Most of the time I hear advice that a regular 9 to 5 job or other schedule of being an employee is making us a slave or at least depreving us from our time by keep us busy enough to not be able to do anything else. But what are other options that allow both enough time to spend on a personal life and make a good living? Most of the time, owning a business eats more time than being an employee. This is maybe a discussion about work life balance, or even being with or against the anti work movement.
I also refuse the idea that tells me to be absolutely frugal. Yes, I live bellow my means, but I also spen d money on my hobbies and what brings joy and meaning to my life. I also save up some money for investment but investing is the hard part when our stock market is too small.
The question is serious. What are the other options or other insight in the situation and its alternatives.
Question is open ended and you can add in more point of views.
How can we, in an alternative setting, not have to work? For example, if I want to drink a nice coffee in the morning and enjoy myself, then I need to somehow work directly for this coffee and collect the beans, roast, grind, and brew them, or indirectly buy paying someone to do it for me. Either way, I can’t enjoy it without some kind of work.
Would you please elaborate your point of view?
Work will always be required. The problem however is that work is a coercion under the current system. You work to live, to provide for yourself the requirements for life: food, shelter, and medical care. We do this dispite the fact that our level of technological achievement could provide all those things with very minimal effort. Once you can be provided with these basic fundamental needs with no strings attached, the earnings you do make can go even farther since your not spending as much one food, medical, or shelter. But it goes beyond just these basic needs. As communal creatures we have it in us to reorder society around the well being of people as opposed to the current order: the maitainance of profit and endless growth. This persuite of growth has left the means of life in control of the few, which in turn gives them control over how you get to live. Anyone who thinks that no one will work in the future is foolish. Instead the goal is for work to be a persuite of enrichment for the whole of the community both local and global, to produce such a surplus that those who do not have the ability to work are not coerced into doing so, and those that can will work to ensure we all live dignified and enriched lives.
True, work will always be needed. Even religion talks about work being mandatory. Here j want to make a distinction between the kinds and frameworks of work. Do I work as an employee, do I work as the business owner, or do I work directly for my needs without need for that much money. Something like primitive technology would do by building my house in mg land using wood and dirt from mg own land and do my farming and livestock. But doing all of that is enourmus amount of work. So if I understand correctly your point, you assign all that work to a community and we share the benefit?
The shape of the nature of communal work will take whatever the material conditions demand, but what needs to be true first is that we’re organizing our work around the right ideals and goals. We do that by subordinating the productive forces of society to those goals instead of trying to coax them to those goals like we do now. Automation might be the right solution to the productive process of a given necessity; human labor might be the appropriate solution if automation isn’t sufficiently capable. The boon of our current system is the division of labor and the socialization of labor. That is to say, the revolutionary innovation and progressive force of capitalism is reorganizing labor such that we break down the productive process of any given item into smaller processes that join together to produce a single output. Instead of a handycraftsmen working many hours to build a chair, lathing every spindle, every leg, and every seat, each of those components is produced individually, creating the same chair in a significantly reduced amount of time.
The regressive side of capitalism as a political and economic organization is that it retained feudalism’s private ownership of the means of production. The tools necessary to produce any given necessity. The handycraftsmen owned his tools; he owned the workshop in which he created his crafts, and in the migration to a socialized production model, he retained the ownership of those tools and workshop, and hired peasents to split the productive process into smaller processes. They used his tools and his workshop, but they retained no ownership over what was produced and, as a result, had no authority over how their output was distributed.
To answer your question more directly: “So if I understand correctly your point, you assign all that work to a community and we share the benefit?”
What you’re describing here is a plan. Currently, the productive forces are subject to no plan, just the whims of those who currently own those productive forces. There is no plan that outlines what needs to be produced, what needs to be focused on, to deliver that shared social benefit. Getting to that place is the challenge we face right now. To reach these goals, we have to have a political system that can, and should, place the productive forces that exist now in a kind of cage. One that dictates to the productive forces the priorities of the community.
“Do I work as an employee, do I work as the business owner, or do I work directly for my needs without need for that much money.”
I don’t see how these are at all mutually exclusive; that someone within the community wouldn’t be any of these things over another. Again, the socialization of labor is the driving force of our productive capacity. That, in turn, will require those who perform tasks across the productive process. Some of those tasks are organizational; others are skilled; some require academic theorizing and experimentation. The thing that we’re seeking to remove, however, is the corceon from the system, where someone is compelled to work a job that they are not interested in or fit to perform. How that is organized is one that follows the material conditions of the community. That organization could support “business owners” given that those businesses are not exploitative to workers. However, if the community is well enough organized, there would be no need for an individual to “own” the “business”. Take for example, trash collection. This is a service that is obviously needed, but does it require someone to “own” the “business” of picking up trash and transporting it to landfills or processing centers? Not likely. Trash management is something that was for a long time a service provided for the community by the municipality, county, or state, province, or “regional government.” The more you begin to ask these questions of different sectors of every day life, the more you might find that you do not need a “business owner”.
But again, that really depends on the material conditions. All things are interconnected, and so those conditions are often contingent on external conditions as well. Global material conditions will need to be shifted as well, before we might see more and more of our everyday lives be transformed into communal ownership rather than private ownership by a “business owner”.
Through much of human history, what you had was either a direct result of your labor or exploitation of the labor of others. As soon as industrial processes came into being, the usefulness of labor was greatly magnified, but the benefits fell mostly to the owners of the processes rather than the workers.
Now imagine a system where the workers or society owned the processes. What once took 50 workers a week could now be accomplished in a day. Thus their workload is greatly reduced. Now carry this to its logical endpoint.
Fully automated screw production BABYYYYYY!!!
You are correct, work will always be required.
Personally, I believe communities are the answer. Instead of working as a baker in exchange for money, why not simply bake goods for my community? Then my neighbour can farm the vegetables and another make repairs in the house and so on.
A lot of families already work like this I think we just need to extend this behaviour to our neighbourhood.
I’d couch it as being forced to work to make someone else rich in order to satisfy our basic needs.
there is always the need for work in the sense of “labor”, regardless of the society we live in. it’s a question of who benefits from this labor, who decides what labor is prioritized, and how the fruits are distributed.
i presume that having is akin to being forced to, or in other words having no other option, which is not synchronous to having a positive connection with one’s own labour.
I suppose that ‘work’ is in and of itself a loaded term and carries different meanings across cultures and eras. If you love the labour of making coffee (eg. growing, harvesting, roasting, brewing), is that really work? Maybe yes, maybe no.
Anyway, a dumb little ramble.
Not the OP, but I have a different perspective you may find useful.
Productivity has increased due to automation and mechanisation. The same number of labour hours produces more output. That means that if we wanted the same output we could put in fewer hours to get it.
Wages have not matched this growth since the 80s. Productivity went up, production went up, but wages stayed flat. So for the same number of hours of work we get the same amount of money, but the produced output is higher. Where does the difference in output go?
It goes to the owners, the rich, the class of people who by virtue of owning the factory, company, means of production, and they get all of those extra bits of value without expending any more effort or innovating in any meaningful way. They bring in automation and mechanisation and increase the productivity of the employee without compensating them more for it.
They then continue increasing their wealth by turning everything into a comodity, something that can be made into a financial instrument and traded. They wrap housing up in REITs and healthcare in health insurance companies. They make everything work for their personal wealth and give nothing back.
So in a sane society if you wanted your cup of coffee in the morning it would cost half or less of what it did in the 80s, so you could afford it with half as many hours of your labour. If it took you an hour of labour to afford a week of coffee in the 80s then now it should take 15-30 minutes instead. You should have more free time.
So yes, people would still work at this point. In the future some things would be completely automated and you would not have to pay any meaningful cost for them, they would be essentially free. Other things would be harder to automate and you would still have to exchange hours of your time to afford them. One day everything would be fully automated including the machines to maintain the machines and no human effort would be required to have a decent standard of living, so you could spend time engaging with people, exploring the universe, learning about how things work, making art, and enjoying culture. Essentially, Star Trek.
You are touching an interesting topic here: we produce more with less time and effort than before. This in theory should allow us more free time, but in reality we still work more regardless so that business owner earns more.
However, I see an issue here. The idea you defend does work when producing material goods, like food and goods where we need a means of production that is hard to acquire. But there are other methods where the means of production are cheap and available to everybody, like teaching, or programming or selling. I see here the biggest entry barrier is salesman skills like finding customers and clients, and ability to solve a multi million dollar issue. I chose that wording because raising a capitable in millions of dollars can be done in multiple ways most people do not comprehend. Personally, as a programmer, if I had the ability to convince people and find customers to build things for them, I would have my own company. Or if I had my salesman skills on point I would open my shop or commercial business. Those can also be considered means of production but since they are immaterial skills, I still haven’t finishes building a slot in my mind to receive them.
The issue is when we see those skills applied they seem trivial or too easy anybody could do them but they are also so hard very few people does them. We also often think of them “what did you even do? I am here doing all the work producing all the product” which is true, but lacking customers to sell to is the problem a majority of my aquiances are struggling with.
I do not say those are impossible to do but where the means of production is a skill, how does it change or affect your take?