I don't think the modern "anti-capitalist" trend is disparaging "performing a skilled role that's useful for your tribe". It's disparaging various of these things:
- being arm-twisted to perform a low-skill, low-utility, role because economic weirdness and bad luck makes it the only work that you can get. Your tribe could use your <furniture making skill>, but it's cheaper to import furniture from China, so tough. Your tribe might like your music, but you aren't as good as Adele, so shut up. You could grow decent fruit but it doesn't pay well enough for you to afford the land to do it, and farms using illegal migrants can undercut your work, so find something else.
- systems parasitically exploiting your desire to provide useful work, to extract maximum value from you beyond what is satisfying and fulfilling, while treating you as disposable waste. You like cooking? Become a chef for 14 hours a day including evenings and weekends, or get out. From Amazon warehouse workers to programmers in the video game industry; intense grind, burnout, fired. Tribes don't tend to do that to people they value.
- systems distorting skills and responsibilities, e.g. not providing good tools, Kafka-esque bureaucracy, firing people in your 'tribe' at will, having your day micromanaged so your skilled work is entirely at the behest of other people, taking away agency from your work, demanding lower quality but faster, demanding higher quality and faster, demanding higher quality and paperwork, so that even if something is using a fulfilling skill, it actually doesn't feel that way.
- removing options to do multiple things; a job is usually a reduced to one role from day start to end. There's not much room for someone who is the local baker, tends the canal lock, sells eggs in the market, and does mountain rescue or whatever.
- taking over your life; e.g. controlling your days off, providing your healthcare, owning all the land so there aren't 'commons' you can opt to live off, lobbying and bribing the lawmakers, mandating 37 pieces of flare, setting your start and finish time, making you justify sickness, demanding you be on-call or available at night.
Consultants with high-demand skills still have some opportunity to avoid this, but huge numbers of people don't.
- being arm-twisted to perform a low-skill, low-utility, role because economic weirdness and bad luck makes it the only work that you can get. Your tribe could use your <furniture making skill>, but it's cheaper to import furniture from China, so tough. Your tribe might like your music, but you aren't as good as Adele, so shut up. You could grow decent fruit but it doesn't pay well enough for you to afford the land to do it, and farms using illegal migrants can undercut your work, so find something else.
- systems parasitically exploiting your desire to provide useful work, to extract maximum value from you beyond what is satisfying and fulfilling, while treating you as disposable waste. You like cooking? Become a chef for 14 hours a day including evenings and weekends, or get out. From Amazon warehouse workers to programmers in the video game industry; intense grind, burnout, fired. Tribes don't tend to do that to people they value.
- systems distorting skills and responsibilities, e.g. not providing good tools, Kafka-esque bureaucracy, firing people in your 'tribe' at will, having your day micromanaged so your skilled work is entirely at the behest of other people, taking away agency from your work, demanding lower quality but faster, demanding higher quality and faster, demanding higher quality and paperwork, so that even if something is using a fulfilling skill, it actually doesn't feel that way.
- removing options to do multiple things; a job is usually a reduced to one role from day start to end. There's not much room for someone who is the local baker, tends the canal lock, sells eggs in the market, and does mountain rescue or whatever.
- taking over your life; e.g. controlling your days off, providing your healthcare, owning all the land so there aren't 'commons' you can opt to live off, lobbying and bribing the lawmakers, mandating 37 pieces of flare, setting your start and finish time, making you justify sickness, demanding you be on-call or available at night.
Consultants with high-demand skills still have some opportunity to avoid this, but huge numbers of people don't.