Work if a fact of life even with high automation/organic composition of capital - someone has to program robots, someone has to maintain them, someone has to design and engineer them, in addition to whatever tasks are out of their scope still needing to be done. You clean your bathroom, you cook your food, you may contribute to open source software or volunteer in your community, you may contribute to an electoral campaign, there are many things you do because human labor is still needed and will likely remain needed for this century at least.

We dont need full automation to reduce the number of hours of labor needed to run society though - Kropotkin estimated we'd need far fewer than 40 hours of labor a week to run a just aand equitable society with the technology of the 19th century. Today we would need far less than what he wrote. I imagine a future where we work 4 to 6 hours a day for only half a week - and instead of working for money to buy things we merely take what we need when we need it. Housing, food, healthcare all provided for without needing to exchange money to get them.

Work sucks when it's not voluntary and you dont have a say in how its run, and it also sucks when its 8 hours or more a day for 50 weeks a year. A socialist society could make it so what you find unappealing about work is no longer the case - not 8 hours a day by 6 or 4. Not a 5 day work week or more if your boss decides, but a 3 day work week that you pick and choose along with generous vacation time. You vote for your manager and have an important democratic impact on your workplace. You get enough that you can retire at 45 after starting proper work at 25. And there are other benefits: instead of producing for profit with shit materials you can produce for need something of quality that's long lasting and get to exercise the human drive for mastery as well as the satisfaction of having made something that will last generations.

Dont get me wrong, we should still aim for FALGSC but we dont need full general AI and digging minerals and lithium from the earth for billions od robots and silicon in order to make a society where work doesnt suck.

The only thing that gives the working class its power is in the name: they work. Society rests on their shoulders. This is what gives them the power to change society! Silicon Valley is trying very hard to replace us with drones, because they know that this will take away our only point of leverage.

EDIT: but yes after we use this power to change society, we will definitely spend less time and effort working.

💯

It feels like there's a big disconnect in the arguments for and against a jobs guarantee.

The argument against is easy to understand, in that it's "workfare"; if we want to support jobless people and have the money to do it we should just give them money.

The argument for is usually not, however, that people "need" to work, or that giving people money for nothing is wrong somehow.

The argument at base is that capitalists should not have the power to decide who gets the money needed to live in society. The point of a jobs guarantee isn't even so much the wage given to those without, but the guarantee. You have a job with the government. It doesn't matter if you're employed somewhere else. It doesn't matter if you don't show up for three years straight. You have a job with the government. You can go do work and get paid for it, and you can't lose that right. It's important of course that there be democratic control, some sort of self- or community-determination of what the jobs are, arts grants as a "government job," sabbaticals, whatever else sounds good... but the most important part is still the guarantee.

A federal "jobs guarantee" where the government serves as a temp agency to supply employees to capitalists would be awful and something I'd hope every socialist would fight against, but even just guaranteed federal wages for volunteer work would be an improvement on the status quo. And if everyone can do that, and isn't reliant on a capitalist to give them a paycheck; and if nobody is unemployed, that puts incredible pressure on private sector employers. At the very least they wouldn't as easily be able to fire everyone who even thinks about unionizing, because they wouldn't be able to recruit replacements from the army of the unemployed.

If the demand for a guaranteed job gets too large, and all the volunteer work positions are filled, you could open it up to, say, non-profit worker co-ops. Then tie it into right-of-first-refusal labor law; if a company goes bankrupt the government loans/gives the workers the money to buy out the physical capital and run the business as a co-op, at which point they'd also be eligible to recruit new workers from the jobs guarantee program.

And after a few years of that... :tito-laugh:

But it really feels like the advocates are either afraid of laying out the socialist case or really do just hate the idea of giving people money for nothing. I heard Pavlina Tcherneva advocate for a jobs guarantee on the Current Affairs podcast and she had a big thing about destroying the reserve army of labor (in those words!)... but then she just stopped the argument at "nobody should be unemployed," as if that in itself was the entire point and there was no reason for her to half-quote Marx at all.

there is! and by "away from the need for work" they mean "away from the need for workers; just hire more guards to shoot them"!

everything's on track!