[CWs: Fat-shaming, Reddit]
I’m not a fan of people scalping toys. I understand scalping is a consequence of living under Capitalism where we are all pitted against each other over artificial scarcity.
What I’m complaining about is this notion of “real” jobs.
Who decides what is a “real job?” And why do people care so much about whether others have a “real job” or not? Your money isn’t magically worth more because you made it working a construction job vs. me pressing a few buttons on an app.
According to “the market” me pressing the Buy button on my trading app and the Sell button later is more valuable than people who clean toilets or cook food or do all sorts of important day-to-day work. But we’re all in the same spot as workers.
(Yes my “career” is not noble or hard work and I’m not defending it. I do what I have to do to survive and find happiness elsewhere.)
The money isn’t tied to effort at all. In fact, it gets easier to make money the more money you have! An example from trading: If you buy a share of stock then sell it back on the same day you buy it, your broker has to, by law, note it as a “day trade”. If you do too many of these in a short period, your broker is supposed to lock your account so that you can’t open any new trades for 90 days… UNLESS you have $25k in your account. You are literally pay walled out of trading your way up from, say, $500 unless you trade very slowly.
This kind of thing happens everywhere. Not sure where I’m going with this, just that people calling certain ways of making money “not real” are missing the point about Capitalism. The landlord doesn’t care how “real” your job is. They’re going to take the money no matter how you got it. Maybe it’s a cope for blue collar workers who see that they are never getting ahead driving tractors all day but also haven’t reached class consciousness.
I’ve always caught the vibe that a Real Job is one that provides socially necessary labour. With whoever they want to discount slotted into Not Real Job and usually the speakers career is slotted into Real Job. It has a squishy airy vibe based definition because there is a lack of understanding of Capital, Labour, Value, Profit among the working class.
So if a Real Job is who provides socially necessary labour, at least thats somewhere you can talk about what constitutes socially necessary and what isn’t. A garbage man is probably socially necessary, a nurse is probably socially necessary, a doctor is probably socially necessary, a carpenter is probably socially necessary, etc. Some labour in that pool seems easy enough to designate socially necessary or not cleanly. Sure there’s room to debate but it’s a little more grounded than merely Real Job or Not Real Job.