What if Jobs Are Not the Solution but the Problem? – James Livingston | Aeon Essays

For, in fact, the differences in what labor means to different people could not be greater. For some, and probably a majority, it remains a stint to be performed. It may be preferable, especially in the context of social attitudes toward production, to doing nothing. Nevertheless, it is fatiguing or monotonous or, at a minimum, a source of no parti

There was a time, the historian Karl Polanyi reminds us, when the “problem” of unemployment for the laborer was not so much a problem of lack of work as lack of wages.22 Today this reality is obscured: lack of work—unemployment—constitutes an acute psychological crisis.

Labor is required for value to be produced and capital accumulated, but that labor, as we’ve noted, is all too often likely to rebel against the process. Labor, after all, is us: messy, desiring, hungry, lonely, angry, frustrated human beings. We may be free to quit our jobs and find ones that we like better, as the mantra goes, but in practice tha

people make career decisions based on their passions, then it’s easy to attribute wage disparities to individual choices rather than acknowledge the reality of structural injustice. This type of “choice washing” perpetuates the idea that income inequality can be overcome just by working hard rather than through systemic reform.