DIR Return Create A Forum - Home
---------------------------------------------------------
True Left
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com
---------------------------------------------------------
*****************************************************
DIR Return to: Issues
*****************************************************
#Post#: 7613--------------------------------------------------
Simple living movements
By: Zea_mays Date: July 20, 2021, 9:31 am
---------------------------------------------------------
For centuries, counterculture movements have eschewed
traditional society's drive to work pointless jobs to
continuously accumulate material possessions. Today, basic
material possessions can be acquired with the smallest amount of
work in history, leading many young people to question what the
point is climbing the career ladder and working nonstop when
their needs can be fulfilled quite easily. Today, despite
advances in technology and economic productivity which should
have made life easier and more prosperous, elite business owners
have become so greedy that many people today are actually
working longer hours, for less pay, for less economic security,
and with far greater stress than previous generations.
The futility of all this has led many young people to ask: why
bother?
I found this article about Chinese millennials who have started
the "lying flat" simple living movement, and I think this
describes attitudes I have seen among young people in the US and
in the West as well. The (Western-admiring) Chinese communist
party views this counterculture movement as a threat to their
geopolitical ambitions. Although, quite frankly, I think
cultural exports could be China's most important geopolitical
"weapon". In the same way that the 1960s Counterculture helped
to erode the USSR, non-Western attitudes coming from something
like a Chinese counterculture would be a breath of fresh air
that could erode the West's hegemony.
[quote]Five years ago, Luo Huazhong discovered that he enjoyed
doing nothing. He quit his job as a factory worker in China,
biked 1,300 miles from Sichuan Province to Tibet and decided he
could get by on odd jobs and $60 a month from his savings. He
called his new lifestyle “lying flat.”
“I have been chilling,” Mr. Luo, 31, wrote in a blog post in
April, describing his way of life. “I don’t feel like there’s
anything wrong.”
He titled his post “Lying Flat Is Justice,” attaching a photo of
himself lying on his bed in a dark room with the curtains drawn.
Before long, the post was being celebrated by Chinese
millennials as an anti-consumerist manifesto. “Lying flat” went
viral and has since become a broader statement about Chinese
society.
A generation ago, the route to success in China was to work
hard, get married and have children. The country’s
authoritarianism was seen as a fair trade-off as millions were
lifted out of poverty. But with employees working longer hours
and housing prices rising faster than incomes, many young
Chinese fear they will be the first generation not to do better
than their parents.
They are now defying the country’s long-held prosperity
narrative by refusing to participate in it.
Mr. Luo’s blog post was removed by censors, who saw it as an
affront to Beijing’s economic ambitions. Mentions of “lying
flat” — tangping, as it’s known in Mandarin — are heavily
restricted on the Chinese internet. An official counternarrative
has also emerged, encouraging young people to work hard for the
sake of the country’s future.
“After working for so long, I just felt numb, like a machine,”
Mr. Luo said in an interview. “And so I resigned.”
To lie flat means to forgo marriage, not have children, stay
unemployed and eschew material wants such as a house or a car.
It is the opposite of what China’s leaders have asked of their
people. But that didn’t bother Leon Ding.
Mr. Ding, 22, has been lying flat for almost three months and
thinks of the act as “silent resistance.” He dropped out of a
university in his final year in March because he didn’t like the
computer science major his parents had chosen for him.
[...]
While plenty of Chinese millennials continue to adhere to the
country’s traditional work ethic, “lying flat” reflects both a
nascent counterculture movement and a backlash against China’s
hypercompetitive work environment.
Xiang Biao, a professor of social anthropology at Oxford
University who focuses on Chinese society, called tangping
culture a turning point for China. “Young people feel a kind of
pressure that they cannot explain and they feel that promises
were broken,” he said. “People realize that material betterment
is no longer the single most important source of meaning in
life.”
The ruling Communist Party, wary of any form of social
instability, has targeted the “lying flat” idea as a threat to
stability in China. Censors have deleted a tangping group with
more than 9,000 members on Douban, a popular internet forum. The
authorities also barred posts on another tangping forum with
more than 200,000 members.
In May, China’s internet regulator ordered online platforms to
“strictly restrict” new posts on tangping, according to a
directive obtained by The New York Times. A second directive
required e-commerce platforms to stop selling clothes, phone
cases and other merchandise branded with “tangping.”
The state news media has called tangping “shameful,” and a
newspaper warned against “lying flat before getting rich.” Yu
Minhong, a prominent billionaire, urged young people not to lie
down, because “otherwise who can we rely on for the future of
our country?”
[...]
Mr. Luo decided to write about tangping after he saw people
heatedly discussing China’s latest census results in April and
calls for the country to address a looming demographic crisis by
having more babies.
He described his original “lying flat” blog post as “an inner
monologue from a man living at the bottom of the society.”
“Those people who say lying down is shameful are shameless,” he
said. “I have the right to choose a slow lifestyle. I didn’t do
anything destructive to society. Do we have to work 12 hours a
day in a sweatshop, and is that justice?”
Mr. Luo was born in rural Jiande County, in eastern Zhejiang
Province. In 2007, he dropped out of a vocational high school
and started working in factories. One job involved working
12-hour shifts at a tire factory. By the end of the day, he had
blisters all over his feet, he said.
In 2014, he found a job as a product inspector in a factory but
didn’t like it. He quit after two years and took on the
occasional acting gig to make ends meet. (In 2018, he played a
corpse in a Chinese movie by, of course, lying flat.)
Today, he lives with his family and spends his days reading
philosophy and news and working out. He said it was an ideal
lifestyle, allowing him to live minimally and “think and express
freely.” He encourages his followers, who call him “the Master
of Lying Down,” to do the same.[/quote]
HTML https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/world/asia/china-slackers-tangping.html
#Post#: 7615--------------------------------------------------
Re: Simple living movements
By: guest55 Date: July 20, 2021, 1:11 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Record Number Of Workers Quitting Jobs
[quote]As businesses reopen and the economy takes off, employees
have options for employment. Some have put off leaving their job
because of the pandemic, are burned out from the last year, or
have money saved by working from home and want to try something
new.[/quote]
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9ilk9lgqqE
#Post#: 7671--------------------------------------------------
Re: Simple living movements
By: Zea_mays Date: July 23, 2021, 11:09 am
---------------------------------------------------------
Another article about the lying flat movement:
[quote]Fed up with work stress, Guo Jianlong quit a newspaper
job in Beijing and moved to China’s mountain southwest to “lie
flat.”
Guo joined a small but visible handful of Chinese urban
professionals who are rattling the ruling Communist Party by
rejecting grueling careers for a “low-desire life.” That is
clashing with the party’s message of success and consumerism as
its celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding.
[...]
“Lying flat” is a “resistance movement” to a “cycle of horror”
from high-pressure Chinese schools to jobs with seemingly
endless work hours, novelist Liao Zenghu wrote in Caixin, the
country’s most prominent business magazine.
“In today’s society, our every move is monitored and every
action criticized,” Liao wrote. “Is there any more rebellious
act than to simply ‘lie flat?’”
[...]
Still, the ruling party is trying to discourage the trend.
Beijing needs skilled professionals to develop technology and
other industries. China’s population is getting older and the
pool of working-age people has shrunk by about 5% from its 2011
peak.
“Struggle itself is a kind of happiness,” the newspaper Southern
Daily, published by the party, said in a commentary. “Choosing
to ‘lie flat’ in the face of pressure is not only unjust but
also shameful.”
The trend echoes similar ones in Japan and other countries where
young people have embraced anti-materialist lifestyles in
response to bleak job prospects and bruising competition for
shrinking economic rewards.
Official data show China’s economic output per person doubled
over the past decade, but many complain the gains went mostly to
a handful of tycoons and state-owned companies. Professionals
say their incomes are failing to keep up with soaring housing,
child care and other costs.
In a sign of the issue’s political sensitivity, four professors
who were quoted by the Chinese press talking about “lying flat”
declined to discuss it with a foreign reporter.
[...]
“We generally believe slavery has died away. In fact, it has
only adapted to the new economic era,” a woman who writes under
the name Xia Bingbao, or Summer Hailstones, said on the Douban
social media service.
Some elite graduates in their 20s who should have the best job
prospects say they are worn out from the “exam hell” of high
school and university. They see no point in making more
sacrifices.
[...]
Thousands vented frustration online after the Communist Party’s
announcement in May that official birth limits would be eased to
allow all couples to have three children instead of two. The
party has enforced birth restrictions since 1980 to restrain
population growth but worries China, with economic output per
person still below the global average, needs more young workers.
Minutes after the announcement, websites were flooded with
complaints that the move did nothing to help parents cope with
child care costs, long work hours, cramped housing, job
discrimination against mothers and a need to look after elderly
parents.[/quote]
HTML https://apnews.com/article/asia-pacific-world-news-beijing-china-business-d2b9f71d73219b32d78709b0afb443ca
#Post#: 7719--------------------------------------------------
Re: Simple living movements
By: Zea_mays Date: July 26, 2021, 11:32 am
---------------------------------------------------------
Although I'm not sure if the ongoing US labor movement in itself
should be considered a simple living movement, hopefully it can
lead people to realizing they can get by on less than they
originally believed and have more options than simply slaving
away. That type of stress seems to be what led to the lying flat
movement, and certainly what causes so many people in the US and
elsewhere to dream of just running away to live a life as a
subsistence farmer or something.
Hopefully all these people who are quitting band together or
find other alternatives, and don't simply slink back to their
exploitative jobs when they can't pay rent again.
[quote]‘People are just walking out in the middle of shifts’:
What it’s like to work in a restaurant right now[/quote]
HTML https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/23/business/restaurant-workers-experience/index.html
[quote]Something remarkable is happening in fast food
establishments, retail stores, and restaurants across America.
You may have seen photos of it go viral. You may have even
experienced it in real life if you've dined at a Chili's or
Applebee's and the hostess apologizes for extra-long wait times.
“WE ALL QUIT, SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE,” disgruntled
employees posted in giant letters on a sign outside a Burger
King in Lincoln, Nebraska earlier this month.
"Almost the entire crew and managers have walked out until
further notice," Chipotle workers wrote in Philadelphia on a
sign posted on the glass doors of their restaurant.
“Closed indefinitely because Dollar General doesn’t pay a living
wage or treat their employees with respect," retail workers
scribbled in Sharpie outside a Dollar General in Eliot, Maine,
after the entire store quit en masse.
[...]
Employment benefits have given workers a little more time to
find jobs and higher expectations in their job search. "Workers
have seen during the pandemic that when lawmakers choose to step
in and act and protect people [via stimulus checks, unemployment
benefits, healthcare], work doesn't have to suck as much.
[...]
Part of the mass resignations can be attributed to the fact that
the pandemic has raised expectations for safety and benefits in
the workplace. Jobs that don't offer health insurance and paid
sick days have never been desirable, but now some workers are
saying they're done putting up with them.
[...]
"It got to the point where I was having chest pains, my chest
was throbbing and my manager would say 'you're fine' and
wouldn't let me leave, so I just quit," she continued. "I would
never work at McDonalds ever again." [/quote]
HTML https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgy7a/we-all-quit-how-americas-workers-are-taking-back-their-power
[quote]"Instead of no one wants to work anymore," former
Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said, "Try no one wants to be
exploited anymore."[/quote]
HTML https://www.businessinsider.com/origin-of-nobody-wants-to-work-anymore-2021-7
#Post#: 7761--------------------------------------------------
Re: Simple living movements
By: guest55 Date: July 29, 2021, 5:48 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
The chlorine shortage that is effecting the U.S. currently is
partly due to the fact that many employees quit. A few of these
chlorine production companies may actually go under because of
it....
#Post#: 7992--------------------------------------------------
Re: Simple living movements
By: guest55 Date: August 10, 2021, 5:45 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
The "American Dream" as described by the narrator of the
following video sounds more like the goals and values of
anthropocentric Western civilization, does it not?:
Why I gave up on the AMERICAN DREAM - and you should too
[quote]After years of chasing the American Dream I've finally
given up on it. And I've never been happier...[/quote]
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhPhnPe7M8U
[quote]I just realized something was off.... — Timothy
Ward[/quote]
What, kind of like the fact that the civilization you live in is
built on a foundation of false history and bad ideas?
See also:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/leftists-against-progressivism/?message=7975
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-a-health-hazard/
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/news/american-empire-collapse-it's-about-to-get-much-worse()-chris-hedges-joins/
HTML https://authenticamericandream.blogspot.com/p/reading-list-for-american-nationalists.html
#Post#: 8000--------------------------------------------------
Re: Simple living movements
By: guest55 Date: August 10, 2021, 6:31 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
What's Really Behind the Labor Shortage in America?
[quote]Why are there sudden;y so many vacant jobs? Where have
all the workers gone? Let's talk about it![/quote]
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F3UgGZ4rgU
[quote]
D K9
2 weeks ago
People are waking up to the fact that they’re worth more than 8
dollars an hour while the fatcats are sitting on billions.
[/quote]
[quote]Andrea Wisner
2 weeks ago
A lot of people had time to listen to Youtubers like Timothy
Ward and realize that they were being taken advantage of. A lot
of them are living in minivans and other vehicles and don't have
to worry about the crazy rents that nobody can afford. [/quote]
#Post#: 8204--------------------------------------------------
Re: Simple living movements
By: guest55 Date: August 21, 2021, 3:41 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
What It Takes to Live a Simple Life
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC50-HNzSKs
[quote]Folks must realize that simple does NOT mean easy. This
is a very physical life, growing food, raising chickens, cutting
wood for the wood stove to keep warm. Thinking simple means easy
is a romantic idea not based in reality. There is beauty in
homesteading, but it is not for the faint of heart. When you get
older, or injured or have health issues creep up on you, simple
becomes not so simple. We are in our 60's, my husband a
disabled Air Force veteran and have lived on our mountain
property for almost 19 years, but it is a daily struggle to grow
our gardens and do daily tending of the land and the flocks. I
would not want to be anywhere else. I have lost my tolerance for
people and artificial noise. The country has gone very soft and
often the dream is much more difficult than folks imagine.
~Cynthia[/quote]
#Post#: 8230--------------------------------------------------
Re: Simple living movements
By: guest55 Date: August 22, 2021, 6:34 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
What Happens When All of Your Co-Workers Quit?
[quote]As a record number of Americans leave their jobs, those
who can’t are working themselves sick.[/quote]
HTML https://www.thecut.com/2021/08/workers-left-behind-by-the-great-resignation.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
#Post#: 8554--------------------------------------------------
Re: Simple living movements
By: Zea_mays Date: September 2, 2021, 12:49 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
I think it is also important to be aware of simple living
movements that we ideologically oppose. For example, many
overworked people have been "romanticizing" hunter-gatherers
since they can supposedly survive on much fewer labor hours than
Westerners and are apparently much happier.
[quote]The "original affluent society" is the proposition that
argues that the lives of hunter-gatherers can be seen as
embedding a sufficient degree of material comfort and security
to be considered affluent. The theory was first put forward in a
paper presented by Marshall Sahlins at a famous symposium in
1966 entitled 'Man the Hunter'. Sahlins observes that affluence
is the satisfaction of wants, "which may be 'easily satisfied'
either by producing much or desiring little."[1] Given a culture
characterized by limited wants, Sahlins argued that
hunter-gatherers were able to live 'affluently' through the
relatively easy satisfaction of their material needs.
[...]
Sahlins' argument partly relies on studies undertaken by
McCarthy and McArthur in Arnhem Land, and by Richard Borshay Lee
among the !Kung.[5][6] These studies show that hunter-gatherers
need only work about fifteen to twenty hours a week in order to
survive and may devote the rest of their time to leisure.[4] Lee
did not include food preparation time in his study, arguing that
"work" should be defined as the time spent gathering enough food
for sustenance. When total time spent on food acquisition,
processing, and cooking was added together, the estimate per
week was 44.5 hours for men and 40.1 hours for women, but Lee
added that this is still less than the total hours spent on work
and housework in many modern Western households.
[...]
Sahlins concludes that the hunter-gatherer only works three to
five hours per adult worker each day in food production.[7][8]
Using data gathered from various foraging societies and
quantitative surveys done among the Arnhem Landers of Australia
and quantitative materials cataloged by Richard Lee on the Dobe
Bushmen of the Kalahari, Sahlins argues that hunter-gatherer
tribes are able to meet their needs through working roughly
15-20 hours per week or less. [/quote]
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society
HTML https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/551018759/are-hunter-gatherers-the-happiest-humans-to-inhabit-earth
HTML https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/200907/play-makes-us-human-v-why-hunter-gatherers-work-is-play
These attitudes have been commercialized over the past decade by
a variety of primitive survivalist TV shows:
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_vs._Wild
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_Survival
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorman
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alone_(TV_series)
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man,_Woman,_Wild
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_and_Afraid
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_with_Ed_Stafford
Of course, primitive survivalism is just a fantasy that is far
too extreme for 99.99% of people to actually try themselves, so
there are also plenty of TV shows, Youtube channels, blogs, etc.
about "homesteading". In a nutshell, homesteading involves
self-sufficiency, minimizing luxuries, living rurally and "off
the grid" since that is cheaper than living in a
densely-populated area, etc. Although homesteading can
theoretically consist of a noble life of subsistence
agriculture, most of the portrayals in the media and in blogs
involve ranching (e.g. raising chickens and cows) and hunting
(for food and fur/clothing). Things such as selling eggs or fur
are also recommended as a way to make a small amount of income
(since true 100% one-person or one-family self-sufficiency isn't
really possible unless you want to live like an actual caveman).
Here are some of the popular homesteading TV shows. You can find
hundreds of blogs and Youtube channels as well.
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Bush_People
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska%3A_The_Last_Frontier
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Alaskans
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Men_(TV_series)
HTML https://go.discovery.com/tv-shows/homestead-rescue
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukon_Men
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Below_Zero
I think there is room for entryism into the homesteading
movement to make it more ethical. There are some vegan
homesteading blogs and forums, but they aren't nearly as
prevalent as ranching/hunting homesteaders.
HTML https://old.reddit.com/r/veganhomesteading/
Considering that pre-industrial subsistence farmers also toiled
for far fewer hours (and far fewer total workdays) than
post-industrial laborers, it shouldn't be too difficult to
replace the idolization of hunter-gatherers with romanticism
surrounding subsistence farmers:
[quote]One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has
reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a
comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or
eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit
-- but rarely articulated -- assumption is that the eighty-hour
standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up
the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn
to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a
cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by
candlelight late into the night.
These images are backward projections of modern work patterns.
And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work
very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even
leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have
been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism
raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed,
there is good reason to believe that working hours in the
mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work
effort in the entire history of humankind.
Therefore, we must take a longer view and look back not just one
hundred years, but three or four, even six or seven hundred.
Consider a typical working day in the medieval period. It
stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight
in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was
intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the
customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and
place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment
breaks.
[...]
The peasant's free time extended beyond officially sanctioned
holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call
the backward-bending supply curve of labor -- the idea that when
wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of
unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many
laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any
of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as
many days as were necessary to earn their customary income --
which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year [...] A
thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did
not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial
records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely
short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later
evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their
worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year. [/quote]
HTML http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
HTML https://allthatsinteresting.com/medieval-peasants-vacation-more
A communist take on how the wealthy elite believed the
self-sufficiency of the peasantry made them too "lazy", and how
the emerging industrialists saw a necessity for the peasantry to
be forced into wage slavery so they would work longer hours in
much worse conditions:
HTML https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/recovered-economic-history-everyone-but-an-idiot-knows-that-the-lower-classes-must-be-kept-poor-or-they-will-never-be-industrious/
I am not well-read on Marxism, but I believe one of the
important concepts is that laborers in the post-industrial era
are "alienated" from the products their labor produces. This is
even more prevalent today in "paper-pushing" jobs where people
file pointless paperwork all day to make a billionaire richer.
What's the purpose in that? Where's the value in that? It is
very easy to get burned out from doing that and want to escape
to something more meaningful.
Subsistence agricultural labor may be difficult:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/mythical-world/aryan-labour/
However, it is not alienating and soul-sucking, because the
purpose of the labor is apparent. It also means you only need to
do enough work to procure the necessary amount of resources to
live (i.e. simple living!). This is in contrast to the Western
drudgery of having to work literally every single week ,without
any purpose, just to live paycheck to paycheck.
---
Some forums of interest:
This one seems to have a lot of communist/anarchist people who
think robots should do all the work while they lazily sit at
home all day and watch TV or something. But it's one of the more
active forums revolving around discontent for Western labor
conditions.
HTML https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/
A more general forum for young people disillusioned with the
Western narrative of "go to college so you can get a good job
and buy consumer products".
HTML https://old.reddit.com/r/lostgeneration/
HTML https://old.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/
HTML https://old.reddit.com/r/simpleliving/
HTML https://old.reddit.com/r/Degrowth/
Although accumulating enough wealth to retire early and live off
of the accumulated wealth doesn't fundamentally challenge the
system, it's at least an option I suppose. Although, I imagine
the types of people who make enough money to do such a thing are
considered "skilled professionals", and if enough of them remove
themselves from the workforce, it may end up having adverse
effects for business elites?
HTML https://old.reddit.com/r/leanfire/
*****************************************************
DIR Next Page