You’ll see people on anti-work posting stories about their bosses taking advantage of them and the responses are almost always, ‘quit your, get a new one and double your wage/salary’.
‘Bro your job and your boss suck, just quit and get a new one with 2x pay’
Or ‘I hate my line of work, what should I do’
A:‘Just get a job at a fortune 500 and transition into a different role’
Or ‘just go back to school bro’
I’m studyied engineering and this theme hits even closer to home to people like me.
‘Oh you earn 50k as an engineer? Weird, the entry level pay of people in my company and everyone I know ever is 120 Million’
The general sentiment on reddit and places like antiwork is one of anger, frustration with our economic system, or general despair. But the frustrations always seem to be ‘I am living paycheck to pay check in a big city earning 200k’ and not ‘I have a PHD and I’m struggling to find a job that pays above minimum wage’, which is more of I’ve encountered. Why does everyone seem so fucking comfortable?
Also I am pretty well convinced that anti-work sentiment is either a natural outgrowth of naive, unprincipled, unmaterialist contra sentiment (e.g. anti-government, anti-authority, anti-bosses etc.) or it’s an op.
The revolution is going to require hard work, and there’s no convincing me otherwise.
Securing the revolution, after it’s successful, will likewise require hard work.
— Stalin, Speech to Industrial Managers, February 1931
If you think that your western, developed, so-called “service economy” would be insulated from the circumstances that the USSR faced, ask yourself what the primary products of your country are, what that would look like under an effective blockade from liberal nations like what the USSR faced and what Cuba faces today, and how (de)industrialised your country currently is.
Now ask yourself how your country is going to be able to pay reparations for the peoples who have been subjected to imperialism and colonialism at the hands of your country and its economic development.
I think anti-work sentiment is yet-another way to domesticate potentially dangerous radical sentiments in the west.