[VIDEO] Recent Video Being Circulated as an Attack on Self-Ownership / Libertarianism

[Sentient Void]

YouTube - Work Sucks! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ArkJmUOIqM&feature=player_embedded#at=94)

A friend who I've been talking to about self-ownership, libertarian philosophy, etc - sent this to me feeling it was a refutation or a negative against concepts of self-ownership.

My response:


I always laugh at the Orwellian logic these socialists (this guy is a socialist, btw, since he continues to refer specifically to labor being the center of all things) use that self-ownership = slavery.

Most of his arguments are non sequitor logical fallacies, and his words and images used are based on *pure* emotionalism and not much of any real system of how society, production and wealth creation should be organized.

He's not even really offering any alternative, he's just complaining. Much of what he's railing against is a limitation of technology, not a limitation of the philosophy of liberty. If he opens his eyes, he'll see that increasing amounts of mundane repetitive tasks *are* being automated by computers and machines. Only capitalism and liberty can most effectively and quickly move us towards such automation (there is no better system for it, and I ask anyone to disprove this). While he rails against how we work, people are living longer, healthier, more productive lives than at any time during history, which has led to a much higher standard of living than ever before. Most of human history has been spent in squalor and misery and under tyrants where people have had little control over their lives, or were always fighting merely to survive. And although we are nowhere near true liberty yet, great strides have been made in the past few hundred years (with some setbacks obviously).

Also, a good amount else of what he's railing against is due to distortions in the marketplace, and corporatism - which is another form of statism, the antithesis of libertarian philosophy. The State is what hinders innovation and social, economic and technological progression through it's expropriations of wealth (taxes), and regulation that destroys wealth creation.

he also makes the fallacious mistake that money = wealth. And 'lower nominal wages' = lower wealth, or lower standard of living. This is not the case. Wealth creation comes from savings and production, not from money. Look at Zimbabwe, they print tons and tons of money, and people make billions of Zimbabwean dollars per year, but their standard of living is shit. Our standard of living is higher simply because we produce and save (forego consumption) more than others. Nominal wages are meaningless when compared to what is actually produced in an economy.

And how could he possibly claim that we shouldn't own ourselves? How can anyone claim such a thing? Either we individually own ourselves (libertarianism), one group owns another group (democracy, monarchy, etc), or everyone owns eachother (communism).

Which do you think this guy supports? Which one do you think is the most moral? He can dress it up all he wants with nice-sounding sentences, but ultimately he's a communist.

Any additional thoughts / opinions?

[silverhandorder]

I couldn't watch it past 20 seconds. It just makes no sense. Seems like a cheap play on words. Good job with the response btw.

[bchavez]

the dumb f*ck in the video lacks common sense....

saying workers are "LOCKED" in the system.

Well, if you don't like your job, get a new one? or create your own business? duh.

That's what I did, I didn't want to go into the "corporate world", so I made my own business. Now I don't live like that. Simple.

[Kregisen]

More stuff in the video was false than true.....it was a ridiculous assessment, and just a rant on the cons of life without any solution.

[Sentient Void]

This is the essay he said inspired him to do the video, and the philosophy / response proposed:

http://www.primitivism.com/abolition.htm

[AMBurns]

That was one of the most evil things I've ever seen. Immoral with full knowledge of it's immorality, and detriment to humanity.

[MyLibertyStuff]

Yea I literally couldnt watch for more than 45 seconds...

[Reason]

seems like the video just shows a lot of shitty things and then misattributes the causes

[Vessol]

Glanced at the comments. The guy who made this or a lot of the commentators at least are part of the "Zeitgeist movement", which is a modern NeoCommunist movement.

It's a shame, I partially attribute my "awakening" to the two Zeitgeist movies.

I can't help but imagine that the maker of this video is a 20-something year old college graduate with a degree in the arts who is sore that he can't get a real job and has to work at mcdonalds all day. He then goes home and watches Fight Club every night, somehow thinking that Tyler Durden is a modern prophet instead of an internal antagonist that he is meant to be to the narrator.

[mczerone]

Okay, made it through a whole minute before I had to stop and critique.

He uses a false analogy to say "you don't own your labor, you are your labor." In itself this statement isn't patently wrong, but it doesn't recognize that there is a mind/body dichotomy wherein one part of your "self" must make decisions and direct the other part of your "self" in the physical world to act to achieve goals as determined by the first part.

There is a great philosophical conundrum to deal with here, but it is not whether you own your labor. It is: do you own your consciousness? Do you have the power to direct your thoughts, or are your thoughts somehow distinct from your will? Do you have will at all?

But without going into those lines of argument, and accepting that you have some freedom of choice (ontologically, at least, in the framework of Sartre), then this free-will is the owner of your physical body. It can choose how to direct your resources, whether to stay in bed or to get up and use your labor, your actions, in some manner.

He makes the related statements that "you are not separable from your labor", and "your labor is your self". There is an element of truth to these things, even from a recognition of self ownership. We can reassert these statements so that they are better defined, and not susceptible to distortion based on the particular use of the term "labor", respectively: "Your actions can never be directed by another, you always control the movements of your body" and "You cannot act without being one with your consciousness." These two phrasings are highly synonymous with the above, yet allow us to distinguish between our labor as either our chosen actions or our expected result from those actions. The former we may only agree by contract to direct in certain manners, pledging to be liable for our own breach, but is unalienable; the latter we may completely disown, sell, or otherwise alienate.

Then he goes on to say that accepting self-ownership leads to social alienation and regimentation - BY USING VISUALS TAKEN FROM COLLECTIVES AND NON-SELF OWNERSHIP SOCIETIES. Even in the verbal argument he makes, he goes from an assumption of self-ownership into a complete contradiction of "others buying and selling you." At this point he is no longer even talking about self ownership societies, but of societies that have already rejected self-ownership.

(I think that this misattribution of causal relationship that says that one thing that you have accepted as "bad" is related to another thing you have accepted as "bad" is very common in people. But that's a psychology question.)

On to minute 2...

[NYgs23]

You didn't need to write all that. All you had to say was, "Except you can quit."

[mczerone]

Okay - minute 2:

Frederick Taylor and the productivity of the workplace. I don't want to write another 6 essays, so I'll try to make this quick:

How dare a manager try to increase productivity! How dare he fire people for not following his rules on his property! To argue against these points is to deny the capital owner his own self-ownership. Further, is he really trying to say that people should be inefficient in what they do?

Next, he blames self-ownership on the development of unfulfilling unskilled labor. This might be true, but so what? If they can pay the employees enough to make them choose to work there, it is de facto "fulfilling". But if they have some control over where people can work, or if there is some state-sponsored union mandating a type of work and level of pay, then there is no self-ownership.

He says that people's wages didn't go up, or even fell! Again - so what? The goods being made available to them through the division of labor became enormously cheaper, their standards of living rose, and they didn't have to spend as much on getting the essentials. They didn't have a nominal wage increase, but they could devote more money on luxuries and investments.

Finally he says that self-ownership and productivity requirements leads to, horror of horrors, modern fast-food work. Well guess what: fast food workers are taught to work as a team, to rotate stations, and to help customers get what they need. It sounds to me like this guy worked in a restaurant and had a particularly bad time. Maybe if he didn't spend all day trying to incite the proletariat he could have focused on contributing and being a nice guy - maybe moved up to management or gotten a good recommendation letter for a new job.

And there's 6 minutes left...

[mczerone]

Minute 3:

Office Space was a great movie. Does he ever stop to think that maybe the culture of Initech is one of the reasons that they had productivity experts coming in, and there was constant chatter of the company being sold?

And he says that the professional world is filled with these jobs. This is debatable, as while this may be the "office" culture there is still a wide sector of service industries that hardly use any offices. And what is their purpose if they aren't productive? Could it be gov't regulation imposing a non-self-ownership decree that each industry needs voluminous record keeping and reporting?

Schooling - false inspirations and further regimentation. The Federal gov't is responsible for this mess. It is explicitly designed to develop little factory drones, all the while lying to the students by telling them they can have whatever they want if they only get the right slip of paper at the end.

It is also the federal gov't pushing the use of loans to go to college without any regard for if the market needs people to have these educations. Again, self-ownership is not even in the ballpark for having caused this unfortunate state of affairs.

"This isn't living, this is dying." Indeed, and isn't he really seeking self-ownership when he desires to escape this?

[mczerone]

minute 4:

best refuted by:

You didn't need to write all that. All you had to say was, "Except you can quit."

The big quote at the end of this minute saying the not even Nero or others could do this to people is patently false: they all had slaves. Certainly being subjected to conditions to earn a wage is better than slavery, is it not?

[mczerone]

Minute 5: more assaults on the worst aspects of "the workplace". I'm sorry, but these "repetitive strain disorders" and "strange spinal problems" are still preferable to dying of malnutrition at 30 years, or of disease or exposure because you couldn't provide the basic hygiene and protections of life. The historical existence of man was not what this guy thinks it was.

A day's work only leaves one drained if he is not a self-owner. I have a complete psychological profile of this guy, he's sad and broken, and he feels that he could run things better. He sees self-ownership as an obstacle to implementing his own plans on everyone. He portrays self-ownership as leading to these things he has been hurt by: schools, jobs, other people. But not only are these things not the product of self ownership, but to really refute self-ownership he would need to impose those very conditions on everyone else: the fact that they are just cogs in his machine, that they have no incentive to produce to meet other's goals, that mid-level managers of his machine need to stamp out individualization, etc.

[mczerone]

Rest of video:

Summarized as: People can't excuse the workplace because it's voluntary, we need to have workers think and thinkers work, we need to produce technology for the betterment of people, not for the betterment of the market.

First, if he thinks he can bring a better workplace into being that better satisfies his workers, what's stopping him? Could it be the natural condition of scarcity? That people cannot arbitrarily to whatever they wish because they are limited by the physical world? The market is what is used to decide what actions work and which don't. The monetary returns are a signal that a firm is treating their employees (he never uses this word, he always says "workers") in the best manner practicable. If anyone could treat them better and get the same or better results with similar resources, they would quickly become the norm.

And who is this "we"? "we" need to create technology? How can this be done as a "we"? Only individuals develop technologies, only individuals value technology. Individuals have different wants and needs, and no collective can guess what single thing best meets all of these demands. If he can do this, he should. We self-ownership advocates aren't stopping him, and may even support him if he brings us a workplace or a technology that any of us find desirable.

Finally, how come he never mentions the workplaces of Google or Yahoo, or of the individually owned party store, or of charity organizations? These workplaces tend to be very liberal - do what you want, show up when you want, get paid to the extent that you help or get the personal returns or seek by means of your helping. Certainly there are areas of the workplace that are more imposing than others, but how can anyone ever decide if they are desirable or not except through market competition?

If his ideas are imposed onto all society, and he sees the level of "freedom" that he thinks people need in their life - how does he know if it still not enough imposition, or if it is too much, or if it overlooks certain aspects of well being in favor of others? To assert that his solution needs to be imposed and insulated from the free-market forces of self-ownership is to directly admit that some people would be better off in life without such imposition.

[Sentient Void]

A wonderful, minute-by-minute complete refutation of pretty much every part of this guy's bullshit. Easily better than mine in the OP, I think.

Thank you for that, mczerone. You are a true defender of liberty. You should e-mail him, as well.

+rep

[Sentient Void]

Glanced at the comments. The guy who made this or a lot of the commentators at least are part of the "Zeitgeist movement", which is a modern NeoCommunist movement.

It's a shame, I partially attribute my "awakening" to the two Zeitgeist movies.

I can't help but imagine that the maker of this video is a 20-something year old college graduate with a degree in the arts who is sore that he can't get a real job and has to work at mcdonalds all day. He then goes home and watches Fight Club every night, somehow thinking that Tyler Durden is a modern prophet instead of an internal antagonist that he is meant to be to the narrator.

You know what, though - Fight Club was (and still is) one of my most favorite movies of all time. And Zeitgeist is the vid that really got me thinking about the world and the system around me before I heard about Ron Paul and began to question more.

Interestingly enough, as blatantly primitivist and anti-capitalist and anti-property Fight Club is, and as neoCommunist Zeitgeist (and especially the sequal and the dumbass Venus Project) is, I became a hardcore propertarian / libertarian anarcho-capitalist. How the hell did that happen?

[Heimdallr]

http://hatshrapnel.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/crying_baby.jpg

[ivflight]

Maybe someone can help me with a source on this, but I'm pretty sure I heard somewhere that after slavery was abolished in the states, the slaves didn't even want to work at their old jobs for double what they were paid as slaves (some slaves were paid). This should be good experimental proof that capitalism is very different than slavery when it comes to acting freely.

[mczerone]

This is the essay he said inspired him to do the video, and the philosophy / response proposed:

http://www.primitivism.com/abolition.htm

That whole site is nothing but crankish verbal masturbation with nary a suggestion for prosperous policy nor a single non-contradicted coherent philosophical position. They write essays on how they want to do away with art, but decorate their site with art. They disdain technology, but have a webpage. They want to do away with work, but merely by rebranding it as play.

I hope the cadre of authors who published there have moved to the uninhabited backwoods and are shitting in a hole next to their unpublished manuscripts that now serve merely as fiber in their malnourished diet.

[Sentient Void]

That whole site is nothing but crankish verbal masturbation with nary a suggestion for prosperous policy nor a single non-contradicted coherent philosophical position. They write essays on how they want to do away with art, but decorate their site with art. They disdain technology, but have a webpage. They want to do away with work, but merely by rebranding it as play.

I hope the cadre of authors who published there have moved to the uninhabited backwoods and are shitting in a hole next to their unpublished manuscripts that now serve merely as fiber in their malnourished diet.

+rep & <3