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dead gay comedy forums)
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croup coughfield posted:why not? It'd be nice if everyone wasn't forced to work to survive and we're near or at a technological level where not everyone does have to work if we organised society remotely efficiently. The obsession with the moral necessity of work just reminds me of protestant and methodist stuff and is for squares imho I'd have thought the point would be to more effectively distribute our production and resources to reduce the work and increase the leisure of everyone "don't work don't get fed" is just standard tory ideology Communist Thoughts has issued a correction as of 00:47 on Sep 3, 2022 |
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Sep 3, 2022 00:41
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Communist Thoughts posted:It'd be nice if everyone wasn't forced to work to survive and we're near or at a technological level where not everyone does have to work if we organised society remotely efficiently. Sir the planet is falling apart
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Sep 3, 2022 00:50
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There's a generalized sense of "working" as "interacting with nature to accomplish meaningful things".marx posted:Labour is the living, form-giving fire, it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time. It doesn't have to mean "monotonous backbreaking slave labor", although when capital is in play it usually does.
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Sep 3, 2022 00:54
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unwantedplatypus posted:Sir the planet is falling apart billions of people commuting to pointless jobs is one of the main reasons the planet is falling apart Communist Thoughts posted:It'd be nice if everyone wasn't forced to work to survive and we're near or at a technological level where not everyone does have to work if we organised society remotely efficiently.  we have so much wasted labor. If you boiled society down to just the truly essential jobs, we would probably only need to work 15-20 hour weeks. instead we have created millions of middlemen, salespeople, etc.whole sectors of the economy are nothing but waste. finance, sales, advertising, etc. it's disgusting.
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Sep 3, 2022 00:57
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The monotony and emptiness you feel at work is unnatural. Anybody who invests themselves in a hobby knows that work can feel good. It can be great to paint or bake or read, and all of these are laborous. The reason you hate work and don't want to do it anymore is because capitalism makes work so terrible.
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Sep 3, 2022 01:01
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it's possible but not actually clear that a rationally-organized economy would mean less overall labor. while a lot of labor is getting done now that is useless or actively destructive there's also a lot of work that should be getting done but isn't because it isn't profitable enough
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Sep 3, 2022 01:02
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WampaLord posted:billions of people commuting to pointless jobs is one of the main reasons the planet is falling apart And a lot of those people are going to need to get real jobs if we want to stop doing imperialism and allow the global south to achieve modern living standards.
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Sep 3, 2022 01:03
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animist posted:There's a generalized sense of "working" as "interacting with nature to accomplish meaningful things". This is exactly what work should be. It should be meaningful and you should feel a sense of pride doing it, at least the majority of the time. Here's the big man saying it himself quote:In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
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Sep 3, 2022 01:06
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croup coughfield posted:
I didn't make that claim. I made the claim that even without the bourgeois taking everything, the level of productive forces still aren't high enough and aren't distributed evenly enough to keep 8 billion fed, air conditioned, educated, healthy and otherwise alive and actualized. especially in the face of an increasingly uninhabitable planet. the amount of human labor that could be productively applied to fixing inequity and environmental damage is 100%. azathoth is probably right, that given the chance people would be glad to do the work. the work still needs to be done. capitalism and imperialism have left scars on the base earth from which everything else is generated. those scars will remain long after their final contradiction and they will take a miracle to heal. without miracles, we have hard work and it is good, it is praxis. but that hard work is going to be more digging canals in 100 degree weather and less jacking off in the noc all night and the praxis is going to be more teaching kids math and less making etsy jewelry or decorating tiles. I suspect that the firmest resistance to this prospect would come from people on this very forum and possibly in this very thread...
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Sep 3, 2022 01:13
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animist posted:This is sorta ahistorical. Abstract credit systems were invented thousands of years before metal currency, e.g. in Sumeria and Egypt. These systems let you convert anything into a particular quantity -- but that quantity was debt, credit, "I'll owe you one", not the intrinsic value of some metal. Of course debt could be kept in units of account based on metal -- or cows, or barley, or salt, etc. But it was understood to be debt -- a social relation -- not gold -- a commodity. Thank you, I genuinely appreciate the correction. My historical areas of specialty don't touch into ancient societies like Egypt or Sumeria (though I could talk somebody's ear off about the sugar trade circa 1650-1850). Though the Romans built their money system on precious metals, didn't they? Even if so, obviously I wrote much too broadly and shouldn't have written what I did specifically regarding gold. Again, thanks. I'll be adding a link to your very insightful post tomorrow.
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Sep 3, 2022 01:22
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it's a lot more involved than that because this is a sort of "poo poo to figure out once we are there" situation figuring out what would the average required labor into essential/productive activities alongside planning in terms of having a fully structured money-like system in place and with trade is a lot of planning with shitloads of factors to consider. There's an absurd amount of extremely cheap labor exported to the capitalist core that skews a lot of what amount of work would be necessary per person to switch the structural arrangement, so to speak for example, if we consider the United States in such scenario, it certainly has the conditions to self-sufficiently provide a decent standard of living to its entire population, but to do so would require immense short-term effort that is entirely non-negotiable because such a transition is going to destroy what is understood as the American standard of living, even to the poor. Without exploiting foreign trade, so much of what makes that standard disappears right away because there's so little buffer (as demonstrated by the pandemic). So, right away from day one, a massive industrial base has to be built to not only provide for the necessary means of living, but to also rearrange the existent one into a socialist/communist incorporation. And with it, a massive construction endeavor to rearrange the lives of many people as possible into means of living that are much more efficient in order to provide better living without wasting resources, which means high density urban living, mass transit systems - TRAINS, etc IDK if someone crunched those numbers for a theoretical maximum-effort labor plan accounting for contemporary technology, it would be very interesting to see
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Sep 3, 2022 01:31
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dead gay comedy forums posted:it's a lot more involved than that because this is a sort of "poo poo to figure out once we are there" situation A more "practical" solution might be to drawn down the trade exploitation concurrent with re-developing the homeland towards self-sufficiency. Such that there isn't a huge shock to standards of living.
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Sep 3, 2022 01:42
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Falstaff posted:Thank you, I genuinely appreciate the correction. My historical areas of specialty don't touch into ancient societies like Egypt or Sumeria (though I could talk somebody's ear off about the sugar trade circa 1650-1850). Though the Romans built their money system on precious metals, didn't they? Even if so, obviously I wrote much too broadly and shouldn't have written what I did specifically regarding gold. Yeah I'm by no means an expert, I'm just paraphrasing Debt; no idea about the romans. I think Graeber's key point is that money is really about credit and precious metals are just a particular unit of account, contra the standard narrative of bourgeois economics. Or really, notions of money as social relation and money as commodity have been interacting for a very long time; the societies that think of money as a commodity tend to be much more exploitative and violent. (Another neat thing the book talks about is that a lot of world religions emerged right at the same time as formalized / written debt. He conjectures that the abstract idea of exchange value spurs a lot of practical and moral questions that are not really necessary to ask when everything runs on informal social bonds; in some sense, money constructs the ideas of selfishness and selflessness, which don't really exist beforehand, because informal bonds aren't liquidatable in the same way. The book also has a lot of neat information about exchange / gift practices for marriage and blood debts. Would definitely recommend it, although he dismisses Marx offhand which is annoying because he mostly agrees with him.) animist has issued a correction as of 02:01 on Sep 3, 2022 |
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Sep 3, 2022 01:53
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Ferrinus posted:it's possible but not actually clear that a rationally-organized economy would mean less overall labor. while a lot of labor is getting done now that is useless or actively destructive there's also a lot of work that should be getting done but isn't because it isn't profitable enough I couldn't disagree more, there is so so so much useless labor being done, there is no way a rational system would involve more or even the same amount of total labor
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Sep 3, 2022 02:10
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The most rewarding job I ever had was cooking, the worst job conditions and pay I've ever experienced was that same job, it's called the Dialectic
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Sep 3, 2022 02:20
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Communist Thoughts posted:It'd be nice if everyone wasn't forced to work to survive and we're near or at a technological level where not everyone does have to work if we organised society remotely efficiently. imagine if the rich all got magically ate overnight. how long would it take to reorganize everything and move everything around so it worked properly, years, decades, centuries? if it's to be communism it's to be war communism for a long rear end time. the moral necessity of work is because it is literally you interacting with the world and hopefully bettering it in some way. it's your dialectic with the world. please don't let the awfulness of how things are blind you not only to how things could be but how they should be
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Sep 3, 2022 02:40
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In Training posted:The most rewarding job I ever had was cooking, the worst job conditions and pay I've ever experienced was that same job, it's called the Dialectic It's an insanely stressful, low paying job. Every boss you get some small business tyrant who fancies himself the next Gordon Ramsay or Marco Pierre White
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Sep 3, 2022 03:19
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Tbh I suspect a lot of lovely jobs would be a lot less lovely if you did them less than 30 hours a week and weren't terrified of losing your only income
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Sep 3, 2022 03:22
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dead gay comedy forums posted:And with it, a massive construction endeavor to rearrange the lives of many people as possible into means of living that are much more efficient in order to provide better living without wasting resources, which means high density urban living, mass transit systems - TRAINS, etc with you up to here. if you like your cities, keep them. other than port and transit work, and serving as hubs for academia and the arts, cities have as much useless overhead as the country side. a lot of the industry is finance and insurance things that, as already mentioned, would virtually disappear under central planning. there's also resiliency in being spread out. 100 years ago my podunk little town had a population of less than 10k and a steel mill and a grip of saw mills. economies of scale don't fair well in disasters. if there are 100 smaller factories producing exactly the same thing spread over the country, weathering disasters is easier
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Sep 3, 2022 03:26
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WampaLord posted:I couldn't disagree more, there is so so so much useless labor being done, there is no way a rational system would involve more or even the same amount of total labor i don't really know what you're going off of here besides pure gut reckons. there's a lot infrastructural and care work needed across the globe
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Sep 3, 2022 04:01
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Ferrinus posted:i don't really know what you're going off of here besides pure gut reckons. there's a lot infrastructural and care work needed across the globe like I said before, there are entire sectors of the economy that are full of not just makework, but actively unproductive work. every insurance company, every rideshare driver, every single finance job, there's literally hundreds of examples one could think of off the top of your head. the actual necessary work is a small fraction of our current total productivity. yes it's basically "gut reckons" because i don't feel like hunting down data for what should be a relatively simple concept to grasp
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Sep 3, 2022 04:09
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on the one hand, it's true that there's a lot of "work" that is, as Graeber puts it, a bullshit job on the other hand, there's a shitton of stuff that we as a society are not working on, that we should be, and would keep a lot of us occupied were we to actually try to address it. Rehabilitating America's infrastructure, implementing climate change resilience, and migrating everything to renewables/nuclear would consume a lot of the manpower that we're otherwise allocating towards... bullshit jobs and then, when you also take into account the ideal of slashing working hours by as much as half, and then splitting the difference across more people, that would require even more folks needing to be employed, even if "employment" is redefined as a 20-hour workweek taken all together, it wouldn't necessarily mean that only a fraction of humanity would be working
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Sep 3, 2022 04:10
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gradenko_2000 posted:on the one hand, it's true that there's a lot of "work" that is, as Graeber puts it, a bullshit job that's exactly what I said to start with, we could have 15-20 hour work weeks, in no way was I saying communism = no work but i do think part of the pitch for communism needs to be "you will work less than under capitalism" or at least "your work will be much more tolerable"
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Sep 3, 2022 04:13
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WampaLord posted:that's exactly what I said to start with, we could have 15-20 hour work weeks, in no way was I saying communism = no work the point is that you have no idea of the scale of operating a society that actually cares for each other and the earth, and the amount of work that would be required. no one else is talking about some imagined sci-fi luxury communism, but about building socialism on this busted up bitch of a planet we've been given
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Sep 3, 2022 04:48
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how much work will be necessary under communism is totally conjecture, and you should not be selling communism to people by arguing that they will only have to work 20 hours a week. it doesn't even seem plausible that we will successfully build communism in our lifetimes, so what good is that pitch? its childish bullshit.
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Sep 3, 2022 06:22
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yeah the operative difference between capitalism and socialism is that under capitalism the benefits of work do not accrue to the worker and in fact tend to make the worker progressively weaker. under socialism it is actually workers who will direct and benefit from social labor in the aggregate. but the fact that we actually get to use and live in the things we make might mean we have a greater incentive to work rather than less, and that's putting aside the multiple societal and environmental disasters that desperately need repair right now before there's been some kind of violent revolution
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Sep 3, 2022 06:29
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I think that there's a certain element of magical thinking when people from USA talk about working hours, which is forgetting how much work goes into things before you even get to see them. While you do indeed have plenty of bullshit jobs, a lot of them are in a non-trivial way related to imperialist extraction from other places - getting rid of these implies getting rid of said imperialism, and you'll have to cover for the gaps it leaves. Which is to say, you'll suddenly have a lot more manufacturing jobs in USA itself, among other things, instead of layers of bullshittery required to get people 6000+ miles away desperate enough to make you boots for 1.5$ an hour (or worse. waaaaaay worse.) and the logistics of getting that stuff over to your hands while squeezing out every single possible dime from the process. Under a socialist system, you'd still genuinely be much better off, the gap between the big burgeoise and you is just that enormous, but the process of actually getting to a steady state where this is possible (late edit: "this" referring to a major reduction in work hours for everyone) is a non-trivial matter, even disregarding the whole "actually establishing socialist control over the beating heart of global imperialism while the climate is going to hell" part. As a side note, people in the imperial core genuinely (and I mean genuinely) grasping the full, unfiltered intensity of imperialism and all the associated horrors, and taking a hard turn to the right is absolutely not an unusual thing - especially among people who realize that they depend on it in some way (even if it's as simple as having an ok paying state funded job after a life spent dealing with poverty). Don't "expose" imperialism without a followup, otherwise you're just working unpaid hours doing prepwork for those who will do the rhetorical follow up on things you say. my dad has issued a correction as of 08:23 on Sep 3, 2022 |
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Sep 3, 2022 07:00
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who else is excited for the Haymarket socialism conference this weekend https://socialismconference.org/schedule/ quote:Saturday, September 3 • 10:00am - 11:30am quote:Monday, September 5 • 10:00am - 11:30am
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Sep 3, 2022 08:35
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If it's not happening in our lifetime it's all speculation anyway so "you will work less for a better life since more hands make lighter work" seems a better pitch than, "you will dig ditches for 200 years" A lot of this stuff just seems similar to the wishful/spiteful "when the revolution comes all the people I dont like are up against the wall!" except its "every youtuber is gonna have to break rocks with a big hammer their whole lives, that'll learn em" It's also similar to the obsession with making "hard choices" Its pretty obvious why the rulers of communist societies pushed the idea that everyone should be hyped for hard labour, same reason any ruling class does Communist Thoughts has issued a correction as of 08:45 on Sep 3, 2022 |
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Sep 3, 2022 08:38
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Atrocious Joe posted:who else is excited for the Haymarket socialism conference this weekend Tankie Campist Promise Li Wow!!!
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Sep 3, 2022 08:54
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Is it an online conference? I thought it was actually in Haymarket which is the posh side of Edinburgh
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Sep 3, 2022 10:44
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Communist Thoughts posted:Is it an online conference? I thought it was actually in Haymarket which is the posh side of Edinburgh hah
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Sep 3, 2022 10:48
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Care to bring up someone specific as the target of your complaints or are you just going to pretend you're on twitter and vaguely grumble into the void? There's more here I'd comment on, but I'll wait for the reply first.
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Sep 3, 2022 10:56
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 Capital Accumulation Here we’re starting to get into the real core of Marxist theory. Where does profit come from? If we start with a sum of value, where does the surplus value come from? Just what is this “capital” at the heart of capitalism, and how does it work? Marx argued that there were two different basic ways people interact with money. Whether you’re employed or self-employed, direct producers sell in order to buy. Capitalists, on the other hand, buy in order to sell. Let’s take three different producers of commodities: Bob, who works as a cook making burgers in his wife’s diner; Linda, who pays Bob a wage and sells burgers in her diner; and Mr. Fischoeder, who runs a chain of burger restaurants along the waterfront in their coastal town. Both Bob and Linda sell in order to buy. Bob sells his labour as a commodity – his ability to make burgers – and Linda sells the burgers produced by Bob. Despite being technically petit bourgeois, Linda interacts with the same money cycle that proletarian Bob does: In both cases they take the money they receive and spend it on the other commodities they need to live (because too many extra burgers lose any use-value to them – they need clothes, shelter, etc.) Their ultimate goals are the use-value inherent in these commodities. This is not true for Mr. Fischoeder. He isn’t directly producing anything – instead, he is a money-owner, a controller of the super-commodity. His goal is to buy commodities (even if that commodity is just labour) to sell them, thereby spending money to get more money. He doesn’t actually want the use-value inherent in any of these things (he might not even like burgers!), but only the exchange-value. Here we see two cycles at work. Bob and Linda live in a cycle of Commodity>Money>Commodities, or C-M-C, where money is simply a middle step to buying more commodities. But for Mr. Fischoeder, money is the beginning and ending of the exchange, a reverse cycle to Bob and Linda: Money>Commodities>Money, or M-C-M. Of course, if the second M is equal to the first M, then Mr. Fischoeder has wasted his time. No capitalist would spend a thousand dollars to pay others to make and sell burgers if they were only going to get a thousand dollars back at the end of the cycle. Mr. Fischoeder seeks to profit from the exchange. Luckily for him, as the supercommodity, money can make more money; M-C-M can become M-C-M`, where M` is a greater sum than M. This difference between M` and M is the origin of surplus value. (Note: All this means that, contrary to liberal economics’ conception, Bob and Linda, as prole and petty boug respectively, interact with the economic system in a fundamentally different way than the capitalist class. It’s a difference of kind, not quantity.) So money doesn’t actually become capital until it engages in this self-expanding value cycle – unless it becomes M`, it’s still just money. This surplus value can take three different forms: Profit, Interest, and Rent. If Mr. Fischoeder didn’t spend his own money in the initial burger-chain investment (which he probably didn’t), then some of M` needs to go to paying the interest. If Mr. Fischoeder rents any of the land or equipment in his burger restaurants, then another portion goes to paying rent. Anything left over becomes profit – surplus value to be used however Mr. Fischeoder likes, but primarily as either dividends (i.e., personal use) or as Capital: A new investment, which in turn will generate additional surplus value.  Writ large, a capitalist society is therefore an accumulation of Capital. Capital Accumulation is one of the defining principles of capitalism, the economic end goal of the whole system. Profit keeps the system going – without it, without this capital accumulation, everything grinds to a halt. The rich need to get richer. So let’s say Mr. Fischoeder spends $90 making X burgers, which he then sells for $100; he’s now selling his commodities above their value. But Mr. Fischoeder can’t just arbitrarily charge whatever he wants for his burgers – outside of monopolies and cartels, the market sees to it that commodities tend to have prices that hover around their value based on their average, socially required labour. Here’s a problem, though: If everyone charges $100 for the materials required to make X burgers, then Mr. Fischoeder isn’t actually gaining anything – or rather, whatever he gains as a seller he loses as a buyer. So this surplus value can’t occur in the exchange for it to truly be profit... It has to come from somewhere else, and Marxism argues that this surplus originates in process of production, between the M and M`. On its own, money only has the power to become commodities: M-C. And as we’ve seen, M-C doesn’t create surplus value. But more happens in M-C-M` than just exchange; whatever Mr. Fischoeder buys with M, he doesn’t simply re-sell those things, but rather he buys commodities to turn into new commodities. And the only commodity that is even capable of doing this is human labour, so necessarily this is where surplus value finds its origin. Furthermore, since the exchange value of material commodities are socially determined (and hover around a particular value), this means that for M` to actually be greater than M, the capitalist must pay less for the human labour commodity than its actual value. This is the source of profit, and which Marx terms Exploitation. Without exploitation, capitalism cannot exist. I would argue that it’s this, the concept of capital accumulation and the way it requires labour to happen, that lies at the core of Marxist theory. If you don’t understand this phenomenon, even if you’ve read and understood everything else Marx wrote, then you don’t really get Marxism. But if you do get this concept but haven’t engaged with anything else, well... I wouldn’t say you’re a well-informed Marxist, but you’ve got the essential foundation down. It’s the defining principle of capitalism. Taken in aggregate, it is this turnover of capital, the M-C-M’ cycle, that allows capital to reproduce itself across society. Capital Reproduction requires that the capitalist class as a whole continually convert their claimed surplus value (M’) into expanded control over the means of production, and to employ ever-more labour power. This conversion, of course, requires the continual sale/purchase of commodities. There are other ways for individuals to claim what they call profit (rent seeking, betting on markets through speculation, etc.), but these methods 1) don’t actually add any value to the overall system, and 2) for someone to gain in speculation, another actor needs to lose over time. Neither of these are sufficient to keep the system going long-term – without surplus value being added into the system as a whole, Capital cannot reproduce itself and the capitalist class will find itself in an ever-more precarious position (speaking in aggregate as a whole class.) This is one of the major contradictions of capitalism: the capitalist class needs to pay the proletarian class as little as possible in order to maximize profit, and continually works to keep wages low... And yet they also need to sell the commodities produced by the system to that very same class they are underpaying, so in attempting to maximize profit they are necessarily harming their ability to actually exchange commodities. Over a long enough period of time, this is going to lead to crises of liquidity, ever-shrinking proletarian buying power, and falling standards of living.  Note: We’ll be talking about surplus value again later. It’s an important subject and has some very tricky implications, which Marx is eager to talk about in detail, but we need to establish some other concepts first before we can get into it further.
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Sep 3, 2022 14:40
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Ferrinus posted:yeah the operative difference between capitalism and socialism is that under capitalism the benefits of work do not accrue to the worker and in fact tend to make the worker progressively weaker. under socialism it is actually workers who will direct and benefit from social labor in the aggregate. but the fact that we actually get to use and live in the things we make might mean we have a greater incentive to work rather than less, and that's putting aside the multiple societal and environmental disasters that desperately need repair right now before there's been some kind of violent revolution I'm reminded of the famous Keynes quote from like a century ago saying that productivity increases should lead to work week decreases, and eventually to like 15-20 hour weeks. Mechanization, automation, computerization, education, and more, and the accompanying productivity increases that have followed them, could theoretically have been used to assure a decent quality of life to everyone and then, rather than continue trying to accumulate more and more, to instead work less and less to maintain that decent quality of life. Instead, because of the profit accumulation drive of capital and the lack of power of labour to demand that for the workers, capitalists have siphoned off the proceeds of productivity growth to enrich themselves, while workers work just as much as they used to despite being more productive than ever before per hour worked. imo it's not irrational to consider the possibility that if that relationship was ended and the productivity increases were no longer solely enriching the bosses, then we could be happy with our current lifestyles, stop doing the extra 20 hours of work per week that goes to enriching the CEO, and have a 20-hour work week. this of course is analyzing the worker in this scenario in isolation however, rather than considering that the work people do in developed countries these days is propped up by environmental devastation and imperialism that forces long, hard working days on people in poorer countries and doesn't account for the negative externalities of modern-day highly productive work processes. If you account for those, it's likely the two things would balance each other out in some way, but I think it might be impossible to figure out where that balance would actually land at the end of some big economic transition.
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Sep 3, 2022 14:59
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my dad posted:
That’s because leftists usually only frame imperialism in a way that makes it seem beneficial to the imperial core. There’s this heavy streak of focusing on how the things you enjoy are morally bad and you should feel bad for using them. When you talk about imperialism as making possible all the nice treats you enjoy, you’re making a material argument in favor of imperialism. And it’s not unpredictable that some people respond “gently caress other, I want my treats” When the reality is that, for example, the economic destruction of core American industries through outsourcing, the exhorbitant military budgets, and increasing police and surveillance state are natural consequences of imperialism. Imperialism broke the back of American labor, and it has never recovered. That’s what I’d focus on to make people realize their material interests lie against exploitation of the global south.
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Sep 3, 2022 15:04
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Communist Thoughts posted:If it's not happening in our lifetime it's all speculation anyway so "you will work less for a better life since more hands make lighter work" seems a better pitch than, "you will dig ditches for 200 years" personally, I think it's a pretty interesting thought experiment, you know? to address the very specific of working time in your complaint, in that scenario I posted before, the thing is that reorganization/allocation of labor is a monumental task in itself. I think it's pretty doable in napkin math terms to make such a society work with 6h shifts, even less, if we are talking about socially necessary labor time the problem is how you live right now. A gigantic plethora of consumer goods and services tied to one another. In order to provide for amenities in such an economic context, people are going to work the supplementary labor time (like Kropotkin describes), which becomes seriously expensive when the consumer market suddenly doesn't get anything from Asian sweatshops which is why I said a non-negotiable short term herculean effort has to be put in place in order to have available, in the shortest time possible, the productive means and infrastructure to continuously sustain and develop standards of living based on how we currently perceive those in the developed West, to then have shorter labor time in a high standard of living. That's part of the pitch. I don't think it's unreasonable at all to have 5h in the short term to attend necessities in the United States where the Rich Got Eaten All Of Sudden, but 3 or 4 hours of additional work are going to be necessary for amenities and supplementary provision, which are going to provide way loving less in those terms of consumer goods and services than right now (This is where forums poster my dad is very correct about. A bunch of people go "well, actually, hegemony is a good thing because..." when they actually stumble into a Marxism but go the other way, realizing to a degree their material conditions and relations and go, you know what, gently caress it, class treason) to summarize, the pitch is "we are going to have a good bunch of years or so of War Communism, then stuff will definitely get better, but not better like you think it is right now, but better in a radically different way. 'Turning suburbia into sustainable agrarian development, with trains instead of cars' radically different way"
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Sep 3, 2022 15:45
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Communist Thoughts posted:If it's not happening in our lifetime it's all speculation anyway so "you will work less for a better life since more hands make lighter work" seems a better pitch than, "you will dig ditches for 200 years" The good faith theory understander has logged on
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Sep 3, 2022 15:48
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my dad posted:As a side note, people in the imperial core genuinely (and I mean genuinely) grasping the full, unfiltered intensity of imperialism and all the associated horrors, and taking a hard turn to the right is absolutely not an unusual thing - especially among people who realize that they depend on it in some way (even if it's as simple as having an ok paying state funded job after a life spent dealing with poverty). Don't "expose" imperialism without a followup, otherwise you're just working unpaid hours doing prepwork for those who will do the rhetorical follow up on things you say. The imperial core rules. We get excited for unions for magazine who's sole point is to get people to consume more products. https://www.wirecutterunion.com/
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Sep 3, 2022 15:53
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Communist Thoughts posted:If it's not happening in our lifetime it's all speculation anyway so "you will work less for a better life since more hands make lighter work" seems a better pitch than, "you will dig ditches for 200 years" a ruling class does indeed benefit from a disciplined and productive labor force. this doesn't change, though, when that labor force IS the ruling class. the operative difference is allocation, not amount, and attempts to conflate socialism and leisure are wrongheaded. losurdo gives some good historical examples in his stalin bio vyelkin posted:I'm reminded of the famous Keynes quote from like a century ago saying that productivity increases should lead to work week decreases, and eventually to like 15-20 hour weeks. Mechanization, automation, computerization, education, and more, and the accompanying productivity increases that have followed them, could theoretically have been used to assure a decent quality of life to everyone and then, rather than continue trying to accumulate more and more, to instead work less and less to maintain that decent quality of life. Instead, because of the profit accumulation drive of capital and the lack of power of labour to demand that for the workers, capitalists have siphoned off the proceeds of productivity growth to enrich themselves, while workers work just as much as they used to despite being more productive than ever before per hour worked. imo it's not irrational to consider the possibility that if that relationship was ended and the productivity increases were no longer solely enriching the bosses, then we could be happy with our current lifestyles, stop doing the extra 20 hours of work per week that goes to enriching the CEO, and have a 20-hour work week. yeah it's not a crazy idea, it's just not a given, and i really don't like the "well what's the point of socialism if i still have to set an alarm and go to work" stance
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Sep 3, 2022 17:06
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