Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism (Outspoken by Pluto)

Class is a mechanism that permits some people to make themselves heard but enforces silence on others, denying them power and agency.

The self-exploitation that characterises the experience of contemporary capitalist work is not just a source of individual misery but a means of guaranteeing profit.

Today’s work promises the experience of togetherness, of being part of a collective, but typically delivers something much more competitive and individualistic.

In this way, neoliberalism creates perverse incentives. Instead of doing the stated tasks of a job, more and more time is spent recording partial or totally one-sided representations of that work. These are then used to shape the parameters of the future conditions and terms of that same job. In doing so, it creates a new reality, through distortio

The threat of paltry benefits or of losing our homes leaves us vulnerable to worse treatment: we, almost always, need a job more than a job needs us. Our entrance into work is unfree, and while we’re there, our time is not our own.

Work has the appearance of informality; it is bound up with social relations and personal social capital, promising to be indistinct from sociability – offering friendship, or even family – in both good and bad jobs.

All of our jobs have significant effects on our health, on our relationships with ourselves and our relationships with others.

Office work becomes an empty parody of real human social life. A dried-up husk of having to pretend to laugh, having to pretend to care, engage in small talk and business talk indefinitely. Futures postponed; emails answered.

When we are called upon to manage or produce emotional states as part of our jobs, the expectation that our personality is also raw material is entrenched.

However, it is possible to say that the emotional demands placed on workers, alongside the precarity and lack of control over their time at work, and their time in general, further problematise the idea of continuously improving working lives.