Comment by smath
3 hours ago
That does make some sense to me! Ty
Could you explain these a bit more (or maybe provide a pointer to they mean):
> "atomization of society that industrialization and contemporary capitalism invite."
How & why exactly do they invite atomization?
> "Relational needs get pegged to currency and become transactional... career becomes a necessary way to fund those transactions"
By this do you mean something like: instead of relying on friends and family for interdependece, we pay for services in a formal economy ?
Not that person but:
> How & why exactly do they invite atomization?
Economies of scale make the commercial services more efficient. Similarly to how my grandma cannot compete in keeping chickens and selling eggs against a huge agricultural corporation, for a working-age person to stay at home and care for their parents is less economical than if this person performs some specialized work at a job, and there are a bunch of other, trained employees taking care of several old people e.g. in a retirement home.
It may have some social functions that get lost, but it gets outcompeted by scalable, specialized, formal-economy alternatives.
Also industrialization made many tasks possible to do alone. With washing machines, microwaves and TV dinners, people can live on their own indefinitely, while this simply wasn't possible before in a farming and manual labor context where you constantly had to ask for and to provide help getting things done. Like building a house, slaughtering a pig, doing field work etc.