How Liberal Centrism Kills Us

Why can’t we just get along, right?

On a previous version of this thread I had articles regarding liberal articles that are heavily critical on modern day capitalism. My takeaway was this: They’re well-meaning but lack political backbone in their solutions. For instance the “solution” to work isn’t to make it involve more play, to let workers get a couple dollars or to devolve a mild amount of autonomy is enough to fix the core problems with our current system.

Making workplaces “open”, making them have shorter hours, more breaks, fewer meetings, more time to cry and be yourself, none of that is cutting at the roots. Getting to the heart of what makes work so awful is capitalism itself as well as the governments that encourage it.

Unfortunately, for all of Jeffery Pfeffer’s solid analysis of the problems work creates for the workers, he doesn’t get this either. And so he becomes another case of liberal centrism and how that kills us, by short-circuiting our imaginations and convincing us only minor tweaks are possible, necessary and worth trying for. That’s a huge limitation to put on all of us and it’s one that robs the liberal vision of having any sort of political punch to it.

All of my previous articles on this subject are on the Internet Archive, so let’s start here instead:

Work harms employees in two fundamental ways. In the US, employment status and your employer determine your access to health-care … Second, employers affect the stress-inducing conditions of work: work-family conflict, long work hours, absence of control over one’s work environment, and economic insecurity.

It’s worth noting that Pfeffer is a “…A giant of business scholarship” and “…teaches one of Stanford’s most popular courses, on office politics and power.” So this kind of analysis is likely the pinnacle of the Educated Liberal who has some Serious Criticisms about how our system currently operates. Except both of the “fundamental ways” in which work harms workers is, while technically correct (the best kind!) is ultimately not actually getting at the fundamentals.

Because while lack of health care and workplace stress due to bosses are important facets of why work sucks, these are symptoms of a larger issue. These might be some of the biggest symptoms, I’d be willing to concede that much. But ultimately they are not the cause of the problem so much as they stem from the problem(s), that being capitalism, the state, hierarchy, etc.

Even if capitalism somehow self-regulated itself into a more caring and gentler version of itself you’d still have unjust power dynamics that lead to toxic relationships and unequal pay and decision making mechanics within a corporation. Which is, in of itself, an entity that is historically prone to corruption, greed and using violence against workers when they dissent.

So OK, disentangle the current apparatus from healthcare (without completely changing the system somehow) and make bosses a little nicer so employees don’t have to get addicted to alcohol or pills to deal with their jobs. What then? That leaves so many workplace based issues and issues that intersect with work very much untouched in the process. But that’s precisely the point for liberals who’d rather us make some “major” tweaks and then call it a day.

All of this said, it’s hard to disagree with Pfeffer says:

Companies do not act on the basis of the best evidence. They merge even though much research shows that mergers destroy value. They use forced-curve ranking systems for performance reviews even though extensive evidence documents the harmful effects. There is no reason to believe they would behave any differently with respect to their human capital.

Exactly! If companies don’t care about what studies show concerning the thing they constantly go on about (stocks, money, investors, etc.) then why would they care about the things they don’t constantly talk about (their workers, safety standards, autonomy etc.). There’s so many more press conferences about how a company is monetarily doing as opposed to how well they’re treating their workers and how they think they can improve on this in the future.

You can always treat people better and can always improve yourselves. But there’s only so many ways you can disappoint your shareholders for the millionth time. And all of this should go to show that the issues with this system go much deeper than just healthcare and basic humanity shown (or not shown) by bosses towards workers, but for Pfeffer it just doesn’t click.

Here’s another frustrating (but slightly valid) take, this time on AI:

Although governments might act to mitigate these adverse impacts through extensive job retraining programs and income maintenance efforts, most governments already face large budget deficits and an ageing population.

Moreover, states in the US and the government in Britain have been reducing their expenditures on higher education for decades. Thus, I see little reason to believe that state action will mitigate the disruptive effects of AI.

Well yeah, when governments are largely owned and operated by the rich and so is automated machinery, it makes sense it’s not going to go well for anyone else. Workers are likely going to see massive layoffs (and have in some cases)  and the reason they are is because they have very little say over what their workplace conditions look like in the first place. Never mind the kinds of conditions that may eventually replace them.

Then again, Pfeffer’s analysis here is slightly simplistic. Yes, it is likely many workers may lose their jobs but this also happened to farmers and the agriculture industry. Many of those people found jobs in other industries just the same. That doesn’t mean it’s the same exact situation (automation impacts many more industries than just agriculture for one thing) but that there’s at least some precedent for us to not be gloom and doom about it. There’s some reason for speculative positivity, especially if workers gain more power and bosses gain less.

But OK, what’s Pfeffer’s (lackluster liberal) solution?

We can—and should—measure the dimensions of work environments, including work hours, that we know affect health. Measurement would be the single most important thing we could do, particularly if we highlighted those workplaces doing the best—and the worst—on the various measures.

Ah, of course, legibility.

No one has ever thought to make corporations simply self-report their own statistics in order for them to be property regulated and then sorted out, right?

This is the kind of lackluster conclusion that is all but inevitable to most liberal analysis. Because the foundational analysis lacks any sort of political backbone, the conclusion shows it at its weakest point possible. That’s why it’s always the point I harp on the most, well, usually.

But this time, I think the “solution” speaks for itself.


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Doing What You Actually Love is a Privilege Under Capitalism

Source: http://www.janellequibuyen.com/about/

Remember when you were a kid? You could watch TV shows you enjoyed, go outside with your friends and play games. You still had to go to school and, sure, you didn’t get a huge say over what dinner was most nights, but most of your activities were your own. Obviously some kids grow up with controlling parents but for me anyways, childhood was a very self-directed and involved many activities like video games, TV and movies that I enjoyed and wanted to do.

These days it’s much harder to make time  for the hobbies I love. I’d love to speedrun Kingdom Hearts 2 more, write my novella more and spend more time on my backlog of video games. But all of these things are hard to do because of work. That one thing you likely didn’t do as a kid growing up (unless someone got around child labor laws) and you were better for it.

But now many of us have to balance our work commitments and our “life” commitments. It’s telling that the term “work-life balance” contrasts work with life. Hanging out with your friends, reading a book, playing video games, writing, meditating, going for a peaceful walk in a forest, these are all things that are part of living. But sitting in a chair for nearly 8 hours and having to live at the beck and call of others is decidedly not living. So what do people do about this misery?

Well, some of them quit their full-time jobs to pursue their passion.

But Janelle Quibuyen counsels otherwise:

Quitting your job to pursue your passion is bullshit. This messaging is only beneficial for privileged people and very dangerous for working class people.

The statement alone reeks of privilege. It confirms you had a full-time job to begin with. It confirms you had time to develop a passion (that you can capitalize off of, enough to meet your cost of living). It confirms you had the option to pursue something different because you feel like it. There are more challenges to being self-employed than just mental perseverance and grit.

We are predatorily luring working class people into an entrepreneur lifestyle as the answer to living a meaningful life and making loads of money.

It’s the new American Dream.

And like George Carlin said, “It’s called the American Dream because you gotta be asleep to believe in it.” And this period of sleep is more like a nightmare for those less privileged.

Here’s a fun fact about me: I’ve never held down a full-time job.

Never.

I’ve worked part-time from 20-30 hours in a week before with the most being in the upper 20s and maybe lower 30s but that was a rarity for me. I’ve never been able to hold down a full-time job because I don’t have that amount of executive functioning to spare. Nor would I even want to at any of the jobs (mostly retail) I’ve worked in the past 10 years or so.

So I have never been able to just quit my “full-time job” since I’ve never had one. That does bring me the advantage of having more time to work on my own hobbies. I’ve been able to make time for school (to the detriment of this site and my writing) but it always feels like a part of my work takes me away from the life I’d rather be living. Sure, my job is pretty chill and pays OK, but I could sit at a chair for hours listening to D&D podcasts in my own house and get paid for it.

And so this statement of “just do what you love, quit your full-time job” hurts folks like me. The people who are too disabled or otherwise not able to find full-time work. And even when it doesn’t harm those folks it can still make people feel ashamed that they’d rather not pour 40 hours into their week for a hobby they’d rather spend 5 hours on a week. Doing something that long can (though not always) burn you out and make you resent what you used to love.

Quibuyen goes on to say:

I am privileged to not have any student loans to repay. … I am privileged to have paid off most of my credit card debt while I was working full-time. I am privileged to be in a relationship with a partner that was working full-time. That I had a partner who I could live with. I quit my job because I was dealing with a family emergency with long-term responsibilities I had to wrap my head around.

I quit my job because I had the privilege to do so.

This is an important article because it not only speaks to the privileges you would need to say something like this but to also do it. I’m glad Quibuyen wrote this article as it’s an important one and it gets to the heart of their own privilege in being able to do what they did. A privilege they admit and are able to come to terms with in this piece. And using that newfound peace they were able to write this great article exposing another superficial myth about work.

This myth surrounding do what you love crucially revolves around the concept of live being different than what it is in reality. In reality, love isn’t a immutable thing, it changes, ebbs and flows with the passage of time and can go away just as easily as it entered. I’ve loved and lost many things in my life and to be able to try (for example) and take speedrunning as a profession seems disastrous to me. The amount of pressure I’d have to put myself under to make that work and the amount of money I’d have to invest just to maybe have it become too frustrating or have my love fade over time? That’s an investment that is much to risky these days.

That said, Quibuyen is wrong to say that “You have no one to blame but yourself if things go awry.” we can also blame the economic systems we live under and feel very little control over. We can take a look at how we got to a culture that constantly admonishes working class folks for not being rich enough to simply do what they love. And we can work to abolish the systems of power that keep in place the privileged above everyone else while they admonish those below them.

As Quibuyen says, “I’m not saying working class people can’t be successful entrepreneurs.”

And neither am I. I agree with them that although the ideal of everyone doing what they love sounds ideal, under current conditions it just isn’t realistic and that’s one of capitalism’s biggest failings when it comes to the topic of work. While we all put in massive efforts everyday we are being rewarded for less than we need to cover basic costs, for people we don’t like, inside of corporations we may not ethically agree with while working far too many hours under people who are overly-demeaning if not downright cruel and abusive towards us.

I guess what I’m really saying is: More Saturday Morning TV Cartoons, Less Capitalism.


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There’s More to Life than Work Scares (Monsters Inc Review)

Look into the face of pure evil, AKA bureaucracy.

I had not seen Monsters Inc since it came out in 2001(?!) and I was only 10 (as my partner helpfully reminded me). I don’t remember much about watching it, just that I know I did watch it at some point and enjoyed it. I think was a young kid I was so enamored with the concept that the fact that the execution is maybe middle of the road didn’t bother me so much.

I was, after all, 10.

Now, nearly 20 years later I’m looking back at Monsters Inc in a very different world. Does this Pixar film do much of anything in the way of critiquing work? Are there any serious takeaways we can get from this movie? I decided to do the horrible task of re-watching this Pixar classic and discovered that, yeah, there’s some work-critical ideas here. The movie doesn’t take them nearly as far as they should, but then I didn’t expect them to.

If you’re young or otherwise never saw Monsters Inc, here’s the general idea: Monsters exist (woah) and they power their world through the screams of children. They hide in your closet (duh) and then come out, scare you and then disappear into their own world. It’s interesting that this movie had to balance between scary and not too scary since it’s a Pixar film. I only found one monster in the movie scary looking or intimidating but I’m also 28 at this point.

The conceit of the film is that the monsters aren’t able to scare kids as well anymore. Kids just don’t scare as easy (no reason is given for why, it’s just treated as a basic fact) and it’s up to Sully and Mike (our protagonists) to help keep the factory running. Eventually shenanigans ensue and an evil plot is revealed that affects everyone within Monsters Inc and outside of it.

I can’t say this film got me too emotional (except at the very end) or that I felt invested in the plot. I cared more about the setting and the concept than the individual plot beats. As for work-critical themes there’s definitely some poking fun at bureaucracy, there’s a whole lot of paperwork in this film, which is partly how the movie indirectly gets most of its plot if you think about it.

There’s also the themes of bad bosses, overly competitive workplaces causing strife inside and outside the organization. Monsters Inc notably has a “scareboard” that all of the monsters compete on to see who is producing the most amount of screams from the most amount of children. Sully is currently ahead of everyone else but as anyone who has played Kingdom Hearts 3 will know, Sully has some competition and it’s not of the friendly variety.

One thing about the movie that isn’t heavily explicit but implied is that the workers have to produce screams or else. Or else what? Well, it doesn’t seem like anyone had money (at least that I remember) so it’s tied more to their existence itself. If they run out of screams then the energy crisis (definitely not timely at all!) will only get worse. But the overall message of the movie isn’t “this is cruel and unfair” just that getting the energy through screams is unfair.

Therefore it’s not the foundation that is suspect but rather the process that’s supported by the foundation, a fairly liberal read on systemic oppression, but there it is.

And while the movie touts an alternative paradigm for these screams it never tries to find an alternative paradigm to the work itself. Nor does it take from its obvious plot convenience surrounding the proposed alternative to shorten how often people need to work. We see that things are a lot easier by the end of the film but we don’t get much in the way of knowing concretely if this has made everyone get more leisure time or not.

At the beginning of the film Sully is consumed with his job. All he does is go to bed after work so he can get up early, exercise for his scares in the day and make his boss happy. Mike tells him when he’s about to go on a date that there’s more to life than scaring. But for Sully this is akin to sacrilege, how can all of his efforts be worth less than going out to restaurants?

The movie doesn’t focus too heavily on Sully’s workaholic nature but it’s at least explicitly stated from Sully’s own best friend that he cares too much about work. Therefore the movie at least acknowledges explicitly that there’s a limit to how much you should be doing. Eventually you need to get outside, take a break and enjoy yourself. But when that eventually reaches its breaking point is left up to question and never furthered as a theme.

In addition, once a possibility for more “ethically sourced” (as I’ll call it) energy is revealed and the evil plot is foiled by our heroes, Sully and Mike seem to find great purpose in their work again. The answer seems to be: Just build your work on more ethically sourced actions and that will resolve any systemic problems you might have with your job!

But of course, that’s not how it works in the real world. We have corporations who talk about their “ethically sourced” materials all of the time but getting that still requires intensive labor, often from immigrants or desperate people who are paid much less than they’re worth.

Ultimately the bad guys aren’t just foiled by Mike and Sully but also another organization that proves it can work against the interests of the corporation. I’m not sure what this is supposed to prove, but generally regulatory agencies are notoriously bad at doing their job when it comes to big corporations. Often because those same regulatory boards are staffed with CEOs from the same corporation or bought off by them, either way.

I know some of this analysis of Monsters Inc may seem ridiculous to some. “It’s a kids movie!” But kids pick up on themes too and movies that are made for kids often appeal (or attempt to appeal) to adults as well. There are real messages Pixar was trying to communicate with Monsters Inc, though I don’t think they were particularly impressive when it came to the topic of work.

Great movie though!


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