/edu/ - Education

Many native tribes would punish the family and social circles of the individuals who committed crimes until the debt was paid off. When you are part owner and actually believe your job is more than selling your soul for x dollars, groups have an incentive to use social pressures to keep others in line or help in solving the issue that causes the problem in the first place.

>>12570
>Many native tribes would punish the family and social circles of the individuals who committed crimes until the debt was paid off.
What do you mean by punishment? Like not being invited to parties because cousin Gerald is slacking off at work?

> When you are part owner and actually believe your job is more than selling your soul for x dollars, groups have an incentive to use social pressures to keep others in line or help in solving the issue that causes the problem in the first place.
I still think this is too abstract and assumes the best case scenario. I get that most people are interested in perfect idealized communism where these things are already ironed out, but I’m more interested in what will happen during the transition and evolution of the system. It is not going to be perfect at the beginning, nothing ever is.

Anti-socialist propagandists are incoherent: One minute they talk about people being forced to work to an inhuman degree, next minute they say everybody gets lazy in socialism. My impression from what I heard about the GDR and the USSR of the 80s is that the second anti-socialist statement is the more realistic one.

People were not afraid of being jobless or homeless. It was common for someone to go buy snacks during for himself and others during official work time. Though it has to be said that this is also common in capitalism but restricted to more privileged jobs, so I'm not sure I would even count this as a minus for socialism. People spend more of their awake time at work than with their families. Seen in that light I think less stress at work due to lower discipline might be well worth the lower material output.

I firmly believe that something like quadrupling productivity only comes from technical changes and not from increasing work discipline. The idea of the need for more work discipline is popular among managers because you don't need to be intelligent to have this idea and it really can bring small improvements almost everywhere. Technical changes can bring massive improvements but managers and owners usually don't have the knowledge and thinking skills for making those.

Of course more remuneration for working longer hours and odd hours is something to be kept. And it makes sense to have some element in the salary that is performance-based as long as that performance can be unambiguously measured. Like carrying sacks… I have to admit I don't think most jobs are unambiguous like that. Some bonus might be distributed by co-workers voting on who should get it. Now they might abuse this by just giving it to a person who is just fun to be around and not necessarily very productive from the consumers' point of view, but is this really a big problem? Remember how much time we spend with co-workers and how this affects our quality of life and theirs. Might as well call this strategy not abuse but a sensible choice people can make.

>>12571
Do I seriously have to give an example?
Let’s say you, steve, and I run a business together. As some kind of communist co-op, in which we are all owners of our means of production. Let’s say we work at a bakery, or a coffee shop, or literally anything. You and I notice that steve seems to be “slacking”. He comes in late, he’s slow, he doesn’t seem to all be there. “But he is our brother!” you say. So we confront him. He shrugs us off. He keeps coming in like this. We ask his friends and family if something is up. We take him to dinner. We follow him home. We drink together. We do various social obligations that extrapolate specific psychological information to determine what is wrong with steve. Does steve have a different circadian rhythm and his shift should start an hour later? Is steve on heroin? Is SteveS marriage crumbing? Does steve stay up all night following his artistic dreams? Did steve suffer a traumatic coffee burn? What the fuck is wrong with steve? We are invested in him as a friend, a comrade, and a co-owner. We take the time out of our day to shove ourselves into his life to figure out what’s going on and we participate in helping find a solution to why steve is like that. This expands to beyond just us two, it’s everyone in Steve’s life also helps. Imagine if your coworkers actually gave a shit about you.

>>12569
i would really love to see someone come in with policies from post-war USSR, or China under Mao, in the communes etc… that would help settle this

but i can point to the fact that Marx talks about creating an army of labor (in the communist manifesto), so maybe something like military discipline, but in context to reflect the situation of labor rather than war. On the other, self-management of individual firms by the workers makes sense as well. They could set the punishments. Or whatever bureaucracy deals with planning production will also deal with people messing up the plan. Or both?

It might make more sense that coworkers have means of dealing with e.g. dangerous work practices, while a local governing organ carries out discipline related to absenteeism, slow labor, etc.

Some disciplinary actions that make sense (to me): being relieved of duty, being given shitty tasks no one else wants, coworkers giving the cold shoulder, cutting consumption power for an individual, cutting consumption power for a whole factory to make them get their people in line… and maybe in the last case if a production plan can't be met because people aren't committing themselves, there has to be a (public, political) reckoning where either a new plan is set, or the people commit more energetically, or the people remain split and cultural revolution against loafers or saboteurs takes place

If worker slack off, the answer is to make the workplace better.
Any other answer is "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

>>12574
The laziness I think of is the capitalist laziness: the business owner who comes in once a week for an hour to nitpick overworked workers, the manager who doesn't advise and take an active role in the workplace, or the owner's child who has a position on the board but spends their days at the beach. I’m not sure that form of laziness can really be applied here. I don't mean coming into work late or missing a few days without telling anyone. What I mean by absenteeism is excessive missed days. Missing 30% of your workdays (excluding days off) is starting to get excessive.

My other concern, safety, doesn't seem to be addressed in this thread. There are other issues as well like harassment and bullying. What I mean by safety is, take for example, the way one fells a tree. If felled improperly, it can hurt a coworker. If the reason for doing it can be addressed socially, then great, but if they're doing it too much then it starts to beg the question of if it's intentional and what to do about that.

I agree that technology does more of the work in increasing productivity and that this can be used to the advantage of society. Less work for all, but these are all goals to attain, not really concrete ways of dealing with workplace misbehavior. It is often a solution to a number of problems though: “we would have no need for x rule if this process were handled by technology”.

>>12576
>Do I seriously
Unfortunately, I have to annoy you further. This basic instinct to care for our comrades is to be expected in an ideal scenario where problems just amount to some resolvable personal issue. But it's just that – the ideal and not the reality of the transition from the beginning of post-capitalism to the success of communism.

This ideal assumes we have gotten past the cultural transition stages where conditions like Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) are no longer prevalent (the incidence in the US appears to be anywhere from 4%-8% of the population). Misbehavior takes several generations to eradicate and it requires active education of existing and future generations on the importance of collectivism. Even then, the studies show that East Germany had some incidence of NPD; we don't really know if that will ever go away. Hence the need for a more serious look into resolving workplace—and even more broadly societal—misbehavior. Going back to your “troubleshooting” of Steve. If he’s a narcissist, then what do you do?

This is my main issue with this rosy outlook on our future under communism – it is too dependent on the assumption that all problems will be solved and not a focus on problem solving. The ability to problem solve is likewise a cultural motif that has to be instilled in people. Figuring out how to solve problems in a collectivist way is hard when we have been raised in an individualist society like the US.

I totally accept that these things are cultural. It's fair to think about how great things will be in the future, but this lack of foresight of concrete problems and misbehavior carried over from capitalist and individualist society is alarming. It is why I'm asking these questions. I'm not here to poke holes in socialism and communism. I am not doubting the ability of workers to self-govern. I don't doubt the human capacity for empathy. I want to consider the future and the transition in the post-capitalist system.

>>12578
>It might make more sense that coworkers have means of dealing with e.g. dangerous work practices, while a local governing organ carries out discipline related to absenteeism, slow labor, etc.

This was where my mind was starting to go. And for dispute that can’t be handled with the self-governance of one group of workers, another group of workers with the same/similar jobs can step in to vote. This protects against the “annoying loser” problem, which is voting to reprimand someone who does what they’re supposed to do but is … an annoying loser.

>Some disciplinary actions that make sense (to me): being relieved of duty, being given shitty tasks no one else wants, coworkers giving the cold shoulder, cutting consumption power for an individual, cutting consumption power for a whole factory to make them get their people in line… and maybe in the last case if a production plan can't be met because people aren't committing themselves, there has to be a (public, political) reckoning where either a new plan is set, or the people commit more energetically, or the people remain split and cultural revolution against loafers or saboteurs takes place

The first line of defense is always self-regulation from fellow laborers as >>12576 points out. Your response is helpful. When you say consumption power, you mean for luxuries, right? There’s a lot to think about. We also have to consider the effects of over-discipline where we create an accidental underclass. But I think strikes are an effective means to push back against over-discipline. Anyway, this was more in line with what I was thinking – organizations set up to handle different problems that may destabilize the system of organized labor. Much to think about, thanks.

If anyone knows of any writings that discuss the governance of reprimand, I would very much appreciate it.