Labor Under Capitalism

This is, for many of us, the dream: unfettered commitment to externalizing our innards without concern for any gaze but our own. Reclaiming one’s time, you could say. But it requires nothing short of a battle.

Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, ‘professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers’ tripled, growing ‘from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.’ In other words, productive jobs have,... See more

On the one hand, the silhouette of a self-deterministic, dream-bearing, free-roaming, modern-age worker emerges as an aspiration. Ironically, these workers are also often the most alienated from the fruits of their labor. The dichotomy between 'us' and 'them' is stark. The product sees an absence of credit or attribution to freelancers at an... See more

I know what kind of work it takes to complete a book manuscript, and I want to do that work, but to arrive at the end of it and learn that what I should have been doing instead is flooding the zone on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok? That is fundamentally demoralizing.

What would happen if we stopped acting as if the primordial form of work is laboring at a production line, or wheat field, or iron foundry, or even in an office cubicle, and instead started from a mother, a teacher, or a caregiver? We might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not contributing toward something called “the... See more

If your role is focused on creating user and customer value, but management and leadership are incentivized to goose shareholder value, you are subject to that structural relationship and often have very little power to change it.