I can’t find a job.
Well I could but there doesn’t seem to be any jobs that fit.
Or if there are I can’t find them. (But I don’t think so)
The biggest problem is that I live in estonia and it seems there really isn’t a well-developed anarchist/socialist/syndicalist movement here. The IWW doesn’t have a branch and searching online doesn’t really yield any results (aside from a couple of socdem groups),
I don’t know how to search for a job that isn’t just doing menial labour for some company.
I would like to work for a global fully-remote anarchically managed tech syndicate. But I don’t think those exist and I imagine starting one is incredibly difficult. (Well starting it wouldn’t be difficult, but finding people capable and willing to work for something like that, while getting enough income, is.)
At the end of the day the means dictate the ends. Looking for a job in a capitalist way is going to land you with a capitalist job. I need to look for a job in a anarchist/socialist/syndicalist way, but how do you do that in an environment where those ideas aren’t widespread?
Actually, finding people who want to work on that sort of thing online is not hard. Worker cooperatives have better pay, better likelihood of success, and come with a cleaner conscience. People want that. Making it work legally is difficult: it’s difficult enough to manage books and build a business within capitalist legal structures while maintining consensus-based organizing without having that be across many national jurisdictions.
Why not work a regular job doing menial labor? The pay is shit? OK, fight for it to be better alongside your comrades. Isn’t that what the labor movement is all about? Idk, easy for me to say in a place with high minimum wage
My main reason is ideological. Why should I waste my precious time working in a job that doesn’t advance my goals of creating a freer society? while also making pennies for some shareholder at the top? on top of that I get bored of doing the same thing over and over again. I want my work to have more variance.
And I guess while being truly international is kinda difficult it seems that it’s a lot easier within the EU and USA.
There is no individual solution. That cooperative of your dream will it be in the air out the planet earth in the eter of your imagination? Or will it be in the capitalist mode of production? In wich world do you live? What is the society who made you? You are a slave like or not. You’ll stay a slave whatever under democratic rules or fascist one in a capitalist enterprise or in a coop. Stop dreaming. Read Marx.
No thanks. I like my theory to be from the current century. You know the one where we have stuff like the internet, imminent climate disaster and the hindsight of the soviet regime.
Also starting a cooperative is no individual solution. It’s a first step towards establishing a collective economy. Which could fuel the collective spirit and start a political movement.
Stay in your theory then the reality is gonna refute you before you know it.
And I assume you would also like to be paid well.
This is a lot of requirements for a job. You want to work in tech, and fully remote, and anarchist, and doing something meaningful, and get paid well. I would recommend starting off by getting the best job that fits your ideology and desires that you can get right now. After all, you still need to support yourself.
Once you have that part down, work on getting a different job that meets another of your desires. Eg, get a tech job. Any job in tech, even if it is shitty. Then get a tech job that is less shitty and pays you well. Then get a tech job that pays you well and lets you work remote part time. Then full time. Then get a fully remote tech job with good pay that works on something meaningful to you. Then get a job at a tech syndicate.
The problem you are running into is that jobs like the one you want are very appealing to many people. Most people want remote work. They want to get paid well. They want to do meaningful work. Etc. Thus, the positions that these employers have will be highly competitive. And you, therefore, must have a high level of skill in your niche and connections in the industry who will pass along your name and pass along opportunities to you. And while a good education in a field can serve as a strong foundation and get your foot in the door to start, most knowledge needed for most jobs is learned on the job - actually doing the work and interacting with other people who are working on the same problems. So to get your dream job, you need experience and connections, and to get experience and connections, you will need to work in less appealing jobs. And since almost all employers are capitalist, you will almost certainly need to work at a number of capitalist firms in order to achieve your goal.
I actually don’t care about the pay. As long as I can buy food and pay my bills I don’t care. I would be willing to work for less than minimum wage if it meant I could have a say in my workplace.
And honestly it doesn’t even need to be a tech syndicate. I would be willing to work for any syndicate, and most areas have some kind of IT.
don’t waste your time then
keep looking for the perfect role but don’t die in a gutter for your ideology in the meantime.
Well, there is one important difference when it comes from manual labor to IT: the latter scales a lot. One person writes a silly piece of code, millions of copies get sold effortlessly, and that’s no limit. So much, that capitalists have no idea how to structure payroll - giving a dev fair share would make them rich enough to stop working immediately - so things like “competitive salary (with respect to your location)” are a thing - just paying enough so that you can’t be lured away by competitors.
But it’s not the perspective I want to highlight. What’s more important, is that value production in IT is so much distorted to benefit the capitalist instead of worker, that no matter how many unions you get in, how much you rob the system, you are collaborating with the bad guys at a scale that’s just on different level. Yes, the payment is often empowering enough to do good things with extra cash, but that’s the situation where taking care of ethics is more important than with “regular” jobs.
Same stuff could be said about finance and military tech, I guess. They scale madly too, just in different ways. So silly of me to get involved in all of these simultaneously.
I tried switching jobs to manual labor in the last month, but once people see my work history, they just freak out. I’d like to operate a mill or fix ignition electronics, but alas, they think I’ll be bored. People do not understand. Mentally relax on a job to have fun later - what a dream.