I often daydream about how society would be if we were not forced by society to pigeon hole ourselves into a specialized career for maximizing the profits of capitalists, and sell most of our time for it.
The idea of creating an entire identity for you around your “career” and only specializing in one thing would be ridiculous in another universe. Humans have so much natural potential for breadth, but that is just not compatible with capitalism.
This is evident with how most people develop “hobbies” outside of work, like wood working, gardening, electronics, music, etc. This idea of separating “hobbies” and the thing we do most of our lives (work) is ridiculous.
Here’s how my world could be different if I owned my time and dedicated it to the benefit of my own and my community instead of capitalists:
- more reading, learning and excusing knowledge with others.
- learn more handy work, like plumbing and wood working. I love customizing my own home!
- more gardening
- participate in the transportation system (picking up shifts to drive a bus for example)
- become a tour guide for my city
- cook and bake for my neighbors
- academic research
- open source software (and non-software) contributions
- pick up shifts at a café and make coffee, tea and smoothies for people
- pick up shifts to clean up public spaces, such as parks or my own neighborhood
- participate in more than one “professions”. I studied one type of engineering but work in a completely different engineering. This already proves I can do both, so why not do both and others?
Humans do not like the same thing over and over every day. It’s unnatural. But somehow we revolve our whole livelihood around if.
Let’s not be confused here. Specialization is what allows for free time. If everyone has to farm and hunt, that’s all you’d do. Specialization is a good thing for humanity and diverse institutions and industries to arise.
Yes, but if we only have to work on our specializations for 16 hours a week each instead of 40+, we would have a lot more time for other good stuff, whether it’s personal development, supporting other specialists, or just hanging out.
i’ve worked for 20h/w and 40h/w. i think 30/32 is a good balance
People are entitled to their preferences. They should also be entitled to overtime after some amount of hours per week that’s lower than forty, I think whatever it takes to bring the rate of unemployment to practically zero.
Typically when unemployment is around 4 percent, that is everyone working that wants to work. The 4 percent is people between jobs and people that are kind of looking for work but not in a rush to work. It difficult to be under that number.
In other words we are often at a point where unemployment is at zero. 4 percent being zero.
I understand and kind of agree with the idea that there is some small amount of unemployment that is practically unavoidable, however, I’m not sure that 4% is it. Per the latest US employment report, we’re at 3.8%. So, it seems like we should set the limbo bar lower than 4%.
That report also breaks down the unemployment rate by demographic and it seems to vary significantly between groups. To say that we are at full employment when blacks and hispanics have about 2% greater unemployment than whites and asians seems incorrect. The minimum practical unemployment rate for all of these groups should be the same. So, if we’re going to adjust OT in order to help achieve full employment, we should be looking at the unemployment rate for the most unemployed race/gender group.
There are also of course problems with how unemployment is measured and calculated, but I suppose that’s a little besides the point.
Regionally there will always be variances. Take Chicago and the loss of the auto industry. It took 25 (???) years for that to clean out. There was nothing to replace it rapidly so either people needed to move or they waited it out till new business evolved. Areas like that will skew the average higher. Maybe you could get an extra percentage nationally but I would say it is pretty close to zero at the moment.
Think about if you had a flat tire in your car. You go to get another tire to replace the one with a hole in it.
But the tire factory only manufactures 300 tires a day. Because they only have a handful of employees who feel like making tires and they only really want to work around 10 hours a week.
Now tires are pretty rare. And that means they are difficult to find. Also, rarity is a supply and demand thing, so now tires are also incredibly expensive. People want a lot of them, but the tire manufacturing plant doesn’t make enough.
Oh, and while you were inside the shop being surprised at the 22 month wait for your replacement tire, and the $3,500 price tag for just the single tire, the other 3 tires were stolen off your car in the parking lot.
Cause people don’t want to pay those prices, or wait that amount of time, which has lead to a massive car tire black market
People would use public transport a lot more. Resulting in much better infrastructure.
Why do we need tire factories working employees 40+ hours a week to make enough tires for everyone? Just hire enough workers so that they all have enough time for a life outside of work. Maybe with a little bit of central planning, we could also reduce the demand for tires by figuring out how to get people to drive less.
Central planning has not been a real benefit to countries that employ it heavily. You just need to look at China, Venezuela, USSR to see the results of current and past ones. It is pretty much a joke.
Considering where they started or what they’re up against, the countries you mentioned do (or did, in the case of the USSR) incredibly well.
Bullshit. The USSR was a house of cards by then end. If it was doing at all well, it would still exist. It same as you stopping all maintenance on your house, car, not buying any cloth for years. Ya you can live well for some time but eventually your car breaks, your house starts to leak and you look like shit.
The USSR may have been able to survive a few more years but the longer they tried that model, the worse off each person would have been and the more unstable they would have become.
You do understand what an analogy used for the purpose of illustrating a point is, right?
What is it with people and being literal to the point of making a conversation painful?
I could explain all of your questions for you, but it takes a lot of groundwork laying that you should have probably picked up on your own by now, and at least a little bit from the education system.
Is all they teach you in school how great Karl Marx is? Did you learn how businesses operate? Assets, liabilities, profit margins, overhead, OSHA, etc?
C-level executives usually set an operational budget per business department. There is a labour budget included in that. It’s a managers duty to use that budget to fill out the labour needs of the business, based on sales and sales forecasts and any other upcoming business changes.
It’s not really as easy as ‘just hire everyone who walks in the door and don’t enforce any attendance policies, if they want to work they’ll show up. Sure, some days we will have more than we need, and other days we won’t have enough, but if the communities needs more tires, I’m sure they’ll just come in and do the right thing.’
Seriously, have you ever had to depend on someone doing their job before? I’m guessing not.
Anyway, we aren’t really talking about societies need for tires, we are talking about capitalism
It is the prerogative of the “C-level executives” to maximize the rate of exploitation on behalf of the bourgeoisie. When the working class eventually takes power from the bourgeoisie, that prerogative becomes obsolete (and so do those parasitic executives). Instead of utilizing improvements in productivity to increase the wealth going to the bourgeoisie, they can instead be used to improve the well-being of the working class.
So, if it turns out that we really need more tires, or whatever fits your analogy, then we’ll just make more tires. However, the wealth that would have been syphoned off to the idle owner class and their lackeys will instead stay under the control of the workers. Therefore, as the revolution progresses, the workers will gain more and more time, energy, and opportunity for individual and communal fulfillment.
Omg, bro don’t spout this communist manifesto shit at me please!
And to the second part “then we’ll just make more tires” is where the devil is in the details. How is that organized? How is that, more importantly, enforced?
You can’t just “bourgeoisie” and the. “We’ll just make more” and skirt off into the sunset. How will we, how exactly will we, make more tires?
Like really dive in here, because this is where the rubber meets the road. How do we ‘just make more’? Where do the workers come from? How do they know we even need to make more tires? Who tells them? And what happens if …. No one shows up to make any more tires?
What if everyone is too busy hiking, or learning a new language, or doing art or writing great novels to make more tires?
If you really want to dive in then just go and read Capital. Otherwise, the short and sweet of it is that it would really be up to the workers. The particular solutions will probably vary depending on the industry, location, the status of the revolution and whatnot, but it might involve combinations of time banks, computer AIs, human engineers just doing the math, and/or even some forms of markets and price signals.
Heard that before. Remember the USSR?
Why would anyone with a bit of critical thinking believe that would be a good model to try again. It is such a joke.
This is quite an in depth solution to sortof what you’re talking about
https://www.thevenusproject.com/
It really only covers making sure people are fed, housed and watered. Personally I think cars are a pain in the arse, I’d rather run or cycle everywhere, but then that’s not everybody. If you really liked them, and you were fed, housed and watered, you’d definitely have time to look at building or contributing to building one, assuming people don’t tell you to fuck off because it’s a noisy, smelly death trap…
Unfortunately, the likelihood would be that a lot of people couldn’t handle being in the same kind of housing as everyone else, because they believe they’re special. But logically this makes much more sense that what we’re currently doing. Capitalism is extremely wasteful.
And before you say, well you’d never get people to agree to this. I think the tankies/fascists have solutions to that problem, you’re just encouraging them…
Yes, we all get that. Not sure what you gain from saying that. It good mental exercise to accept the modifications people make to your anology. Otherwise, we’re not “thinking together”.
World War II is a working example of your hypothetical. The country (USA*) had to ration food, shoes, metal, paper, and rubber - so therefore even tires - to name a few. This all happened under capitalism. The country complied and to even make up for the loss of product women joined the workforce - i.e. Rosie the Riveter. I’m not trying to get into an argument but I wanted to point out your example already came and went and the country responded as it would under either economic system.
First of all, I will start with saying that this is a highly unlikely scenario, because modern technology already allows us way way more tires that we need with a fraction of the labor time we put. But let us assume not and entertain this a bit.
This is a perfect example where members of society will find themselves in a situation where there is a big need for tires that is not being met. Instead of hand wavingly complaining and hoping the government or corporations ramp up production, we remember we don’t live under capitalism anymore. We are masters of our own destiny! society is now oriented around human need and wants, not profits! Our prime motivation for working is not to please capitalists in exchange for earning enough to live and a little more. It is to serve the interests of ourselves and our communities, and this is a prime example of a need of ourselves and communities.
So because we are unhappy with the state of tires, we decide to contribute more of the large amount of free time we have to produce more tires (and you only need a tiny fraction of humanity to do this. Consider how many people work in the tire industry right now). The fluidity afforded to us by having both free time and the control over production is a lot greater than you think. We do not even have to imagine this. Many historical civilizations did this already. We can only do better because technology grants us a million times the ability they had to produce.
Historical civilizations were not producing tires or any goods for that matter at industrial scales, so that comparison is useless. If you think that the only reason profit motives exist today is to “please capitalists”, you need to do some more reading into how the industrial economy works.
We only got to producing more advanced things like tires because of how technology made things so much easier to produce with a fraction of the labor time. This is a continuing trend in history.
And yes I do think that society is oriented around profits (and pleasing capitalists, which happens by producing profits. I find it ironic that you chose this truism to argue against lmao). I hope you don’t expect a response to that second part, because it is not argument and not worth responding to.
actually, hunter-gatherer communities ‘work’ significantly less time than we do in our corporate jobs. farming is a different story: here’s one study: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520115646.htm
You can read that study and see that it only represents one instance where hunter gathers were more efficient than farmers in the same region. You cant use that to say to our current system is less efficient. I hate pop science so much its unreal.
It’s also pretty evident that we could not sustain the current population on preindustrial farming let alone hunter gathering.
How about this then?
https://www.ft.com/content/dd71dc3-4566-48e0-a1d9-3e8bd2b3f60f
reminds me of this project https://farm.bot/ .
but a project like this is so slow or nonexistant development ( i would argue: this is because we put all our hope and time into specialization.) this is only maintained by a few people. it doesn’t compete or compare with the size and scale of modern industrial farms so nobody really cares and its not deemed to be important.
i suppose thats a good thing. its not worthwhile to persue agriculture anymore. food is cheap.
i’m more worried about paying my landlord.
They also have sky high infant mortality rates
Is it because they work less, or is it possibly because our technology, sanitary practices, medical expertise and ability to treat diseases based on thousands of years of trials far exceeds there?
I bet it’s because they worked less.
That would then mean we would have to support the entire food supply on hunting rather than farming for this to be true, so basically 90% of the population would have to die
Are you thinking that OP is proposing we go back to hunting? I can guarantee that is not what was meant here.
He basically is, he states that I hunter gathering societies that much less work was done, but significantly more in farming societies as a response to another poster saying specialization and careers are a significant contributor to the free time we do have. If he’s not suggesting a hunting society is better I don’t know what the point of his comment is.
if only monke had toilet paper and modern comforts
I remember reading in The Mating Mind that since hunter gatherer societies long ago had more leisure time, they could spend it socializing, and growing their brain.
Yup. Hunter gatherers has a lot of free time. Honestly, I think it was pretty swell, except for lack of medical ability perhaps.
Yeah, OPs got the spirit but misses the point. We are being pressured to sell our time at a minimum of 40 hours every week. It’s thanks to specialization (and the technology that developed from it) that this quantity of of time is grossly over-allocated. Trade and travel allowed people to create better products in less time, so people were no longer very literally working to live, day-in, day-out. Unfortunately wages are kept low, wealth is kept centralized and culture continues to place value on excess so that we’re continually convinced that we “have” to work as many hours as we can find.
I don’t understand what you think I missed. When I said “specialization”, I meant the idea of just doing one thing and one thing only as a “career”. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t specialize or that people won’t. But if I specialize in construction labor, with the extra time awarded to me I could also participate in design if I wanted.
There’s no efficiency while we’re supporting a welfare class of bourgeoisie.
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heres what wikipedia has to say:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour
historically it seems to have been beneficial… and led us to where we are currently.
Wish I could upvote this 10x
Not everyone has to farm and hunt. It was more than 200,000 years ago that humanity figured out how not to get all of us to farm and hunt, way before capitalism ever was a thing.
Speicalization in the context I used does not mean “be an expert at a thing”. It means “Spend most of your time doing just that one thing”. I can see why you were confused, I think my use of “pigeon-holed” was probably better than specializetion.
Specialization has always been a thing. Probably more so before. A carpenter wouldn’t just wake up and “nah, I’d rather work with pottery today”. The carpenter probably became a carpenter because their parents passed on their carpentering skills to them, so that’s what they do until they die.
Hi Mr Smith, another loaf of your god awful bread please.
I think you misunderstood my comment. I was saying that maybe my use of specialization is incorrect here.
We don’t actually know when money started so it’s hard to say.
But even before money the person with more stuff could acquire more stuff through barter. Even if they weren’t using money it’s still basically capitalism.
Barter being the predecessor of money is actually false, and has never been supported with sufficient evidence.
From what anthropology tells us, money was introduced by force, not by a natural tendency for humans to barter, and wanting a better way to do it.
And no, that isn’t “basically capitalism”. No “capital” involved here in the sense of capitalism.
Yes we do, money started around temple societies in the fertile crescent to control people and keep them centrally located.
Also, there is no known historical example of a purely barter economy. What’s known now is everything tended to work on an informal gift/reputation economy.
Until money came along, was typically forced upon people, and then if the money system failed, people fell back to a barter system. Neither money or barter are natural for the vast majority of human time and society
The invention of currency basically just introduced universal fungibility to a communities barter system by adding 1 additional step.
It’s a good step. You need something else to trade if the guy that raises chickens needs medicine and the pharmacist doesn’t want chicken products.
But the same result would occur in socialism. Even communism. I don’t know what you expect to happen in any societal economic structure that would suddenly give you the freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want. Jobs existed the same way all the way back then as they do now. And that was the birth of capitalism, not before it. Most didn’t own their land. It belonged to a king or emperor. Sure there are exceptions and caveats, but to say capitalism didn’t exist back then isn’t accurate. Capitalism isn’t bad. It’s how it’s implemented that makes it awful. I think we need to migrate to socialism via capitalism. But it requires winning of the minds of the populace and that won’t happen until folks have an accurate understanding of both capitalism and whatever system you want them to transition to. I don’t even know what system you’re supporting with your question. It sounds like you’re trying to describe some sort of star trek utopia that supposedly is advanced beyond economic systems (yet how many episodes revolved around trade deals between planets and races… but I digress).
Are you arguing that ancient societies had “jobs”, and in the same way that we do nowadays? I don’t intend to be rude (and sorry if I come off that way), but a simple Google search will tell you that’s false, but I’d be glad to cite you exact resources as well.
While the exact beginning of capitalism may be a subject of a little debate, no expert on the matter believes it goes that far back. Again, simple Google search reveals it, and I’ll be glad to cite you resources if you want.
This wasn’t always true. There was a time that preceded class society. And not all class society is capitalism.
It is the scientific consensus that it did not.
Not sure what you mean here. Can you please elaborate?
It is simple. Instead of orienting society around profits and capital, we orient it around bettering the human condition. Instead of working our days to generate more profit for capitalists in exchange for money to buy necessities, we work to serve our interests and our own communities. So much wasted labor is suddenly removed.