Who Would Work If They Didn't Really Have To?

WHO WOULD WORK IF THEY DIDN'T REALLY HAVE TO?

(Image from Flickr Creative Commons)

Often, when universal basic income is proposed, the incentive to work when one's income is guaranteed whether you submit to employment or not, come under question.

I believe this attitude only makes sense in a world of debt-fuelled wage-slavery in which terms like 'work' and 'vacation' become twisted.

In a world of wage slavery, 'jobs' monopolise the word work, so people commonly assume that to be 'working' you must have to submit to wage-paying labour. Any activity that does not fall into that category is dismissed as mere 'hobbying' or 'doing nothing', even if the activity is actually more productive and beneficial to society than some jobs.

Furthermore, in a world of debt-fuelled wage-slavery, any activity that does not involve either surrendering one's time to paid labour or in spending money as a materialist consumer is discouraged. The ideal individual in such a world is the person who is money rich and time-poor. In fact, with the banking and financial systems now having figured out how to transition from quality-based lending to quantity-based lending, you don't even need to be money rich. You can be suckered into piling up debt on your credit cards etc.

These conditions set us up for a world of 'job spill', where job-related tasks encroach on more and more of one's out-of-office hours (IT-enabled networked tech plays a major role in job spill, obviously). It sets us up for a world in which, where possible, everything that makes work rewarding in the non-material sense is designed out of the system in pursuit of hiring cheaper labour that is more easily coerced into accepting conditions closer to slavery. It sets us up for a world in which to not submit oneself to labouring mostly for the reward of others or not to be endlessly pursuing the consumerist lifestyle is to be frowned upon and to be ostracised from society.

Having been made to sacrifice so much of their time to the cause of feeding cancer capitalism's inexhaustible hunger for debt, it is little wonder that what little time away from 'work' the wage-slave gets is spent either throwing themselves into a frenzy of non-job activities such that they return to their job feeling like they need a vacation, or is spent slumped in front of the TV with a beer because the demands of the fascist organisation they work for has already burned them out. It's also no surprise that one's out-of-job options seem so limited when the emphasis is so heavily placed on activities that entail spending money.

The dream of spending endless days just eating, drinking, bonking and sleeping is old to say the least. It sounds almost exactly like the way medieval thinkers imagined heaven to be. It is hardly surprising if people equate heaven with endless selfish hedonism if they scarcely get to experience it in their daily life.

But we have to wonder if most people really would be satisfied doing only that, if we were not under constant pressure to become credit-card bingeing wage-slaves. What if we didn't have this general attitude that if you do not submit to a job then you deserve nothing no matter how much abundance we could technically bring about? What if society acknowledged that, actually, 'work' encompasses much more than merely wage-paying labour and that there are more personally and socially rewarding ways to use one's time other than going out and overspending?

In such a world, while some people might be content to just binge, booze and bonk, I think far more would prefer to devote time to self-improvement and to developing communities they care about. I think most people would work harder than before, because now all their efforts are going into things they really care about rather than their time being sacrificed to perpetuate a runaway consumerist system.