[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.
This was a problem I had reading Bullshit Jobs.
While it does shine some light on what is a socially beneficial job and the fact that the current system tends to create artificial jobs in its inability to deal with its own contradictions, it doesn’t really talk much about the root problem being class exploitation.
Sure, my bullshit job could maybe be optimized away at some point by a more efficient process, but that won’t make me happy when under capitalism I will probably end up becoming jobless and desperate instead.
The root contradiction is always the class distinction, like the fact that the work we do sometimes is useless for society or even harmful to it, while being beneficial to the capitalists, or that capitalists view actual solutions to many problems as cost and bad business decisions for their profit making, so instead ducktape solutions are applied forcing workers to do something that they themselves don’t consider all that useful.