Quote:
Originally Posted by elphenor
well his description of the attitudes towards labor in the past isn't really historical...it's just a narrative
a more critical look would reveal a whole swath of different ideas on what work ought to be
for example, when rural workers were forced into specialized factory work, there was quite a lot of resentment on the grounds that it was dehumanizing and not much better than slavery
the fact that it relatively increased their wages was not enough to prevent anger at being stripped of autonomy
so much so that you find it even in the mainstream politics of the time, that wage slavery had to be addressed
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I didn't actually say anything about historical "attitudes" towards labor. But if you want to be real about it, people have often resented any sort of change and so sure maybe agrarian farmers resented industrialization. But most of us wouldn't opt to go back to an agrarian lifestyle if given the choice. And to some extent you do have that choice. Agrarian communes do exist. Most people aren't willing to unplug from modern society and embrace that sort of lifestyle. Just like our ancestors, we have become accustomed to a certain lifestyle. Such is life.
I don't day anything of this to say we can't possibly get rid of wage slavery etc in the future. Just that doing so... That will be the actual deviation from the norm of what the human condition is like. That would be an even more drastic change in the human condition than the invention of agriculture and the industrial revolution combined. I'm not as optimistic about the inevitability of this transformation happening if we live long enough... But it do agree it's worth pursuing.