Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism (Outspoken by Pluto)

we shouldn’t assume that our consumer needs are natural or fixed any more than capitalism itself is.

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

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.

Fordism wasn’t a revolution in technology alone – the production line isn’t just a piece of neutral infrastructure. It’s also a technology of control.

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.

These acts of re-labelling are often inspired by the work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild. Hochschild’s 1983 The Managed Heart described how certain jobs involve the management of a worker’s own internal emotional states.

Just as Marx called into question the naturalness of work under capitalism – showing it not as a natural attribute of humanity but a historically specific and violent arrangement – women associated with the Wages for Housework movement sought to show that the unpaid work women did in the home was not out of a natural feminine benevolence, but explo

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.

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.