apas-95:

anarchistmemecollective:

bogleech:

Some notes don’t get it… Yes that is literally what it is, the idea that working less is just morally wrong.

I get the point being made here, but it’s wrong. This isn’t some ‘feelings beat facts’ thing, that’s not how countries are run in the real world. If it really were less productive for capitalism for kids to start so early and workers to have more time off, then that’s what businesses would be doing - but they’re not. Why is this? The answer isn’t that capitalists suddenly all decided that they don’t actually care about profit and would rather sabotage their own bottom line - it’s that it is in fact more profitable to do it this way.

As an example, we can point out how it’d be cheaper to give free housing to homeless people than constantly policing and arresting them. Is this an example of capitalism giving up its profitability to enforce some ideological vice? No! Because if we think just one step further, we can realise that, while a lot of money is spent on policing homeless people, the policing of homeless people generates a lot of money, too. The threat of homelessness forces people to accept harsher, more exploitative jobs. The threat of homelessness forces people to put themselves in debt for housing. The fact that there are at any time a lot of people in a terrible situation desperate for a job means that those who do have jobs are under threat of being fired at any time and replaced with any one of the thousands who are desperate for their job.

With work, even if it makes the worker less productive, it’s more profitable to keep them at work as long as you can. Remember, your boss isn’t buying your labour, he’s buying your time. Time you spend doing shitty work for him is time you’re not spending doing anything else - like working a second job at his competitor, or any number of activities it’d be much better to sell to you. Same with school - you might be getting worse grades from coming in early, but the point is to take you off your parents’ hands so they can go to work, and we already discussed why their boss wants them in as long as possible. Actually teaching you is a secondary goal insofar as it’ll make you a better worker, and hey, if you get an office job it’s a good habit to learn to take your work home, where your boss doesn’t have to pay overtime.

In the real world, ideological and moral values like ‘working less is just wrong’ are products of a real material benefit for a certain social group - to say that it’s the ideology that’s in control of material reality, and not the other way around, is backwards.