All my communist posts keep getting deleted there. It is crazy to me that a workers subreddit is not communist 😵‍💫. They are not going to achieve anything by being neoliberals.

  • Kaffe
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    1 year ago

    Or should humans look forward to toiling hours away doing work they find little to not meaning in?

    You don’t understand alienation if you’re talking about work in such a manner. Your miscomprehension allows you to take such an antisocial position on laboring for others without exploitation, the comm in Communism stands for Community. I shouldn’t have to describe socially divided labor as being the true power of production over Capital.

    Humanity proceeds only as a species through technology. That’s why we are measured by our inventions. Fire; the wheel; agriculture; architecture; the internet; computers; etc.

    Extremely eurocentric evaluations of “progress”. It frankly isn’t true, which is why the Euros have been trashing the planet for 5 centuries. Technological determinism hasn’t proven itself useful, we are Marxists.

    Humanity has always striven to do less work and that is the core foundation of a lot of technological progression. “How can we preform more, by doing less?” That’s the entire point of humanity moving from a 12-14 hour workday as peasants, to 10-12 hours in the early industrial revolution, to 8-10 hours currently. Saying that we should not aim to do less work is bizarre.

    From redsails:

    Sadly for socialists, twilight encroaches on daylight as much as it pierces night. A combination of neo-colonial looting, the aforementioned welfare policies, and a bit of clever rhetoric has given capitalism truly extraordinary resilience. [26] By granting concessions, capitalists in the West avoided ever being dethroned, and their liberal ideologues then proceeded to persuade workers in the West (and the world) that “retiring early” and “living off of passive income” (becoming a landlord, or a shareholder) are in fact viable and honourable dreams within the reach of everyone. Now that “everyone” can throw their savings into an investment account and become a little bit of a capitalist, Stalin’s plea to lionize and empower workers arouses pity, fear, or scorn.

    Countless people hailing from all over the world have now been able to taste what it feels like to belong to a leisurely aristocracy that can drown itself in novelties while barely lifting a finger, and this arrangement is set up in such a way that suburbanites don’t even have to burden themselves with learning the names of the slaves servicing such a lifestyle! The “American Dream” has extremely wide appeal, and not only among Germans of the 1930s. It’s a mistake to underestimate it. Liberalism gets credit for policies fought for by workers in the same way that business owners get credit for the products made by workers, leaving workers (on whom everyone depends) with the same social standing as beggars. As a result, workers begin to attempt to rid themselves of this pitiful condition as soon as possible. The fact that many today offer up “anti-work” as a pro-worker slogan is a stark index of how far we’ve strayed from Marx’s conceptualization of labour as “not only a means of life, but life’s prime want.” [27]

    Quote mining Marx but avoiding the parts of Capital where he talks about humans laboring because that’s what we do.

    And I’ll answer the two other replies here, you were the one who brought up generalized AI, which is pure science fiction, as way to free humans from labor. If an artificial intelligence actually existed, it would necessarily enter social relations with humans and could be considered exploited by your “Communists”.

    When would we ever have a world where there’s not enough things to get done? If we free from “janitorial duties” as you so much lament, shouldn’t we use that surplus labor in a “progressive” field? Since the level of technology you expect to free us completely of labor is basically mastery of the universe, I’m going to call it utopian Idealism. It’s unhelpful if people think that’s what we Communists are about, and we only attract increasingly bourgeois audiences.

    • ComradeSalad
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      1 year ago

      You have completely misunderstood my point.

      Where did I ever say that we should just up and leave all work? I said we should put our efforts towards work that matters, not “janitorial duties”.

      Where did I ever say that we should every isolate ourselves? That we should not do any work with those around us? Did you even read what I wrote? You completely strawmanned my position and avoided nearly everything I mentioned.

      Also deriding technological progress as “Eurocentric trash” is insane.

      Lastly, planes, smartphones, MRI machines, tanks, the internet, and rockets used to all by science fiction. To completely disregard a notion that is right spring the corner because it’s “science fiction” is the exact thinking that lead the Soviet Union to completely fail to anticipate or make use of computer technology in the 60-80’s.

      Have fun burying your head in the sand and deriding technology because it’s “Eurocentric”.

      • Kaffe
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        1 year ago

        No your judgement of societies by their “technological progress” is eurocentric. It’s the same reactionary positions of Liberal historians who look at Africans as “primitive” because they didn’t use wheels, despite wheels being useless for certain terrains. It’s giving terra nilus BS that justified stealing productive human-managed ecosystems of the Amerindians and razing them for plantations worked by slaves. I’m saying there’s no “objective” level of progress. It can not be calculated based on how many gadgets you have.

        All of these things are cool and great, when used towards definite human needs. There is no march on progress that we need to shape our societies towards today because petty bougies like to live lavish lives through Imperialism. There will never be a time in which human labor shouldn’t be directed to developing material conditions. You are comparing exploitative work with time loss for what, hobbies, isn’t that still labor? Peoples’ hobbies require labor. We have no need for Aristocratic Marxism. You took issue with me calling full automation Idealism, because it is. I’m an automation engineer, I build it for a living. I can only accelerate human labor, make it more efficient, but there will always need to be humans doing work toward definite goals.

        Utopian views of a laborless society are bourgeois because they are a class of exploiters who seek to or live that dream already. The difference in our stances is that I believe you can never eliminate work, and if you could, you are only limiting your society from the benefits of socialized labor. You believe that there is a point in which labor itself is unnecessary. I’m asking what technology this would require, and is that technology even feasible? Is it even worth this being a goal for our movement? I think it completely focuses on Capital and dead labor instead of the living labor that makes any society run. It’s the same grand vision of the bourgeoisie.