All my communist posts keep getting deleted there. It is crazy to me that a workers subreddit is not communist 😵💫. They are not going to achieve anything by being neoliberals.
It’s ultimately a petit bourgeois movement. What it started as nominally doesn’t matter, the type of people it attracts is most telling of the function of that sub.
The revolution is going to require work and, if you’re like me and you live in a so-called post-industrial country which is dominated by a “service economy” (which is completely different from a Soviet bureaucratic state, I promise, because government bureaucracy bad but the countless fractal overlapping private bureaucracies under capitalism are a beautiful thing and a shining example of Free Market Efficiency™) then there’s going to be a lot of work necessary to reindustrialize your country post-revolution, especially when facing capitalist subversion and encirclement plus the necessity of providing genuine development-focused aid to countries and groups subjected to colonialism/neocolonialism and imperialism by your country.
Anything less than that is to hold petit-bourgeois aspirations for your revolution which doesn’t take into account the need to pay reparations for the damage that your country has inflicted globally.
If your idea of a socialist society is one where everyone gets to be digital nomads working 15-hour work weeks then it’s about as idealistic as assuming that everyone under capitalism could become rich if we all became hedge fund managers.
You can’t convince me that the revolution isn’t going require a lot of hard work to achieve and even then, that’s just the beginning.
This is a great write up about this. The best response I’ve seen to this sorta argument so far. It’s ridiculous when people think that within just a few years of socialism everyone will be an artist working 20 hour work weeks
I’ve been wondering about this recently, will it be easier to re-industrialize than it was to industrialize at all first? Anyone have any essays about that?
Honestly, it’s a really good question. I haven’t seen any articles or lectures discussing this issue myself.
As for reindustrializing, I think that’s going to depend upon which countries are willing to provide trade and development to a post-industrial revolutionary country. Honestly, I think that it would require relying upon China heavily.
The thing is for a country like mine, we have old factories which are mostly disused. It’s possible to get them back up and running again but there’s often the issue of retooling machinery and reestablishing the supply chains necessary to keep the machinery working, which assumes that the machinery is still supplied by whoever made it and that it’s serviceable. This is not necessarily the case, however but I’m far from an expert in these matters.
In short, I think reindustrializing would be easier than industrializing was (assuming that there isn’t a total embargo against the country) but it will be a pretty arduous process to recreate all of the domestic supply chains and to retrain people in order to maintain the machinery necessary to reindustrialize.
How did it become petit bourgeois?
The aspirations of the anti-work movement are a society that doesn’t require human labor, or minimal labor expectations, through automation of production.
First, this is largely idealist. Communism doesn’t require full automation to overcome class society. Automation to this level is science fiction. Anti-work has no coherent theory or praxis in achieving such a society.
Second, “anti-working” people already exist, the bourgeoisie. They live off of a fully automated class of working peoples. Anti-work requires others to be working. What it boils down to is a society, like ours, that replaces human workers with machines. Now what is easier to achieve, a society in which we fully automate work (sci-fi), or a society in which we fully dehumanize, objectify, and commodify, the workers (slavery, colonialism)?
Rather than have me explain why any rejection of scientific socialism that projects “anti-capitalism” is essentially a petit bourgeois position, let me post this article on Trotskyism: https://redsails.org/the-social-basis-and-logic-of-trotskyism/
Anti-work allows the petit-bourgeois minded (petty propertied, middle income, labor aristocracy, herrenvolk) to have a theory-less expression of their utopian dreams. It attracts the petty bourgeoisie because nobody fears work more than the bourgeois strata so close to being condemned to the Proletariat.
You keep repeating it over and over, but I still do not see your point as to how a society can not work to make itself completely automated with the technological advancement given to it.
General Artificial Intelligence, robots, automated processes, etc.
Wouldn’t that be the bed rock of a communist society in which labour exploitation can be completely avoided, as there would be no need for the vast majority of workers to begin with? And humans would be free to peruse their own pursuits?
It would be, Deng described communism as being a society with material abundance; how do we get to that point? Clearly automation.
Even Marx described the use of “Automatons” in the factories to replace workers.
The entire point of technology is to make humans obsolete in the workplace.
AND THATS GOOD. So I struggle to see the original posters point about it being “utopian” and impossible.
Because they think it alone, will solve class antagonism
That’s not what the poster said. They said that the entire concept is utopian, which is absurd.
No you misunderstand. Automation to the degree of ending mandatory labor does not exist. The technology we have today is capable of Communism, material abundance. Expecting technology alone to bring us there is as idealistic as solving Patriarchy through machine births removing the requirement for sexual reproduction. Automation accelerates human labor. It cannot replace it, ever.
It’s a technologist’s dream. We don’t need to wait for technology, we need to organize society in a way that liberates technological advancement, that itself is Communism.
I will say that, General AI is purely science fiction. We are absolutely nowhere close to specific AI either. It’s not intelligent, that’s a fact. ML is only a technique for predictive processing, it cannot constitute intelligence however.
You seem to have an odd definition of exploitation. Labor itself isn’t exploitative, laboring for someone else is not exploitative. We don’t need to hand all labor to a class of machine slaves to achieve Communism. This is a capital L Liberty ideal in the original sense of the word, freedom to own slaves.
Idealizing a society built off of technology that does not exist in our time is by definition Idealism.
We don’t need to hand all labor to a class of machine slaves to achieve Communism. This is a capital L Liberty ideal in the original sense of the word, freedom to own slaves.
Do you legitimately think that machines are comparable to human slaves? Do you think we are going to be giving sentience to a “Janitor-bot”? It’s a computer.
Do you view your phone and computer as mechanical slaves??? Are factory assembly line robots, slaves?
Why would a “worker bot” require higher level thinking? That would be horrifically cruel.
I heavily disagree.
I never said that we have to wait for machines and technology to implement socialism and communism. Where did you get that?
Humanity has always striven to do less work and that is the core foundation of a lot of technological progression. “How can we preform more, by doing less?” That’s the entire point of humanity moving from a 12-14 hour workday as peasants, to 10-12 hours in the early industrial revolution, to 8-10 hours currently. Saying that we should not aim to do less work is bizarre.
My definition of labour exploitation is not “work bad”, I’m saying you can avoid the entire concept by cutting the middleman and removing the human from the equation at all.
Second to that, how is labour not exploitative at its core? Why should humanity not aim to be free of its shackles and pursue that which truly matters to us? Do you think many people find any meaning at all in being factory workers? Cashiers? Clerks? Janitors? Electricians? Or do you think they would find more meaning in pursuing intellectual endeavors, the arts, the sciences, or developing their own identity though self discovery?
Or should humans look forward to toiling hours away doing work they find little to not meaning in?
Again, that’s the entire point of technology. To do less MEANINGLESS work. Do you think if you have a person all their basic necessities that they would stay home and not do anything at all?
Humanity proceeds only as a species through technology. That’s why we are measured by our inventions. Fire; the wheel; agriculture; architecture; the internet; computers; etc.
Or should humans look forward to toiling hours away doing work they find little to not meaning in?
You don’t understand alienation if you’re talking about work in such a manner. Your miscomprehension allows you to take such an antisocial position on laboring for others without exploitation, the comm in Communism stands for Community. I shouldn’t have to describe socially divided labor as being the true power of production over Capital.
Humanity proceeds only as a species through technology. That’s why we are measured by our inventions. Fire; the wheel; agriculture; architecture; the internet; computers; etc.
Extremely eurocentric evaluations of “progress”. It frankly isn’t true, which is why the Euros have been trashing the planet for 5 centuries. Technological determinism hasn’t proven itself useful, we are Marxists.
Humanity has always striven to do less work and that is the core foundation of a lot of technological progression. “How can we preform more, by doing less?” That’s the entire point of humanity moving from a 12-14 hour workday as peasants, to 10-12 hours in the early industrial revolution, to 8-10 hours currently. Saying that we should not aim to do less work is bizarre.
From redsails:
Sadly for socialists, twilight encroaches on daylight as much as it pierces night. A combination of neo-colonial looting, the aforementioned welfare policies, and a bit of clever rhetoric has given capitalism truly extraordinary resilience. [26] By granting concessions, capitalists in the West avoided ever being dethroned, and their liberal ideologues then proceeded to persuade workers in the West (and the world) that “retiring early” and “living off of passive income” (becoming a landlord, or a shareholder) are in fact viable and honourable dreams within the reach of everyone. Now that “everyone” can throw their savings into an investment account and become a little bit of a capitalist, Stalin’s plea to lionize and empower workers arouses pity, fear, or scorn.
Countless people hailing from all over the world have now been able to taste what it feels like to belong to a leisurely aristocracy that can drown itself in novelties while barely lifting a finger, and this arrangement is set up in such a way that suburbanites don’t even have to burden themselves with learning the names of the slaves servicing such a lifestyle! The “American Dream” has extremely wide appeal, and not only among Germans of the 1930s. It’s a mistake to underestimate it. Liberalism gets credit for policies fought for by workers in the same way that business owners get credit for the products made by workers, leaving workers (on whom everyone depends) with the same social standing as beggars. As a result, workers begin to attempt to rid themselves of this pitiful condition as soon as possible. The fact that many today offer up “anti-work” as a pro-worker slogan is a stark index of how far we’ve strayed from Marx’s conceptualization of labour as “not only a means of life, but life’s prime want.” [27]
Quote mining Marx but avoiding the parts of Capital where he talks about humans laboring because that’s what we do.
And I’ll answer the two other replies here, you were the one who brought up generalized AI, which is pure science fiction, as way to free humans from labor. If an artificial intelligence actually existed, it would necessarily enter social relations with humans and could be considered exploited by your “Communists”.
When would we ever have a world where there’s not enough things to get done? If we free from “janitorial duties” as you so much lament, shouldn’t we use that surplus labor in a “progressive” field? Since the level of technology you expect to free us completely of labor is basically mastery of the universe, I’m going to call it utopian Idealism. It’s unhelpful if people think that’s what we Communists are about, and we only attract increasingly bourgeois audiences.
You have completely misunderstood my point.
Where did I ever say that we should just up and leave all work? I said we should put our efforts towards work that matters, not “janitorial duties”.
Where did I ever say that we should every isolate ourselves? That we should not do any work with those around us? Did you even read what I wrote? You completely strawmanned my position and avoided nearly everything I mentioned.
Also deriding technological progress as “Eurocentric trash” is insane.
Lastly, planes, smartphones, MRI machines, tanks, the internet, and rockets used to all by science fiction. To completely disregard a notion that is right spring the corner because it’s “science fiction” is the exact thinking that lead the Soviet Union to completely fail to anticipate or make use of computer technology in the 60-80’s.
Have fun burying your head in the sand and deriding technology because it’s “Eurocentric”.
Our robot slave “Communism” finna be overthrown by robot Socialism
Why would you give robots that do menial labour or mindless tasks any form of sentience? That would be horrifically cruel. Why would you even build a machine like that?
If you give them sentience, treat them as humans. But you don’t need to give higher level thinking to a computer that doesn’t need it.
I got flamed on that sub once because I said that the shift from 40h a week from 5 into 4 days (so, 10 hours a day) isn’t the monumental victory everyone was seeking.
After that I knew the sub wasn’t in for actual radical change.
They had that very ‘interesting’ interview on some news channel, soon after many of them moved to another sub called work reform or something similar lol.
A sub which was modded by a bunch of people who were involved in investment banking and executive positions, btw.
I think 10-hour days would be worse for a decent number of people
I already know people who can only pick up their kids from daycare at around 18.30 right now, at an 8 hour day. Imagine having to pick them up at 20.30 lol.
I guess the main pro would be for those who commute to work
How so? Personal anecdote: I commute to work, it takes about an hour in each direction (sometimes more, sometimes a bit less). So my 8-hour workday is already much longer. If it were to be 10 hours officially, I might as well start living right there on the job
(That sounds awful, I hope you can find a job closer to your home.) The advantage would be saving two hours a week on commuting, but in your case that might not be worth the trade-off
I would 100% rather work 5 8 hour days over 4 10 hour days
Ill take 4 10s for the sole reason that i have to drive 1 less day a week.
For many people I can definitely see that. I, personally, would be opposed to that being required but can understand people wanting it
I currently work a 4/10 7am-5:30pm. It’s not all people make it out to be, end of day if I want to do something after all my duties are completed my freetime comes out of my sleep time so what, 4 days of non-stop work/sleep/stress for 1 extra day. Some people may not want that and it still doesn’t reduce how much we’re exploited in any capacity. That sub is way too liberal for fundamental change, as is most of the “left” of reddit.
Apparently the creators of the subs were initially Ancoms, but as the sub got more popular it had more flavours of Anarchists until regular libs flooded it and took over lol.
They still have self-flaired “communists” and their supposed litmus test for being a true one is to believe all the state department lies about the PRC and other designated enemies. 🤡
They used to be communist, became anarchist, and now they’re socdem at best. I got booted over a year ago already for being a commie. The admin told me that if I’d read theory I’d be an anarchist and then I wouldn’t have been banned.
Reading anarchist theory was integral in my becoming a communist. I will leave it up to interpretation as to whether that is an insult or compliment towards anarchism.
To be fair, some early founding members of the CPC had also experimented with anarchist theory and eventually gravitated towards reading Marx.
From my understanding, a young Mao held many anarchist leanings. Helps explain the party’s more leftist (ultra- or otherwise) praxis at times when compared to the contemporary CPSU, which had more of a history of direct conflict with anarchists.
I read both Marxist and anarchist theory initially and found the Marxists works to make a far more compelling argument compounded with a successful history and a failed anarchist history
The admin told me that if I’d read theory I’d be an anarchist
And by “reading theory” they actually meant watching Breadtubers do cultural analysis of the current trends in movies and TV interspersed with the occasional video essay about how authoritarianism is bad and how Marx was actually an anarchist deep-down who cherished Bakunin (and how Engels, the sneaky authoritarian, cynically perverted Marx’s work after his death.)
I heard it’s full of undercover feds.
How would they know who is one?
If the paramilitary infiltrations in Michigan are anything to go by, they don’t
what sub?
Have you read this community’s name?
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