Processing jobs ain't real jobs today, huh.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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Quote from Kropotkin 'Conquest of Bread'
Is that Felix the Cat with the hot take?
Yep
If baking a loaf makes you enough money to make a loaf. Who is paying the farmer for the wheat to make that loaf?
The point is the baker is not free when they must buy back the fruits of their labor with their wages.
Neither is the farmer, if you're adding it in. The farmer that harvests the fields for the money to buy a sack of grain is not free. Nor is a miller working to buy a sack of flour.
Each produces more than they receive. The currency they recieve for their production is inadequate to enable their freedom.
So if a farmer didn't need to buy their grain back, or a baker their baked bread, then perhaps the fruits of their labor would be more effectively shared, instead of commodified and so attached to currency. (This is the concept known as labor owning the means of production.)
You can argue about how currencies and commodification of labor is handled, but then we're already on the right track, so to speak.
This concept only works if you act like you can only do so much, but commercial bakers can make hundreds to thousands of loaves of bread a day. So then the argument falls apart and becomes pointless. Say they make 100-200 dollars a day, that's more than enough money to buy bread and food for the day. This isn't even a good argument for labor because the straight text makes it sound like they want to keep all the bread they make, but if it's more than one loaf than it would just be wasted.
If the concept is lost that wage earning to survive is not freedom, then yes this meme does not appear to communicate it well enough. The use of bread and baker would be an attempt to draw the connection, but then again it is also a meme using a picture of Felix the Cat.
The premise of Felix being read on theory is more an opening to engagement than a strict political art critique, imo.
If a farmer can't buy the amount of grain he produces is because he's not producing all of it. Why?
Someone built the machines that the farmer used to farm. Whoever built those machines did partially produce the grain. Same goes for whoever owns the land and whoever produced the seeds and whoever marketed and sold the grain.
If there is a farmer that:
- Built his own farming equipment with raw materials mined by himself.
- Owns the land the wheat is growing on.
- Produced the seeds to plant the wheat.
- Marketed and sold the grain.
Then that farmer produced that grain with only his labor, therefore he should in theory be able to buy the same amount of grain he sold, just make sure to put the right price on it. But what is the point? If he did all that labor himself to buy some grain, he could've just kept some grain for himself.
A baker that bakes a loaf of bread didn't produce a loaf of bread. It turned some labor+materials+capital into a loaf of bread. If those materials and capital are not the fruit of your labour, neither is the entire loaf.
If a farmer can't buy the amount of grain he produces
That's not the premise at all. This isn't about the ability to extract a 1-1 ratio. It's not about extraction at all. It is posing that the wage earner is not free despite the value they produce.
They're producing products that increase that value. Grain into flour, flour into bread. Each phase of that labor is commodified around a wage which does not increase in value based on their produced value. Those wages earned are a portion of extracted value.
The wage earner that produced the machinery was not paid a wage based on the value of grain produced. It's something different. And that difference is where the wage earner is not free.
To your credit you have posed scenarios where the farmers and laborers are also the owners of the operation, which is a big piece of this puzzle. But something of note:
Same goes for whoever owns the land
What is the productive labor that is ownership of land? What value has the landowner produced in the bread?
That's not the premise at all. This isn't about the ability to extract a 1-1 ratio
That's literally what the post is about.
At what ratio of the loaf would the baker be free? 10%? 50%? 90%?
The post implies that the baker would only be free at 100%. Since it just says "he was paid less than the whole loaf". At no point in the post was stated the size of the slice.
If the post wanted to communicate what you believe it is communicated, it could say something like:
You are not free if you aren't fairly compensated for your labor
Or
You are not free if you don't own the oven you are baking on
Or whatever else that is not objectively wrong.
But this post instead decided to go with an "iam14andthisisdeep" quote instead so leftists can masturbate to it and the right can ignore it as ridiculous. Changing the opinion of absolutely no one.
It is true that land is not obtained by labor, but it is still a limited resource needed for production, so if someone owns it, that someone will most of the time only agree other people use it in exchange for part of the final product. But you can take land out of any equation in this conversation if you want. The post is still nonsensical.
I can agree with you that the bottom 50-9X% of the population is compensated less than the labor they provide. But that doesn't change the fact that a baker will never earn a loaf of bread for baking a loaf of bread.
It's a fruitful discussion here, and I agree the comic is reductive. Notwithstanding the incomplete representation of the circumstance, the point the comic is trying to make is that there is inequity/injustice in the distribution of costs and benefits produced even in the complete picture from beginning to end.
The debate eventually gets to difficult conflicts in ethical values around concepts of property/ownership, labor, individual/society, rights, and meaningful living.
What the comic aims to illustrate is a symptom of a system that maximizes the opportunities to live freely for a minority at the expense of a majority who see their opportunities to live freely minimized, suggesting that the symptom indicates the system is unjust.
I don't think the comic is that successful in doing so, there are many ways to poke holes in it. However, the degree of successful communication by the comic is a different thing from the argument it points to.
It is a simplification, but it gets the point across. Socialist posters should be truthful and self-evident, I agree. What would you say would be a similarly pithy statement to put in Felix's mouth here, that is accurate to the reality?
I provided two possible quotes. Ofc they need some working since I'm not good at that.
More possibilites:
If you get paid the same for working hard than the guy next to you that spends the whole working day staring at the phone, you're not free
If your manager just "manages" you and gets paid double, you're not free
If you have to stay the 8h even after your job is done, you're not free
If you have to ask for permission to go to the doctor you're not free
If you have to ask for permission to take your vacation days you're not free
If your wage increases don't even keep up with inflation, you're not free
If your rent is more than 10% of your 40h/week wage, you're not free
It is true that land is not obtained by labor, but it is still a limited resource needed for production, so if someone owns it, that someone will most of the time only agree other people use it in exchange for part of the final product.
in exchange for part of the final product.
If that final product is 'money' then I understand your logic and also why this comic exists. At the most minimalist interpretation that inherent rentierism is an example of an unnecessary extraction of the value of labor from those who produce it.
But again, this is about wages. You can't slide between 'wage earners' and 'owners' any more than you can define 'land' and 'landowners' interchangeably.
Look, you can focus on land all you want. But as I said, remove it from the equation and my point still stands. I only included land to make a more real example. It is not needed for an argument. You're just using it to avoid arguing against my initial position.
I am consistently referring to 'wages' which is a word you've now categorically refused to use so far. If I am to avoid anything it is further perversing a discussion on whether Felix the Cat is out of his element here.
I haven't refused to use it. I just didn't because there is no wage in this post. It's a transaction.
You bake me a loaf, I give you a slice.
Can convert it to a wage if you want.
Bake me 500 loafs per month, I'll give you a wage of 500 slices per month.
I've done it, I used the word wage. How does this change anything of the argument? It's still the same. You can't provide a wage of 500 loafs per month to someone that bakes 500 loafs per month.
God forbid a pithy quote not capture the entire world of nuance
I think the fact that a drop of nuance topples the whole pithy quote shows that the quote isn't very valuable. It's got the right idea, but it isn't expressed well.
Whinging about downvotes, that's a downvote
It's 1 loaf for 1 slice, so the maths seems to check out.
Baking a loaf is just part of the process of obtaining a loaf. If the value of that part relative to the value of the loaf is the same as the size of a slice relative to the size of the loaf, then yes, math does check out.
Except the corporations own all of the processes, and people are being exploited for their labor at every step.
All of what you said could be true, and still this pic would be dumb.
Even if there are no corporations, basically every product is done thanks to the effort of multiple people. If 20 people build a house together, they can't sell that house and each of them buy a similar house with that money. That's just not how reality works.
Except that people who spend 8 or more hours a day, five or more days a week, making thousands of loaves of bread for corporations to profit off of, are barely scraping by, hardly able to afford the necessities, and in many cases making tough decisions on what essentials to do without, while corporations rake in record profits which go straight to the shareholders and C-suite, who contribute next to nothing to the process of production.
If that seems totally fine and normal to you, then I can't help you.
Bakers can have excellent well paid union jobs with a good pension, at big corporations. Not all do but that's a different issue.
Keyword "can." Not everywhere is unionized
That's not what this post is about. Someone that spends 8 hours a day five days a week in any 1st world country can afford plenty of leaves of bread. Doesn't matter if they're a baker, a cashier, an engineer, or a metalworker.
The reason you can't bake a single loaf and buy another is not because the CEO ate your loaf. The reason is because you had to buy an oven, ingredients, and the energy to turn that oven on.
You could argue how little executives contribute to society. My argument is that even if there were no executives, you wouldn't be free according to this pic. Not even in a communist or anarchist society.
As long as there is the labor of more than one person involved at all in producing anything, selling that product will not earn you enough to buy it back since you have to give part of that to the other people that put in their labor for that product.
I am honestly in awe that there are so many people that can't comprehend this.
Someone that spends 8 hours a day five days a week in any 1st world country can afford plenty of leaves of bread
Maybe if the only essential recurring expense is bread. In reality, at a bare minimum, people also need to afford rent, utilities, healthcare, transportation to and from work, and food with enough variety to provide full, balanced nutrition. Suddenly the bread budget looks much smaller.
The reason you can't bake a single loaf and buy another is not because the CEO ate your loaf.
Thanks for admitting you've never actually looked into the numbers concerning social stratification and wealth disparity.
As long as there is the labor of more than one person involved at all in producing anything, selling that product will not earn you enough to buy it back since you have to give part of that to the other people that put in their labor for that product.
That would only apply if you're selling the product at cost, in which case the necessities you need to buy on a regular basis would also be more affordable. The reality in the current system is that products are sold for a huge markup, making most of the essentials less affordable for the people doing the productive labor, while the profits from those markups go straight to the top.
I am honestly in awe that there are so many people that can't comprehend this.
Then you might want to check your own comprehension, because there are layers of subtext that are going straight over your head.
For further reading, see "the alienation of labor," and "the appropriation of the surplus value of labor."
You'd have to be nearly functionally illiterate to be unable to recognize how those concepts manifest in modern society.
Then you're making a way different argument than what the post is making.
The post says that a baker that bakes a loaf should be able to afford a loaf.
You're now saying that whoever works X hours should be able to buy Y things. This is very different.
First of all, not all hours of labor are worth the same. And if you believe that, you're delusional. In my opinion, a farmer that grows food for 8 hours a day should be able to afford more bread than someone that spends 8 hours a day digging a hole and filling it back up again.
And a farmer that is hardworking and manages to produce 10 kg of grain per hour should be able to afford more than a lazy one producing 0.5kg per hour.
All 3 of those did 8 hours of labor.
The reason your argument is way off the post is that the post is very clear what the labor is (baking 1 loaf). And what the compensation is expected (1 loaf).
You are neither clear about the labor (8h 5 days of unknown kind of labor), nor about the expected compensation (rent, utilities, healthcare, transport, balanced nutrition).
I can agree that all real jobs if done with an acceptable performance for 40h/week should be able to afford all that + more if those expenses are reasonable (a mansion rent and 1bedroom apartment rent are both rent). But how much is "more"?
But that is neither the point of this post, nor the point of the argument.
You apparently can't read subtext. It's a fucking meme and you're trying to take it literally, missing the point entirely. It's clearly about drawing attention to the alienation of labor, wage stagnation, and the cost of living crisis. If you're incapable of picking up on that then you must be extremely privileged and sheltered.
someone that spends 8 hours a day digging a hole and filling it back up again.
The people who maintain your roads and water lines would like a word.
And a farmer that is hardworking and manages to produce 10 kg of grain per hour should be able to afford more than a lazy one producing 0.5kg per hour.
A couple fallacies here. 1) that's not how grain production works. It takes days of labor over an extended period (weeks and months) to produce a harvest. It's not a "kg of grain per hour" scenario.
-
harvest output does not directly corelate with "working hard." Weather plays a role. Some seasons have better harvests than others. Some people own a few acres, some own hundreds of hectares. It's not "farmer who only produces .5kg is lazy."
-
the people who own the land, in most cases, are not the ones doing the farming. The people doing the labor are often compensated the least. So your "hard work" fallacy is extremely flawed.
I can agree that all real jobs if done with an acceptable performance for 40h/week should be able to afford all that + more if those expenses are reasonable (a mansion rent and 1bedroom apartment rent are both rent).
You have to be extremely out of touch in order to think like that. Were you born into wealth or something?
People who are living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to make ends meet aren't worried about living in mansions. In some places, the shittiest studio apartments in the most run-down neighborhoods already cost $1000 a month or more. And if you're a family of four, you're gonna need something bigger than that.
I don't think you are arguing in good faith. And you're trying to derail this conversation in 20 different directions so I'm going to ignore 90% of your comment.
The reason the "subtext" is irrelevant is because there's no reason for it.
It's like making a post saying "all cats should be provided by restaurant-level handcrafted meals paid by the government". Then I comment "that is stupid and unsustainable". Then you come here saying "it's not stupid, every MINUTE there are cats dying of hunger all around the world! The post is not about restaurant-level meals! It's about feeding the poor unfortunate kitten that have been abandoned! Are you a soulless cat-hating human?"
And digging a hole just to fill it back again does not fix any pipes :) it just makes the soil a little bit looser.
I think you're the one not arguing in good faith. Projection, much?
In this context, the "bread" is a symbol, being used to comment on a much broader range of social phenomena, just like political cartoons have always done since they were first invented.
Everyone else here seems to pick up on that, because they live through the reality every day of being overworked and underpaid while the cost of living goes further and further out of reach. The fact that you don't get it just tells everyone how glaringly out of touch you are with the plight of ordinary everyday people.
And your inane comparison to cats in restaurants is nothing more than a strawman, not worth even taking seriously.
And digging a hole just to fill it back again does not fix any pipes :) it just makes the soil a little bit looser.
Nobody is getting paid to dig a hole and fill it in without a reason, so your imaginary scenarios aren't going to convince anyone that the average worker is already getting paid enough, or that if anyone is poor they probably deserve it because their job is pointless or they don't work hard, or whatever point you're trying to make.
I have argued why I don't believe you're arguing in good faith. And your response to that is saying that I don't either.
You haven't either said why my argument is wrong nor why I am arguing in bad faith.
You just keep ignoring my points and accusing me of things without any argument behind the accusations.
So until you provide any argument for your accusations and start responding to my arguments. I will refuse to argue with you.
Your ideology does not equate to reality.
Not sure what you think my "ideology" is, but seeing as I merely stated a plain and simple fact, if you think it equates to "ideology" then your version of "reality" is quite delusional