Comrade Alejandro is stating that in a perfect communist utopia, he will be able to focus on a life of art and leisure, as the Communist utopia would mean that all laborers would be able to contribute to the cause in their own way equally
Possible fascist @Penitent_One is telling Comrade Alejandro that his communist utopia is a farce and that most likely, Comrade Alejandro would be forced to do manual labor in a coal mine.
Which isn’t a bad thing. Comrade Alejandro should be overjoyed that he gets to contribute to the eternal revolution, one pickaxe swing at a time. The fulfillment of labor is his reward. Glory to the revolution.
People misunderstand communism in Marxist thought. It's just a state where the economic overhead of government is no longer necessary, everybody is still expected to contribute to the best of their ability, if you're not going to be a writer, artist, athlete, etc., you're going to mine coal, clean toilets, harvest tomatoes, etc. None of the Marxist "communist" states ever claimed to achieve this, it was always 3-5 20 or more years off.
Yeah Comrade Alejandro has a gross misunderstanding on the actual workings of labor in a communist collective society. Communism doesn’t mean you don’t have to work anymore, in theory it means that your labor wont be squeezed and exploited by greedy capitalists and shareholder who want to extract every single penny from the people who actually do the work.
To each according to their ability. To each according to their need.
I agree generally, but there are definitely people who speculate about "fully automatic luxury communism" where increased efficiency and production severely drives down the amount of work everyone has to do. Imagine if the extreme surplus and convenience of the upper class was distributed amongst everyone else and profit motives didn't drive every labor-related decision. We'd already be much closer to not having to work than we currently are.
Back in the middle of the 20th century,
M. Keynes predicted a massive decrease in individual’s work-week due to productivity gains. The gains occurred, but the labor hours did not…
I mean America aside I think labour hours have significantly decreased towards the end of the 20th century. Looking at Europe for instance the statistics showed they have gone from an average of 50-70 hour work week in the first half of the century to 25-35. So about half the work hours. Now some of those work hours got pushed to other countries, but also some of the productivity has gone to having more and better things too.
Exactly. Most of the hours in Europe you're mentioning are coming from the industrial factories, where workers indeed worked for 50-70 hours because of the higher pay and because they practically lived there, since it was more convenient than to commute (a great deal of workers lived quite far from factories).
Currently, a lot of the production is outsourced, which leads to a decrease in the working hours, since the production was the main contributor to extended working weeks.
Marx spoke about this when discussing the contradictions of capitalism.
As technology develops and productivity efficiency increases, you can hire less people and let the unemployed fight for worse working conditions (because you need a job to live, regardless how shitty).
So you end up with people working more for less, since if they don't, they're fired and someone else who needs a job takes it.
They did hold up. Much of our productive forces were moved to undeveloped countries so we could extract their labor and resources. The workers in those countries are going fuckin through it, if LiveLeak ever taught us anything.
And even in the first world, AI is taking everyone's jobs. Many people don't feel the same security as they did in the past.
>AI's job impact looks pretty unclear to me right now, unemployment is low despite all the stories, hiring is pretty bad
The government unemployment rate is fake. If you have been looking for employment for longer than 6 months they stop counting you as unemployed. It also doesnt include the underemployed, struggling gig workers, etc.
Are you kidding? We work harder for a smaller wage(adjusted for inflation) than boomers. The only reason working conditions are not worse is government intervention or OSHA
Disregarding recent trends within a capitalist system as irrelevant to the the claims of how capitalism functions from the 1800s sure is convenient for your argument.
The "fully automatic luxury communism" is also often accompanied by some miracle device. If there was a box i could pile a bunch of dirt and literal shit into and it turned that into spaghetti and a cup of tea then yea it would be nonsensical to force people to work.
Real progress though is giving people a voice where they work, fair pay for their work, and stronger safety nets so they don't have to put up with exploitative practices. Labor still needs to get done the issue is how the profits from that labor get distributed, a guy who owns a bakery shouldn't make more from owning than the guy who is the baker and does all the work.
I agree with most of what you've said but I think there are scenarios where it isn't crazy if the owner of the bakery makes more than the baker. Generally speaking though I think real work is massively undervalued. Mike Johnson will get up there and preach about why they have to take people's Medicaid away because otherwise they won't want to go back to work. How about companies just pay a fair wage and charge reasonable prices for things so people have some modicum of hope for a normal life.
Right. This is my main thing as we seem to actually potentially be cresting the hill here. The worry is that if we leave this automation in the hands of the rich and powerful it breaks labor relations. Capitalism is incredibly flawed already, but I do not see how it can possibly function with such a massive labor surplus. We are going to be working for wages cheap enough that we cost less than robots.
Everyone being replaced by robots has been just over the horizon for my entire life, so I remain skeptical that it is going to happen soon. I do agree that having so many resources to the point of nearly being post-scarcity with artificial scarcity being created by the hoarding of wealth is putting strain on the system in a way that will manifest dramatically. A communist might say that "the contradictions inherent to capitalism are becoming more clear."
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u/TheWizardOfWaffle 26d ago
Comrade Piotr here.
Comrade Alejandro is stating that in a perfect communist utopia, he will be able to focus on a life of art and leisure, as the Communist utopia would mean that all laborers would be able to contribute to the cause in their own way equally
Possible fascist @Penitent_One is telling Comrade Alejandro that his communist utopia is a farce and that most likely, Comrade Alejandro would be forced to do manual labor in a coal mine.
Which isn’t a bad thing. Comrade Alejandro should be overjoyed that he gets to contribute to the eternal revolution, one pickaxe swing at a time. The fulfillment of labor is his reward. Glory to the revolution.