You hate to see conservative socialism folks
The whole thread is a doozy. https://twitter.com/SpaceLarouche/status/1583151971225071617
While this guy's analysis is clearly working backwards from his preferred conclusion (aka bullshit), I have difficulty imagining a realistic scenario where a successful socialist revolution leads to an immediate decrease in workload in a significant way. Firstly you have to rebuild from the damage of a violent revolution, then build up productive forces and defend yourself against reactionaries both internal and external.
While it's true that Communism is the most likely of all systems to lead to a society of utopian abundance, none of us alive today are likely to live to see it due to the sheer amount of work involved in un-fucking our ecosystem to allow for future human life to flourish.
The advertising office worker to billboard teardown crew pipeline will be real.
It helps that we could work on meaningful projects like solving world hunger, solving the houseless crisis, solving climate change, the care of the sick and maimed, the defence of the revolution if it isn't global yet. All of that instead of figuring out how to sell corn syrup in a new way or financial crimes.
^100% this.
Even in the most idealistic of scenarios fully automated luxury gay space communism is something maybe our great grandchildren could see. As for us: oh dear fucking god there is just so much fucking work to be done and automation and AI ain't gonna cut it. The benefit of revolution for us should be the knowledge that our labor will be less alienated and directed towards things that benefit the whole of society rather than a few rich capitalists, and perhaps the establishment of a new social contract and list of rights.
"Then Crispien went on to talk about high wages. He said that conditions in Germany were such that, in comparison with workers in Russia and Eastern Europe in general, workers there had a reasonably good standard of living. He says that a revolution can only be carried out if the workers do not suffer ‘excessive’ impoverishment. I ask myself whether it is permissible to talk in such terms in a communist party. It is counter-revolutionary. We in Russia certainly have a living standard that is lower than in Germany, and when we set up the dictatorship the result was that the workers were even hungrier and their living standard dropped still further. The victory of the workers is impossible without sacrifice, without the temporary worsening of their conditions. We must tell the workers the opposite of what Crispien says. To wish to prepare workers for the dictatorship and to talk to them about ‘not excessive’ impoverishment is to forget what is most important, that is that the labour aristocracy arose by helping their ‘own’ bourgeoisie to conquer and strangle the whole world by imperialist means and by thus being able to secure better wages. If the German working class want to do revolutionary work now they must make sacrifices and not shrink from it."
:lenin-da:
I actually disagree with this quite a lot, especially in relation to the US and most of the first world. The amount of overproduction that happens so that there can be 100 different varieties of potato chips and breakfast cereals in your typical western grocery store alone is staggering. 30% of the food Americans buy ends up spiling before it's used and that isnt evem counting all the perfectly good stuff that's thrown out because it didn't sell. The productive forces which have been built up in the west are probably enough to feed, clothe and house the entire planet 2-3x over. I understand that a lot of work needs to go into unfucking ecosystems, but I think you're underestimating just how much overproduction happens in the west, and specifically the US.
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.
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
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.
One of the first Soviet decrees reduced workday from 11,5 hours to 8 hours.
Mandatory lunch break wasn't counted in this 8 hours, probably explains this.
sacrificing for the people who are sacrificing for the need to sacrifice :very-smart:
Absolutely, we should all be working his extremely communist 80-hour work week, 20 hours for naps, 10 hours for lunches, 30 hours for Twitter, 10 hours for going on plane rides so short that it would have been faster to walk or ride a bike.
smdh, it's not even signifiers with any signified. It's all signifiers all the way down.
And has @REVMAXXING completely disregarded the teachings of the Bible, that book of proletarian ethics
That's enough Twitter for the day.
Remember when Karl Marx urged the proletariat to turn the other cheek?
Communism means working more and harder.
The businessman embodies Socialist values.
Oh, I see, we're talking about work on the Lunch is Labor model. Yes, sir! Reporting for my 9-hour shift at the naps factory, sir! Let's build us some communism.
trueanon's latest ep is about larouchites, apparently a lot of the patsoc people are getting into larouche
They've Been into LaRouche, it's just a little (barely) subtler. This tweet is verbatim LaRouche
https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle/status/1582819850367356928
There are takes, and then there are takes. This is, uh.....most definitely a take
languorous
You can't use a $5 word like that and claim to be against having too much free time.
so pretty much the same thing as now, except I get a pod and gruel provided to me?
I'd be fine maintaining the general 40 h work week in the near term after some revolution
