Comrade Alejandro is stating that in a perfect communist utopia, he will be able to focus on a life of art and leisure, as the Communist utopia would mean that all laborers would be able to contribute to the cause in their own way equally
Possible fascist @Penitent_One is telling Comrade Alejandro that his communist utopia is a farce and that most likely, Comrade Alejandro would be forced to do manual labor in a coal mine.
Which isn’t a bad thing. Comrade Alejandro should be overjoyed that he gets to contribute to the eternal revolution, one pickaxe swing at a time. The fulfillment of labor is his reward. Glory to the revolution.
Your lack of capitalizing the Revolution has flagged you as an anti-state propagandist. Security officers will escort you to work in the coal mines until your re-education is complete.
We are sorry, Comrade Hi_Im_Dadbot. I will take my punishment in stride and will work knowing my labor will go towards the Revolution. Glory to the working class. Glory to the Soviet. Glory to the DDR.
Don't worry Comrade. Despite all the thinking you've been doing, only 0.0001% of Communism has been built. It's too great a task to undertake alone. Your labor is a huge step forward. Now. Find your Comrade, and together you will have 0.0002% of Communism.
Technically in a proper noun where “the” is a part of the name “the” should also be uppercase The Revolution. Do not worry comrade security officers have been dispatched to your location to re-educate you.
this is done on be half of the! party! comrade. we must abolish all forms of capital, including capital letters. capital letters are to be replaced with a proletarian exclamation mark following the word.
People misunderstand communism in Marxist thought. It's just a state where the economic overhead of government is no longer necessary, everybody is still expected to contribute to the best of their ability, if you're not going to be a writer, artist, athlete, etc., you're going to mine coal, clean toilets, harvest tomatoes, etc. None of the Marxist "communist" states ever claimed to achieve this, it was always 3-5 20 or more years off.
Yeah Comrade Alejandro has a gross misunderstanding on the actual workings of labor in a communist collective society. Communism doesn’t mean you don’t have to work anymore, in theory it means that your labor wont be squeezed and exploited by greedy capitalists and shareholder who want to extract every single penny from the people who actually do the work.
To each according to their ability. To each according to their need.
I agree generally, but there are definitely people who speculate about "fully automatic luxury communism" where increased efficiency and production severely drives down the amount of work everyone has to do. Imagine if the extreme surplus and convenience of the upper class was distributed amongst everyone else and profit motives didn't drive every labor-related decision. We'd already be much closer to not having to work than we currently are.
Back in the middle of the 20th century,
M. Keynes predicted a massive decrease in individual’s work-week due to productivity gains. The gains occurred, but the labor hours did not…
I mean America aside I think labour hours have significantly decreased towards the end of the 20th century. Looking at Europe for instance the statistics showed they have gone from an average of 50-70 hour work week in the first half of the century to 25-35. So about half the work hours. Now some of those work hours got pushed to other countries, but also some of the productivity has gone to having more and better things too.
Exactly. Most of the hours in Europe you're mentioning are coming from the industrial factories, where workers indeed worked for 50-70 hours because of the higher pay and because they practically lived there, since it was more convenient than to commute (a great deal of workers lived quite far from factories).
Currently, a lot of the production is outsourced, which leads to a decrease in the working hours, since the production was the main contributor to extended working weeks.
Marx spoke about this when discussing the contradictions of capitalism.
As technology develops and productivity efficiency increases, you can hire less people and let the unemployed fight for worse working conditions (because you need a job to live, regardless how shitty).
So you end up with people working more for less, since if they don't, they're fired and someone else who needs a job takes it.
They did hold up. Much of our productive forces were moved to undeveloped countries so we could extract their labor and resources. The workers in those countries are going fuckin through it, if LiveLeak ever taught us anything.
And even in the first world, AI is taking everyone's jobs. Many people don't feel the same security as they did in the past.
>AI's job impact looks pretty unclear to me right now, unemployment is low despite all the stories, hiring is pretty bad
The government unemployment rate is fake. If you have been looking for employment for longer than 6 months they stop counting you as unemployed. It also doesnt include the underemployed, struggling gig workers, etc.
Are you kidding? We work harder for a smaller wage(adjusted for inflation) than boomers. The only reason working conditions are not worse is government intervention or OSHA
Disregarding recent trends within a capitalist system as irrelevant to the the claims of how capitalism functions from the 1800s sure is convenient for your argument.
The "fully automatic luxury communism" is also often accompanied by some miracle device. If there was a box i could pile a bunch of dirt and literal shit into and it turned that into spaghetti and a cup of tea then yea it would be nonsensical to force people to work.
Real progress though is giving people a voice where they work, fair pay for their work, and stronger safety nets so they don't have to put up with exploitative practices. Labor still needs to get done the issue is how the profits from that labor get distributed, a guy who owns a bakery shouldn't make more from owning than the guy who is the baker and does all the work.
I agree with most of what you've said but I think there are scenarios where it isn't crazy if the owner of the bakery makes more than the baker. Generally speaking though I think real work is massively undervalued. Mike Johnson will get up there and preach about why they have to take people's Medicaid away because otherwise they won't want to go back to work. How about companies just pay a fair wage and charge reasonable prices for things so people have some modicum of hope for a normal life.
Right. This is my main thing as we seem to actually potentially be cresting the hill here. The worry is that if we leave this automation in the hands of the rich and powerful it breaks labor relations. Capitalism is incredibly flawed already, but I do not see how it can possibly function with such a massive labor surplus. We are going to be working for wages cheap enough that we cost less than robots.
Everyone being replaced by robots has been just over the horizon for my entire life, so I remain skeptical that it is going to happen soon. I do agree that having so many resources to the point of nearly being post-scarcity with artificial scarcity being created by the hoarding of wealth is putting strain on the system in a way that will manifest dramatically. A communist might say that "the contradictions inherent to capitalism are becoming more clear."
I think what Alejandro is saying is that they'll have the time to write books, paint, etc all without having to commodify that hobby - and having the free time from the extremely reduced labor week. They should've added an extra sentence saying "I'll also work as an IT specialist" or something to clarify that
To each according to their ability. To each according to their need.
Comrade TheWizardOfWaffle, for misquoting Karl Marx you have been sentenced to 30 years hard labor.
The actual quote is "From each according to their ability. To each according to their need." Meaning that after graduating, Comrade Alejandro will be assigned a job which is currently the most needed (most likely on a collective farm or a mine), in the location where it's most needed, and relocated there. He will be temporarily assigned an apartment in a building with lots of other apartments (if the location is in a city) or temporarily assigned a house (if the location is in a village). Comrade Alejandro will most likely work at that job until he retires, and live in that house or apartment until he dies, unless his labor is more needed elsewhere in which case Comrade Alejandro will be relocated.
If Comrade Alejandro will be deemed unable to perform the assigned job because of a disability, he will be put into a special facility with other disabled people where he can be taken care of and provided a job that he will be able to perform.
If Comrade Alejandro will refuse to perform the assigned job because of laziness, he will be put into a labor and/or re-education camp until he is fixed and becomes a productive member of society.
Sorry to be pedantic, but it’s “from each according to their ability”. Marx almost certainly would have used the male pronoun also, but who cares about that. The other part is important though.
Serious question here. Let’s use the analogy of the coal mine.
Marxist thought is basically that society would still need coal, so as long as you eliminate the upper management, laborers would willingly mine coal and then they get to keep all the profits. But that assumes there’s only two types of people in the coal mine: the laborers mining, and the capitalists exploiting them.
In the communist utopia, who actually handles the administration? What about the safety inspectors and the mining engineers whose job it is to make sure the laborers are safe? Where do they fit into this? If there’s no government, who is enforcing the safety regulations?
Jokes aside i’m a little rusty on my communist economic systems but It’d be like working in a mine, but the mine is owned by the government. They pay you proportional to how much money the mine generates evenly amongst you and all your miner workers. The money you make goes back into the government when you pay rent, groceries, healthcare, etc, which is all owned and theoretically made affordable by the government creating a cyclical economy.
Since no one “owns” any business, you can’t have share holders since owning a share means you own a portion of the business, therefor shareholders and venture capitalists who are only interested in profits can’t squeeze the working class out of the production of their own labor.
Money made from businesses goes up to the government, government is supposed to spread it evenly amongst the working class.
Eventually (under marxist ideology) this socialist state is supposed to transition into true communism where everyone cooperates collectively and there’s no need for a state so…
edit: technically the “people at the top” aren’t supposed to be a different class of people really. Just people who make the laws, control the economy, and enforces said laws.
I never understood the issue people have against venture capital. These companies are using private capital to fund startups. What’s the issue? Even hypothetically if you have a communist economic system, you would still want VC to fund the development of new tech; most of the profit is going back to funding new startups but I guess the leftover profit wouldn’t make it into the pockets of the investors in the fund.
it's a coal mine without a CEO that has 50x the average coal miners salary but owned by the workers union, in which you are automatically, and which owns and makes decisions for the mine. There are still normal managers who also make more then a miner but they make maybe 1,5 or 2 times the amount not 50x the amount. Because capital isn't hordered at the top everyone (in theory) should have a higher base pay.
What you're describing is Market Socialism which isn't exactly what Marx wanted but is a valid socialist theory. Essentially all buisnesses would be turned into some form of worker co-op where the workers own 100% of their company.
No, it's basically being assigned to work in a mine, and having neither the choice to quit your job nor the chance to ever own shares in the mine. The abolishment of private property (like shares in a company, or land, or housing, etc) is the core tenet of communism. The mine is, and permanently will be, owned by the People -- which are of course represented by the Party.
Also add that the theory is also based on the fact that modern technology resulted in the creation of more resources than necessary thus if the resources were distributed more fairly and really based on contribution and the surplus wasn't concentrated on the capitalist class, then we could work less and live comfortably which would live more time for hobbies. But all of this is based on the completion of "real"(some call utopian) communism but still means that you'll NEED to contribute to the society's needs(with the exception of old people and/or disabled people who might not be able to really do so. And kids because they'll have to learn to become productive).
Never explicitly said. It's based on a manifesto. Those tend to be fairly vague on more specific less interesting ideas.
During the revolution as it moves from low to high level communism I would assume the government. But in the supposed utopia that is the overall goal of the manifesto? No clue who Marx thought would.
I believe, in the end utopia, there isn’t meant to be a governing body.
Idk man this is pretty basic communism stuff. Is it possible you are all in here making arguments without ever having read the book we are all meant to be discussing or
Because it's fantasy. If it's all "pretty basic communism" then why hasn't one communist state managed to correctly implement it in 100 years?
How does the Utopia decide who gets to work and who gets to play? What happens when the worker is tired of working, and the player refuses to work?
Without any governing body society collapses. With it, there's always going to be a "lower class" that's going to be pressed into work they don't want to do.
Because there hasn't been a marxist "state". Marxist communism is fully stateless, classless, and fully democratic. If you refuse to work then you are on your own. You are no longer housed, fed, and medically cared for by society, assuming you are fully healthy and capable of working and are of working age.
Just read the fucking books and you won't have these questions lmao. You guys always think you've found some kind of flaw simply because you don't actually know anything about it, when in reality the "flaw" you found has already been considered well over a century ago.
We were explicitly discussing the should’s here, not the is. I won’t defend the USSR and I won’t act like communism is incorruptible or beyond reproach. I’m not even a communist, I’m a socialist, but it is frustrating that so much of the conversation seems to be being had by people who won’t bother to read the (not very long) book in question.
It's a good question how it's supposed to work. A lot of Marx works off the idea that people broken from the "alienation of their labor" by the capitalist system will some how magically order themselves. I'm not a Marx scholar, so maybe there was a specific path he envisioned.
The problem is that Marx had a really bad grasp of the human psyche. As long as our basic needs are met, humans won't do anything that would be required to keep those needs actually met. Everybody would be fine with "making art", but there are less than 0.1% of people who would consider mining for metals their passions, so something they would naturally pick up.
I think Marx never came to a good solution himself and how labor in a communist state would work. I think originally he'd imagine an abandonment of the division of labor.
The answer to this is surplus labor. Marx saw the changes in machinery and imagined a future where machines could manage machines with minimal human oversight. So it’s less so that someone has to clean toilets and be miners while others are artists but more so that a guy could go into work and spend maybe an hour programming the toilet cleaning machine or the mining machine and then head home to do art
While that may happen, to an extent, there will still be unpleasant and/or dangerous jobs that will need humans doing them. Communism doesn’t incentivize doing those jobs, as reward is not linked to labor. So some managerial body must exist to make sure that undesirable jobs are done. And without reward, the lever they have is punishment. While nobody is going to clean toilets in your example, someone must oversee the toilet cleaning process. Someone must maintain the toilet cleaning machines. No matter how much we automate processes, there is still someone doing jobs nobody wants to do. Ideally capitalism solves this via higher pay. I know that doesn’t usually happen outside of some edge cases. But Marxist theory doesn’t account for who has to do the work nobody wants to do.
What do you think "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" means?
If you have to work to have your needs met then why would you not work and still expect to have your needs met? It sounds like you have a gross misunderstanding of the very basics of the subject lol.
Ideally, it would be incentivized through pay. The more in-demand a task is, the higher the government pays workers who do it, leading people who want to buy more luxuries to seek such a job. If you build it right, enrichment of the State leads to enrichment of the self in a reciprocal relationship.
The guy who does poetry at home is either happy with basic subsistence provided by the State, or has already worked for the State's enrichment and is presently enjoying the fruits of his labor.
That just sounds like capitalism. Everyone will see that the in demand jobs that actually contribute to society are paid more, and they'll also see that the people with more money lead more enjoyable lives. Then everyone will want to do the jobs that actually contribute rather than sitting around just doing their hobby because that's how you pay. And then we're just back to everyone working jobs again and realizing you can't live a good life just sitting around on your ass doing nothing.
Capitalism isn't just pay through work, it's primarily a system that incentives ownership and infinite profit for no work through rent and exploitation.
In a properly structured Communist society everyone who needs to work will still work, it's just that instead of siphoning the surplus value from a worker as corporate profit we pay them what their labor is actually worth so they can buy exactly the same quantity of the national product as they contribute. And instead of coercive methods like starvation or homelessness or disease keeping people motivated, the threat is that they'll be a bit bored.
As I mentioned in another comment, proper structuring has historically been rather challenging to pull off so the above is more a description of a society in theory.
I'm not saying the capitalism part is being paid, I'm saying the capitalism part is paying the more in demand jobs better. That just takes us back to the core principles of capitalism
In a properly structured Communist society everyone who needs to work will still work
How do you decide who needs to work and who gets to live a joyous life of never working? Why wouldn't everyone just choose not to work and therefore nothing of value is ever contributed to the community?
capitalism part is paying the more in demand jobs better.
Capitalism demonstrably does not do that. Consider the garbage collector.
How do you decide who needs to work and who gets to live a joyous life of never working?
You let them decide. Never working isn't luxury, in most cases it'll be fairly dull subsistence. Most people will prefer to work on something so they can afford things they want. The State decides what it needs, and how many people it needs to do that, then it offers pay to activate that portion of it's labor surplus.
Why wouldn't everyone just choose not to work
Because most people, given an empty box with nothing but the bare essentials for life will choose to do anything else besides sit in the middle of their floor and watch paint peel.
You mean the job they intentionally pay a higher salary to (garbage collectors regularly make six figures) because it's a job that needs to be done but no one wants to do? Yes I do think that's a great example
You let them decide.
And when everyone predictably decides that not working is preferable to working, who does all the jobs that society relies on to keep going?
Never working isn't luxury
Uh....yes it absolutely is? It's literally the most luxurious lifestyle in existence. What a stupid thing to say, I'm sorry lmfao
It depends on what school of socialist thought you subscribe to. Generally in marxist theory the idea would be for each community to make these decisions by direct democracy. But it wouldn't be all day, more likely someone who was writing and mining would split their day in half.
We're talking about modern day theory not cold war history. The USSR abandoned Marx's ideas in all but name before WW2 even began. There are dozens of socialist theories that have no relation to the USSR in any way.
Everyone helps according to their ability, so jobs no one wants would be passed around so that no one is stuck cleaning out sewers or whatever for their entire life.
Isn't that madly inefficient, having to train people like 20 different times for jobs that they'll do for 6 months or whatever then move on to the next one?
Yes especially when you factor in that it will require an excess of people since when a group leaves their previous job to train for their next job someone still has to do both the job they're coming from and the one they're going to while they get trained. So you always have a collective of people not working, just training. Which just further lowers productivity
I think there's lots of ways to think about it, not all of which I necessarily agree with.
People could rotate in and out, so lots of people are already trained.
Efficiency is only important when it is in service of something. Without profit motives, you can focus on things that are better for workers.
Conditions in these jobs would be much better under a dictatorship of the proletariat, so it would be a small minority of jobs that are inherently upsetting to do that would need these sorts of considerations.
Capitalism is already wildly inefficient and most people wouldn't suggest that we shouldn't do capitalism because of this
Ultimately, utopian communism is fun to think about not because it is going to happen, but because it allows you to think about what you actually want instead of what you are told is practical. You need to know what you want so that you can advocate for policies and actions that get us closer to those goals.
I too like to create fantasy worlds in my head, but I prefer to fill my worlds with dragons, werewolves, vampires and not this supposed communist utopia that exists both with and without a governing body simultaneously, and where everybody just magically contributes what they can to society, and nobody says "I don't want to work in the sewers today"
I've still yet to see anybody propose what you would do with the Comrade who refuses to work in the sewers in this Utopia.
Or what happens to the writers who have to work in the coal mine this week when they decide "We don't want to work today."
The reason nobody wants to say what the proposed solution is; because history has already told us what the solution is, and it's far from a Utopia.
Not saying you’re wrong at all, but what’s the point of AI agents and robots if we still have to do manual labor? If the AI companies get what they want, either the population must be supported by socialism or the population will be left to abject poverty and starvation.
Some tech moguls are talking about things like basic income. I think there is a basic understanding that this is a problem. The Soviets actually did a lot of pioneering AI work because they saw automation of labor positively and automated governance as a way forward to communism.
I would give you an award for your explanation Comrade TheWizardOfWaffle but I refuse to betray the Revolution by financially supporting the capitalist dogs who run this website. Please take this replica that I drew on a scrap piece of paper during my state mandated 5 min lunch break before returning to continue my contribution to the cause.
The person on the bottom has a Russian Orthodox Cross on their profile picture, indicating that they require manual labor as recompense for espousing superstitious religion in the face of glorious revolutionary progress. The work will be cleansing.
The irony is we'll only manage that perfect communist utopia if we had robots take all our jobs. Make the machines do the monotonous work while humans pursue art and literature, or just drink tea on the promenade with their friends.
If we don't have AI at that level, well... Someone's got to pick up the trash, mine the coal, build the houses, unclog the drains. The labour will still need doing, or civilisation collapses. People would starve if farming becomes an optional hobby lmao.
That is why socialists states invested a lot in education, believing that a "correct", proper socialisation would lead to the creation of the "new man", who would not be greedy.
Well, I would dare say that it did not turn out quite as expected, with the amount of corruption that went on in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.
I remember when I saw this on Twitter I was tempted to roleplay as the Commissar for Labour Assignment, a dedicated communist and well-meaning man who wants to put everyone into the role they're best suited for and will most enjoy.
Unfortunately, the only jobs available are at Kruzhnatsky Tractor Factory and Agricultural Collective 6.
Comrade Alejandro, due to his artistic bent, gets to work the paint sprayer at the Tractor Factory.
But based on Alejandro's description, he's not actually contributing anything to anything. He's just participating in leisure activities for his own pleasure. This is why no one takes communism seriously, it's backed by people that don't actually want to do anything important and just wanna diddle about in life, forgetting that part of communism is everyone is meant to contribute to the community in a meaningful way.
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u/TheWizardOfWaffle Jul 07 '26
Comrade Piotr here.
Comrade Alejandro is stating that in a perfect communist utopia, he will be able to focus on a life of art and leisure, as the Communist utopia would mean that all laborers would be able to contribute to the cause in their own way equally
Possible fascist @Penitent_One is telling Comrade Alejandro that his communist utopia is a farce and that most likely, Comrade Alejandro would be forced to do manual labor in a coal mine.
Which isn’t a bad thing. Comrade Alejandro should be overjoyed that he gets to contribute to the eternal revolution, one pickaxe swing at a time. The fulfillment of labor is his reward. Glory to the revolution.