Take This Job, and Share ItThis article is interesting, because I compare it with my own stance in discussions, and I find it rather similar. This view, to call for a reduction in working hours and abolition of overtime work, is based on two ideas. The first is similar to that in this article: we want to free people from alienating labour, why the ******** would we demand they work more? The other is much more practical: a shorter work week means less produced per shift, therefore in order to maintain current levels of production more shifts would need to be hired. This swells the ranks of the proletariat and provides more people in an objective position to be sympathetic to socialism. However in both cases my understanding of the shorter workweek, no matter the ultimate length, is based on the slogan "40 for 30", that is, forty hours pay, for thirty hours work. A reduction in working hours at no loss in pay. NO loss in pay.
Just the other day, I posted this very brief sketch of 'what communist revolution means'. Being brief, it cannot but be flawed. Nevertheless, compare what follows with the ideas being condemned in this article, that simple equity in distribution, "everyone can have an iPhone" style:
*expropriation of all large industry, transport, infrastructure, and agriculture, placing these into the collective hands of the workers themselves.
*unification of the whole country, and the world, on the basis of local councils made up by instantly recallable representatives from local workplaces, barring any employer of labour from participating in these councils either as elector or representative.
*abolition of wage labour, providing people with housing, food, clothes, in short, the necessities of life, as democratically and rationally determined by the above representatives and councils.
*expansion of automation and technical efficiency to reduce human labour in the direct production process to a minimum, while including all people who are able, while making sure all people to be engaged, at various times, in administrative work, thus abolishing the distinction between brain and hand work.
*with the free time so generated, providing greater education for all, so that all can be meaningfully engaged in cultural, artistic, and scientific work.
Hold that naive 'equalitarian communism' in mind for a moment and read
this excerpt.
[edit: a good article to read is
Against Jobs, for Full Employment]
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