That's all it is.

I mean... probably originally, but that's not all that it is, nowadays. Some people really do unironically mean the former, in that sub on the social network that shall not be named (though I haven't checked it for... hrm, almost a year now!:-P).

You mean that sub that saw a huge surge in subscribers, increased bad faith actors, and general chaos ahead of the infamous mod schism that shredded any credibility that might have been hanging on?
As someone who watched it happen in real time, no one will ever be able to convince me that all of that was a coincidence.
- I didn't go into the details, but yeah you got exactly what I meant:-). 💯
  Some of them were probably even real.
- Represented by the dogwalker in the famous interview
- That was as intentional and obvious as the agent provocateurs that were used to break up and arrest the occupy wall street protests.
  They've stopped shooting us because MLK Jr became a martyr. Now they just arrest us and make us disappear.
I do feel like the former or something close to it should be our goal as a society.
- Um... you probably meant the latter, as in the second one, right? Eating Doritos while slaves do all the hard work - presuming we aren't talking about non-sentient robots but actual people - sounds kinda selfish to me:-P.
  Edit: to clarify, I'm down with the live like a King 👑 and eat Doritos 🔺 parts, it's only the pesky slavery 🤕 part that I'm against!
I can't speak for living like a king but we were able to recently confirmed again the whole lazy proletariat myth is a capitalist fiction. During the COVID-19 lockdown we had furloughed workers with a perfect opportunity to just lounge for months, and they just couldn't. Healthy adults just can't couch potato and watch TV for two weeks. When they try, they get cabin fever and start leaning how to ~~widdle~~ whittle wood into bear sculptures. The Great Resignation was driven partially by lockdown hobbies that became lucrative,
I, personally, can couch-potato out for weeks, but at my worst, I have slept for months, getting up only to eat and excrete. I didn't sleep always; sometimes I'd lie there awake but my inertia would be so great I couldn't lift a hand. This is avolition a symptom of mental illness, such as major depression. When doctors noticed that I can make like a log for almost a year, I was diagnosed and qualify for disability.
When all your workers are lethargic or crabby or stealing all the nitrous canisters, maybe your workplace is toxic. Maybe the managers aren't actually managing but acting like children who need to be handled. Or maybe you're not paying them enough to get out of precarity, which is a major cause of chronic mental illness like major depression.
- True dat. A lot of people would love to work - making art, preparing meals, teaching students, protecting innocents, prosecuting criminals, building things, knowledge discovery, curing sickness, caring for needs, etc. - if only the managers would allow it rather than impose all those constraints for profit or no reason except to sound (and be) bossy.
  Oh, and also for proper pay - at least enough to be able to eat and afford a home. And a LOT of dedicated people skimp REALLY heavily on the latter, I mean workers doing the job for a fraction of what they are truly "worth".
  "But nobody wants to work anymore" is code for "they don't want to do what I say, how I say, if I say, for next to no pay".
  I'll do a LOT of work for a friend for free, but not for an ass-hat unless compensated appropriately or as close to that as I can manage.
- leaning how to widdle wood
  "Whittle."
  Barring some hobbies both risky and risque.
Work as capitalism defines it is alienating. I am very much against unfulfilling drudgery.
- Most of us are, including me. Chase your bliss - I truly hope you find it:-).
  But please, don't make other people into your bitch.
  Your choice is one thing, but why force others to do your work for you? Read the OP again in case you missed it: in addition to living like a king and eating Doritos, it also says "while other people do all the hard work" - the keyword there is people, as in human beings, not robots.
  If, as you claim, you are "very much against unfulfilling drudgery", then why would you support having others do that work for you?
  And maybe that's not what you meant, so it's all good and we are in agreement. But it kinda sounded like the opposite, and you were against work only when you might have to do it, and thus by implication perhaps for work so long as it is others who end up doing it? So I just wanted to make sure that I did not leave that unsaid.
  You do you, that's great, so long as you allow the same of others. That's all I'm saying.
- Is anyone even left there at all? (On Reddit I mean, not just the sub:-P)

What? A left wing movement that uses the wrong name to make people understand what they truly mean? Really? Nah, that would never happen!

Adversaries to a movement will split hairs and redefine a movement anyways.
That's all we are seeing here. Look at now they tried to frame Black Lived Matters, something quite clean cut.
- No. We suck at naming things. And communication in general.
  "Black Lives Matter Too" would have been more clear.
  "Replace the Police" would have been better also.
  Even mainstream Democrats suck at it. They should be shouting every day, how they're taking on big corp's, going after antitrust abuses and unpaid taxes; While refusing to audit anyone making less than $250,000. But instead they just keep saying some variation of "The economy's great, stupid."
- BLM was a scam, a grift.. that's an undeniable fact.
  What was achieved? Because what we witnessed was violence, theft and property destruction. If you deny this, you are willfully ignorant or a bold faced liar.
  Oh and Malcolm X was right. More Black people should study Malcolm X and his message.
Some people do argue for a post-work, scarcity-free utopia. However, I don’t see how that’s ever a possibility even in an endless universe unless we solve mortality and answer every possible question there is about the nature of existence and reality. There will always be “work”.
I think work reformists look at exploitative conditions both at home and in developing nations, and rightfully want better. There’s no reason why millions of people cannot be lifted out of poverty via direct intervention. Training and educating those people for whatever self determined purpose makes the most sense. Currently people’s lives are wasted on perma survival mode, and it’s a waste of human intellectual potential and intellectual capital.
to make people understand what they truly mean
Sizable portion won't understand though. That's a big issue with that sort of names

Yeah, but that interview on Fox News really killed the movement pretty hard lol

Why? An interview with any right wing idiot doesn't dent their movement
- Because their movement is idiots.
- Because they lost all credibility that day
- A leading figure (well, mod but...) acting like a fool and making the movement sound ridiculous does happen fairly often.
- So they lost an argument to Fox and fox are the idiots. Do you realize how stupid you sound?

Is that right? To the average person, "Anti-Work" sounds like you're straight up against working, and unless you want to explain this to every single person individually, Fox News is going to keep having a field day misrepresenting your movement.

Yeah, "Work Reform" is much better. There's this weird trend of massively exaggerating a talking point, as the echo chamber seems incapable of thinking about any kind of optics or moderation
- No work reform implies slightly different, which isn't the point. Any message must make you question the system.
Honestly that mod torpedoing the whole movement with a dumb interview and forcing the rebrand to work reform was probably one of the best things that could've happened.
Leftists really suck at marketing. Between that, antifa, and defunding the police, they really don't seem to know how to put a name to an idea that can't be misconstrued by an opponent with the maturity of a 5 year old (which, as luck would have it, is most opposition). I'd even argue BLM should be on that list.
Edit to add: global warming.
- We're really good at marketing exclusively to other leftists.
- I believe it stems from Liberalism. Class consciousness is on the rise, but newly-class aware liberals aren't yet aquainted with Leftist theory. These ideas are popular among liberals that are becoming more familiar with leftism but are disconnected from the centuries of leftist progress.
- The real problem is that big media (and therefore the prevailing narratives) are all controlled by the authoritarian corporate establishment.
- Black lives matter is the least hyperbolic statement of that movement imaginable. That there was pushback even on that framing speaks more to the vile ess of its opponents than to a failure of marketing.
  You might want to put it on your list but it's the opposite problem to your other examples if anything.

Once I saw a guy arguing for pure capitalism because otherwise the state would have to force people to work with threats of incarceration or whatever.

It's like some sort of trolley problem delusion. It is fine shoving desperate people into whatever jobs they can get, but only if the Invisible Hand does it. It's fine if the threat is homelessness and starvation, but only if the Invisible Hand does it.

60 seems optimistic
Plenty of "antiwork supporters" do believe option 1
Your stance is valid

They may think they believe it, but the lockdowns of 2020 showed otherwise. Unless you're one of the "lucky" nonneurotypical people with a disorder that makes it possible to just lay around and do nothing, people go stir crazy. Feeling productive may as well be on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That's one of the reasons the great resignation happened. Way too many of us are working bullshit jobs, and we got to face that reality head on, and didn't like it one bit.

Why the hell haven’t you guys shifted the movement name over to work reform after what happened on tv? It’s not helping

Exactly! I have a genetic illness that caused congenital deformities and injuries and disability later in life, starting around my teens thanks to puberty.

From an early age my relationship with work was distorted because I found myself trapped in the gap between two pathways. I was obviously capable of work, with the right treatment and support I had a lot of potential. But I was disabled, and I required expensive supports and medical intervention, and under the public healthcare system there reaches a point of disability and limitations in capacity that you are written off by the system. Shoved in a residential group home, given a pension below the poverty line, and expected not to try. (genuinely, we're expected not to try, if someone on a disability pension works a job, they can loose their pension, which is many cases is also tied to housing and access to medical services)

I'd flip between the two systems, I'd have a great few months with regular access to treatment, I'd get a job plan from the dole office, I'd sit through work readiness courses, I'd be getting healthier and looking forward to working and being a good little contributor to society. Then I'd hit a waiting list for my medical care, my health would slip, I'd be re-assessed by the welfare department and deemed too disabled to work, my job plan would be shredded and I'd get a pension support plan. Then I'd get to the top of the wait list, resume treatment, and get back to getting to work.

I didn't start a "real job" until I was 24, it was a call centre gig and I near killed myself trying to do it.

It wasn't even hard. It was a true 9-5 (no overtime, no bullshit) and you mentally didn't need to bring any of it home with you. It was easy for me, but my body decided it was too much. My health suffered and it took years to fully recover, with me barely pulling myself together here and there for gig work in between being bounced on and off the disability pension system.

The whole endeavour was far more expensive to tax payers than a system like UBI. Processing my case 70 times because the disability support, and employment support eligibility requirements are so strict and the lines between streams so black and white took a lot of administrative resources.

I've been in my current industry for 10 years this November. I work part time, 12-20 hours a week depending on my health. I'm highly successful in my field because I'm working within my body and mind's means and playing to my strengths. I'm a whole person with a life outside work and I bring that range of experiences to my job, enriching what I bring to my organisation - which is good, because my job is a mutual exchange between me and my employer, it's not exploitive towards me the worker, which further prevents burn out for me.

But we exist within the capitalist system of funding and our wages are set by the department of health and human services. I make $34,000AUD a year and it's not enough to survive.

But if I work any harder my body will not survive.

I'm asking to do what I can do for my community, while living a safe existence.... Not being forced to choose between litteraly breaking my back working for someone else's greedy profit, or starving in a tent (though realistically, a lot of people are doing both)

Anti-work is anti-exploitation.

It's not about people wanting to be lazy yet still have all the niceties, it's about not being coerced into a lifetime of labor to enrich the ones coercing you. A person's labor should enrich themselves and those they choose.

Anti-work is anti-exploitation.
Well, then why not call it anti-exploitation? That would clear up a whole lot of things.
- I think that would cause a different confusion. I don't know that this is a concept that can be expressed in a single existing word. Sometimes concepts take time before the right word arises. No sense blaming people for using the language available to them to express a novel idea.

If everyone here, as they claim, is not against work, then why call it anti work? Why not call it anti labour exploitation?

For all the claims made in this post, I see a hundred saying that wage labor is the same as slavery, so this is a bit hard to believe

As someone who is legitimately anti-work I have a real problem with people who just want to change things. We're not getting FALGSC with "work reform" because then there's no reason to fully automate it.
- "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" for those that want to save the time searching.
- FALGSC isn't going to happen overnight, and work reform is a realistic interim solution.
  Arguing for lower hours and more pay to match the massive increases in productivity we've seen over the last 100 years is totally feasible. And a step in the right direction long term.
  FALGSC is currently not feasible, and at this rate automation is only making the rich richer
- We're pretty far from being able to automate everything
There's !workreform@lemmy.world
When I dig my garden I am doing work. That obviously entails no wage labour let alone labour exploitation. Why is it hard to belive people might be against wage labour in its present form but not against fulfilling, self directed labour?
- Because getting food from your own garden is cute but absurdly unsustainable for 8 billion people in this world?
  Like it or not, factories and large companies are the reason that 8 billion people can love on this planet. Granted, said companies can be quite abusive and a lot of rules are still in place allowing this abuse, but we're getting better at it, ymmv per country. Either way, abuse is not as bad today as it was 100 years ago or even 50 years ago. If automation and AI continue their current course, we'll all be working 2-3 day weeks soon as well.
  Either way, I get the point, I'm just saying don't swing too far in the other direction either.

Yeah no.

That is not what most here say when they talk about it. It's immediately "working for a salary is slavery!" (Literally that I've been told literally dozens of times now here)

Everyone can agree with the second paragraph, most people here subscribe to the first paragraph, though.

It's weird how the name doesn't break down to what it really means.

If only there was a word that meant forced labour that injured the worker.

Every time someone brings up wage slavery, there's some doofus who feels the urge to argue that it's unfair to chattel slavery.
"Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other."
— Frederick Douglass

Didn't they have a whole civil war over that in the Reddit sub? Some genuinely thought the sub was for people who just don't want to work at all and some were more thinking of work reform

Something like that, yes. I believe that was the cause why /r/WorkReform was started which is much better name - less confrontational, less off-putting for people who might be on the fence on the topic. Because honestly, "anti work" means "against work".
The civil war was mainly because one of the mods went on Fox News, and it did not go well.
- That's putting the dogwalker fiasco mildly

So... anti-physical labor work?

Non-physical labour is also often incredibly stressful, stress has similar effect on both mental and physical health of people.
- Hm.. I can agree with that. Especially if working in a toxic environment. After all, when you're negatively impacted mentally, it does have the effect of making you physically lethargic.

Personally I am in favour of the former definition, just substitute "othet people" with "automation"

I take issue with all the comments suggesting that the movement should be rebranding into "work reform", because reforming is absolutely not the point. Speaking as someone who subscribes to the anti-work movement, my problem is not that much with current laboral laws and, in fact, I'd go as far as saying that all jobs I have had so far have been reasonably respectful with me except for maybe one.

My problem with that is that we consider normal that, in order to deserve leading a meaningful life, we must be working for someone richer or for the economy. Our life must be dedicated to constantly providing products and services so that we deserve to enjoy what little is left of it. In more concrete terms, I don't like that we must get into wage labor in order to have access to fundamental goods such as food, water, housing, amenities or even free time. I believe all human beings living in a society capable of providing these are entitled to them, I also believe that our current society is perfectly capable of that, and that the only reason why the working class only gets conditional access or no access at all to fundamental goods are bullshit "number go up" reasons. I don't buy for a second that homeless people deserve their status because "they didn't work hard enough". Wage labor being such a central axis of our current way of life is what I'm strongly opposed to.

Furthermore, I regard the power balance between employer and worker to be fundamentally broken, and no reform can do away with that. When you sign a contract and accept the terms of a job, are you really accepting them or just avoiding the alternative, the threat of homelessness? For a lot of people who can't find jobs easily, not signing might mean starving or losing their home. How is that not coercion? Sure, if you don't accept the terms of your current job, you can just look for another (even though this is not a reasonable posibility for a lot of people), but any job will offer as little pay with as many working hours as possible because, due to the lack of meaningful consent, all employers can get away with that. And we accept it as normal and reasonable.

I also don't believe that abolishing wage labor will make people spend their whole lives not adding anything to society. If given enough free time, people will get bored of not doing anything and engage in work that they actually enjoy, of their own actual volition. I know I get involved into a lot of things given long enough vacations or subsidized unemployement. Now imagine if we just could get organized to find out what tasks need to be done, and each picked the tasks that they geniunely want to do, without being coerced. Without rich assholes and investors getting involved and often forcing us to work long hours on tasks that won't add anything to the world, but they make money.

"Reforming" laboral laws is absolutely not enough for this. Sure, I'd appreciate a reduction in my working hours, an increase in my salary, more vacations, etc but even if those goals were met, I'd still be out there protesting for the reasons I've just stated. Work, as we understand it today, is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed without it being abolished first.

You may not agree with me, mind you, and have a more moderate position stating that work must not be abolished as it can be meaningfully reformed. But then you are subscribing to a different ideology altogether. Which is legitimate and can be argued for, but it does not match the ideology of the anti-work movement. Sure, under late capitalism, some short term goals may match, but the long term goals are entirely different. My point being, "work reform" would be a terrible rebranding for the movement because it stands for a different ideology entirely.

If I sort this community by top for the week, this is the top post.

The second post hilariously concludes "All work is degrading."

You guys got some Doritos?

Compromise: be the king of Doritos but also have ample opportunity for a job that actually pays a living wage; and good insurance to coincide with said title

Maybe I missed the boat on why we do it this way, but I think one of the first things we need to do is decouple jobs from insurance. Not much sucks as bad as losing a job then simultaneously losing insurance (oh but cobra! No cobra is stupidly expensive for someone out of a job)
Wages would need to go up to cover what was lost, not to mention reaching a living wage, the pay still needs to cover cost of insurance. Also in that vein, our tax brackets need to rise, our current ones are outdated compared to inflation.
This soapbox goes on a ways, but that's probably enough for now.
- Fuck Cobra, and, also, hard agree. Healthcare should just..exist. Accessibly.

Anti-work is everyone living like a king and eating Doritos and nobody doing hard work.

I would argue: Anti-work is everyone having the choice of living like a king and eating Doritos and nobody doing hard work, if they don't want to.
Some people enjoy and get great satisfaction from hard work. Most people are inclined to do some form of work (including creative) rather than be completely idle. They should be allowed to do so, if they wish.

20

https://lemmy.world/c/workreform

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !workreform@lemmy.world

Kings fucking love doritos

OK, that’s what you’re against, but what are you for?

Mutual aid, free association, common ownership of the means of production, coalescing into a society where people contribute out of genuine gratitude to be part of it
- That is totally legal right now. Have at it.
Honest smiles. I'm sure exceptions are sure to exist, but for the majority. When I've even been adjacent to them, they're pretty awesome. I don't care if it's a wedding between two wonderful ladies or my dad getting a Russian WW2 M1891. There's that grin, half not believing, half awe, and half pure childish glee that really can't be beat. I stand for everyone getting that at some time.
It's gonna suck most of the time, and some people are gonna need a hand to get there, but damn, it's worth it.
- Very cool.
  Very cool.
  And you can convince a few dozen Ph.Ds to give your kid a university education in exchange for honest smiles considering they have mouths to feed?
Worker Ownership of the Means of Production.
- It is not illegal. My wife works for an employee owned company.

Get to work bum. If your job hurts you, better yourself and get a better job. Either way, stop whining.

Enjoying that delicious boot leather?
- You wouldn't know what boots are bum