deal and worker protections and unions and such are the only things that ever made this paradigm tolerable for the modern worker.
And honestly, most of the feel good symbolic interactionist stuff I mentioned above is just propaganda to make people the perfect worker. Intense shame and social rejection associated with joblessness exists to coerce people to work. The resentment ethics that a lot of working class people have are weaponized to keep us all fighting amongst ourselves and to keep us all working. The idea that people work to earn their money just leads to the idea that rich people earned and deserve their money. it also implies you dont necessarily deserve a living wage if your labor isnt deemed value enough. And keep in mind, value is dictated by a rigged market system that is determined by supply and demand, where the supply of workers is higher than the demand inherently, to keep the entire system working as intended. So the entire system is rigged against you.
And yeah, we can work less, we always could, but you know what? Despite how much I often priase FDR, he made a deal with the devil with the business community to keep us on this treadmill of 40 hours a week forever. It's why the system just leads to us growing endlessly where we never work less. We could've decided to work less. Hugo Black wanted to reduce the working hours to 30 hours a week, but FDR bypassed that because hey guess what, the rich kind of decided that if we ended up giving workers more freedom, they might not want to work and consume as much, so instead we created a culture of consumption and work, and created the never ending cycle of growth.
And again, because despite this obvious social engineering, we still like to pretend work is voluntary, we like to claim that people just CHOSE higher living standards over working less, despite us not having a choice.
If anything, capitalism is like the perfect open air prison. it's a system that obviously enslave us, while convincing most people that it's all voluntary, and convincing us that it's all freedom. We can leave at any time but there's nowhere for us to go. We claim it's voluntary but it's not. As rick and morty points out, it's slavery with extra steps, all in the name of infinite growth and profits.
During COVID, people were realizing that gee, maybe society doesnt have to be that way. Well, we cant have that. You don't think that the desire to resist covid restrictions and frame it as government tyranny was intentional? This resistance was likely funded by big corporations and wealthy conservative interests. You don't think the push to go back to normal ASAP was intentional? people didnt want people getting too comfortable working less or not working. The same is true with the whole push to end work from home. What's up with that? it's about control. They fear that workers might realize there's more to their lives than work, so nope, gotta go back to normal because cultural changes away from work might lead to a social revolution that shifts us away from being so work centric. These guys want work to be everyone's #1 in their life, so that they never develop any independence from the system. it's how they maintain control. They dont need to do the heavy handed stuff, as long as they can control the populace in their mind. Same with the "no one wants to work any more" thing.
And you know what? They wanna make COVID and its consequences so unbearable they literally tried (and possibly succeeded) in "Jimmy Cartering" Joe Biden. Do you think it's a mistake that the wealthy portray bidenomics as hell on earth? They do it to make COVID seem like hell, and to ensure that we never go back to that again. Because they want to ensure that we all go back to work and like it. They weaponize the majority, their minds dulled by work and empty consumerism, to want more of that work and empty consumerism, and to demonize the very people who want more freedom, and to demonize the people who even temporarily suggested suspending the normal rules in the face of a global pandemic. The reason society responded so badly to the recovery from COVID, was to ensure their own ideological supremacy, and to ensure that the majority continue to work, and consume, and LIKE IT. Again, open air prison, with the special interests weaponizing people against each other, consumers against workers.
And btw, this is why the democratic party is obsessed with centrism to the point of being weaponized incompetence personified. The democratic party was once the party of the workers. But even then it only conceded power when it had to, and through the new deal era, it even moved away from being truly progressive, eventually turning on labor leaders, and by the 1970s, being practically at war with their own base as their coalition imploded. Then reagan took over, moved to the right, and the dems became complicit in the 1990s. And even now, they insist on compromising. They could've won with bernie, but decided not to. They decided that you would get nothinf and be happy and went with hillary. And if they lost to trump, oh well, at least we didnt get the guy who would truly be for workers. They stopped andrew yang from even taking off at all. and had propagandists on CNBC and the like going on about the dignity of work after his town halls. Or they'd cut his mics on debates. They'd make sure progressive candidates couldnt take off, and actively organized against them to make sure they couldnt work.
In 2024, they suppressed a real primary, and then when they did finally force biden out, they pushed an ideological coup to go back to the center. I thought harris would resist this, but she didn't, she went hard center and lost because of it IMO. Gotta abandon healthcare for all and lean into that cringey opportunity economy crap after all. And now we got trump again. *sigh* I hope to see the people force the dems to move left after this loss, but idk if we will. I think we might keep the party hard center simply because the establishment is paid to lose. Who knows?
Either way. I think the real reasons our economy is as it is, isn't because work is somehow great, or because we actually need to live like this. I think that we live like this because powerful interest in society have created the perfect open air prison to make us think we're free, while we're all simultaneously slaves. If we were truly free and exercised our freedoms i suspect the powerful would put a stop to it, by force, if necessary. After all, it's what we've systemically done over the past several centuries. our society was engineered to be like it is. It doesn't have to be. As I discussed in the functionalist section, while yes, we do need to work to some extent, capitalism has given us a lot of flexibility in that regard. We can choose, on a sliding scale, how much we work vs how much we produce. We could make work more voluntary. We could work less. Sure, we'd have lower living standards, but "lower" as in, "European". As I've outlined in previous articles, we could work a whole lot less and still have GDP levels akin to France, or Great Britain, or Germany, or Finland/Sweden. The real problems with work isnt working less. It's the mushy cultural BS about how work is so great, and more importantly, it's about powerful interests keeping us all on a treadmill, and controlling the levers of power, to stop change from happening. All that mushy cultural stuff is propaganda, or a pretext, to keep us running around like hamsters on a wheel thinking yay, this is the dream, isnt this great? While demonizing people who speak truth to power and see the system for what it is.
And yeah. that's how it all fits together. We can choose to work less if we wanted, with some tradeoffs of course. Wealthy interests wanna keep us all working while most wealth goes to the top. And that mushy propaganda stuff about how much meaning work provides people is just nonsense to justify it.
Hence why I dont go for symbolic interactionism much as an actual theory. I mean, it can look at the cultural meanings that stuff provides, but behind it, it's always functionalism, and conflict theory. Those are the two that really matter. Mushy cultural nonsense is mushy cultural nonsense and culture can change, and when under fire from the forces of reason, should change to conform to reason. What really matters is "what does this actually provide to society?" and "how does this benefit the wealthy and powerful?" And as we can see, looking at all three in tandem, the real interesting analysis is the conflict analysis. It's the most important one if we wanna understand why we work like we do. And we do so because the wealthy and powerful want us all to be de facto slaves who dont realize they're enslaved. That's why society is as it is. It doesnt have to be this way. if anything covid proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt for me. But the powers that be made sure to wage a culture war to crush any opposition to their system that would form, once people started freeing themselves from that matrix. Like, COVID actually did kind of allow the curtain to slip just a little and people were starting to wake up, and then they decided NOPE we cant let that happen, we need to be back to work immediately and get things going again.
And yeah. That's my sociological analysis on work. Not the most uplifting discussion, if anything, it's depressing, but that's why I am so passionate about this subject. because what i desire more than anything is my freedom. I dont want to be a slave for the rest of my life to this crappy system. And Im not saying, like the socialists do, that overturning capitalism is the answer. I DONT think that. If anything, going back to functionalism, I think capitalism is the superior system, I dont think socialists have convincing answer to all questions of functionalism and the meat and potatoes of who does what and how the economy would work in a different system. i think they lost the cold war for a reason, and I think even china has become functionally "state capitalist" for a reason. Capitalism works, socialism doesn't. Let's not go THAT route, and if anything, my anti work goals kind of require some form of capitalism to function. BUT, i still acknowledge that capitalism as practiced is basically slavery with extra steps and we gotta do better.
This is why I always define my views as radical and moderate. I have a bit of an anti capitalist ethos, but at the same time, it's tempered with pragmatism and i seek reformist change in the current system via a second new deal, not a literal revolution. And it's why I like candidates who offer major systemic changes like Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders, rather than either literal socialists, or corporate moderates. They offer the scale of change I think is needed.
And yeah. That's my analysis of the situation. I'm gonna end this here.
