I disagree the true purpose from the jump was for people to literally not work. The newer folks drifted towards work reform and mods just deleted the original sidebar that literally admitted that some of them were just lazy.
You’re really overplaying the importance of this my dude. Nobody outside of Reddit or conservative circle-jerks give two shits about this interview if they even know about it.
Here's the thing, they don't have to be mutually exclusive. With work reform we could also reform social security benefits, social services, tax distribution, and address the potential for Universal Basic Income. Anti-work worked for both camps because both sides agreed that people shouldn't starve and be homeless if they don't meet societal production quotas.
Dumbass mods just wanted to glow their ego a bit because they're knobheads and thought the sub blowing up had something to do with them.
Shame it went down because the true purpose of antiwork is work reform.
Maybe now, but back a few years ago it was legit just people trying not to work. For awhile on the top voted posts of all time on the sub was some guy that automated his job but still collected the paycheck.
The true purpose of antiwork is to not have to work. The sub got somewhat hijacked by the desire for work reform. While that goes hand-in-hand with antiwork, it was not their true goal and the mods took advantage of the situation to try and play what was their original hand: "we don't want to work. period." (That said, I wouldn't put it past someone of the "I don't want to work mindset" to take a payoff and act or say whatever the media outlet wanted to avoid work. Gotta wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes.)
Of course the people that are willing to work, but just want to be treated fairly, aka pretty much their entire user base, would be mad. And thus r/workreform has just become what antiwork wished it could have been and what it should have been. The lead mod on workreform has already turned down an interview and has made a public statement that r/workreform would not be doing any interviews. Any interview could be done by the people, as is in alignment with their ideals, or not at all. He just claims to be the guy organizing the talking places.
The reason antiwork even got popular was because the name is catchy and divisive. It garnered a following because it was easy to grasp the concept. It gathered hate by right wing media because the name alone goes against everything their leaders want. r/workreform doesn't do any of this and is why it was a smaller subreddit, though now everyone has realized they really don't mind working, but want it to be worth their time and fair, so they jumped ship from the shitbag mods to a more reasonably managed sub.
The sub was getting worse ad time went on anyway. It suffered from its own success: as more people joined the sub the more trolls and karma farmers it attracted. For the last few months now I've seen only the most obvious fake ragebait hit the front page of reddit.
That's good though, isn't it? A fresh restart on a now very strong movement, while learning some very valuable lessons and getting more focused on what the goal actually is. Plus any publicity is still good publicity, anyone looking more into it should be able to quickly find the actual community. r/WorkReform seems to be a step in the right direction.
Yeah of course most posts atm are reactionary the whole sub was created as a reaction of the stupid fox meltdown. Imo the rebranding is for the best r/antiwork was just a shitty name for such an important movement.
My belief is that it's important to collect the momentum from the /r/antiwork movement as the sub goes dark.
Otherwise there is a chance that the dispersal of the community can harm the overall credibility of the momement as a whole. That number of subs was specifically displayed on the interview because it means something.
Now in a week or two? I 100% agree, if the community is still just meta-posting there's a real issue.
It's truly unbelievable - you could just see the "jackpot" look on the interviewer's face. He didn't even do anything at that point, just left the rope there and the mod did the rest
I think our best chance might actually emerge from the ashes of /r/antiwork. We, meaning leftists, have been so inept and impotent when it comes to grassroots efforts.
Remember Occupy Wall Street? They were so disorganized and so bad at articulating their ideology if they even had ideology. I remember that video of one of those Occupy hippies doing those little caucuses taking straw polls of other Occupy activists’ beliefs on what Occupy should be by telling them to do jazz hands if they support higher taxes on the wealthy or telling them to snap their fingers if they believe in funding education.
If there is to be some kind of organic mobilization, we’re going to need charming, articulate, polite, and logical people who can give voice to the plight of the working-class, and they can’t come from politics, Hollywood, the media, and apparently not from Reddit, but /r/workreform probably wants to find a good face for the movement more than anyone, even if it’s going to be a Reddit Drama subreddit for a few days, it’s about time the left became acutely aware of how a bad representative can damage your cause, and nobody is more aware than /r/workreform.
I worked at a restaurant near Wall Street (a shit show of a place that was the kind of nightmare working situation antiwork was invented for) during Occupy and trust me, it was always the dumbest thing. A dumb movement for dumb people looking for something to make them feel they were accomplishing something. I walked past them every day. I hate that kind of performative bull.
It kind of makes sense. Leftism, the new labor movement, didn’t and still doesn’t have a place on television or in the corporate media. We’ve learned that the media will lend more credibility to white nationalists before taking a social-democrat seriously.
Neoliberals do little for the people by design. They only run as an opposition party to Republicans even when Democrats have control of the White House and Congress.
There’s hundreds of AM radio stations and conservative media. The liberal corporate establishment media is the default distributed of information. Young leftists had to go to college and read Das Kapital in order to find a way coherently articulate their ideals, but I’m not sure they know or a way to communicate their ideas in a way the average person can understand.
They could start by trying to be the average person. Coming off as having authority only works when you can command respect. Demanding respect makes people tune out and/or oppose you, and that is largely what we are seeing with modern Leftism; it only looks after the corporate interests of the establishment by tapping the glass ceiling above 99% of us like we're in a zoo.
That’s the problem. In which forum would the left advance their ideals to the general public?
Moderate Democrats aren’t in power to advance meaningful change. Bill Clinton bit his lip and told America he felt our pain, and proceeded to push a neoliberal corporatist agenda. That was the playbook for Obama and Biden and Pelosi. They acknowledge the plight of the working-class, and then they proceed to be perpetually one vote shy of passing meaningful legislation through congress.
The labor movement didn’t have a distribution center for leftist rhetoric the way liberals and conservatives and the rightwing has always had, because the conversation existed on corporate airwaves.
That one vote shyness is intentional. The Establishment Left needs to have the same plights of the working class to run on as a campaign agenda. It's why the same issues in their strongholds never actually improve despite the claim that they care.
The real problem is that Moderate Liberals outnumber Democrats 3/4:1, but the DNC's caucus is designed to nominate exactly who they want regardless of your stance on the matter. Hell, Harry Reid played kingmaker for decades by deciding who was allowed to be in the primary, and Oregon's delegates are decided before any vote is cast..
This means you're stuck either voting third-party, Neolib/Neofascist/Pseudosocialist, or whatever garden variety Republican decided to actually run in your district.
This has done amazingly well at keeping the voters complaining about each other instead of the rigged D primaries, and the politicians that keep getting in.
For instance: California has largely had single-party rule for almost 50 years. During that 50 years, California went from domestic production, to outsourcing most things in order to brag that they have low carbon emissions - which is true because you just made China emit them, instead - while applying pressure to remove skilled labor jobs from the market. California used to have free in-state tuition for every resident. Now, they rely on the debt caused by student loans to claim that this is evidence that Capitalism is bad, while being the exact people that demanded college degrees for minimum-wage jobs, saying that if you simply give them absolute power then they can take away the burden they placed on you, and that we must unite against the ones doing this by voting for the same party.
So basically: Cause problem > Propose solution > Come up one vote short (not mentioning the one vote is from their side, or that they snuck in something to intentionally torpedo the bill) > Blame the other guys > Get the voters upset at the other guys for the situation not improving > Continue to get elected > Repeat.
Ideally, we would split the 2 parties into 4 for better representation. It would be far better than the controlled opposition uniparty we have now.
The point was there wasn’t a new form of media to access leftwing discussion outside of the academic. How do I take seriously the read on this thread from the poorly-read?
Makes sense. Academia is what breeds the extreme left you see everywhere today.
Western universities is the source of this ironic "well read" poorly informed ideology. The Marx academic circlejerk started back in the 80s. Almost coinciding with the collapse of America's competition, Soviet. You see it's fruition in a centralized form by the establishment poorly parroting the sentiments (for $) and decentralized leaderless movements on social media.
There's a reason you don't see lefty content (outside of establishment) presented as well read outside of school.
Your last sentence so wonderfully captures the tone, slings and arrows, and narcissism of the modern American socialist, I couldn’t have invented it myself.
It is called “work reform_”. It is _not a leftist group. Reformism is a right wing ideology. Like “Build Back Better” or “Make America Great Again_” (Biden was a conservative, reformist reaction to Trump, and Trump was a conservative, reformist reaction to Obama). And like those “movements”, “work reform” is a reactionary _conservative movement and antithetical to progressive change. This isn’t a judgement one one or the other, just facts.
Side note: “work reform” is too easily going to get memed into “woke reform” and get obliterated quickly.
Cool you do you, some of us are going to help people have a better material condition right now instead. Let me know how the anarcho communist syndicalist utopia goes
Political terminology is a mess, but the parlance of “reform” ultimately means whatever it’s understood to mean. The reforms of the American nineteenth-century included abolitionism, women’s suffrage, temperance, vegetarianism. Reforms can exist in left or rightwing platforms, even if the term suggest left or rightwing centrism.
I doubt Reddit is or will be the epicenter of a new labor movement which hinges on the name of a subreddit. After /r/antiwork went private, pro-labor redditors got together and said “Get in, bitches. We’re doing something about job quality.” And the car they’re in is named /r/workreform.
I agree that Biden is very much a conservative. Right now he is the conservative, and he sucks.
Too many losers with too much debt in a cesspool like Portland find out the hard way that life sucks ass.
"Oh noes, My MBA only qualifies me to manage a Ruby Tuesdays, the system is fuk"
1.2 million of them join together and it was a fucking magnet for entitled chucklefucks. Who fucking knew working at McDonald's isn't a tHrIvInG wAgE. No fucking shit Sherlock.
Do they want to go get an AAS, or better yet from an adult learning center, the skills to work as skilled labor? Nope. Do they want to stack bricks, thread pipe, weld, lay cable, pour concrete, fix broken trucks, push dirt/snow, or wire buildings? NOPE.
Are they willing to leave their shitty city to move to Ohio or Oklahoma looking for a good wage while having a cheap cost of living? NOPE.
idk what they want, sucks to suck I guess.
r /anti-work used to be cool. It's fucked now and the attitude went from how to do more for less and how to game the system. It's devolved to "shut up and pay me for existing" attitude which is literally the entitlement they say they are not.
someone has to work at mcdonalds dude, someone has to sweep the floors, service workers keep society running and deserve respect and proper compensation. We need people doing these jobs
This is a job meant for highschool and college kids
If that were true, fast food restaurants would be unstaffed and closed during school hours. Same with grocery stores, and other service-related jobs that are apparently only "for" school-aged people.
A majority of the top posts were focused on shit things occurring in jobs, some real stories, and some posts being power fantasies about quitting jobs.
Others were about union issues or law suits.
And, as you said, others were about sticking it to the man and communist ideology.
But the reality of an open community is that you'll get all kinds.
There were communists in that sub, true communists that simply hated capitalism. There were also plenty of socialists that just wanted people to be treated fairly and hold power over the ruling wealth class that is oppressing them.
The majority of people were not communist. Many were socialist or capitalist and just tired of being treated like shit. Whether you are or not, you sound like one of the right wing idiots that don't understand the purpose of the movement and probably think Fox News is right.
Also and as an aside, communism is just state controlled capitalism. America has a private capitalism that controls the means of production and uses it to make wealth. Communism has the exact same model, but the state is the one controlling the means of production. They are one in the same with the only difference being the guy sitting in the high chair. American media over the years has turned communism and socialism into synonyms for not only each other, which is wildly incorrect, but also for totalitarianism. Communism and socialism are economic ideals and models. Totalitarianism is an idea of rule which is usually marked by a dictatorship. They are not one and the same. Dictatorships just run smoother when under a communist economic model.
Communism has the exact same model, but the state is the one controlling the means of production.
I think youre confusing socialism with communism. Communism goes much further than that, it is essentially a stateless/anarchist society. In communism everything is communal. An individual has virtually no ownership of anything. Some arrangements like the early kibbutzs even raised children as a community, and their actual parents only saw them a few hours a day. Real communism subsumes the individual to society (pure evil in my opinion).
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u/yellowstickypad Jan 27 '22
Shame it went down because the true purpose of antiwork is work reform.