Product, Industry, and Evolution
For those who started their career prior to 1990, I would like to introduce a term abstract job, also known by the loose-whip tongued as 'B.S. jobs.' Some have no experience of them, I have had personal experience of them, and most Millennials will recognize the concept though they may be sheepish about admitting to having been in one. In my experience, it is the job that is fully externally realized, that represents a categorical divorce of industry, product, and labour. They are generally created for a specific and ephemeral need that is not widely known or recognized. An extreme example would be someone whose job it is to copy content between MS Excel spreadsheets.
Consider the Greater Honeyguide. It is a species of bird that sends vocal signals to humans to guide them to bee colonies to find honey, which once destroyed, it then itself feeds on for survival. This system of necessity appears to have lasted many generations, but does the bird really perform a real job in association with a real product or service for the human? How did it go from being a contingent fact that birds luckily found honey, to an industry of birds in many different territories that expect to find honey?
What do you think is the structure of real labour? By that, I mean work that satisfies the following fields, which are not exhaustive or mutually exclusive:
Industry: Recognition of the work widely and unconsciously as a source of use value (i.e. carpenters, painters, lawyers, etc.). The association that the labour leads to something significant or has social meaning. Ideally serving to allocate resources to certain forms of virtuous work with a collective purpose.
Evolution: Fulfillment of necessity within a system of existence. Tends to it's own existence (i.e. personal assistants, chatbot programmers) and has a place in its existence that can't be easily rationalized out of. Ideally to allow the labourer a sense of self-determination, or that they have learned to do something that will further their survival and selection. If they lose their job, they can find another like it.
Product: Generates quantitative and qualitative value. Produces something that has these forms of value either to end users or as capital. Example: a photographer that shoots wedding videos. Ideally creates the sense that the labourer is bestowing value on a result of their labour. Taking the Excel spreadsheet example, this individual can be replaced by ChatGPT so their work could be construed as standing in the way of the product.
Consider the Greater Honeyguide. It is a species of bird that sends vocal signals to humans to guide them to bee colonies to find honey, which once destroyed, it then itself feeds on for survival. This system of necessity appears to have lasted many generations, but does the bird really perform a real job in association with a real product or service for the human? How did it go from being a contingent fact that birds luckily found honey, to an industry of birds in many different territories that expect to find honey?
What do you think is the structure of real labour? By that, I mean work that satisfies the following fields, which are not exhaustive or mutually exclusive:
Industry: Recognition of the work widely and unconsciously as a source of use value (i.e. carpenters, painters, lawyers, etc.). The association that the labour leads to something significant or has social meaning. Ideally serving to allocate resources to certain forms of virtuous work with a collective purpose.
Evolution: Fulfillment of necessity within a system of existence. Tends to it's own existence (i.e. personal assistants, chatbot programmers) and has a place in its existence that can't be easily rationalized out of. Ideally to allow the labourer a sense of self-determination, or that they have learned to do something that will further their survival and selection. If they lose their job, they can find another like it.
Product: Generates quantitative and qualitative value. Produces something that has these forms of value either to end users or as capital. Example: a photographer that shoots wedding videos. Ideally creates the sense that the labourer is bestowing value on a result of their labour. Taking the Excel spreadsheet example, this individual can be replaced by ChatGPT so their work could be construed as standing in the way of the product.
Comments (20)
Quoting kudos
Just look at the American EPA statistics on the generation of solid wastes from the 1960 to now.
Simple, the ideal is that people should not be used for labor, not that labor is the purpose of human life. Thats one reason Marx was wrong. His very notion of happy producer is itself exploitive- its just pushed back to the existential level rather than the economic system level. My advice- get out of the production is the point of life mentality. Of course this leads to Pessimism and AN, but Ill meet you there with open arms when you get there :wink:
Not in the sense of mass production. No.
But there are carpenters, bakers, and chocolate makers who truly enjoy their labor.
If one holds a critical view of human culture and society, it is pretty clear that the category of bullshit jobs can be enlarged beyond mere box ticking pointlessness to include CEO roles, marketing, conference organizing, consultants (in almost any area) management theorists, sociologists and a host of others. Obviously, this category of 'bullshit' is dependent upon what presuppositions one holds about purpose and value.
Quoting L'éléphant
Indeed.
There have been experiments done (these are true experiments) on UBI, universal basic income, to get low income people to be more productive to get to better paying jobs (or jobs they enjoy, which means they would keep the job). The idea was, for a fixed monthly supplemental funds, the people could use their time training for skills (any skills). The UBI mistakenly postulated that low income is the reason why they remain poor. The monthly funds actually made them less likely to pursue further action.
Notice I didnt attempt to say that, simply that people shouldnt be used for their labor, whether its enjoyable or not. Hell, some assembly line workers might have enjoyed their labor under big capitslism boss man. Same principle applies.
So, how are people going to earn money?
Shit, sucks doesnt it?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Hence existential problem.
I think the flip you identify is the financialisation of the real economy the shift from producing to meet a current demand to manufacturing the consumption that can justify an unbound growth in production.
If investment in labour is about satisfying a current level of demand, that is one thing. But if the investment is in consumers willing to financialise their futures and so take on an ever rising interest burden, then that is a different world.
What then is real labour when the economy is more about selling future debt? Well financial engineering and debt marketing are well paid occupations. And real work so far as the global debt industry is concerned.
Not sure if this covers your concept of abstract jobs. But who exactly employed this spreadsheet content person and for what ostensible purpose? Did it help sell loans? Directly or indirectly?
The tyranny is to cause people to be put in a situation whereby they must labor to earn a living.
The charade is that its good for you! And the implication is to jump off a cliff if you question the assumptions (more aggressive paternalism for what is good for people- what other people must do). All the same paternalistic impulse to promote ones positive projects (virtue/character building, civilization, science, whatever excuse/project you want) over other peoples negative ethics.
With increased specialisation we see the onset of particular types of 'labour' sloughed off to free up time of the specialist.
Pessimism and AN (I would think AN would be enough). It seems we have two options: lose or pretend, and you're saying I'm not pessimistic enough for choosing losing? We aren't talking about production as the point of life, but the other way around, the point of life is production. You can't escape the role economy plays in being and becoming by turning becoming into a finite separateness from being. This is the mistake of reductive existential ethos, for which I have low esteem.
I think where you have gone with this is interesting. It sounds like you are drawing a parallel between a collective shift towards a debt-based economy of negation and seeing this negation manifested down to to individual level. If so, in what way are you hinting at a negational quality of these jobs?
The job is necessary, but is that plainly enough? Would you want to live in a state that was run by someone's imagination? I don't see how it's any better to live out the majority of your life in a job that is the product of someone's imagination; A kind of Cartesian Xanadu.
But yet we have a deliberate choice to create more people, and so existential ethics DO come into play. And we can force more people who need to labor into existence, or we can choose not to. By labor, not only do I mean economically, but the burdens in life in general. You can choose to prevent others from being forced to do anything at all. It may be that forcing others into the game of life, is itself misguided/wrong. If you don't like tyranny, then tyrannical measures, like controlling that someone must be burdened with the pains/sufferings of life because you deem it worthwhile for them, is about as aggressively paternalistic as you can get. Of course, this may fit perfectly in such systems as communism, so I can see why you might not mind it.
Well, it seems to be that you believe that man is born for some reason (meaningful labor is a large part of that apparently homo economicus or whatnot). But I am questioning that assumption I guess. Meaningful labor is not ALL that life offers, and I can imagine a scenario where someone doesn't find any "labor" (at least in the survival sense) meaningful. And that itself pushes back against this essentialist notion of "homo economicus". It might even be the case that there are considerations of ethical proportions that override any of this scheme to create a society of "meaningful labor".
Homo Economicus seems to be influenced by a close alignment of capitalism with Platonism, Epicureanism, and with Old Testament notions of faith, pleasure, and the good. For this reason, it's ideas always seem to be out of step with modern thinking; the only modern philosophy it understands is survivalist, or generally misinterpreted, existentialism. Really, capitalism is the only system that is 'good-driven.' That is, it is supposed to automatically align itself to a state of virtue and good. Goods are automatically driven to ideal balances of price versus supply to allocate resources with maximum efficiency to areas that humans 'like.' Businesses are supposed to be in balance with consumers so that they offer each other services and meaning to the cultural whole.
And this last intuitive part 'like' is the caveat. The whole thing runs on ideas of pleasure and not pleasures themselves. Modern Homo Economicus has abandoned the finite determinisms of the old philosophy in daily life and can't stand their simplicity, but nonetheless can't escape their determination of the self, which has proven critical to its necessity in the forms of advertising and the Debordian 'spectacular existence' it presents consumers with. Therefore you have two options: Embrace selfhood and allow the capitalist ideology to erode away the new philosophy (pretend), or continue into the dirty gutters of tending to it as it's servant (lose).
Thing that's important to point out is that Capitalism is a system based on reason. It is an idea, so its physical manifestations aren't essential in concrete forms.