Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism (Outspoken by Pluto)

The amount of collective effort that goes into shaping consumer demand is nearly inconceivable; it takes a lot of work to create the feeling of needs for new clothes.

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.

Addressing the problem of work must involve raising the floor rather than making it easier for a tiny number to puncture the ceiling.

This means that when we criticise work, we often come up against fear and confusion.

Denaturalising makes visible that something is a historically contingent set of power-relations, rather than a ‘natural’, unchanging permanent state of affairs.

Through feminism’s theoretical and practical mobilisations, the category or concept of ‘work’ itself was called into question.

Even without the technical know-how of exactly how something was made or brought to the consumer, how much effort it requires, it is possible to reorient our knowledge of the world; to look at a building and wonder who built it, and under which conditions. When we do this, we can see everything around us as a product of human effort, of world-makin

How we work is shaped not by technology alone, but by existing relations of power.

New technologies and labour-saving processes can be good things: the problem is who owns the technology required for these processes and in whose interest that technology is developed and run.