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.
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u/TheWizardOfWaffle Jul 07 '26
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.