The Light in the Darkness

This, too, is a trashed bathroom; young queer people living through hell and having precious little control over their circumstances or the world in which they exist can affect something by using the language of social justice as a cudgel on their would-be allies, as well as getting a brief feeling of power over someone else by doing it.

Like, if 30% of people stopped working entirely, and the other people just did half the amount of work they do now, everyone would still be fed, dressed, housed, nursed etc. We would be fine.

But I think it is also quite obvious if you logically think about it.

Think about what work is actually essential. We technically know this right now very well - because the lockdown was not that long ago.

Really essential are:

Jobs related to food production and food logistics

Jobs related to water management

Jobs related to waste management

Jobs related to infrastructure construction and maintanance

Jobs related to clothing production to a certain extend

Some jobs related to grooming

Jobs in education

Medical and care jobs

Food production and logisitics is technically already massively automated. Yes, this does not change that especially food production, together with construction and textile work are also the areas of jobs involving among the most exploitation and slave work to this day. But still: the amount of man-hours involved in any food production these days is tiny to the amount it took just 100 years ago, let alone 300 years ago, when the vast majority of any work done in total was in food production.

Same with water management. And waste management, as well. While waste management is a bigger problem than it ever was, it still is automated for the most part.

Now, in terms of infrastructure and maintenance it is a bit more complicated and highly varied. Like, yes, it is so much more automated, but also some parts do badly when automated so... still, while this tends to be the biggest area of man hours needed in terms of the essentials today, outside of care work... it is still less.

Clothing is not as automated as you think it is. This is still mostly manual labor that does get underpaid - but ironically speaking if it was done better less of it would need to be done (reminder that most clothes these days end in landfills).

Education, care, and personal hygiene is the areas that indeed you cannot automate a whole lot. But it still is not... even if more people worked in those areas than they are doing today (you know, given that those areas are currently mostly understaffed), it still would not mean every human around needs to work a 40 hours a week job.

I mean, just look at what jobs people these days are actually working. So much work is just some dead end office work and stuff along those lines.