In our civilized societies we are rich. Why then are the many poor? Why this painful drudgery for the masses? Why, even to the best-paid workman, this uncertainty for the morrow, in the midst of all the wealth inherited from the past, and in spite of the powerful means of production, which could ensure comfort to all, in return for a few hours daily toil? - Peter Kropotkin (1892)
I think it’s important to frame this kind of argument very carefully. There is a misconception that communists and socialists just don’t want to work and want a free ride.
Communists, socialists, and anarchists are fine with work. They are not fine with exploitation. Work is not necessarily exploitive. Work should be rewarded and incentivized.
But, in a civilized society, your ability to merely survive should not be dependent on your ability or willingness to work. That doesn’t mean that the quality of life of someone who chooses not to work should be the same as someone who chooses to work. It only means that choosing not to work should not be a death sentence.
How any particular society may choose to implement such a system of non-exploitative, minimally coercive work may vary. But the main point is giving people more control over their work, their working conditions, and their lives generally.
“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” still applies. You’re just more likely to also get the things you want if you do valuable labor.
Edit: another point. I’d argue that leftists are MORE okay with work than capitalism enjoyers because they do not want people to be paid for simply owning things and not doing labor. The goal of capitalism - how to win capitalism - is to just own things and exploit others’ labor, not to work. How to win Socialism is doing the job you enjoy/are best at/are most willing to do for the reward offered - that’s it. Simple as.
Shit if I could not work and live in a barely kept together apartment or trailer home eating only bread and drinking tap water, I’d be happy af. Work does nothing but depress me and my therapist hasn’t been able to help with that.
First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.
– Marx
The thing is, you do work at home. You spend time maintaining your life, buying groceries, you spend time thinking thoughts that turn into actions, you make things, you learn, you educate. But that stuff isn’t defined as work. The only thing capitalist defines as work is working for the capitalist. But even then much work that you do so you can make profit for them, like commuting, buying work clothes, fixing your car, is also working for the capitalist. But its unpaid.
Additionally, your working day then has a dual character also. Part of your day, usually the smaller part, you work to regenerate the money that the capitalist pays you, but the rest of the day you are working solely for the capitalists profit. It appears as if you’re paid for every hour, but you actually make your wages back in only the first couple hours of your work.
You are alienated from your work, from the value of it, and from the excess. So may not be that you don’t like work, you may just see that there’s no actual point to it, you’re naturally in tune with the facts of your exploitation, and your spirit resists it. You’re not wrong for hating your own exploitation, in fact, the historical movements that created wage labor brutally destroyed all other forms of self sustainance.
Another thing about our system, is that a certain percentage of the population has to be unemployed in order to keep wages low, and we produce about 3x more than what we need to sustain everyone on the planet with a high cost of living. Socialism would abolish the 40 hour work week. You could work part time for the benefit of society and the rest of that time would be yours to pursue your own happiness and self actualization rather than just recharging your battery just enough to be exploited for the next day.
I like in the Marx passage how he calls it the labor of mortification. In Marx’s roundabout way of writing, he’s saying that wage labor is death
You wouldn’t be happy as fuck for long. Eventually you’d get bored enough that you’d start doing something. Doing something is work.
That’s kind of the point though, when left go their own devices people generally choose to work, its just that when their base needs are met they will tend to work that brings them joy first instead of pay.
Yeah I’d most likely engage more with my hobbies, but nobody is paying me to go on walks or write some awful reviews of movies and videogames. They instead pay me to pump air into cow carcaases for 8.5 hours in a 30-35 degree room. Something that leaves me exhausted and basically no time to do things that make me not want to blow my brains out unless my epileptic ass wants to start depriving myself of sleep.
but people would have to work for you to maintain that lifestyle
That “lifestyle” of near poverty.
I think you’re missing OP’s point. Those basics of shelter and food can easily be covered by society, in the modern age, with our understanding of science allowing agriculture to be a piece of piss now-a-days compared with how it used to be. We have machines that can do the labour of hundreds, thousands, of people. We have computers that allow for the tracking of a million and one data points.
Yes, people would have to work to provide someone with bread and water. But it’s such a minimal amount of work in the grand scheme of things, that why should we really care? Those that work will live better lifestyles, will reap greater rewards. But why should those that don’t work be left to starve and die when for such a tiny percentage of society’s expenditure they can have their basic needs covered?
Perhaps, after a year of not working and recovering from the rat race, they may even see the value in working again. If it benefits their community, instead of having to work 40+ hours a week just to cover their basic requirements. Work can, and should, be far more flexible than it currently is. If our basic necessities are met then that allows for flexibility, it allows for labour to adapt as society’s needs change over time.
It prevents exploitation, as you no longer need to work but want to work to improve your situation or that of your community.
But the neccecities of life, the work of doctors, farmers, electricians is all work. Things people have to dedicate their lives to. To recieve the fruits of that work, the common person needs to work in their own way. Doctors dont want to work every day of their carreer. Plently of neccecary jobs are worked by people who never would want to do it, even once. To ask for their time and effort while giving nothing of your own is entitled.
Lol. Patient variant: once again, yes, all of it is also work. No, to do that one does not have to dedicate their whole lives to it. No, asking a miniscule of collective time and effort is not entitled
Normal variant: dude(ss), you seriously gonna complain about minimally covering survival of some folk while having families with wealth enough for several generations to live fucking awesome without any need to work a second in their life? Are you nuts or something?
Im not saying its perfect. But all people that can work should work, without exception and it should be a requirement for housing, food and medical care.
Interesting. Genuine question: how do you propose to compel to work those who are wealthy enough to live without working?
Bullshit. If I can provide for someone without them needing to do a thing, I am fine with it. If I ever get a say in how things are done, never will I agree to what you propose
So you wish for indentured servitude? Sisyphean toil? Slavery? For the masses. What a prick.
Our system is so wasteful that we pproduce about 3x more than what we would need in order for every person on earth to have a “middle class” first world lifestyle. The system is even incredibly wasteful beyond that and throws away most produce, because it isn’t profitable to sell, it ends up in a landfill.
Check out this blog by anthropologist and degrowth luminary, Jackson Hickel https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/10/27/degrowth-a-call-for-radical-abundance
I didnt say our system was the way to go
I didn’t mean to contradict you. Just provide some framing.
*Robots
Please, read Conquest of Bread. It frames it very effectively.
IMO this is giving too much credit to the bad faith argument. Anyone saying “oh you lazy socialist you just don’t want to work” is either incredibly ignorant, or more likely deliberately trolling.
It isn’t usually bad faith imo. They just genuinely can’t conceive of a world with a less coercive system of work. I’d say it is
incredibly ignorant. It’s hard even for leftists to envision the specifics of such a system - why would it be any easier for people who’ve never even considered an alternative? So they just think, naively, that without the threat of systemic violence jobs wouldn’t get doneIt’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable-but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.
- Ursula K. Le Guin
nah. I won’t be happy until we have trillionaires. Meanwhile, I can barely afford to eat.
/s just in case.
Right to Well Being for All!
"We must recognize, and loudly proclaim, that everyone, whatever his grade in the old society, whether strong or weak, capable of incapable, has, before everything, THE RIGHT TO LIVE, and society is bound to share amongst all, without exception, the means of existence it has at its disposal. We must acknowledge this, proclaim it loudly and act up to it.
Affairs must be managed in such a way that from the first day of the revolution the worker shall know that a new era is opening before him; that henceforth none need crouch under the bridges while places are hard by; none need fast in the midst of plenty; none need perish with cold near shops full of fur; that all is for all, in practice as well as in theory, and that at last, for the first time in history, that a revolution has been accomplished which considers the NEEDS of people before schooling them in their DUTIES.
This cannot be brought about by Acts of Parliament but only by taking immediate and effective possession of all that is necessary to ensure the well-being of all…"
— Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread,
I’ll always upvote Kropotkin
The wage form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working-day into necessary labour and surplus-labour, into paid and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour. In the corvée [a feudal form of labor exploitation where serfs or peasants worked some days in their own fields, and some days in the fields of their lords], the labour of the worker for himself, and his compulsory labour for his lord, differ in space and time in the clearest possible way. In slave labour, even that part of the working-day in which the slave is only replacing the value of his own means of existence, appears as labour for his master. All the slave’s labour appears as unpaid labour. In wage labour, on the contrary, even surplus-labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid. There the property-relation conceals the labour of the slave for himself; here the money-relation conceals the unpaid labour of the wage labourer.
… this relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalistic mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists.
– Marx
I mean, your associated quote does very much advocate trading hours of your time just to survive, so I’m not really sure how to reconcile it with your caption on the image.
The key word in the post is “selling”. Under capitalism, our labor/time becomes a commodity that we sell to the highest bidder (i.e., the capitalist). We do not own what we produce, nor do we own the means to produce goods efficiently. So we must sell ourselves–in the form of wages–by the hour/year in order to secure the the material needs of our existence. We are institutionally coerced. Whoever does not sell themselves cannot have food, clothing, shelter–even though we produce more than enough to go around.
In the 19th century, Kropotkin noticed that technological advances have made it possible to secure everyone’s needs. In this quote, we see that the the rise of machines (“means of production”) will “ensure comfort to all” for the price of “a few hours daily toil”. (See: The Conquest of Bread for more.) Yes, back in 1892, Kropotkin thought we would only need to work four hours a day to produce enough food, water, shelter, housing, etc. for everyone. The key, say Kropotkin, is that we must use these technological advances to produce the things we need rather than to make a few people unimaginably wealthy. Accordingly, we no longer need to sell our selves to those who take the bulk of the value we produce as their own profit; and there is no reason that anyone should go hungry, thirsty, or homeless in the present day.
your associated quote does very much advocate trading hours of your time just to survive
No it doesn’t? It’s clearly criticizing the system that requires such a trade.
Tell a liberal to mutual aid, and they’ll send cops to you in the middle of the night.
Tell kids we’ve been robbed since forever, and you have comrades touring aid for Gaza.
And think for myself? Sorry, I still havent watched all of Lost yet. I have no plans on watching it but I just cant live in a world where its not an option.
This is a part-time dog walker take. Be pro-worker, not anti-work. A lot of workers should be better paid, better treated, safer. But if you want to enjoy the labor all at once of construction workers, electricians, farmers, bakers, miners, hell just imagine how many people are in the production chain for your toilet paper? You should still expect to work hard.
Work has always been necessary. Working for the profit of billionaires is relatively new in human history.
Having lived in subsistence farming communities, this is such an ignorant rich bitch take.
Food doesn’t just show up at your house. Someone somewhere has to engage in agriculture to get you that food you want to eat. Someone has to wait around for rains. Someone has to till the earth to get the food you eat. You don’t deserve free food any more than a farmer does who had to grow it from the soil.
Not sure what this has to do with arguing against capitalist exploitation of labor. The person tilling the soil to grow food has more aligned interests with the office worker than the owners.
arguing against capitalist exploitation of labor.
Because the OP doesn’t mention it. Spending hours of your life to survive is necessary, even with modern mass production.
That was the subtext I picked up.
It just shouldn’t be limited to farming.
Think of all the things you currently pay for. How much of that do you expect to be provided for you while you do nothing in return?
Garbage collection, water, electric, and yes, housing and food.
The idea seems to be that all these kinds of things would be provided, and you only have to work enough to buy your Xbox.
We’re not children and the government isn’t your parents.
I do think there should be more of a balance between these things. It is in everyone’s interest to provide really basic housing, even if just to keep the homeless off the streets.
But we also all have to work.
How much of your 40 hour work week do you think gets absorbed by the billionaires? I expect for most people it’s much less than half.
We should be able to handle healthcare, education, maybe minimal housing, meals on wheels was a great program. But we don’t want half of our people to just stop working. Your life requires upkeep, and that can’t all come from other people.
I really don’t understand how people read the title and read the quote from Kropotkin and think that the post is somehow anti-work. We have always had to secure the material goods of our existence whether we lived in hunter-gather societies, villages, feudalism, capitalism, etc. No one is arguing that we live in a post-scarcity Star Trek society.
The point is we shouldn’t have to work for someone who owns that physical/intellectual labor and gives wages in return. That is an economic system that has outgrown its usefulness.
No one is arguing that we live in a post-scarcity Star Trek society.
China seems to be working hard on accomplishing it, with putting AI and robotics to better development and utilization, for the greater whole. I have my personal criticisms and if I lived there and had a vote, I would voice them, but when our society decides to come together for the greater whole, I can voice them then.
JFC - I’m talking about people that live in a village in West Africa. They own the land and work fucking hard just to survive and have never seen the inside of an office in their lives. Their lives are not bucolic fantasy, their lives are, at their core, not much different than yours and mine. They want to work less and have more and just be left alone. But they’re farming millet and sorghum in literal sand, prone to the weather to dictate if they starve or not.
Or maybe you tell me more about the value of their labor and how somewhere far far in the distance someone is keeping them poor against their will and best efforts.
Ok, but why are you talking about people that live in a village in west africa? The post’s original subtext, to me, is pretty clearly about people selling their labor for less than its true value to survive, while the ownership class tremendously profits. Farmers working their own land aren’t being exploited (not counting interactions with the outside world that might affect them if they try to sell crops).
Or maybe you tell me more about the value of their labor and how somewhere far far in the distance someone is keeping them poor against their will and best efforts.
I’m not an expert but I imagine colonialism and such might have an impact.
I’m talking about people who farm and need labor to survive, and placing that labor in the context that sometimes you can be left alone, have relatively little direct impact from colonialism or even capitalism, and that doesn’t make one’s labor somehow special or magical. You can do everything right and free from most trappings of capitalism and life can still be hard and suck.
Posts like this push some socialist farm worker fantasy, as if Soviet era propaganda of smiling peasants was how things were - I’ve lived like that. It’s not pleasant on average, which is why people leave those communities unless something specific keeps them there. It works as a method of basic survival of the species, but so does having 7 or 8 kids per woman to try and get 3 to reach adulthood so you can sell off one girl for the dowry payment.
I’m also talking about places where no French or English is spoken, where the currency they use isn’t even the one for the country where they live, and none of that changes the fact that rain-fed subsistence agriculture is backbreaking labor. There’s no one to blame but the Earth itself, and climate change on a long enough scale, but desertification of the Sahara has been taking place for thousands of years. Climate change is simply speeding up the inevitable, but population growth is making that worse. Trees only grow so fast, and they don’t grow fast enough for a village of 20 cook fires to suddenly expand to 50 cook fires in 20 years and not impact the environment.
Whatever, we’ll all end up experiencing it ourselves in the next 10 years or so anyway.
People that build the machines. The chips used in those machines. Etc. All the stuff that goes into everything and how things depend on each other is absolutely mind blowing complex.
Market investment, including short selling. Foreign manipulation of markets, including fighters paid to keep conditions the same or worse for farmers…
I never said we should stop working. Read the title.
We have the machines to produce enough food, water, clothing, housing, etc. for everyone. And yet we live under an economic system in which millions around the globe do not have access to these goods. People are incentivized to throw food away or keep houses empty when the alternative is unprofitable. But we no longer need to organize society such that that the products of our labor is based around price and profit.
WE DON’T have the machines! John Deere and Case and AGCO and Claas have the machines. What open source non-profit modern machines are there out there you’re talking about? Because I’d love to buy one.
Also, no one is incentivized to throw food away, people are lazy AF and rich westerners somehow don’t seem to mind waste. Don’t attribute to malevolence what incompetence will explain.
I used to live in a place that was at the bottom of the UNDP development scale. When I would go “out” to eat basic rice and sauce, I would usually have 2-6 kids, like actual children, standing next to me waiting to eat the scraps. And they would fight over a few handfulls of rice because they were starving and that was the system of alms-giving. And while I feel guilt now for every bite of food I waste, and I try not to, I’m not about to expend 200 times the energy to DHL cooked rice to West Africa. You have to balance resource use at a local level with the resources needed to move food other places. Even shipping all that soy that China didn’t buy from the US to anywhere in need incurs huge costs, plus significant CO2 emissions.
You are literally describing capitalism, and why it’s fucking us all over. You are agreeing with the original quote.
The people who build those machines have zero ownership or control of them. Yeah, no shit that’s the problem.
How does one expect to build a tractor without materials? Like a mine to get iron ore from the ground, foundries to smelt it, machine shops to craft parts, rubber or oil processing to make tires, etc.? Supply chains under a command economy have been much worse slavery just as much as you would say they are when people are paid for their labor.
Let’s look at examples. Albania’s socialism was incredibly closed off, and the Hoxha regime a full on analogue surveillance state because they didn’t trust their neighbors because they weren’t socialist enough. They bought tractors from other socialist countries for decades (socialists doing capitalism with the government, so it doesn’t count), until in 1978 they finally just made a factory to copy the Chinese tractors they were buying because of their paranoia about other socialist countries trying to infiltrate them.
Of course I’m describing capitalism, because I’m telling you that you genuinely can’t expect some noble socialist utopia to actually get you tractors without conscripting people who don’t want to build tractors into receiving rations - or money, take your pick - to work in a factory.
So supply chain economics don’t work without capitalism? Is that the claim?
no one is incentivized to throw food away,
Recall how much food was thrown away during COVID. Or how the crops were left to rot in the fields during the Dust Bowl (1930s). It costs money to harvest and distribute food so the incentive is to dump it and try again hoping for a better market in the future.
What open source non-profit modern machines are there out there you’re talking about? Because I’d love to buy one.
Who said anything about buying their machines? There is another option.
I don’t know which specific country you lived in, and yet I would bet my life savings that the poverty of this country is a result of the (past) colonialism and (present-day) exploitative agreements from Europe/U.S. This colonialism made the ruling class wealthier while extracting value from the land, labor, and resources of developing nations.
The Sahel states are exploring solutions that seem to show progress.
While every country in Africa has varied levels of impact from colonialism, there are places where the local economy is relatively untouched when you push down to the local level.
I lived on the border between 1 country that was poor with nearly no resources to be extracted, and 8km from another country with resources where the poverty deepened as you left the coastal area. And while in the 80’s mining money paid for a few roads, that’s about as far as it got. The village used the currency of the other country because they would walk 10km to the market there once a week because the markets where they lived didn’t have anything much worth buying because it was all the same stuff they grew at home. One guy spoke about 6 words of English, no one spoke French, which is supposed to be the colonial language. So the local economy for most villages really were a perfect example of a post-apocalyptic world where the apocalypse was living in a place that barely supports humans anyway. Short of radios, batteries, lanterns, one bicycle, and canned tomato paste, life went on exactly like it did 100 years ago or 500 years ago, long before any Europeans every actually breezed through the area, which is a history I’m deeply familiar with.
To further explain the isolation, everyone grows seeds from the previous year, so there’s no nefarious Monsanto to blame. It’s the same millet and sorghum varieties they’ve grown since as far back as anyone can remember. There is no export, no international trade of their crops. During harvest season people who try and get some diversity in their diet and buy things like cooking oil sell some of their harvest at the worst time of the year, when everyone else is also trying to get cash. The grain they produce doesn’t go farther than 15km from the field where it’s grown, maybe 25km into a nearby town if someone comes out to buy it. Which is the modern version of caravans from the oasis towns of the Sahara coming down to buy it 150+ years ago. Cars using roads that follow caravan paths are one of those new developments, which actually reduce labor and resource needs to get food to people.
Your life savings will help educate young women in this country, so feel free to send that over when you get a chance. When you educate a woman, you educate a community.
Also, yes, please tell me what this “other option” is regarding mechanized farming. Man, if you tell me it’s animal traction, I swear…
