Comment by loup-vaillant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by loup-vaillant | Hacker News Reader

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You are assuming that working less hours means earning less money. An obvious enough assumption.

Well, that's false.

First, the actual mean work-week is not that high, once you take unemployment into account: some people are working their ass off, but many others either have precarious part-time jobs (fewer hours, but often no reliable schedule), or don't work at all. Reducing the official "full time" work-week would merely force the capitalists to re-allocate work a bit more equally. This will mean less unemployment, and less expensive unemployment insurance —which plays a big role in compensating for the loss of gross revenue.

Second, we could consider allocating less money to capitalists, and more to workers. The ratio used to be 60/40 in the 70s. Now it is more like 70/30, if not worse. Taking that ratio back can easily compensate for 20% cut in our working time.

Of course, such a change is impossible to initiate through individual action alone. You did capture the current conundrum of the isolated proletarian: work one's ass off, or don't earn enough. But there is a third alternative: rise up and change this rotten world.

Not easy. But as history has proven to us time and again, the world can change.

Yes, the world can change. The trouble is that it's impossible reliably to predict what change will result from a given action. The other trouble is that it's impossible reliably to predict what action will result from a given action. People are like that, be it ever so easy for a systems-oriented thinker -- like Marx, or yourself, or for that matter myself -- to forget. (Like any bad habit, this is susceptible to self-discipline.)

The other other trouble is that the soi-disant "social sciences" aren't and cannot be, because controlled experiments are impossible. Historiography and inference are fine and valuable things, but inflicting one's conclusions on others is a project best approached with a maximum of trepidation.

And the final trouble, the really insuperable one, lies in the fact that true collective action, the seat and soul of theoretical socialism, is in practice impossible save on the smallest and meanest scale, such as the rough music of medieval Europe, or the lynchings of the postbellum American South. In a larger arena, such as that of political action, true collectivism runs contrary to the unified intent and direction necessary to survival; begin as it may, a political movement must grow a leader or die. It may, as many, achieve both; it cannot possibly achieve neither, for the same reason its individual members cannot achieve orbit unaided, no matter how high they jump.

No doubt the world can change. The Bolsheviks changed it, quite effectively. Did they make of it what they intended? Did they make of it a better world than they found it? Will you?

What exactly do you mean by: > allocating less money to capitalists, and more to workers ?

Where are those ratios coming from, who's allocating this money, and how would you change the ratio?

Hi. I'm no Marxist, but I am old enough to remember the world before President Reagan & Friends.

Back then, the US had a tax structure that meant that the 1%ers paid much more in income taxes (FWIW, the poor also paid less in FICA); government was better funded, and could hire more people to clean up some of society's loose ends.

I'm not a fan of "basic income", although some "welfare" may have a place, but there is a lot of infrastructure that goes into supporting a business friendly environment, as well as making the country a nicer or safer place to live.

Of course, the powers that be in this country don't want us to turn into some kind of socialist hell-hole like Germany or Sweden :-)

People are always more than willing to redistribute "other people's money".

It always makes me laugh when I see this sort of talk in places like Hacker News. This is a very privileged subculture. If the proletariat rises up, the "intelligentsia" of Silicon Valley will likely be on the chopping block.

Not really. SV employees pay 40-50+% income in tax. The founders, maybe, are at threat.

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