"Resignations are rising because people are seeing more job listings, not because they’re feeling more Marxist."
All the recent union pushes are just coincidence... I guess.
Americans love their jobs, I'll give them that.
But why is not liking your job labelled as "Marxist"? They say WE overuse the word racist but they use "marxist/communist/liberal" to just mean "blasphemer".
Ok this article made me so unreasonably angry that I decided to look up the author. This haughty litte twerp was born in a wealthy DC suburb where the median income is over $200,000 a year and he got hired by the Atlantic at 23. His professional career before that was, uh...
Fucking acting in WaPo-reviewed Shakespeare plays.
This fucking dukeling has never worked a day in his goddamn life. I look forward to the day he has to start hauling carts with the rest of us, I'll ask him if he still thinks people love their jobs then.
Shakespeare was popular in no small part because the work was populist. Hamlet is literally a story about a royal family so dysfunctional that they all end up killing each other.
It's almost comical how often this happens when you do the slightest bit of digging into these "journalists", they're so immediately discredited, but 99% of people will never take even that small step of critical analysis.
“During the second cold war, the hyper-capitalist ideological framework could transform any data about existing neoliberal societies into lionizing evidence. If the Americans refused to negotiate a point, they were principled and righteous; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a pragmatic move to put the enemy off their guard. By supporting arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their benign intent; but when in fact they opposed most armament treaties, it was because they were acting in the interest of protecting their allies. If the churches in the USA were empty, this demonstrated that religious needs were well-handled by occultist start-ups ; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were full of spirit and commitment to the God-blessed nation. If the workers went on strike (as happened on frequent occasions), this was evidence of their being empowered to do so by the liberal system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because their needs were so well-satisfied. An excess of consumer supplies meant that capitalism was creating wealth for the world; A diminished availability of consumer goods signaled the start of a new and better relation of consumer and commodity, a ‘Great Reset’, where the citizen would ’ own nothing and be happy’."
(not my work)
Do you think it's possible to completely exterminate Marxism? like imagine the USA launching on an extensive de-Marxification of the entire Western Hemisphere and burning and destroying every single piece of even vaguely Marxist literature available, like a Manhattan level project at firmly entrenching capital for another 10,000 years. Just absolutely annihilating left wing thought, a police officer for every worker you know.
An inverted Maoism. Instead your personal cop will act as an ideological commissar to make sure you do not stray from the bounty of the free market. The de-Marxification will be complete, no one will ever complain about their job ever, EVER again
I imagine if this were to happen, assuming materialism (don't know if I'm using this right, I don't read) is 'true', someone else will come up with basically the same thing.
Edit: Looks like someone else gave basically the same answer a few seconds before me.
itll just pop up again under a different banner, like stomping on a spider egg sack and hundreds of little spiders crawl out from under your boot
okay so after Groucho-Marxism, we'll get to Barxism. They'll stamp that out, and we'll have Marks-Schism. A few mass killings here and there and that will be no more. We'll end up with something weird sounding like Larks Prism but by that point they'll be real tired of killing people and go home
That basically happened in Indonesia, and anarchism sprung up in its place. :shrug-outta-hecks:
and anarchism sprung up in its place
uhhh, seems like it worked at keeping Indonesia a poor and right-wing country mostly? How big is anarchism there?
I have no numbers to give you. It has a presence unlike in most of the global south, is my understanding; they had some big protests a couple years ago and I could clearly see them in the pictures and videos (such as here ).
A poor substitute for the old communist party, but that could also be due to them having to start from scratch.
I'm just making the case that crushing Marxism ultimately only causes class conflict to manifest in other forms, rather than totally eradicating it.
It's a good example 👍
I think part of it is just that, like is often said by communists, you can't kill the idea (or "revolution"). Unless they completely isolated themselves from the world. And people have heard of communism no matter what, unless they killed every working age adult.
You can eliminate every book by Marx, you can suppress all forms of socialism and anarchism, you can atomise the workers until they're all contractors forbidden to talk to each other inside or outside the workplace.
But you cant eliminate the material conditions. The falling rate of profit is a bitch.
The workers will rise in conflict anyway, and capitalism will collapse anyway. The question is will the workers be organised enough to replace it, or will the collapse take down civilisation with it?
Eastern Europe basically tried to do something in this vein with destruction of Marxist literature printed in socialist times, banning of Communist parties and incessant propaganda. They were partially successful, and the more fash they went, the more successful.
like a Manhattan level project at firmly entrenching capital for another 10,000 years.
I think they've already done enough of that
They've been doing it for years and guess what; shit doesn't work.
then when will this shit be gone? when will people stop being brainwashed capitalism-liking idiots? :yes-honey-left:
if most atlantic journalists don't hate their jobs, we're slacking
We must initiate a protracted posting war against journalists. Find the stupidest lines this... Thompson has ever published and bully him with them from here until he quits in shame.
The great White Whale of our efforts is Matty, whose lack of self awareness might make bullying him into submission literally impossible.
Been seeing lots of anti communist stuff just happening to show up in my different feeds lately. Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if they were just having the algorithms feed this shit to us.
Enough people just think Russia is communist still so it’s probably just bleeding over
It's both. The west is both more
fasanti-communist than you think and the algorithms are pushingfascianti-communism more than you think.
Joke's on the atlantic. i don't hate my job. i hate capitalism.
Honest question; people don’t hate their jobs right? They hate their pay. If I could make the salary I do now (nothing exorbitant; I promise) working in the deli I did in high school; I’d rather work the deli job
I've definitely been very well paid at jobs I still hated.
I mean, there's a level of pay I'd still put up with them, but at that point the only reason I'd want more money is so I can quit the job sooner, so there's a limit.
I think I meant I’ve basically hated every job I’ve had in my life but getting paid more helps as long as my work isn’t contributing to anything I disagree with ideologically
Isn’t that hating your job? The why is usually the pay for the work
not necessarily. you can find your work enjoying and fulfilling, but resent that you aren't making enough to live off of it. This is the case for most artists, for example. They have to subsequently get other jobs that they hate to make it by.
Yea seems like a contradiction to me. Like there isn’t a job anyone won’t do; just a wage they won’t do it for. I’d clean toilets for like 90K a year but I wouldn’t like it
That’s also true. I’ve got a very good friend who works for Raytheon but makes well over 100K which is money I can only dream of. They just aren’t in the same place as I am ideologically but I think you’re onto something
Olufemi Taiwo touched upon these things in an interview (podcast Last Dope Intellectual) for his upcoming book Elite Capture.
I think it’s more broadly about all things the elites capture (for instance, regulatory agencies), but tbh I don’t have the best memory/the interview was more free-wheeling than “give an outline of your book”.
The context was about people taking on the class-characteristics of their peers/whatever the job requires, regardless of how they may have started ideologically (to some extent, it’s contextual, etc).
This is all to say, I’m very much looking forward to that book, I thought it was a very interesting and worthwhile topic
I've hated every clerk job I've ever had, and would have hated it if it made me a millionaire. I wouldn't have quit so quick if it made me a millionaire, but I'd still have hated it.
I hate the low pay, lack of resources, the fact that we have appallingly low numbers of support staff and the bullshit hoops we have to jump through. I mean yeah apart from that.
Having said that if I owned a complete fucking rust bucket of a car that fell apart every fifty miles and cost a fortune to run I would sure as shit hate driving.
Honest question; people don’t hate their jobs right? They hate their pay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
The author contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs:
- flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters, makers of websites whose sites neglect ease of use and speed for looks;
- goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists, community managers;
- duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing bloated code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;
- box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, quality service managers;
- taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals.
i like my job, in the loose sense that i like the social function of my role and the institutional slack i've nested myself within to allow me to do good-ish works most of the time, in spite of institutional forces and naked, crass careerism of the power structure.
that said, they've bungled so much in recent years and continue to do anything except pay regular workers more money. they have hemorrhaged so many people since covid popped off, so many critical roles are unfilled because the pay offering for the credential / work requirements is still assbackwards.
it's so stupid, because an equivalent gig with the feds is like GS-12+, which for me would be like a 50% raise. and the feds have lots of open positions and i guess their union is powerful enough to have been like, "yeah, we don't give a shit, everyone can be remote right now." meaning i wouldn't probably have to relocate.
i almost want to do it just so i can go to my exit interview and be like https://youtu.be/STpeoKr0ocI?t=164
