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Is my understanding correct?
I argue that currently society has no need to work 40 hours per week. And the only reason we work that much is to keep people employed and a small minority getting profits from the products created by the workers.
Capitalists will use the market card. If you create a consumer good (even if based on lies) and it sells, means there's a need for it. I argue that if people could choose to work less and deciding democratically where to focus their labor force on, even by losing such items, they'd rather do so than keep things as they are.
I'm saying there's a lot of waste of labor force, and most people would sacrifice the enormous amount of useless items for more free time, time that they could use for leisure but also for creativity and progress (that I think humans, at least some, naturally strive for, personal objectives).
Shortsighted analysis and lacking Marxist terms, but how right am I?
I also have another problem. People right now can't choose to work little just for food, home and electricity, the main problem are houses, they are extremely expensive. Why are they this expensive? Is it artificial? How could you drive the prices down?
Yes, not very revolutionary, but I'm trying to convince people to realize things don't have to be as they are, and this seems like a good way to start.
I would agree that there's no reason besides the capitalist system that people need to work 40 or more hours a week. For one thing there are huge numbers of structurally unemployed people who are thrown out of the system entirely, right next to people who are working 60+ hour work weeks. At the same time as capitalists whine about skills mismatch and not being able to find people who are skilled, education budgets are cut and tuition prices rise sky high.
Another thing, capitalism is in many industries no longer a progressive system as far as reducing labor by machinery and automation. For example, there are industries that, when undertaken in the United States, are undertaken in a very mechanized fashion. However, most of the production occurs in China utilizing hugely inefficient labor-intensive methods because the labor-power is cheaper than the machinery there. There is a structural reluctance towards further automation in many industries because of the further destabilizing unemployment which results, as well as reduction in profit. See "Race against the Machine" for an example of bourgeois anxiety over this, they fear mass unemployment and inequality caused by automation under capitalism would cause revolt.
Thirdly, many sectors are completely unproductive, and are only necessary to maintain capitalism. Examples would include insurance and financial sectors, which are really just a dead weight but critical for the operation of the system.
Last edited by oneday; 29th January 2016 at 23:58.
Interesting, I started reading Conquest of Bread, and just yesterday I reached some parts that go into what I'm saying:
Imagine nowadays, and as you said, if you remove unproductive sectors there'd be much more labour available for useful stuff.
We should remember that the whole purpose of labor-saving methods and machines in capitalist production has nothing to do with reducing the burden on the laborers as far as the length of the working day is concerned. It's only to increase the surplus-value.
In fact, without anybody realizing it these applications provide strong incentives for an increase in the working day, because they reduce the relative number of workers and hence profit. Also, there is a strong incentive to keep the hours as long as possible, because of the race against rent or other time interval obligations, and depreciation of machines independent of the time they are actually used.
You'd think that as time went on, the working day would have gotten shorter and shorter as the mass of use-values produced grows but there is a strong tendency against it inherent in capitalist production. It is only through class struggle that the working day has been limited in the ways it has been so far.
In my country, minimum wage is enough for you to live with basic necessities, for that you need to work 8 hours per day.
Yeah, all this productive technology, but we still need to work many hours, more than these primitive societies to have similar quality of life.
Fuck this, my blood boils.
Weren't the so-called 'communist states' extracting surplus value from workers too?
Abolition of the wages system is the revolution for me.
Certainly I believe in the abolition of the wage system, but the term 'communist state' is a misnomer. Maybe it could be argued as a socialist state, or rather a leftist experiment by a minority of the far left, i.e. Lenin and his fraction.
"If you consider an outcry against Stalinist mass murder and its justification a "dramatic moralist outcry" then how about an undramatic, unmoral outcry: "Fuck you!""-Red Dave
'Communist state' 'Socialist state' no difference.
Quit the stageism.
I agree with you FMB, here in my city there are A LOT of empty houses, and still to rent one costs half of the minimum salary. Where are The Market Laws (Praised be them) when poor people need them?
Unfortunately "Communism" is a classless, stateless, society. Socialism is much the same, but open to much wider interpretation, with people like Sanders (as social democrat) and Mao (as a maoist) still belonging to the tradition, in addition to the Anarchists of course.
I know you know this, however, and this boils down to a divide as old as the First International between Anarchists and Communists in regards to methodology, most prominently the transition question. Kropotkin, Bukharin, etc. belong to socialism, but not communism. Unless Anarcho-Caps and other such nonsense is now allowed on this site.
Being a communist, and rejecting the idea of totalitarian regimes being communist, is not stageist to me. Simple common sense, and in the defense of a large fraction of the left repressed because of such connotations across the world, even when there was none.
Last edited by Heretek; 12th February 2016 at 22:43. Reason: Post while I was posting
"If you consider an outcry against Stalinist mass murder and its justification a "dramatic moralist outcry" then how about an undramatic, unmoral outcry: "Fuck you!""-Red Dave
Abolition of the wages system is not sufficient on its own. It could mean the return of slavery where we work for food and shelter. The real revolution has to be seizing the means of production and placing it under the democratic control of society. The abolition of the wage system would follow.
"Events have their own logic, even when human beings do not." - Rosa Luxemburg
"There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." - Lenin
Abolition of the wages system might not be sufficient but it is a necessary part of socialist revolution.
Yeah, the more people start questioning the modern capitalist way of defining "efficiency", the better. I would hope that this is something intuitive enough that no amount of bombardment by propaganda could obscure it completely.
People do, indeed, at least seem to understand in crisis situations that something is "off" about layoffs by a company during a period of record profits. Yet, the struggle never seems to go beyond immediate "concessions" in an attempt to stave off more unemployment.
"I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will." - Antonio Gramsci
"If he did advocate revolutionary change, such advocacy could not, of course, receive constitutional protection, since it would be by definition anti-constitutional."
- J.A. MacGuigan in Roach v. Canada, 1994
It's interesting you say that, because Keynes predicted that we'd all be working 15 hour work weeks by now, based on the trends at the time.
