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Nowadays, if one speaks of "wealth producers," people will automatically assume one is referring not to workers but to capitalists.

The United States plays a key role in our story. Nowhere was the principle that all wealth derives from labor more universally accepted as ordinary common sense, yet nowhere, too, was the counterattack against this common sense so calculated, so sustained, and so ultimately effective.

When... Lincoln delivered his first annual message to Congress in 1861, he included the following lines... "Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

in 1832—that is, 35 years before the appearance of Marx's Capital—we encounter warnings like the following: "That labor is the sole source of wealth seems to be a doctrine as dangerous as it is false, as it unhappily affords a handle to those who would represent all property as belonging to the working classes, and the share which is received by others as a robbery or fraud upon them."

everything that made rich and powerful people rich and powerful was, in fact, created by the efforts of the poor

if work is noble, then the most noble work should not be compensated, since it is obscene to put a price on something of such absolute value.

I'm wondering what his source is for the bit at the bottom of 226 where he talks about the guild structure breaking down and how that kept workers in a kind of perpetual adolescence.

Work, Aristotle insisted, in no sense makes you a better person; in fact, it makes you a worse one, since it takes up so much time, thus making it difficult to fulfill one's social and political obligations.

Yet ultimately, disciplined work under the direction of an adult head of a household was to transform the young into self-disciplines adults, at which point they would no longer have to work for others but would be self-employed.

Young people were expected to work for wages in the households of others because—unless one was intending to join the clergy and become a scholar—what we would consider paid work, and what we would consider education, were seen as largely the same thing, and both were a process of learning self-discipline, about "achieving mastery of one's baser desires" and learning how to behave like a proper self-contained adult.

(continued) and see that as the essence of "work," leaving to women most of the actual labor of tidying and maintaining things to make this illusion possible.

men like to conceive of themselves as doing socially or culturally what they like to think of women as doing naturally. "Production" is thus simultaneously a variation on a male fantasy of childbirth, and of the action of a male Creator God who similarly created the entire universe through the sheer power of his mind, just as men see themselves as creating the world from their minds and brawn (continued)

most work can't be said to "create" anything; most of it is a matter of maintaining and rearranging things. Consider a coffee cup. We "produce" it once. We wash it a thousand times. Even work we think of as "productive—growing potatoes, forging a shovel, assembling a computer—could just as easily be seen as tending, transforming, reshaping, and rearranging materials and elements that already exist.

[I chose not to include some of the sections I'd noted; they pretty much repeat other sections.]

if we were simply talking about supply and demand, it would be impossible to understand why American nurses are paid so much less than corporate lawyers, despite the fact that the united states is currently experiencing an acute shortage of trained nurses and a glut of law school graduates.

Very few economists have actually attempted to measure the overall social value of different professions; most would probably take the very idea as something of a fool's errand; but those who have tried tend to confirm that there is indeed an inverse relation between usefulness and pay.

Two years before, when garbage collectors had gone on strike for a mere ten days in New York, the city caved in to their demands because it had become uninhabitable.

in 1970 there was a six-month bank strike in Ireland; rather than the economy grinding to a halt as the organizers had anticipated, most people simply continued to write checks, which began to circulate as a form of currency, but otherwise carried on much as they had before.

at the time of writing, the Uber corporation, considered one of the world's most dynamic, has seen the resignation of not only its founder, but a host of other top executives, with the result that it "is currently operating without a CEO, COO, CFO, or CMO" – all without any apparent effect on day-to-day operations.

Often, when I present the concept of bullshit jobs in radical forums, someone awash in Marxist theory will instantly stand up to declare that I have it wrong: maybe some workers think their work is useless, but that work must be producing profits for capitalism.

[yes, but producing profit for capitalists does not make the work useful to the worker or to society]

it still doesn't answer the question of what it means to "improve people's lives," and on that, of course, rests everything.

most people seem to operate with a combination of ... positions: that when a good or service answers a demand or otherwise improved people's lives, then it can be considered genuinely valuable, but when it merely serves to create demand, either by making people feel they are fat and ugly, or luring them into debt and then charging interest, it is not.

(oops)

Rupert felt that most bank employees were in no sense idling about; actually, he felt most worked quite hard; only all their labor was ultimately accomplishing, in his estimation, was to come up with clever ways to appropriate the fruits of the REAL labor done by others.

"the idea that the market can undervalue or overvalue things has been with us for a very long time. It's still an inherent part of our common sense, otherwise it would be impossible for anyone to ever say they were ripped off or got an especially good deal"

In the Middle Ages, this was seen explicitly as a moral question: How can one determine the "just price" of a commodity? If a merchant raised prices during wartime, at what point was he paying himself legitimate hazard pay, and at what point was he just gouging?

[This seems particularly relevant in 2020.]

"TV used to be commissioned by one channel controller who would ask producers he liked to make whatever shows they wanted... I have not gotten a show sold for four years. Not because we are particularly bad but because of nepotism and politics."

(me: doesn't the "used to be" flat out describe nepotism and politics also???)

in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, there was a tacit understanding in much of the industrialized world that if productivity in a certain enterprise improved, a certain share of the increased profits would be redistributed to the workers in the form of improved wages and benefits. Since the 80s, this is no longer the case.

Industrial capitalism obviously changed all that, and the rise of managerialism in the twentieth century drove the process even further; but rather than this in any sense reversing under financialized capitalism, the situation has actually worsened.

Anyone whose work was based on some kind of specialized knowledge, whether lace makers, wheelwrights... was expected to collectively regulate their own affairs... at the very least, a medieval sword smith or soap maker could go about his work in the confidence that he would never have anyone who was not himself a sword smith or a soap maker telling him he was not going about it correctly.

GM, for example, makes its money not from selling cars but rather from interest collected on auto loans.