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In our civilized societies we are rich. Why then are the many poor? Why this painful drudgery for the masses? Why, even to the best-paid workman, this uncertainty for the morrow, in the midst of all the wealth inherited from the past, and in spite of the powerful means of production, which could ensure comfort to all, in return for a few hours daily toil? - Peter Kropotkin (1892)
I think it's important to frame this kind of argument very carefully. There is a misconception that communists and socialists just don't want to work and want a free ride.
Communists, socialists, and anarchists are fine with work. They are not fine with exploitation. Work is not necessarily exploitive. Work should be rewarded and incentivized.
But, in a civilized society, your ability to merely survive should not be dependent on your ability or willingness to work. That doesn't mean that the quality of life of someone who chooses not to work should be the same as someone who chooses to work. It only means that choosing not to work should not be a death sentence.
How any particular society may choose to implement such a system of non-exploitative, minimally coercive work may vary. But the main point is giving people more control over their work, their working conditions, and their lives generally.
"From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" still applies. You're just more likely to also get the things you want if you do valuable labor.
Edit: another point. I'd argue that leftists are MORE okay with work than capitalism enjoyers because they do not want people to be paid for simply owning things and not doing labor. The goal of capitalism - how to win capitalism - is to just own things and exploit others' labor, not to work. How to win Socialism is doing the job you enjoy/are best at/are most willing to do for the reward offered - that's it. Simple as.
Shit if I could not work and live in a barely kept together apartment or trailer home eating only bread and drinking tap water, I'd be happy af. Work does nothing but depress me and my therapist hasn't been able to help with that.
First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.
-- Marx
The thing is, you do work at home. You spend time maintaining your life, buying groceries, you spend time thinking thoughts that turn into actions, you make things, you learn, you educate. But that stuff isn't defined as work. The only thing capitalist defines as work is working for the capitalist. But even then much work that you do so you can make profit for them, like commuting, buying work clothes, fixing your car, is also working for the capitalist. But its unpaid.
Additionally, your working day then has a dual character also. Part of your day, usually the smaller part, you work to regenerate the money that the capitalist pays you, but the rest of the day you are working solely for the capitalists profit. It appears as if you're paid for every hour, but you actually make your wages back in only the first couple hours of your work.
You are alienated from your work, from the value of it, and from the excess. So may not be that you don't like work, you may just see that there's no actual point to it, you're naturally in tune with the facts of your exploitation, and your spirit resists it. You're not wrong for hating your own exploitation, in fact, the historical movements that created wage labor brutally destroyed all other forms of self sustainance.
Another thing about our system, is that a certain percentage of the population has to be unemployed in order to keep wages low, and we produce about 3x more than what we need to sustain everyone on the planet with a high cost of living. Socialism would abolish the 40 hour work week. You could work part time for the benefit of society and the rest of that time would be yours to pursue your own happiness and self actualization rather than just recharging your battery just enough to be exploited for the next day.
I like in the Marx passage how he calls it the labor of mortification. In Marx's roundabout way of writing, he's saying that wage labor is death
You wouldn't be happy as fuck for long. Eventually you'd get bored enough that you'd start doing something. Doing something is work.
That's kind of the point though, when left go their own devices people generally choose to work, its just that when their base needs are met they will tend to work that brings them joy first instead of pay.
Yeah I'd most likely engage more with my hobbies, but nobody is paying me to go on walks or write some awful reviews of movies and videogames. They instead pay me to pump air into cow carcaases for 8.5 hours in a 30-35 degree room. Something that leaves me exhausted and basically no time to do things that make me not want to blow my brains out unless my epileptic ass wants to start depriving myself of sleep.
but people would have to work for you to maintain that lifestyle
That "lifestyle" of near poverty.
I think you're missing OP's point. Those basics of shelter and food can easily be covered by society, in the modern age, with our understanding of science allowing agriculture to be a piece of piss now-a-days compared with how it used to be. We have machines that can do the labour of hundreds, thousands, of people. We have computers that allow for the tracking of a million and one data points.
Yes, people would have to work to provide someone with bread and water. But it's such a minimal amount of work in the grand scheme of things, that why should we really care? Those that work will live better lifestyles, will reap greater rewards. But why should those that don't work be left to starve and die when for such a tiny percentage of society's expenditure they can have their basic needs covered?
Perhaps, after a year of not working and recovering from the rat race, they may even see the value in working again. If it benefits their community, instead of having to work 40+ hours a week just to cover their basic requirements. Work can, and should, be far more flexible than it currently is. If our basic necessities are met then that allows for flexibility, it allows for labour to adapt as society's needs change over time.
It prevents exploitation, as you no longer need to work but want to work to improve your situation or that of your community.
But the neccecities of life, the work of doctors, farmers, electricians is all work. Things people have to dedicate their lives to. To recieve the fruits of that work, the common person needs to work in their own way. Doctors dont want to work every day of their carreer. Plently of neccecary jobs are worked by people who never would want to do it, even once. To ask for their time and effort while giving nothing of your own is entitled.
Lol. Patient variant: once again, yes, all of it is also work. No, to do that one does not have to dedicate their whole lives to it. No, asking a miniscule of collective time and effort is not entitled
Normal variant: dude(ss), you seriously gonna complain about minimally covering survival of some folk while having families with wealth enough for several generations to live fucking awesome without any need to work a second in their life? Are you nuts or something?
*Robots
Our system is so wasteful that we pproduce about 3x more than what we would need in order for every person on earth to have a "middle class" first world lifestyle. The system is even incredibly wasteful beyond that and throws away most produce, because it isn't profitable to sell, it ends up in a landfill.
Check out this blog by anthropologist and degrowth luminary, Jackson Hickel https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/10/27/degrowth-a-call-for-radical-abundance
I didnt say our system was the way to go
I didn't mean to contradict you. Just provide some framing.
IMO this is giving too much credit to the bad faith argument. Anyone saying "oh you lazy socialist you just don't want to work" is either incredibly ignorant, or more likely deliberately trolling.
It isn't usually bad faith imo. They just genuinely can't conceive of a world with a less coercive system of work. I'd say it is ~~in~~credibly ignorant. It's hard even for leftists to envision the specifics of such a system - why would it be any easier for people who've never even considered an alternative? So they just think, naively, that without the threat of systemic violence jobs wouldn't get done
It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable-but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.
Please, read Conquest of Bread. It frames it very effectively.
I mean, your associated quote does very much advocate trading hours of your time just to survive, so I'm not really sure how to reconcile it with your caption on the image.
The key word in the post is "selling". Under capitalism, our labor/time becomes a commodity that we sell to the highest bidder (i.e., the capitalist). We do not own what we produce, nor do we own the means to produce goods efficiently. So we must sell ourselves--in the form of wages--by the hour/year in order to secure the the material needs of our existence. We are institutionally coerced. Whoever does not sell themselves cannot have food, clothing, shelter--even though we produce more than enough to go around.
In the 19th century, Kropotkin noticed that technological advances have made it possible to secure everyone's needs. In this quote, we see that the the rise of machines ("means of production") will "ensure comfort to all" for the price of "a few hours daily toil". (See: The Conquest of Bread for more.) Yes, back in 1892, Kropotkin thought we would only need to work four hours a day to produce enough food, water, shelter, housing, etc. for everyone. The key, say Kropotkin, is that we must use these technological advances to produce the things we need rather than to make a few people unimaginably wealthy. Accordingly, we no longer need to sell our selves to those who take the bulk of the value we produce as their own profit; and there is no reason that anyone should go hungry, thirsty, or homeless in the present day.
your associated quote does very much advocate trading hours of your time just to survive
No it doesn't? It's clearly criticizing the system that requires such a trade.
Tell a liberal to mutual aid, and they’ll send cops to you in the middle of the night.
Tell kids we've been robbed since forever, and you have comrades touring aid for Gaza.
nah. I won't be happy until we have trillionaires. Meanwhile, I can barely afford to eat.
/s just in case.
I'll always upvote Kropotkin
The wage form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working-day into necessary labour and surplus-labour, into paid and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour. In the corvée [a feudal form of labor exploitation where serfs or peasants worked some days in their own fields, and some days in the fields of their lords], the labour of the worker for himself, and his compulsory labour for his lord, differ in space and time in the clearest possible way. In slave labour, even that part of the working-day in which the slave is only replacing the value of his own means of existence, appears as labour for his master. All the slave’s labour appears as unpaid labour. In wage labour, on the contrary, even surplus-labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid. There the property-relation conceals the labour of the slave for himself; here the money-relation conceals the unpaid labour of the wage labourer.
... this relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalistic mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists.
-- Marx
Right to Well Being for All!
"We must recognize, and loudly proclaim, that everyone, whatever his grade in the old society, whether strong or weak, capable of incapable, has, before everything, THE RIGHT TO LIVE, and society is bound to share amongst all, without exception, the means of existence it has at its disposal. We must acknowledge this, proclaim it loudly and act up to it.
Affairs must be managed in such a way that from the first day of the revolution the worker shall know that a new era is opening before him; that henceforth none need crouch under the bridges while places are hard by; none need fast in the midst of plenty; none need perish with cold near shops full of fur; that all is for all, in practice as well as in theory, and that at last, for the first time in history, that a revolution has been accomplished which considers the NEEDS of people before schooling them in their DUTIES.
This cannot be brought about by Acts of Parliament but only by taking immediate and effective possession of all that is necessary to ensure the well-being of all...."
— Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread,
And think for myself? Sorry, I still havent watched all of Lost yet. I have no plans on watching it but I just cant live in a world where its not an option.