this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
522 points (95.6% liked)
Antiwork
7692 readers
1 users here now
-
We're trying to reduce the numbers of hours a person has to work.
-
We talk about the end of paid work being mandatory for survival.
Partnerships:
- Matrix/Element chatroom
- Discord (channel: #antiwork)
- IRC: #antiwork on IRCNow.org (i.e., connect to ircs://irc.ircnow.org and
/join #antiwork) - Your facebook group link here
- Your x link here
- lemmy.ca/c/antiwork
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No, that's completely wrong.
He said it should go UP by 40-50% ie about 6% - which is still low by Australian standards.
Unemployment averaged 8% in the 1980s and 10% in the 1990s.
Okay but increasing unemployment is meant to do exactly what this petty oligarch wants: discipline labor, preventing workers (that's us) from eking out a little more from a very lopsided economic system.
Marx referred to the unemployed aa the reserve army of labor for capital. The bourgeois use it to say: "Want safer conditions? Enough money to pay rent and go to the doctor? Tough shit, there are hundreds of people I can call on to take your job."
The unemployment rate is carefully curated by the capitalist class to prevent low rates and their worst nightmare, full employment.
If unemployment rate is the key, why not create so many worker cooperatives that everybody can have a job?
A worker cooperative is just another business, albeit one where ownership is distributed among the workers. It still functions within the capitalist system and must follow its dictates. They start with capital, employ wage laborers, and must create profit to survive.
I mention this because really your question might as well be, "well why don't people just start more businesses to make more people employed?" The answer applies to co-ops as well: because unemployment is controlled by making it more costly to do business, forcing a need to cut costs (usually starting with labor) and often simply failed businesses. Co-ops are not free from this, they need capital to survive just like a capitalist-owned business.
The only way to free ourselves from this system is to expropriate control of the businesses and put it into workers' hands, which necessarily happens under the same conditions under which we could eliminate artificial unemployment (control of the state).
Put another way, we need to control the means of production, not be minor players still at the whims of capital.
Edit: I should probably mention that there's more to it than this but it requires getting into the weeds of Marxist theory.
Thanks for your detailed answer.
I wouldn't call it capitalism but markets. How can you escape markets, even if you control a state? Some people argue that the soviet union broke due to low oil prices.
Have you considered that coops need less capital to survive? When doing business becomes costly, coops could be the only businesses that survive. They could then keep unemployment rates ar zero while making profits.
Markets don't really mean anything nowadays outside the context of capitalism. It's a place you sell commodities and where there is a presumption of competition. Where does competition come from when production is not capital-driven (and then profit-driven)? The capital valorization process is still there and therefore the slew of horrors forcing humans to destroy each other so there can be 7 brands of blood diamonds.
Socialists have different perspectives on markets after there has been a socialist-won revolution. All of us know they are imbued with capitalist relations, the question is about how they might be used transitionally.
You can skip markets through nationalization, for example. A nationalized power grid operates better and more cheaply than those that operate as markets, for example. Or running a transit system. Maybe nobody needs 7 brands of bland diced tomatoes. That kind of thing.
The Soviet Union broke due to constant and merciless capitalist violence. Everything else is just responses in that constellation, like failing to sufficiently oppose that violence. A simple example is the decimation of the Soviet population by the invading fascists - the genocidal capitalists that were gladly supported by other capitalist nations so long as they thought they would destroy the Soviet Union. This hollowed out the conveyer belt of competent political actors and is why Kryschev came to power and was able to maintain it for his wing of revisionists (possibly the only time you'll hear me use that term unironically).
Co-ops would likely need more capital to survive, as they'll be less preemptively brutal towards their workers (themselves). This means lower rates of profit, requiring a larger scale of operation. Co-ops are often driven out of business by capitalist competition, where the organization of production is forcefully focused onto increasing profits by reducing what is paid for inputs: tools, materials, and labor. Co-ops are forced to operate in the same market and therefore risk going out of business when a competitor undercuts them in prices by 50%. This is one of the reasons that China forces the creation and maintenance of several worker co-ops and is careful about unions. They want those businesses to succeed and export, as China's strategy is to accept most forms of capitalist exploitation in order to draw productive capacity into its borders. They know that co-ops generally need help to survive.
If coops are more capital efficient and the proletariat definitionally doesn't own capital that means...
There is no amount of efficiency that is more important than momentum. Consider the robber barons. I could make a perfectly effective business but they could just bribe a senator to get a tax cut and beat me. The market can only evaluate one data set and lying cheating and stealing all fall outside the scope of that.
What does that mean? That managing a successful revolution is easier than managing coops?
Why is it important that the proletariat owns capital? Deconstruct your requirements and find a way to achieve your goals. If you try to achieve something that people want then there is a way to get it.
Some people argue that. Also we did industraial and agricultural sabotage to them. Threatened to annihilate the world and and did several wars with them. So not exactly a fair test
How was agriculture sabotaged?
I can find a article fomer cia agents talking about how they did it. They would det fields on fire, break important farm equipment stuff like thst.
Was that enough to turn the country into a net importer? I thought the general mismanagement was the bigger problem.
General mismanagement? They went from a feudal dirt based monarchy to the first spacefairing civilization in a lifetime. Their management was far better than ours. We just had a head start and the power to do more evil.
And yet China managed to survive. Of course there are external factors but it's important to know which internal decisions could have led to success.
Processors, internet, renewable energy, etc. Maybe winning the space race prevented success in other areas?
Stalin should not have stopped till the sea. China is willing to do what it takes to win. They have cut deals with evil countries to get resources to allow them to become the next hegemony. The US might never have stayed on top for quite some time if China had not seized the means of production
The atomic bomb, Stalin had to stop.
But that suggests that capitalistic meddling brought the sovjet union down. The primary question should be how the sovjet union could have kept the lead.
You got the money for that? They tried it back in thr 70s. The banks froze them out and bought their assets on the cheap after the sabotaging
You will have to bootstrap it.
No, we can just wait for America to fail and let China do it.
Yes, let's also outsource the revolution.
Will China take over America? If not, why would China change the economic system in the West? Without the petrodollar, there should just be significantly less resources available.
Yeah, eventually. Resources would stay the same. Money is fake. That would have no reason to change anything.
Money is not fake in international trade. Resources can be delivered to other countries.
Resources are real, but many doesn't correctly correlate with resources. Look at all the times everything has fallen appart when they try to use money for stuff and people realize that. Look at 08, look at the current covid depression.
Those problems don't help to fix the import problem.
I'd rather people not suffer personally.