Wage labor alone cannot motivate people without offering meaning

Evidence

Paying people has never touched people’s deepest motivations. You need to offer some other cause, some other purpose. What happens when you demoralise people, destroy their capacity to commit to any purpose in life beyond capital accumulation, and don’t even pay them? What if you don’t even offer them the possibility of being exploited, and classify them as a surplus population? — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2019

Categorization

• SEED: Possible essay angle: the ‘surplus population’ as capital’s motivational bankruptcy — how being denied even exploitation erodes all commitment to the system.
• XREF: Connects to Parable of the Sower’s framing of dispossessed surplus populations, and to the earlier poverty-as-lack-of-power notes from Annihilation of Caste. — connects to: Experiential labour cannot be bought directly, only time and potential can — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 127; Wages compensate time but not enthusiasm workers contribute freely — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 65; Human labour contains an uncommodifiable part beyond its market price — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 68 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Wages compensate time but not enthusiasm workers contribute freely #expands (0.86) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 65
• Human labour contains an uncommodifiable part beyond its market price #corroborates (0.85) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 68
• Experiential labour cannot be bought directly, only time and potential can #corroborates (0.83) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 127
• Profit arises from labour’s uncommodifiable experiential dimension #expands (0.80)
• Self-branding shifts economic risk onto workers while demanding constant unpaid labor #exemplifies (0.76) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 524
• Rationalized labor discipline requires directing nervous energy away from passion #complicates (0.73) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1124