Wouldn't it be nice if everyone had a job, and every job paid a living—no, a flourishing!—wage, enough to support a wife and kids, to buy a house, and to save for your children's college education. Labor laws (that set limits on hours or working conditions, or that require or provision for workers' benefits) are premised on this idea that we can simply make it illegal to do or employ labor that is performed in an exploitative way—and in theory this would force all employers to provide adequate jobs and fair treatment.
But suppose Chernobyl melts down. Who's going in to the reactor to clean up and prevent a mass contamination event? What about Karen? Or Trump? Or Brian Thompson (when he was still alive)? Would they volunteer to sacrifice themselves to save us from nuclear contamination?
No way! They are the very last types of people to participate in any undesirable labor.
It's as if civilization is a great parade, like a snake, with a head, body, and tail, as well as a tongue it flicks out to test the air.
The forked tongue is slaves and soldiers, driven ahead of the procession by whip-bearing lashers (cops, repo men, collections agencies, army officers, conformist parents, bosses, pessimists, scabs).
The nose (or snout) is dirty jobs, the disgusting and dangerously dirty jobs that only hardened experts do. These experts protect society with their fierce hard work, and so they have a certain authority and can demand high (labor-based) rates. These are the people who, not being coerced and herded ahead like the slaves and soldiers, are in a position to volunteer to go into Chernobyl. They are near the disaster, have the necessary skill, are hard-working, and are not being immediately coerced to go into Chernobyl.
Behind them, the eyes and head of the snake are the shitty (and shittier) jobs. Things like fast food, retail, and all highly repetitive and mind-numbing jobs fit here. Shittier jobs are the same, except they also take a heavy toll on your body over the years, due to stress, repetitive motion, or general hard labor. Shitty and shittier jobs are both jobs people are generally coerced into (by capitalism—but not immediately coerced, or we'd call it slavery); shittier jobs are held by people who put up with it, or who put up with a shitty job for a long time until it becomes a shittier job.
Nobody wants to be any of these things so far if they can help it, except a dirty job expert in some specialization if that's your calling (and even many or most of them would probably quit if they won the lottery). However, past this, this is where the desirable parts of the human condition start, and where you get to make a living not by doing hard labor, but by being human—by doing cultural labor, including intellectual, communicative, or aesthetic labor.
As the body of the snake we have the professional classes, white-collar workers. These are people who have to significantly compromise their true vision in order to fit into the world of professional money-making. Being in the middle of the food chain, they must both participate in the rhetoric and social policing which keeps less desirable labor as a thing for others (and therefore they must essentially support the status quo of the current division of labor and prestige in society), and they must also particpate in the rhetoric that the ruling classes use to continually define and redefine the meaning of life for the bourgeois in a perennial wiping-clean of meaning which keeps the bourgeois ideologically yoked to obedient nothingness—keeps them "white".
Finally, the tail of the snake makes up the ruling classes, all those exempted from undesirable labor or pressured labor of any kind through having wealth (and enough social and physical space set up to exercise that wealth as power). The people further back are "higher up" in the hierarchy, with politicians being the snake's cloaca, until finally at the very back—the snake's tail-tip or rattle—are the billionaires (at this moment in history).
So, to summarize, the hierachy of labor and laborers is:
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Deadly and coerced labor (slaves and soldiers, Chernobyl cleanup)
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Dirty and dangerous jobs (high-paid expert labor)
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Shitty jobs (and shittier jobs) (lower/lower-middle class)
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Professional "white-collar" jobs (middle class)
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Independently wealthy (upper class, actively controls and manipulates society to maintain wealth/power without having to do anything the other classes feel pressured to do)
So, in order to normalize these different lifestyles for both people living them and the people who might try to interfere with or harass people living these lifestyles, different rhetorics are deployed within and about each of these classes of labor and their workers. There are in fact so many overlapping and inverted versions of these stories that it is very easy to feel overwhelmed and lose track of the fact that are really only two or three social classes at most, overall (poor/rich or lower/middle/upper).
Those in the Professional class like to imagine that "we" can simply legislate that all workers must be treated and paid like Professional workers—to legislate that all jobs must be structured like white-collar jobs. However, this ignores the reality of the necessity of dangerous and dirty jobs, a necessity kept thoroughly dissociated from the "at-will" fantasy of (fully or universally) voluntary employment indulged in by the Professional class. In other words, Professionals have no answer to the question of how we can make all jobs non-shitty and still get dirty and dangerous necessary things done, and here they fall silent, because the machinations of coercive labor are already operating in their favor.
The lower classes are already pushed into their role and kept there, so they are maybe not the most likely place where a disruptive rhetoric will originate from. They have also already had plenty of chances, and produced many disruptive rhetorics, but nothing that has been truly/deeply convincing to the Professional or ruling-class mindsets. Marx is really the capstone here, a rigorous logic of the poor, for the poor, by the poor (not deragotory) which thereby generates a Euclidian smooth matrix across all classes (in other words, Marx, by articulating the logic of capitalism, has articulated a minute logic of infinitessimal classism).
Perhaps the dirty job expert professional class are the ones to look to, the heroes of society. They have a good work ethic, a close relationship with on-the-job injury and the possibility of becoming disabled, and they care (about society, about people, and about doing a quality job). They also have experience being occasionally treated as interchangable with the disposable (slave & soldier) classes, so they are skeptical of power. However, in my experience, people in this dirty jobs expert professional class have already self-selected into an elite and highly-paid professional society, and are not interested in making society make sense for everybody. Essentially, they are profiting by operating a mini franchise of the entire image of society, with each one the king of their dirty/dangerous specialized industry. No need to critique the profit machine when it's working for you (and you still have your health).
The rhetoric of valorizing all jobs simply because they are necessary to survive is a rhetoric originating from the Professional (bourgeois) classes and projected on the lower class, who are forced to work shitty jobs. Having a Professional white-collar job is valorous because it's victorious: You get to make money while just doing little intellectual and cultural things that aren't nearly as difficult as hard labor or obeying an aggressive boss. It's not really virtuous, it's just pure of suffering and so it feels virtuous, and this blemishlessness is then raised and flown as the banner of the bourgeois (see also corporate Buddhism). For someone working a shitty job, identifying with this ideology can be beneficial, because it's upwardly mobile to believe in the ideology of the economic class to which you're aiming to attain. For someone working in a shittier job—i.e., they have little hope of escaping—believing in this ideology is self-defeating and can contribute to a learned helplessness, which (if you review the definition of a shittier job given above) originally produces the shittier job (out of a shitty job). Valorizing labor is part of the bourgeois smugness complex, and has little if anything to do with workers'-rights movements, which obviously must begin from the realization that a lot of labor is shitty and undesirable—not from the fantasy that all labor is valorous and dignified. That's a smug reification if you're Professional, but false consciousness for people working shitty jobs they wish they could quit.
The apportionment of rhetorics across populations must follow certain ratios, or there will be too many uppity over-educated individuals who refuse to take shitty jobs and start protesting instead (like in France). This would raise the price of labor, above basically zero where it is now (pay to work!), which is of course completely unacceptable to capitalists everywhere, who implicitly want to drive everyone out onto the street to be homeless and scramble for gig work everyday like during the industrial revolution.
So, one way that those in power maintain this apportionment of correct rhetorics across different laboring-classes (besides expensive, grandiose, and ubiquitous propaganda campaigns) is by speaking their rhetorics in a compressed and persuasive way. These statements keep society in line by making sure everybody else is frequently reminded of the way things are and their place within the whole. The complex of different classes and double-standards between these classes must be continually reinfored or it will extinguish (as per the laws of behaviorist psychology).
For example, the statement (which I am paraphrasing from a recent post on the Seattle subreddit), "Crime and drugs are the problem—they should clean up the streets and involuntarily hospitalize the homeless" contains a number of disagreeable (to me) political assumptions—but it packs in even more economic assumptions about the state of affairs of society and the roles people are expected to play. We've got the cops ("they") who are being invited to do their job of violently coercing anyone out in public who looks too dirty or weird; we've got the poor crazy veterans and drug-addicts and other homeless who are verbally objectified and treated as a problem and human cargo to hide out-of-sight; and we've got the privileged speaker, who elides their own presence in this equation while also deigning to speak with the Voice of the Sovereign in calling for extermination of untouchables. Finally, we have the Professional (and shitty-jobs) class of modern Psychiatry, the institution which, like the police, is simply assumed to be present and fully-functioning already—and yet, somehow, not properly doing its job. So, we can see how this statement, which is overtly morally-politically triggering (for me), is even more insidious in that it packs in these assumed categories with stereotypical conceptual boundaries between the categories. It's really a class-bound wish, an opining of the desire for the extermination of an eyesore—not for the elimination of suffering, but a direct call for hiding it, because there is an explicitly voiced yet unconscious desire to escape the guilt of participating in the middle of the food chain of capitalism—guilt at being comfortably ensconced in the belly of the beast.
If we can begin to see that these statements about jobs and class and laborers/professionals/capitalists are all relative and class-bound statements which ultimately serve to divide and negate our fellow human beings, we can begin to pierce through the veil of this rhetoric and see how highly contingent and full of layers of bullshit our public discourse really is. Because really, there is only one class, and that's Humans, and none of us like to do shitty jobs or be coerced.
So, given that, what would the beginnings of a more humane and fair (and refactored!), worldview, one that acknowledges the shared laziness of all humans, look like?
Well, assuming that there really are some dirty and dangerous (or murderous) jobs that need doing, we do need some kind of system to assign or allow volunteers to choose to do these jobs. A voluntary system is better than a coercive system. So, there is really nothing wrong with a system where we award points to people for doing undesirable things. The problem is the manipulative rhetoric, unfair pricing of labor, and when the whole situation around the labor becomes coercive and prison-like. Maybe someone can come up with a better system than 'economy', but this is good enough for our thought experiment.
Right now, the shittiest jobs are also the lowest-paid, because those pushed into shitty jobs are already on the losing end of the game of power. However, from the point-of-view of the dirty job expert professionals, it makes a lot more sense that the more undesirable, dirty, and dangerous a job is, the more one ought to be paid to do it. That would actually be fair.
So, what prevents this system from existing? Why isn't this system already in-place?
It's from people making money without providing labor (or value/goods/services) to others. It's people making money by manipulating the back-end of the economy, i.e., by manipulating the money and labor system itself, i.e., by manipulating everyone else on the globe from behind a curtain. "What do you?" "Oh, I'm an investor," is really an admission of guilt in a game of disavowed social and economic manipulation—rulership without democracy, governance without representation. It's really an alienation of society from its own rulers, a perfect failure of the project of democracy—to have an unaccountable CEO or Wall Street investor.
In past ages—the time of Benjamin Franklin—gentlemen did not attempt to increase their wealth, their score, except through honorable business; it seems many were fully dedicated to a single calling, which they identified with, and would never imagine trying to make a fortune any other way, or just for the sake of it. In other words, money didn't come first—life, honor, and calling came first. A gentleman did not make his fortune by cheating his customers, exploiting his workers, or stealing from public coffers. He didn't need to! A true gentleman had all the linguistic and social capabilities needed to produce highly beneficial social and economic structures for his society. Undoubtably, some such uncorrupt and productive economic actors really did exist.
However, as the thumbscrews of capital have been cranked ever-tighter, this ideology decayed and was forced to give way to a much more expedient, instrumental, and self-interested ideology of hustle culture. Money comes first now, and we are expected to fit our dreams into capitalism, not the other way around.
As this intensification of capitalism continues, money will begin to cleave and separate from true value. It is a nigh-universal dedication to and acceptance of money and its (supposedly transitive/objective) trade-value which allows capitalism to function and appear as a unified system and interior of numbers. As intensifying capitalism makes conditions and previous lifestyles increasingly unlivable, more and more people will be essentially cut-off from almost all functions of money, and will be forced to create a new trans/post-money conceptual framework about how to get things done in the world.
This alternative, conceptually pluralistic, qualitatively rich vision of coherent ways and working techniques to live and attain resources without money is the greatest threat to capitalism. Capitalists want us all to think that the only way to think about life, value, exchange, resources, and attainment are with Money and the One ($1). But this is a lie: there really are other ways to think about life and how to make a living, and these ways are becoming more powerful and more effective (i.e., more "profitable") the more capitalism tightens its screws. As it becomes increasingly impossible to imagine living (at all!) under capitalism, people will naturally begin to imagine alternative logics and ways to organize themselves.
The fundamental distinction between societies that allow capitalists to be their wealthy and ruling class, and societies that don't, is whether those societies allow people to make money without providing goods and services. Note that I didn't say whether the law allows people to make money this way. It's whether it's socially acceptable that matters (the law will follow).
Right now, it's entirely socially acceptable to make money in finance, or any-which-way. Capitalism has become so harsh that a reactionary "You need to get yours! Good for you!" ideology has sprung up so we can all reassure each other to be vicious enough to survive. But this isn't really a good ultimate viewpoint.
Really, what has to go is the idea that it's OK to make money in any other way besides a specific instance of providing value to another living human. Kind of like the inverse of the idea that there should be no victimless crimes: There should be no benefitless transactions, no "sales to no-one". That should be considered fraud, and is considered fraud, of Society, in my book.
We could have nice things—we could have a fair economy with all the benefits this brings (great societal wealth, high-paying jobs, low prices, rapid economic-historical advancement)—if only we all stopped accepting financial manipulation as value-creation, and stopped accepting all money which is financially manipulable.
We are now at the cutting edge of my thinking. Because what is an unmanipulable money-system but a scorekeeping system where scores are NOT transferable? That is, not-a-money-system at all but rather a scoreboard/leaderboard of some kind, with rules actually designed to virtuously incentivize what we want to incentive as a society. This would be totally doable—we have the technology, we have the central brutal enforcement—we just need to vote to build the government website. This would yoke the economy to Society, as perhaps it should be.
The idea that scores need to be conserved, and transferable, is an unnecessary assumption clung to by people who wish to accumulate (or hold on to) a lot of finite, scarce points. We could (for example) easily just let people buy things with money they don't have, and this would be a site of minting and a place where money enters the economy.
However, instead of this, we have the violently-held belief that money must be conserved (the Law of the Conservation of Money), and instead, we inflate the value of that money on the side by manipulating the currency supply, using bonds and government subsidies and investments in new-and-emerging industries (farmers are always dead last in the hierarchy, being the first industry). So, really, it's pretty sadistic and disingenuous for the same people (the capitalists) who are violently demanding money be conserved, to also be the people who are violently demanding we manipulate and inflate the currency supply to cater to various demands. We could just inflate the currency supply in a direct and honest way by voting on minting and giving specific $ amounts to specific parties. It would work out the same in terms of undermining the idea that $1=$1, which is already totally undermined and not true. (It's already like we are all on the same government website, in terms of our money being synced.)
There's nothing wrong with finite money, either, as long as it's used by an aware populace who doesn't let people make money for doing nothing, and doesn't let the currency supply become monopolized by capitalists (=manipulators of money who don't do [or won't code their actions as standard] specific labor transactions). In other words, hard money would work fine and largely fairly for a society that was uncaptured and that controlled the material basis (e.g., gold, or rare earth metals if digital currency) of its currency.
We don't have either of those, so hard money (such as BTC) is a good wedge against fiat money and its frequent inflations, but it's unfortunately associated with the traditional idea of capitalism.
But maybe there is such a thing as non-capitalist money? Or a need to separate the idea of using money from the idea of being a capitalist.
We could all use money in non-capitalist way, and refuse to do business with capitalists, and use bitcoin colored coins to flag capitalists' money as untouchable, effectively taking capitalists and their corrupt money out of the system by the will of the people. This would fix the problem.
But to do that, we need to recognize this separation between capitalism and a mere money system, the latter of which could be fair and used in a fair way, if there were no capitalists gaming and dominating it. It's OK, even morally good (and, incidentally, Christian) to run a good and honest business that provides a good (or at least quite fair) deal to your customers (or it would be if our economy wasn't so vicious—gotta run a non-profit to be good by the numbers, in such an environment! But we are talking rhetoric/ideology here so we can bracket this). In other words, it's OK to work or run a business for a living, and to make some reasonable profit (from transacting with customers, not from exploiting workers)—doesn't matter who owns or exactly how profits are distributed—because that's not the big problem nor the determinative thing organizing our society.
What matters is that we all start to reject the idea of making money by doing nothing. One might make a living by doing nothing difficult or unpleasant, but that's not what we are talking about here. We are talking about taking in money—someone else's score going down, and mine going up—when I haven't transacted with that person, nor provided any product/service of any value to anybody.
These are two separate problems. First, it's a problem when I can make my score go up and someone else's go down from a distance, without them having transacted with me or anyone. This means that we ought to find and eliminate all causes of inflation in our scorekeeping system (not perpetuate and manipulate these forces as the Federal Reserve does!), as these forms of inflation can be understood simply as sources of error in the scopekeeping system. Second, we must denormalize the idea that someone's score goes up just because they got more money.
No, someone's score should only go up when they did something for someone else, consensually, and that person assents (because they are grateful for the transaction). Again, any other ways scores are changing are a source of error and an artifact of an imperfect/incomplete concept of what the scorekeeping system is actually supposed to be and incentivize.
Capitalists want money to exist in simultaneous superposition of being both a refined tool of high society, and in an eternal state-of-nature where they can brutally take candy from babies in a game of winner-takes-all. This shows the hypocrisy and contempt of Society, which is clearly corrupt and suffused with capitalists to the core, since in every instance, Society is only too eager to proclaim the capitalists' story and cover-up for their alley murders. Society is owned (or, enslaved) by Capital, and this creates a Disney-like spectacle where high society is driven to doe-eyed madness by the ever-intensifying stench of its own denied farts (since they can't realize they are owned by capitalists and capitalist ideology without being ostracized). Society normalizes the social classes, the distribution of labor-roles, and valorizes the idea that "Any way you make money is OK." This is the core belief of our world that would need to change, for capitalism to become denormalized.
