/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.

It shouldn't be a struggle to answer this question, gang.

>>12569
Just use the same disciplinary rules we have now. Get told off by your manager and co-workers, or get fired. Abolishing class society, private property and money doesn't mean we're abolishing all forms of social discipline.

Amazing how people will readily question the need for labor discipline but will get offended over questioning school discipline

Labor disciplines itself when set to some task. If you don't do the job assigned to you, if you don't pull your weight, you won't work at some place. The other workers do not want you there.

All of this was premised on the idea that workers know how to work and didn't need to be told. That is the most basic rule. The workers in charge means exactly that; that there is a body among the workers that handles disciplinary action.

The moment you introduce some technocratic management from outside, where the incentives are not the workers' own, you've already detracted from the task of labor itself. This is how you shit up a workplace, create intrigues, and get the slaves to attack each other. It's always for that purpose. It is premised on the belief that workers are evil and stupid and will just destroy everything if they're not managed by a boss that is detached from labor and sees labor as a purely desultory and miserable act.

Sadly, the mangers were proven true, and this happened mostly because the workers really were evil, because they were taught that evil is stronger than any goodness in the world. If workers do not want society, then what exactly are they doing among society? The genuine aim of the laboring classes is to be free of overbearing management, and they will work towards that aim. Once established, they turned viciously against other workers and the lowest class, having established security for themselves and their buddies. There is no law of labor itself or "law of nature" that required this to happen. That is how history for humans turned out, for reasons humans understood well but that "the theory" insisted wasn't happening as it was happening.

If however the question assumes that workers do this purely out of incompetence rather than malice, that is a faulty assumption. Anyone who works learns by heart what is necessary for whatever work task they are set to. If they do not know this, they will have to learn, or they will surely sink. The malice of labor against other laborers was already established in humanity since time immemorial. What management desired was to intensify that malice and glorify it, naturalize it, and essentialize it. If that was accomplished, then any impulse of the workers to band together out of necessity would be permanently negated—and so it was done, and the workers could only watch as they were set against each other by intrigues and schemes, and then were told it was illegal for them to stop what was being done to them. The workers had enough self-interest to know this would destroy them and attempted to resist, but resistance was "retarded". By repeated moral education at the earliest possible age, any sense of the world that told the workers they didn't have to comply with this was broken, and the overarching theories they were taught from the earliest age taught them that avarice, malice, and hatred of the weak was the dominant value of the human race, of human society, and life's prime want. Their labor would now be purposed entirely towards that aim, and so long as the worker could find someone to kick down, they were "in". All other considerations, including the thing you were ostensibly there to work towards in the first place, were now moot. Obviously this worked to the benefit of classes that did not work and did not suffer, who were never treated in the same way, and these favored classes were pulled aside and learned the grin, the sneer, and all of the markers of aristocracy.

If however you were speaking of how workplace rules and policies are set, they are created by people who work. That's the only way any of them can be enforced. Any edict from the managers has to be enforceable at the ground level or by ever-increasing violence. Since naked violence is highly ineffective, management teaches by making examples of those who are cast out from birth or from an early age, purely for the sake of doing so. Discipline is deliberately arbitrary, rewards malice, glorifies the sloth of workers if it serves the "greater jihad", and calculated precisely to produce the result we see today. In a functional society, none of this faggotry would be tolerated. Workers are there to work. If they're going to instigate and make everyone miserable, they'd be thrown out, and that is the clearest and most present danger. It does not take a great intellect to calculate which workers are deliberately sabotaging, which workers are simply lazy and do not want to be there for their own reason, and which workers are incompetent whether they're trying or not to do the job. It is the highest imperative of instigators to insist honesty is incompetence, and malice is genius. The workers readily accepted their programming once it was worked out as a theory and imposed on society, and we are stuck here ever since. The notion that only managers or "privileged intelligence" can discern reality is not the core conceit. The worship of malice and lying for its own sake is the core conceit. Only after the fact is the excuse made that "workers are retarded", to justify what had already been encoded in the moral programming of this society. Eventually this does destroy even the most basic labor skill of a society, which is accelerated by deliberate poisoning and intensification of malice. Such a society would rapidly depopulate, which is entirely the point and why we were made to do this. The workers did it to themselves, and they wouldn't have done any different by some inner volition or goodness. Whatever good was in them was easily negated by the overarching imperatives of society, which had nothing to do with the labor task itself. The workers hated that which looked funny more than they hated their oppressors, and those workers that refused to see it that way were isolated and purged first, made examples. Ritual sacrifice always does this, and it has been known to every slavery humanity ever tried.

There's more to discipline than punishing misbehavior. It's more a question of how to effectively motivate workers to work more.

>>12574
>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.
You are a social democrat

>>24181
The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor.