Several interesting questions from Rory on the idea of a “Fridays Off” embargo to enforce a 32 hours work week:
“I’m on board.
There is the problem of how to overcome the resistance not only from the capitalists, but the proletariat themselves who will not be so happy when activists are blocking the highway during the morning commute. And, if it’s the employees who are participating in the strike, they are always at risk of being replaced by the more desperate within their class. In this, it’s also interesting to ponder which parts of society are striking, cashiers or surgeons.
This leads me to conclude it’s essential to consider *what* people are supposed to be doing when not working during the embargo. Is there a way to demonstrate to the worker, possibly by providing services during the strike, that there is another way to live that doesn’t require the sale of their labor-power? I have no idea if this is only a messaging issue or something more fundamental. Probably the the latter.
The strike in Brazil will probably be the next example of what happens when there is no real effort into addressing the problem of how to live without a job in a world so alienated from nature: a few burned busses with, at best, minor labor policy concessions that will barely phase the machine on it’s way to self-destruction.”
I think Rory raises four important questions in this comment. Let me see if I can summarize them:
- Won’t workers get really pissed off if activists block commuters who are only trying to get to work in the morning?
- Won’t workers who participate in such blockades be fired by their employer in retaliation?
- What will people do with their time off on days when an embargo is called? For instance, won’t it be necessary to organize events on days when an embargo is enforced to demonstrate another way of life is possible?
- Isn’t it necessary to address the problem of living without work in a world so alienated from nature.
The last question is the easiest: we already know how to live without work. Our solution is called “weekends”. An embargo on all labor time beyond 32 hours is simply an extension of the weekend from 48 hours to 72 hours per week. Over a period of five years we intend to progressively extend the weekend until it encompasses the entire week. At that point, compulsory labor time will fall to zero and all time will become free, disposable time for the mass of society. Society and social relations will be no longer constituted by labor. Rather labor, material production, will be constituted (determined) solely by the actual need of the members of society. Free time means just that: nothing should determine how this time is spent but the wants and needs of the individual for that activity.
I believe this answers question three as well. We should demonstrate what people should do with their day off by doing whatever we want for that day. If that is a festival, a demonstration, an outdoor lecture, a concert or time hiking in the hills — or all of them together. Together or separately, people can fill their time as they see fit. This activity alone demonstrates that another life is possible. These activities do not have to be in groups, nor do they have to involve “good works” or social activism. They can be whatever individuals decide to do together or separately. All that matters is that it is something each person wants to do, not some activity determined by the priests of social activism.
Some things to remember:
First, free time is not meant to be a chance for you to “give back to the community”. We have been giving and giving our surplus labor time for hundreds of years. No more “giving.” Free time is our time to dispose of as it pleases us alone.
Second, free time is not an opportunity for corporate style “team building” events or political rallies. There is no obligation implied in free time but that you do what you want to do and nothing else. Don’t try to turn free time into what it isn’t: a new way of producing and/or distributing commodities — a new way of organizing society around labor. Free time is the abolition of production, distribution and labor as the organizing principle of society.
To answer questions 1 and 2:
Yes, people will be really pissed off that they are being prevented from reaching their jobs. The capitalists will be equally pissed off that our actions disrupt the production of surplus value and will retaliate against us. But, in first place, this is no different than the hostility a few brave workers faced when they opposed World War I. Public scorn was poured on them and the entire machinery of the state set about to crush them. I have heard that not a few internationalists were lynched by other workers gripped with patriotic zeal.
Further, during the Freedom Movement, civil rights workers were routinely lynched by mobs more or less directed by governments, police and the FBI. Strikes have always been attacked by Pinkertons, soldiers, police, politicians and scabs. The distinction here is that placing an embargo on labor threatens capitalism to its core and the reaction will be equally ferocious. Communists have faced this sort of absolute hostility from the whole of society before. It is nothing new nor particularly surprising.
The very idea of placing an embargo on labor time is so outrageous as to be unthinkable. It will take some time for people to adjust. People who today would not consider walking off the job to win union recognition have to be convinced to walk off to emancipate themselves from wage slavery entirely. This will require months of militant actions just to get a hearing from the working class.
The Real Movement 
My point about providing “services” was simplistic. The case I had in mind was a service like a hospital or emergency vehicle that gets shut down, even if incidentally. That led me to realize there are services that are essential to all forms of society. Not “services” as commodities, but things like food, shelter, and medicine that a society produces in order to function. How would those processes work today, and can we implement them? By asking those questions, I think one gets a more accurate sense of where battle lines exist.
There is a minimum amount of time that needs to be devoted to persisting, correct? Even if it’s only 1% of the total amount of time available. If that 1% is dominated by capitalist interests, how can the Left ever succeed if it never addresses it that 1% directly? Every Left movement will fail because it cannot persist long enough. Or, if it “succeeds”, it will probably be due more to the inability for the capitalist apparatus to maintain itself in that moment in history rather than social pressure. That would imply, I believe, that the habitat has decayed so drastically that the outcome would be unpredictable, but not good. In that case, I would conclude that all anti-capitalist elements failed and were inconsequential in the scheme of things. That’s the trajectory I believe we’re on now.
“This will require months of militant actions just to get a hearing from the working class.”
Now, this is interesting. I’m surprised that it seems to boil down to the tactics implemented by the strikers. Is this what you’re implying? Why did all the previous strikes and protests fail to stop capitalism? In what form will this “hearing from the working class” take place? Will the militants simply keep breaking shop windows or will they give the working class a better offer? Both?
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Those are exactly the questions that should not concern us. We are not trying to organize society. Society is self-organizing. Even if we successfully limit labor to 32 hours, society would simply do what was required within a social working week limited to 32 hours. The remaining part of your comment is not worthy of a response. If your objections had any merit, no general strike could ever happen. And here we aren’t even speaking of a general strike but closing a road or two for a few hours.
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No general strike to could ever happen or succeed? Without even going in to the definition of “success”, I’m thinking about why strikes or any anti-capitalism movements have failed so far.
I didn’t mean for my statement to be so pointed. I was just a little surprised at the specificity of the last paragraph which seems to suggest with a given amount of time, a resistance movement can convince the rest of the workers to follow their lead. Not that I disagree in theory.
How would you judge Standing Rock?
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“If that is a festival, a demonstration, an outdoor lecture, a concert or time hiking in the hills — or all of them together.”
The big hole in your argument is the apartheid structure that is now required and would be even more required on the global scale to supply consumer goods to the newly “freed” Western workers who have a 72 hour weekend. Western workers consume more than their share as it is. Development is and has been asymmetric to the benefit of the West.
When would the Bangledeshi or Chinese or South American or East African wage laborer who supply commodities to the festival, demonstration, lecture, or hike but receive much less value of labor power (in purchasing power parity) for the same level of productivity as their Western counterparts, will be able to participate in similar activities?
You don’t even have to go that far as the imbalances in value of labor power are regional within the same national borders as well ( but not to same extent due to transfer payments).
These differences allow for significant expansion of Department III spending, some on what Marx would deem to be valid (education, healthcare, long term infrastructure spending, disability payments), but much is invalid: e.g. military, adjudication, advertising, excessive luxury spending to name a few.
Your current proposal consciously ignores the persistent and continuous expansion of peripheral sweated labor combined with pauperization that has occurred over 100 years of capitalism. It is aristocratic and without any sense of egalitarianism. It also ignores the millions of displaced peasants who although are poor, are at least self sufficient and can never integrate into the current needs for labor. The land they occupy can be incorporated into profit via commodity export but the billions of people expropriated have no where else to go but shanty-towns and an informal market economy hell.
On another note:
Marx’s 19th century hope of “self-directed activity” was dependent on Capitalist/Worker struggle developing a widespread international “general intellect” capable of self-directing knowledge creation, use value production, and idle/higher activity free-time. This included maintaining what is current (reproduction), expanding into what is newly desired (expanded reproduction) without ruining everything in the process, AND enabling free time (idle and higher activity). His hope, despite your technofetishism, wasn’t realized as the counterevolution promoted war, advertising and consumerism and retained the underlying social relations and the subsequent (super)profits.
This is not criticizing the goal of free-time, it is a large part of the project, but free-time and nothing else is just plain negligent and could not possibly stand the test of time. At least the communization current is more honest, as at least it says create activities that are “more than just productive” and have a life among those activities to avoid the reintroduction of capitalist value.
(Whether than could work for 10 billion people is another story.)
My current thought:
People need to be more involved in civilizations and not pauperized, sweated, Western “middle-class”, Department III leeches, or capitalists.
I say civilizations because one global civilization ala US hegemony is too hierarchical and undemocratic. It will be an apartheid of a small group of winners and a large group of losers. And it will be a neotributarian society sending use value from the periphery to the center.
Communism, to me, is free-time of populations with sufficient general intellect producing use-values for each other without money , private property, slavery, or the State where the people self organize for the common interest.
The most fair and representative way would be where any thinking entity (e.g. human as species being), can be chosen by random to act for a certain duration in planning bodies to make decisions in the common interest, based on their own review of the scientific facts.
The name for this is non-electoral democracy by random lots as was practiced in Athens, Venice, Florence etc. and recently Iceland and the Netherlands. Radical equality of decision making. Of course the ancient cases narrowed the pool of citizens, which would not be the case.
These are not States. They are planning bodies. From local, to regional, to larger, each with citizen representation. All seen as equally competent decision makers.
Look up Terrill G. Bouricius “Democracy through Multi-Body Sortition.” and David Van Reybrouck, although they are both Liberals in terms of property rights.
The elites hate it, as they control the current system with money, election campaigns and advertising.
Without a change in the process of decision making we will continue toward a pauperized neotributarian apartheid…which you seem to be happy with.
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You make a whole lot of assumptions that are unwarranted, reading in utterly bad faith. You should really stop doing that.
First: Cut working hours progressively towards zero everywhere. What are the workers in third world hellholes meant to do? Exactly the same as workers in first world hellholes. Why do you assume this would not be the response Jehu will give?
Second: In reducing the necessary labour time, capitalism will be forced to do three things: intensify the work done, increase mechanisation, increase the amount of people working. Those doubly-freed peasants that are outside the needs of capital for labour would then be brought within the needs of capital for labour.
Third: Australia currently produces four times the beef if consumes (put another way, australia exports 75% of the beef it produces). https://www.mla.com.au/globalassets/mla-corporate/prices–markets/documents/trends–analysis/fast-facts–maps/mla_beef-fast-facts-2016.pdf
Australia currently produces well over 25 billion tonnes of wheat annually, and exports 4/5 of those. http://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=au&commodity=wheat
It does this, and way more agriculture, with 3% of the annual labour. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/australia/employment-in-agriculture-percent-of-total-employment-wb-data.html
I bring this up to show that 3% of the total paid labour in australia produces more than enough to feed many Australia’s. Other production is more amenable to mechanisation and rationalisation, utilising less and less labour. So the idea that we can’t spread australian scientific agriculture and german scientific industry to the whole world, that we couldn’t reduce the necessary labour for social reproduction to an absurd low, allowing the overwhelming majority of waking hours be dedicated to whatever the fuck we want, welllllll… the idea we can’t do that needs serious justification.
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Jehu is a mini-Fukayama. He claims to understand the Left while ignoring 75 years of “left” alternatives, struggles, and theory.
His latest twitter rant confirms as much.
“There is not a third option, because the Left, after 40 years, still hasn’t come up with one”
The problem is that monopoly capitalism and State force has actively, consistently, and forcefully prevented many of the alternatives for emancipatory politics and self-association, especially harsh during crises of capitalism when Capitalism and the Capitalist State are trying to get out of crises.
and
“How is it that 40 years after Thatcher declared there was no alternative to neoliberalism, the Left hasn’t yet produced one?”
The simple answer is violence. Economic Violence. Educational Violence and when that doesn’t work. Killing People. This is how Capitalism formed and this is how Capitalism survives. Old and New forms of property and its enforcement.
What does it matter what Jehu thinks or writes. It really doesn’t. It is incomplete and seems to me purposeful sophism, because his writing shows that he is not dumb.
My hope is that he actually rids himself of the liberal virus and stops misleading people along the path of neoliberalism.
I’d suggest he read “The Struggle for Food Sovereignty” edited by Herrerra and Lau…but this might be too “Left” for him and undermine his position that you can be anti-capitalist, anti-State and pro-sovereignty….which means anti-neoliberal…in other words. Communist.
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should be: “undermine his position that you cannot be anti-capitalist, anti-State and pro-sovereignty”…where the sovereign is an emancipated people with interior and exterior scientific knowledge but without exterior interference based on exterior interests.
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Thomas:
“Again: “counterevolution promoted war, advertising and consumerism” — that’s just an expression of deep mistrust of proletarians.”
Don’t know how letting any proletarian make decisions ala serving on juries is deep mistrust of proletarians.
The counterrevolution was a monopoly Capitalist /imperialist State revolution to foment war, production of war material, offensive weapon production and territorial expansion….and Bernaysian consumerism and propaganda to promote consumer goods rather than free time ( idle and higher activity)
I do not believe that modern proletarians are what Marx envisioned as achieving a general intellect…we are products of the system that created us.
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Jehu, not sure if you’re aware, but many of the larger service farms like Wal-mart and others already have switched to a 30 hour or less work week for all but their ten year or older employees. They’ve done it not to reduce hours or curtail employment, but for that age old reason: profit. For those below 30 hour work weeks they don’t have to pay their standard benefits, nor insurance (which is the major reason). So for most people this is already a fact of life. And, for most service employees here in the U.S.A. it means they have to work a second or third job, sometimes midnight shifts straight to their primary 30 hour job – working upward of 60 – 70 hours in temp jobs just to help their families and themselves survive.
So all this bullshit academic talk by these less than knowledgeable ignoramuses seems almost laughable for the millions of service workers who have already suffered the loss of work hours… the only thing such a notion would do now is to make it mandatory for all corporations to go temporary, forcing all employees to lose benefits, insurance, pensions, etc. Of course this is the reason for Obama care to begin with, not to help people get lower insurance, but to force people in temp work to have to have insurance to save on Government spending and penalize them with high tax penalties if they don’t conform to the new system; as well as, to allow the corps to skate by without worrying about insurance for even those above the break line. It’s a racket pure and simple, one that benefits State and Corporations at the expense of the proles.
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I mean 10 year or younger employees in the above…
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OH, Jehu, wanted to ask if you’d read Money and Totality
A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx’s Logic in Capital and the End of the ‘TransformationProblem’ by Fred Moseley?
He supposedly offers a new ‘macro-monetary’ interpretation of Marx’s logical method in Capital, based on substantial textual evidence, which emphasises two main points: (1) Marx’s theory is primarily a macroeconomic theory of the total surplus-value produced in the economy as a whole; and (2) Marx’s theory is a monetary theory from beginning to end and the circuit of money capital – M – C – M’ – is the logical framework of Marx’s theory. It follows from this ‘macro-monetary’ interpretation that, contrary to the prevailing view, there is no ‘transformation problem’ in Marx’s theory; i.e., Marx did not ‘fail to transform the inputs of constant capital and variable capital’ in his theory of prices of production in Part 2 of Volume III.
I haven’t read it but was curious if you had, and what your thoughts are?
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I was tweeting and commenting on this recently => Deconstructing Hierarchies: On the Paradox of Contrived Leadership and Arbitrary Positions of Power” by Colin Jenkins https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/colin-jenkins-deconstructing-hierarchies-on-the-paradox-of-contrived-leadership-and-arbitrary-p , it’s an interesting essay.
If people are willing to forgo free time for the workplace scenario that Jenkins has described, which I feel is pretty accurate, absolutely nothing can be done. The people have made a conscious choice to allow the bulk of their time to be utilized in a condition rooted in slavery.
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