You hate to see conservative socialism folks
The whole thread is a doozy. https://twitter.com/SpaceLarouche/status/1583151971225071617
You hate to see conservative socialism folks
The whole thread is a doozy. https://twitter.com/SpaceLarouche/status/1583151971225071617
I dunno, atleast 30% of all work today is complete and utter pointless bullshit, another big chunk is bullshit that only has purpose because of value extraction under capitalism. When you account for the fact that a lot of valuable work, especially I the third world, isn't automated solely because it is more profitable not to, I think we could get by with a great deal less work. And this isn't accounting for the lessened capacity we need to deal with the negative externalities of keeping capital functioning.
You're not wrong...but I think you also have to consider just how much work we basically need to do to survive as a species that is effectively getting ignored because it isn't profitable right now. I still think the big hope we have is that under communism there will be less "bullshit jobs" and/or jobs that basically only exist because the bougiesie need their goddamn treats. The workload itself though....I don't know...there's a lot to do.
Most of fixing the planet is simply stop fucking the thing up. Like undoing the damage is important, but that can be done over time. So much of our carbon emissions are completely fucking pointless.
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I think for the first few decades we could get working hours down to 40 hours a week for mostly everyone. We would need a lot of people to build public infrastructure, green energy, housing, agriculture, etc. We could put everyone to work 40 hours and be on a good path instead of some people regularly working 60+ hours a week and other people working more who are underemployed. Then as workload decreases, we could see a backing off period of possibly 35 hour weeks, 30 hour weeks... etc as automation takes over. It also depends on the job. This also must be accompanied by education/trade programs. It just seems that we have so much damn work to do to turn the ship around that expecting any serious decrease over the standard 40 hour week seems difficult.
That being said, we really shouldn't try and push work to take over our lives even more than it is now. There's a reason our ancestors fought for the 8 hour work day and we shouldn't backslide on that
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It's definitely possible, even likely, that we would reduce work hours entirely, the way you laid it out is pretty convincing. I think you are probably correct in that a 35 hour, or 30 hour week could easily work within a socialist economy while maintaining the base level of living standards (that is, everyone eats and can take part in recreation, but there are less treats). I'm not so sure about within a capitalist economy though, I think since capitalism requires ever increasing profit and growth, it requires an increase in productivity and stagnating wages to sustain itself. But we weren't originally talking about capitalist economy anyway.
I guess it's just hard to imagine a world where I work less while also actually working to solve real problems that need solving, not working for some capitalist company making widgets. And it's also hard to imagine that there wouldn't be an enormous amount of work that needs to be done. But we also have a lot of people.
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