2w ago

Let us work for the needs of all rather than the profit of few.

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)

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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.
- Please, read Conquest of Bread. It frames it very effectively.
Having lived in subsistence farming communities, this is such an ignorant rich bitch take.
Food doesn't just show up at your house. Someone somewhere has to engage in agriculture to get you that food you want to eat. Someone has to wait around for rains. Someone has to till the earth to get the food you eat. You don't deserve free food any more than a farmer does who had to grow it from the soil.
- Not sure what this has to do with arguing against capitalist exploitation of labor. The person tilling the soil to grow food has more aligned interests with the office worker than the owners.
  
  arguing against capitalist exploitation of labor.
  Because the OP doesn't mention it. Spending hours of your life to survive is necessary, even with modern mass production.
  
  JFC - I'm talking about people that live in a village in West Africa. They own the land and work fucking hard just to survive and have never seen the inside of an office in their lives. Their lives are not bucolic fantasy, their lives are, at their core, not much different than yours and mine. They want to work less and have more and just be left alone. But they're farming millet and sorghum in literal sand, prone to the weather to dictate if they starve or not.
  Or maybe you tell me more about the value of their labor and how somewhere far far in the distance someone is keeping them poor against their will and best efforts.
- I never said we should stop working. Read the title.
  We have the machines to produce enough food, water, clothing, housing, etc. for everyone. And yet we live under an economic system in which millions around the globe do not have access to these goods. People are incentivized to throw food away or keep houses empty when the alternative is unprofitable. But we no longer need to organize society such that that the products of our labor is based around price and profit.
  
  WE DON'T have the machines! John Deere and Case and AGCO and Claas have the machines. What open source non-profit modern machines are there out there you're talking about? Because I'd love to buy one.
  Also, no one is incentivized to throw food away, people are lazy AF and rich westerners somehow don't seem to mind waste. Don't attribute to malevolence what incompetence will explain.
  I used to live in a place that was at the bottom of the UNDP development scale. When I would go "out" to eat basic rice and sauce, I would usually have 2-6 kids, like actual children, standing next to me waiting to eat the scraps. And they would fight over a few handfulls of rice because they were starving and that was the system of alms-giving. And while I feel guilt now for every bite of food I waste, and I try not to, I'm not about to expend 200 times the energy to DHL cooked rice to West Africa. You have to balance resource use at a local level with the resources needed to move food other places. Even shipping all that soy that China didn't buy from the US to anywhere in need incurs huge costs, plus significant CO2 emissions.
nah. I won't be happy until we have trillionaires. Meanwhile, I can barely afford to eat.
/s just in case.
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.
I'll always upvote Kropotkin
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,
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
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.

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