One thing the certain boomer & capitalist genre of money saving advice for millennials, and the same kind of critiques of expenditures millennials & left twitters themselves make, is their agreement that moralizing people’s consumption choices is a worthwhile thing to do lol

Beyond the trite phrasing, what I mean is, both of them make equally silly moralizations of people’s consumption & service expenditures, that ignore equity, time, space, psychological, marginal, and constraint issues

The reasons people order out, go to restaurants, hire cleaning services, use ride share apps, get coffees, but luxuries, heck even the reasons they do drugs or pay for nudes are largely the same, whether someone is rich or poor.

Ultimately it’s to save time, effort, reduce stress, have a small enjoyment in an otherwise shitty world, get a small simulated pleasure in an otherwise droll life, socialize, fit different things in their day, clean & prevent messes, and so on.

Also, re: money, given that time represents foregone money, Inasmuch as one could have spent that time working (Altho there’s a limit to how far this principle can go), anything time saving is money saving.

That’s why rich people pay for every single service imaginable, and for every thing they can offload their daily tasks on to. Since their hourly income amounts to, idk, $1000 or something, paying people. $900 /hr to do everything, makes sense

The other part of this is that high earning people, especially if they’re high earning professionals, managers, petty boug, and the like, work absurdly long hours.

The Dickensian image of the long hours toiling laborer and the frivolous wealthy person, is more or less no longer true for The Global North & has been inverted except for several key exceptions.

So, for example, most public service officials, and industrial laborers work fixed hours weekly, with good benefits & protections. The exceptions to this are those like teachers, nurses & cops who are effectively on call or have to bring their work home.

I’m not making a point about effort or ease—cops will get paid double over time to sit in a car on the side of the highway, retire after 20 years and all their kids go to college. Teachers & nurses have non stop high stress jobs.

The other big exception are the extractive industries. Agricultural workers, whether temporary or the petty boug farmers work constant hours. Oil workers & miners also work long hours, tho US oil workers are more akin to tradesmen & independent contractors & get a ton of money.

While those working in the FIRE (finance) l sector, in professional, managerial, teaching, contracting, white collar, petty boug, petty rentier, haute capitalists, politicians, researchers, professors etc often work >80 hours weeks.

Many of them work in high comfort conditions, mixed activity (i.e. consumption & socialization while they work), or do what’s called ‘bullshit jobs’ but the point is the same either way.

At the other end, among the average laborer outside industry, professions, etc, including to an extent tradesmen, Altho they more resemble the above, among the lumpen, and others one sees a bifurcation into two strata.

At the one end are the chronically under-, marginally attached, un- and or part time employed, who end up working inconsistent and short weeks, or alternate between intense periods and then no work at all, & are remunerated incredibly poorly or not at all.

At the other end, are those like tradesmen, ride share drivers, cleaning services, people working in service, food & retail industries full time, assistants etc, who work long, often doubled shifts, albeit precariously & not protected by formal contract.

Then you have those who get the worst of both worlds, who work several part time & precarious gigs often back to back, so they have the strain, uncertainty & low wages of the former with the lack of benefits & protectiond etc of the latter.

This isn’t including those highly varied but related in this one aspect that go under the headings of informal, under the table, black market, reproductive, care, home, supplemental, volunteer, intern, prison, criminal, self employed, creative, etc work.

Drug dealers, panhandlers, homeless people doing informal odd jobs, sex workers, and so on, have a job profile that resembles the case I said above of the combo of worst of both worlds, sporadic, uncertain, on call hours, with low benefits, protections, etc.

Everyone likes to make fun of artists, writers, creatives, professors, teachers, scholars, researchers, students, crafts people, actors, sports players, entertainers, etc, but they often similarly functionally have no difference between their work & non work lives.

And this doesn’t yet include all the work people have to do at home taking care of families, cooking, cleaning, raising kids, doing laundry, commuting, and so on. Which highly varies from those that do it constantly under high stress with no pay to those who don’t do it all.

And then you have the categories of unpaid or very low paid work or work meant to be paid in ancillary benefits , which bifurcates along the lines of voluntary & not, community & individual, formal & informal, fiduciary & instrumental.

For example, we don’t normally think of student work. internships, volunteering, community art centers, supplemental unstated ‘expected’ work at home, & so on, as being in the same rubric, but from the perspective of capital they share key features.

Namely, capital treats them as sources of free labor, and or as sources of *consumption*, they’re not particularly efficient, and they’re usually done instrumentally to achieve non material benefits.

Another category that bears some similarities that has gone thru several distinct phases is convict, penal, compulsory, corvee, prison, probationary, and related work.

In its first phase, corvee, convict & prison labor was often just a substitute for taxes, fines & interest, a way to subsidize colonialism, or a way to force industrial labor for the state or super exploitative capitalist industries. Think French & British versions.

In Americas, the empires, and the settler colonies, this took a particularly twisted form as a way to create or control colonies & slaves and later to force de jure emancipated slaves & colonial subjects into de facto unfree again.

With the rise of reform movement, progressivism, and then later civil rights & social movements, we can say from the early 1900s to the 70s & 80s it took a different form altogether, first only for white prisoners then everyonez

This was where it was used as a sentence itself or as a way to take time off of a sentence. It earned prisoners privileges, allowed them time outside of the prison, kept them away from the rest, paid a little, & let them occupy their time & learn or use a skill.

What unites all these three forms of prison labor, is that they’re usually not that much less efficient than their free form (or at least produce much more than they pay & receive). The first & third version also were done in lieu of taxes, fines, fees, prison time & so on.

In the 70s & 80s there began a scale back of this, and with tough on crime laws, services like education, ‘volunteering’ & prison employment were either scaled back entirely or had their relative benefits & substitution effects removed.

Of course, this meant that the rate at which people would opt for them cratered, as did their productivity. And so the rise of the contemporary form of prison & convict labor combined the various features of the previous three.

You see, with the exception of necessary but dangerous or unsavory jobs, ranging from the more mild sanitation to the obscene example of convict fire fighters, prison labor ceased to be ‘efficient’, yet also often became compulsory.

For example, contemporary prison workers in many services, crafts, industries, agriculture, production, textiles, and so on, are vastly less efficient than normal workers (i mean if you’re being compelled for little pay & no reward in horrible conditions, would you work hard?)

So much so that often they’re actually more costly than what they produce or replace, &/or their gains in cost savings are less than their losses in quality & functionality. Capitalists don’t like using prison labor unless they’re paid, subsidized or otherwise benefited to do so

The private prison companies obviously profit, as do those like COs & so on who get paid for this stuff, but the state itself, obviously the workers, & absent generous tax breaks, subsidies & benefits, the capitalists who employ them, take massive losses here.

Even private prison companies are only profitable because of generous subsidies, tax breaks, contracts, & guarantee customers. Indeed, much of the private prison industry exists as effectively a money laundering, influence generating, & tax break/subsidy generation.

If it’s unclear why I seemingly pivoted from discussions of consumption & services & the moralizations thereof, to the structure of employment & occupations, it is because, for the purposes of my argument, they share many relative features.

They are sites of super exploitation, they often double as consumption, services & employment, They’re places where tasks are offloaded & allocates oitside formal markets, they involve fundamentally the trade off of time & so on,

They also happen to be the things about which that those leftists, without a rigorous basis in class analysis & social science, moralize & prognosticate without much basis, and in a pique in disproportion to their realities on the ground.

I’ve done threads elsewhere on the issues with the notion of the way the PMC is used, on how the traditional image of the industrial proletariat labor doesn’t exist in the US or abroad, & how most people in the global north fit the definition of petty boug & labor aristocrat

I’ll link to those, but basically they center on the fact that occupation, sector, & firm, are different, productive/unproductive & value are not moral categories, and class is different from income, wealth, & aesthetic markers

This is a thread & meta thread basically on the decline in the image of the traditional industrial proletariat. https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1182454736794083330?s=21 https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1182454736794083330

The first point is that there are far more bourgeois, petty bourgeois, labor aristocrats, professionals, managers, government workers, high earning workers of other kinds, and so on than people realize, globally

The second point is that what Marx calls ‘unproductive’ labor—either unproductive sectors & firms (with high productive & unproductive laborers), or unproductive laborers in productive sectors, are the bulk of output globally & have been for a while

The third point, is that the intersections of gender, sexuality, disability, race, nationality, citizenship, neurodivergence, mental health, age, criminality, and so on, are vastly more important than people realize

The fourth is that the bulk of labor, capital, and GDP, and at an incesssing rate, is in services, logistics, consumption, transport, government, military, destructive, social control, guard, metrical, financial & other areas.

Basically,as such,the ‘productive’ sectors,industry, &esxttaction are the vast minority of GDP & labor globally,each have a vast amount of unproductive labor as part of them, & many of them are either worked by lumpen proletariats or professionals, petty boug or labor aristocrats

The proletariat globally is primarily the service & informal proletariat in ‘unproductive’ industries is now the bulwark of women in the global south, often informally, with dependents & disabilities, & so on.

The worker banging in industrial steel is something like only 10% of the world, & the portion of that exclusively proletarian is even smaller, while the proportion that’s able bodied, let alone a man or white is like 3% of the world population.

This thread is the flip side of this. The point here is simple. When you moralize class & conflate class & income you run into the problem—most people, even low earning ones, in the Gloval North are technically petty boug capitalists https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1183493749927755776?s=21 https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1183493749927755776

While many of the highest earning people in the global north are technically just laborers! Therefore you get a situation where there are high earning laborers & low earning petty bourgeois. Which shows why aestheticizing, moralizing & conflating with income is silly.

Here’s a thread I did on the house cleaner discourse all together (and hopefully by citing this one, with the other two, it’s now clear why i linked the consumption & labor stuff the way I did) https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1260865831166189569?s=21 https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1260865831166189569