Do people enjoy work?

A simple thought experiment ought to resolve this once and for all.

If people enjoy work then why is the economy not set up so that we pay money to work and get paid to shop?

Suppose I want to work as a farmer. It is true that I would pay money to get trained. But that is a once off payment that i would expect to pay back from the income of being a farmer. Why not have it that I get paid by retailers to shop and with that money I then pay people to take my produce as a farmer. Or if I am an employee I get money for shopping and save up so that I can pay someone to work for them.

What would we do in a negative economy like this? Wouldn't we just shop and accumulate money and the economy would instantly grind to a halt. There is no desire to work in itself, there is only the desire to consume which drives the desire to work. The economy is set up like it is to harness the desire to consume to propel people into the right type of work. This is the purpose of money, in fact, to ensure that demand communicates with supply. Where language is spoken between people, money speaks between desires.

So it is a nonsense to think that we enjoy being employed.

However I have gone from one absudity to another. Everything we do is work and I keep "work" separate in meaning from "employed". We enjoy work. I enjoy playing football with friends and working hard in defence. I enjoyed spending the weekend again working for my mother at home. But "work" is not economic, it is just what humans do. It becomes economic when we work "for someone" and importantly within a property system, where what we do is owned by someone else. This changes the nature of work to employment and this is what we don't like. People who enjoy employment are either self-employed and make other people suffer employment, or they are delusioned.

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To recap the lengthy discussion and analysis of my experiences in my last, and maybe "last", employment: it was not my work that was ever an issue, it was that I didn't accept the authority of the company owners. This is the crux from which everything else follows. In human society it is the social structure which is paramount, above any business, productivity or profit. The quality os labour is subordinated to the framework of inequality between people. Nobody in a company "structure" (which is designed like this not because it is better for the company function, but because it makes sense to social creatures like humans) is ever going to demote themselves for the benefit of the company function. A bad manager is still a manager, it is their position in the system that counts not whether their work is "good" or "bad". It is this social feature of humans which makes the supposed logic of business and economics just a side issue.

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There is an interesting implication here. The standard economic undertanding of "wages" are as a reward for working. What has taxed this blog is the fact that most work doesn't get wages. Mothers most strikingly don't get paid for doing the most important job of raising the next generation. Where would all the economists and capitalists be without a market and workforce at all! But the previous entry seems to explain this and validate the separation of human action into that we might call work and that we call employment. It is an old discussion in the blog but seems to be concluding here. Work is a natural thing that humans indeed animal and nature does. We do work to find a mate. We do work to impress her, even to have sex is work. We do work to play sports. We do work to watch television. Even sleep is work. Work is present when we expend energy. It is an odd thing that we like to work. Our whole system is designed to do work. Cast a person onto a desert island and, if they know how, they will work to survive quite instinctively.

Why then given this natural propesity, and enjoyment of work, do we need wages then? It is not to compensate for working evidently! It is to compensate for working for someone. That is to say doing work which someone else owns. This is the definition of employment. Thus self-employment cannot exist because if we own our own labour then we are working rather than being employed and so we don't need compensation for what we do... we already own it.

How perverted it is then that within the Capitalism paradigm we can set up a company and buy all the hardware of that company so that we own every computer, desk and chair and yet we work as though it belonges to someone else so that "they" give us a wage.

What is happening here is that even when we are self-employed we are really working for our client who is paying us to work for them.

Which ever way you look at it no-one owns their own labour in Capitalism - so who pays the wages? It doesn't work!!

todo