Many people who worked from home would agree that virtually the same action can be work or play depending on a few factors. During the pandemic, it was amusing to me that I'd put away the laptop of play and take out the laptop of work. I'd be sitting in the same exact position, doing materially similar things, but one is relaxing and the other is stressful.
At first glance, one of the things that makes it work is that you're choosing to do it rather than being forced to do it.
It isn't just about being forced, though. It's about there being pressure doing it. I like doing stuff with my hands and working on projects. My feed has all kinds of things I've done for fun. But if I fail at those things (and it happens a lot), It doesn't really matter. There's no negative consequence if I fail on my projects, or if I drop them entirely either temporarily or permanently.
The play circuit in our brains depends on there being low real-world stakes to the game. You can get two mice in the lab, and they can play fight and they love to do that and will constantly seek it out, but get another two mice in the lab who are fighting over resources or a mate and they hate to do that -- they'll do it for their core drives of survival and replication, but they don't seek it out for its own benefit. The difference between a fight where you're going to die or otherwise suffer if you lose, and a fight where your friend goes "you lose haha lets go eat some lunch" if you lose is the core of the difference between work and play.
One mistake people make is assuming that people have to work because of capitalism. That's an anti-reality stance. In a hunter gatherer society you might not have a boss pointing and yelling at you to increase company profit, but you've got the specter of death -- if you don't hunt or forage, you're going to die. If you don't build shelter, you're going to die. If you don't gather something for a fire, then you're going to die. If you don't build the fire, you're going to die. With that sort of pressure, is hunting and gathering and building stuff work? You bet it is!
Let's say the toilet breaks right now. Guess what? I'm going to spend a chunk of my weekend fixing the toilet. And I need to fix that toilet or there won't be a functioning toilet. I have to do it because not having a working toilet in my house isn't a reasonable option. And there's some pressure because I have to succeed, and I can't just drop it. It's not paid work, but it is work, and once I'm done with it I'll go out and do something fun.
Should I blame capitalism for my broken toilet, then? Of course not. Reality is that regardless of the economic system I lived under, the toilet would be broken and I need to fix it. Under every economic system, at some point I'm going to need to take a dump.
We can see this with people whose job is something we'd consider "play" in any other circumstance -- Streamers play video games, but playing video games on stream because you need to is stressful since like the hunter gatherer hunting or gathering, their survival depends on it. Other streamers just end up hanging out and talking with a chat, and in any other situation that'd be considered leisure activity but for those streamers it's work.
In the case of the streamer, they're fully in control of their schedule. They can start streaming when they want, they can stop when they want, they can choose what to talk about and what to play on stream. But despite that, it's still work. And many of them express that their jobs can be stressful and they need time off.
This is why one of the core boomer philosophies of "find work doing something you love" is flat-out wrong. By making something you love to do into work, there's a chance you actually destroy that thing you enjoyed by adding the stress of having to make a survival with it.
One thing that's also anti-reality is saying that our modern world doesn't have leisure. Compared to any moment in the history of the world, there's more opportunities for leisure than ever before. Most households have multiple televisions, multiple computers, multiple smart phones. People spend hours on these devices. The fact that the leisure time isn't particularly fulfilling is a different problem.
Often times, people point to today and they point to feudal times and say that in feudal times people had much more free time because they didn't spend as much time on the farm. This disregards that life took more work back then. Today we have washers and dryers, back then you'd need to wash your clothes by hand. Today we have premanufactured clothes, back then you'd need to make and repair your own clothes. Today we have premade foods and refrigerators, back then you'd need to preserve and store food for the winter. Today our homes heat themselves via electricity or gas and thermostats, back then you'd need to maintain a hearth, and that also speaks to the work that would go into cooking food. So we work at jobs so we can afford these modern luxuries, and in so doing don't need to do the backbreaking labor of maintaining a household. Moreover, it was common for people under feudalism to work 12 or 16 hours, which does happen sometimes today but is uncommon -- meaning that while our work days are rough, they're quite short (assuming you have a full time job) compared to the past.
If anything, I'd argue that one of our biggest problems today isn't that people lack meaningful leisure, it's that they lack meaningful work. Yes, people do work jobs to get money to pay for their lives, but for many jobs there isn't a sense that you're contributing to anything meaningful. Particularly if you're a real cog in the machine, you can't see the benefits to the customers below you, and you're not a part of the benefits of the owners above you, you're like a horse with blinders on, just following orders. Then you get home and you can have a very nice lifestyle historically speaking with very little actual work, so all you have left to do is play. It doesn't feel earned, however, so while having more play than most people in the history of the world you feel unfulfilled, and without a philosophical framework to suggest that perhaps to be fulfilled you need to go out and do meaningful work, you assume it's because you don't have enough play.
(6000 characters.... I wonder how much this even federates?)
At first glance, one of the things that makes it work is that you're choosing to do it rather than being forced to do it.
It isn't just about being forced, though. It's about there being pressure doing it. I like doing stuff with my hands and working on projects. My feed has all kinds of things I've done for fun. But if I fail at those things (and it happens a lot), It doesn't really matter. There's no negative consequence if I fail on my projects, or if I drop them entirely either temporarily or permanently.
The play circuit in our brains depends on there being low real-world stakes to the game. You can get two mice in the lab, and they can play fight and they love to do that and will constantly seek it out, but get another two mice in the lab who are fighting over resources or a mate and they hate to do that -- they'll do it for their core drives of survival and replication, but they don't seek it out for its own benefit. The difference between a fight where you're going to die or otherwise suffer if you lose, and a fight where your friend goes "you lose haha lets go eat some lunch" if you lose is the core of the difference between work and play.
One mistake people make is assuming that people have to work because of capitalism. That's an anti-reality stance. In a hunter gatherer society you might not have a boss pointing and yelling at you to increase company profit, but you've got the specter of death -- if you don't hunt or forage, you're going to die. If you don't build shelter, you're going to die. If you don't gather something for a fire, then you're going to die. If you don't build the fire, you're going to die. With that sort of pressure, is hunting and gathering and building stuff work? You bet it is!
Let's say the toilet breaks right now. Guess what? I'm going to spend a chunk of my weekend fixing the toilet. And I need to fix that toilet or there won't be a functioning toilet. I have to do it because not having a working toilet in my house isn't a reasonable option. And there's some pressure because I have to succeed, and I can't just drop it. It's not paid work, but it is work, and once I'm done with it I'll go out and do something fun.
Should I blame capitalism for my broken toilet, then? Of course not. Reality is that regardless of the economic system I lived under, the toilet would be broken and I need to fix it. Under every economic system, at some point I'm going to need to take a dump.
We can see this with people whose job is something we'd consider "play" in any other circumstance -- Streamers play video games, but playing video games on stream because you need to is stressful since like the hunter gatherer hunting or gathering, their survival depends on it. Other streamers just end up hanging out and talking with a chat, and in any other situation that'd be considered leisure activity but for those streamers it's work.
In the case of the streamer, they're fully in control of their schedule. They can start streaming when they want, they can stop when they want, they can choose what to talk about and what to play on stream. But despite that, it's still work. And many of them express that their jobs can be stressful and they need time off.
This is why one of the core boomer philosophies of "find work doing something you love" is flat-out wrong. By making something you love to do into work, there's a chance you actually destroy that thing you enjoyed by adding the stress of having to make a survival with it.
One thing that's also anti-reality is saying that our modern world doesn't have leisure. Compared to any moment in the history of the world, there's more opportunities for leisure than ever before. Most households have multiple televisions, multiple computers, multiple smart phones. People spend hours on these devices. The fact that the leisure time isn't particularly fulfilling is a different problem.
Often times, people point to today and they point to feudal times and say that in feudal times people had much more free time because they didn't spend as much time on the farm. This disregards that life took more work back then. Today we have washers and dryers, back then you'd need to wash your clothes by hand. Today we have premanufactured clothes, back then you'd need to make and repair your own clothes. Today we have premade foods and refrigerators, back then you'd need to preserve and store food for the winter. Today our homes heat themselves via electricity or gas and thermostats, back then you'd need to maintain a hearth, and that also speaks to the work that would go into cooking food. So we work at jobs so we can afford these modern luxuries, and in so doing don't need to do the backbreaking labor of maintaining a household. Moreover, it was common for people under feudalism to work 12 or 16 hours, which does happen sometimes today but is uncommon -- meaning that while our work days are rough, they're quite short (assuming you have a full time job) compared to the past.
If anything, I'd argue that one of our biggest problems today isn't that people lack meaningful leisure, it's that they lack meaningful work. Yes, people do work jobs to get money to pay for their lives, but for many jobs there isn't a sense that you're contributing to anything meaningful. Particularly if you're a real cog in the machine, you can't see the benefits to the customers below you, and you're not a part of the benefits of the owners above you, you're like a horse with blinders on, just following orders. Then you get home and you can have a very nice lifestyle historically speaking with very little actual work, so all you have left to do is play. It doesn't feel earned, however, so while having more play than most people in the history of the world you feel unfulfilled, and without a philosophical framework to suggest that perhaps to be fulfilled you need to go out and do meaningful work, you assume it's because you don't have enough play.
(6000 characters.... I wonder how much this even federates?)
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it seems to me that land taxes, fishing licenses, and the government deciding what you're allowed to do on government land like roads are the definition of something that is categorically not a specific problem of capitalism, even if it can exist under capitalism.
Capitalism is fundamentally the private ownership and control of resources. If you can own a piece of land or a home, if you can own your own labor, if you can own tools, if you can essentially use these how you wish without someone else telling you what you can or cannot do with these things, then it is capitalism. If the government is dictating what you can or cannot do with your labor, your tools, your resources, then that thing is not capitalism but central planning.
Taxation and licensure can exist within a capitalist framework, but so can communes and worker cooperatives. The key is that if you're saying "taxation is an example of why capitalism is bad", or "fishing licenses are an example of why capitalism is bad", that's simply definitionally wrong. Both represent something other than private ownership and control of capital. You could own the land surrounding the lake, but the government controls your ability to fish on your lake. This detail would be part of the capitalist ownership of the lake, but itself would not be capitalism, since it is an aspect under which you do not own or control the lake privately.
Licensure of resources and taxation are things that can and do exist under virtually every economic system, and would be more prominent rather than less prominent under non capitalist economic systems.
Resource licensure would be an explicit requirement of centrally planned economies. "you can use this to do this" would be common because the state gets to choose who gets to have what rather than who wants to pay to own it.
Taxation was a central feature of feudalism, which shares features with other economic systems including capitalism, but was explicitly not capitalism, since under capitalism there is private ownership and control of resources, but under feudalism all ownership and control of resources lies with the king, who parcels it out to his nobility who further parcel it out, all of them charging taxes for the privilege.
Now, that doesn't mean that injustice can't exist under capitalism. Under Capitalism, those who have more money have more power, and those who have less money have less power. There are a number of unjust ways that someone can end up with more money or less money.
The thing is, we have to be careful parceling out the blame because if we don't understand what we have in front of us, we can end up proposing solutions to non-causes of problems. When I was in high school, I didn't like the school. We were on something called the "Quarter System" where classes took 10 weeks and we'd be in specific classes longer, as opposed to the normal Semester system where classes took 20 years. I blamed all the problems in the school on the quarter system, but in reality the root of my problems were with myself and the fact that I was dealing with a nasty divorce of my parents at home, and I didn't have a strong social circle at school to help make life more tolerable for me. Switching from the quarter system to the semester system would have had 0 effect on my enjoyment of the school system.
(Ok, I'm done effortposting, honest!)
Capitalism is fundamentally the private ownership and control of resources. If you can own a piece of land or a home, if you can own your own labor, if you can own tools, if you can essentially use these how you wish without someone else telling you what you can or cannot do with these things, then it is capitalism. If the government is dictating what you can or cannot do with your labor, your tools, your resources, then that thing is not capitalism but central planning.
Taxation and licensure can exist within a capitalist framework, but so can communes and worker cooperatives. The key is that if you're saying "taxation is an example of why capitalism is bad", or "fishing licenses are an example of why capitalism is bad", that's simply definitionally wrong. Both represent something other than private ownership and control of capital. You could own the land surrounding the lake, but the government controls your ability to fish on your lake. This detail would be part of the capitalist ownership of the lake, but itself would not be capitalism, since it is an aspect under which you do not own or control the lake privately.
Licensure of resources and taxation are things that can and do exist under virtually every economic system, and would be more prominent rather than less prominent under non capitalist economic systems.
Resource licensure would be an explicit requirement of centrally planned economies. "you can use this to do this" would be common because the state gets to choose who gets to have what rather than who wants to pay to own it.
Taxation was a central feature of feudalism, which shares features with other economic systems including capitalism, but was explicitly not capitalism, since under capitalism there is private ownership and control of resources, but under feudalism all ownership and control of resources lies with the king, who parcels it out to his nobility who further parcel it out, all of them charging taxes for the privilege.
Now, that doesn't mean that injustice can't exist under capitalism. Under Capitalism, those who have more money have more power, and those who have less money have less power. There are a number of unjust ways that someone can end up with more money or less money.
The thing is, we have to be careful parceling out the blame because if we don't understand what we have in front of us, we can end up proposing solutions to non-causes of problems. When I was in high school, I didn't like the school. We were on something called the "Quarter System" where classes took 10 weeks and we'd be in specific classes longer, as opposed to the normal Semester system where classes took 20 years. I blamed all the problems in the school on the quarter system, but in reality the root of my problems were with myself and the fact that I was dealing with a nasty divorce of my parents at home, and I didn't have a strong social circle at school to help make life more tolerable for me. Switching from the quarter system to the semester system would have had 0 effect on my enjoyment of the school system.
(Ok, I'm done effortposting, honest!)
You are incorrect, and your statement is in accurate. Private ownership of property, including homes and means of production (which includes labor), is indeed a fundamental characteristic of capitalism.
As a certified journeyman I'd be ok with some guild socialism, but not sure it'd be best for all of society.
For real, separate from any other discussion, the microcosm that is england in that era is fascinating. One reason those forests needed to be established is that there were so many people cutting down forests for fuel with improper management of the land. Eventually they tried to start burning coal despite it being terrible because they needed heat even if it cost everyone their health. It's a remimder of the fragility of our environment and the reasons we're so reliant on the fossil fuel energy subsidy. We can't just go back thoughtlessly to how we lived pre fossil fuels, because we'll just burn down every forest. Otoh, there are clear present and future costs to continuing to burn fossil fuels.