[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.
Sorry but if you are making money moving stonks around you are a labor parasite, no different than a landlord
True, but I will keep pressing the buttons until I find a job. Unemployment ran out and gotta make money somehow.
Also my wife vetoed my OnlyFans, “Read theory in lingerie” backup plan 😅
If you’re poor the only real job is one where you suffer and are constantly burnt out making someone else rich
If you’re rich the only real job is business person
If you do anything to do with art or science that’s not a real job (Unless you are the CEO of an art or science company)
CEO of an art of science company
capitalism final boss
Autocorrect hates me
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.
I think it’s a very rudimentary form of class consciousness, or at least a recognition of the illogic of the economy. People recognize that there is a disparity between the value of the work being done (hoarding children’s toys to make money off of arbitrage, standing in a big building buying and selling stock) and the amount these people are compensated compared to the value of keeping trash off of the street or maintaining the sewer system or cooking food for people.
You’re right that the system is basically unreasonable. I don’t think it’s weird for people to notice that and be upset about it though, even if they lack the terminology to say what they’re upset about.
Internally to my industry it always just meant “retail jobs” (fake) or “not retail jobs” (real) excluding maybe assistant store manager and above (salary + bonus tiers).
or just anything that required training or certification (so a “real job” was a job you had to purchase)
but yeah money is money we are in the latest stage of capitalism and we are all mercenaries
deleted by creator
Your worth as a person is direcly tied to “what you do for a living”.
When somebody says something with the phrase “real job” they are directly making a statment about whether somebody is a useless eater or not. Sometimes it will even go so far as to be a direct judgement about a person’s moral character.
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.
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.
