Don't get me wrong, I fully support unions and workers' rights but I don't think labor is a good thing in and out of itself. Creative labor, scientific labor, etc. sure but I think most jobs should just be automated in the long term.
>>2903458>but I think most jobs should just be automated in the long term.Hmm sounds like a lot of work doing that
>>2903458All machinery is a product of past labor. Marx calls this constant capital. So if you own machinery, you own the product of past labor. Someone labored for you to make that machinery possible. Even if the machine was built by a machine was built by a machine was built by a machine, at the end of that long chain you have a human being who wax exploited.
To quote Smith Anon (not me) in a post from the political economy thread that I mostly agree with:
>>2870923The Jevons Paradox applied to labour consumption brings obvious problems, since where it may be used at an increase of productivity, its demand will increase, extending the working day. Thus, J.S. Mill writes (1848):
<it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. We must also consider the famed Cotton Gin of Eli Whitney (1793):
<He had originally thought that reducing the amount of manual labor in processing cotton might spell an end for slavery, but the consequences of his invention were quite different.https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2004/fall/cotton-gin-patentOf course, the efficiency of labour only drove up the demand for slaves in the US, the same way Smith (1776) writes how the addition of capital investment in production leads to a demand for wage labour. So then, the Jevons Paradox proves deadly for labourers.
>>2903458And? What do you hope to get out of this blog-post?
>>2903498I feel like this should be obvious to anyone who knows how work function, like if an employee manages to do his work faster they're not going to pay him the same for less hours, they're just going to give him more work, so why would that apply to machine labor, every increase in quality of life for the working class was obtained through class struggle, not because of mechanization increasing profits (also why people constantly trip themselves with the SNLT, it's not about the actual end price, it's about the minimum viable price derived from the cost of labor, but outside of non-existant pure free market conditions, actual prices will NEVER reach it)
the common braindead centrist mantra about automation that seems to be going around a lot now is "automate the mundane, democratize the expertise" but the distinction between "mundane" jobs and "expert" jobs is just elitist bullshit. there are millions of very well-paid managers and doctors and lawyers and software engineers who have less "expertise" than a guy who cleans skid marks out of toilet bowls, and building a machine that conducts boring pointless powerpoint presentations or irreponsibly dispenses prescriptions or files frivolous lawsuits or vomits out terrible code is a lot easier than building a machine that cleans skid marks out of toilet bowls.
Why are you saying this like it's a hot take? Every job that can be automated should.
>>2903518>there are millions of very well-paid managers and doctors and lawyers and software engineers who have less "expertise" than a guy who cleans skid marks out of toilet bowlssalute to the guy cleaning the skid marks but this is delusional. switch the surgeon and the janitor. the surgeon would be able to do the janitor's job with every little training, he would just resent it. The janitor would need years of training to do the surgeon's job. If you mean people who got promoted out of pure nepotism despite having no idea what's going on yes, then I agree the skid mark guy is probably more competent than the CEO's failson who got a sinecure. But if you mean someone who can actually do a very hard skill that requires a lot of technical training, that is not the same thing.
>>2903528Based and surgeonpilled
>>2903528you would be very surprised how stupid and useless the so-called "white collar professionals" can be in the rare situation where they have to do so-called "blue collar work", cutting themselves with box cutters, lifting boxes with their backs, stripping philips heads, using masking tape on exposed wires, yanking on lawn mower cords without priming the fuel pump, trying to loosen lugnuts with the tire jacked up, unscrewing the water line on a toilet without shutting the valve. one time i worked at an animal shelter and this guy who came out of veterinary school with a doctorate was doing volunteer work and he dumped a whole cat box full of litter and cat shit into the sink garbage disposal and turned it on.
>>2903458>Don't get me wrong, I fully support unions and workers' rights but I don't think labor is a good thing in and out of itself.Fair
>Creative labor, scientific labor, etc. sure but I think most jobs should just be automated in the long term.I was under the impression that was a common stance to have.
Long term, yeah I agree, but momentarily work is pretty important..
by the way, if you ever want some great free entertainment go to a local marina with a boat ramp and just sit back and watch white-collar dads try to take their brand new boats out on the water for the first time, it's fucking hilarious. they lose their minds trying to figure out how to steer when backing up a trailer and it goes in the opposite direction they expect it to, they forget to put in the drain plugs and back it in and the boat fills up with water and now weighs a hundred tons and they panic and shift back into drive and floor the pedal because it's now trying to drag their truck into the water with it, they get the boat off the trailer into the water and tie it off and then get back in the truck to go park and the rope gets snagged on the trailer and they drag the boat up the ramp, they try to step out onto the wet trailer tongue while pushing the boat off and slip and bust their asses or rack their nuts and fall into the water with their wallet and phone in their pockets, and while all this is happening there's an audience forming of redneck dads who have been waiting in line to use the ramp and they're all grinning and cracking open beers and heckling the guy, it's amazing.
>>2903458Karl Marx would agree
i hate people who are like "i don't dream of labor"
israeli coded mentality because you don't have to mine the battery that comes in the phone you use to order doordash
when socialism wins there will be no NEETs
The emphasis on the necessity of labour come from a lot of online Leninists uncritically repeating verbatim what Lenin et al. said during an era where most of Europe was barely developed compared to now, and still had large parts operating under the feudal mode of production, especially in Russia.
They act as if the 40 hour workweek was coming from the word of God, and shall never ever change, even as AI is about to make a lot of people unemployed.
People outside of the Marxist tradition from Keynes to the technocratic movement in the early 20th century had no problem envisioning a 15-hour workweek in the future (i.e. right now) for the whole of society. Marx gave us a throughout critique of labour in capitalism, but a lot of modern day Marxists insist that the organization of labour under capitalism is immutable and completely normal, a natural fact of life, the only problem is that instead of capitalists managing labourers, the state should do it instead, but the organization shall remain exactly the same.
That being said, in my experience, it's first and foremost an online phenomenon from young people inexperienced with theory who want to signal themselves as very radical to the world. In the outside world, the Marxists from various tendencies I've encountered, Leninist or not, tend to be in favor of a reduction of labour hours, and keep the horizon described in the Gothakritik in mind. If they don't, they are doomed to irrelevance.
>>2903591Stop e-begging and get a job then, Erik. Why is it always people with no jobs like you and Haz who talk about "Under socialism, everyone will work harder because work is good"?
No fuck you, I enjoy free time, I don't need to work 70 hours at a bullshit service job or manufacture some products that break easily to produce more surplus value for my capitalist overlords.
Quality over quantity. Why is it so hard to understand for you, protestant-brained morons?
>>2903591Also why do we even need Doordash? Abolish fucking Doordash. The only legitimate use of Doordash is for overworked single parents who don't have time to cook after their shift.
Do you see where I'm getting at? Labor under capitalism is exhausting everyone, creating more bullshit polluting jobs that serves no real purpose in terms of quality of life. Doordash and the food service industry in general exists because a lot of people don't have free time to cook.
Work less, cook yourself more, it's that fucking simple. It's not that hard to make your own pizza. We don't need Doordash or McDicks. Do we want to radically reorganize society or not? Because it seems like a lot of you just want capitalism with a coat of red paint.
>>2903606I work 2 jobs, one night shift and have 1 day off, both minimum wage. You can donate to my legal fund here:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/erik-houdini-legal-fund/You understand that the amount of work needed to combat climate change will be an unprecedented national project only comparable to the industrialization the USSR went through right? You want high speed rail? Someone has to build it. All improvements to society require labor, even if the society is run by the labor.
Don't ever mention Haz and my name in the same breath again.
>>2903616I won't donate shit, you aren't the only poor person here. Next time, don't insult a D-tier right-wing literally who with an Instagram account tied to your real name.
You do realize that a large part of the pollution causing climate change is due to
people commuting to their jobs by car 5 days a week? Look at this:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/27/four-day-working-week-would-slash-uk-carbon-footprint-reportDo we truly need more people commuting by car to a fucking marketing office 5 days a week? Because people aren't building high-speed rail right now in the USA. They work at Starbucks, at McDicks, at office jobs pushing papers around, filling useless Excel sheets. You don't need more work hours to build high-speed rail in America, you need to get rid of these bullshit jobs and focus on what matter. The longer hours you people will work, the more your energy will be diverted for useless labour to create abstract monetary value for capitalists instead of tangible goods. And this is the real cause of climate change: people wasting energy and resources at things that don't matter.
The USSR was a failure in part because they never reduced work-hours, which never pushed them to ameliorate technology and production techniques in order to gain efficiency. The USSR is dead, I look toward the present and the future, the fucking present material conditions.
And I already have high-speed rail in my country, and we work less than in the USA, while remaining a first-world country. Only in America it's normal to work two jobs like in a third-world country. I don't understand why you love your servitude so much, for a radical.
>>2903591Oh shit Houdini is back.
You gotta fix your infosec, man. Become a vtuber or something. The reason Agent Kochinski and hasan can be fleshtubers is because they're limp neoliberals, you're too radical for that.
>>2903458The leftist vision of human freedom is a universal labor camp. This is non-negotiable.
it's not work that sucks, it is bosses and companies and the system that suck. humans enjoy work, humans were born to work, to build things and solve problems and take care of each other, work is one of the most fulfilling things in our lives, to the point where we form our entire identities around our work and and we even name ourselves after our work, what a person does is what that person is, it is their whole reason for living. that's why living under a capitalist system that doesn't really value work is so unbearable and degrading and unnatural for us, being underpaid and exploited and marginalized for our work, constantly threatened with being fired and replaced and robbed of our ability to work, not having a choice in what kind of work we get to do or when we work or how we work or whom or what we work for.
it is not work that needs to be abolished, it is slavery that needs to be abolished, it is authoritarianism that needs to be abolished. that's all capitalism is, is just authoritarianism by private companies instead of the state, we spend most of our waking hours living under private-sector dictatorships where we have no rights, no representation, no leverage of any kind, we don't elect our rulers and they are completely unaccountable, and when we are not at work we are giving all the money we earned from our work right back to these same unaccountable private dictators who sell us all the things we need to live at whatever exorbitant prices they choose and if we don't like it we can go fuck ourselves because it's all owned by the same company and there's nowhere else to go. we are slaves given the illusion of freedom in exchange for a system that is arguably even more dehumanizing than chattel slavery, because at least when a person is owned the owner has incentive to care for their investment and ensure they are fed and clothed and don't get injured or sick, but when a person is merely a rental then the renter doesn't have to give a shit about them, they can just burn through them and rent another one.
>>2903628Yeah, honestly I get pissed off when leftists say we should work more, while everywhere neoliberals and neofascists are also telling us we need to work more for less pay at fucking useless jobs while there is also 10% of unemployment, so I lashed out on him, but I still like the Houd, has some good genuine insights at times and yeah, I hope that bitch won't cause him too much trouble in the end.
it's kind of amazing that you have to sign a contract just to look at a news article, but an employer doesn't have to sign a contract to control a human being's entire life.
>>2903602Lenin talked about organizing scientifically the production with fordism and such with the main goal being the reduction of working hours actually. Afaik he didn't ostensibly defend the abolition of labor like Marx but it's something that is obvious down line with the eradication of commodity production, private property etc.
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