I’m talking about deeply held beliefs you have that many might disagree with here or deem to be incompatible with Marxist ideology. I’m interested because I doubt everyone here is an ideological robot who all share the same uniformity in belief
I’m talking about deeply held beliefs you have that many might disagree with here or deem to be incompatible with Marxist ideology. I’m interested because I doubt everyone here is an ideological robot who all share the same uniformity in belief
Self-hatred helps no one comrade. I suffer from disordered eating myself as the result of childhood trauma, so my weight fluctuates a fair bit over the years. We know, collectively, how we can help everyone eat healthier and promote physical activity but its just impossible to combat the forces of capitalism that cause these conditions inside the system itself. They’ve literally processed food to the point of being a drug. Not all labor is physical either, and while physical health for all should be the goal those who struggle in this area are not useless.
This might be an unchecked labor aristocratic tendency to romanticize labor on my part.
Me shitting on software engineering in particular is partly me knee jerk hating things that are associated with myself and partly me trying to take the field off a pedestal. I touched a bit on why I think a lot of what programmers by trade do isn’t helpful to society in another post.. The tendency of productive labor being used to create shit is by no means exclusive to software engineering, but the importance, difficulty, and pay for the role (and to a lesser extent tech workers more generally) is overinflated in burgerland.
This is only a half baked hypothesis on my part that needs actual research, but I suspect the high pay and benefits tech workers get relative to workers in other fields is largely due to the role of the internet in maintaining burger hegemony. If you’re porky spying on people and disseminating propaganda all over the world, it makes sense to take measures to keep the people who maintain this powerful tool as compliant as possible.
I’d just like to jump in here to challenge the idea that labour only counts if it’s ‘helpful to society’. I know you clarified this already, so this isn’t a critique of what you said, but to dig into the issues.
I’m thinking about plumbers, builders, agricultural workers, dockers – all jobs which have become increasingly comfortable and easier (not necessarily easy with modern tech, but that’s a side issue). When these workers go to work, it’s to do the bidding of capital. So the construction worker builds cheap, shitty homes. The agricultural worker covers our food in pesticides and ruins the environment at the same time. Etc, etc.
So the fact that e.g. a software engineer works for Amazon or Facebook doesn’t necessarily mean much for the abstract job. The problem is, if the work is not socially useful according to an ideal of socialism (in capitalism, if it makes profit, it is socially useful), it’s because the worker is, like others, doing the bidding of capital. Under another social structure, their work could be more useful if, for instance, they were working on software that ensured food or medicine was distributed effectively.
This doesn’t really resolve the other aspects relating to buying off the labour aristocracy, though.