Flippant Anarchism. A lighter take on social criticism with the aim of agitation.
Post humorous takes on capitalism and the states which prop it up. Memes, shitposting, screenshots of humorous good takes, discussions making fun of some reactionary online, it all works.
This community is anarchist-flavored. Reactionary takes won't be tolerated.
Don't take yourselves too seriously. Serious posts go to !anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Rules
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Absolutely no right-wing jokes. This includes "Anarcho"-Capitalist concepts.
Absolutely no redfash jokes. This includes anything that props up the capitalist ruling classes pretending to be communists.
No bigotry whatsoever. See instance rules.
This is an anarchist comm. You don't have to be an anarchist to post, but you should at least understand what anarchism actually is. We're not here to educate you.
No shaming people for being anti-electoralism. This should be obvious from the above point but apparently we need to make it obvious to the turbolibs who can't control themselves. You have the rest of lemmy to moralize.
Join the matrix room for some real-time discussion.
"The problem with capitalism is that there's billionaires who steal too much labor, and everything would be fixed if correct policy was put into place that turned everyone into a small business owner" and other fascist rhetoric you can keep telling yourself
Why is it that half the posts i see from this comm use the logic of a child?
They're trying to explain complex ideas to people like you.
Fun math, assuming 3 million man hours to design, test, and bring a car to production and 35 hours to build the actual car, a 200k unit run would work out to 50 hours per car.
Why would it be only 35 hours though. It starts with people mining the raw resources, producing the raw parts, and includes transport on every step of the way. I estimate it's at least 1000s of hours. 35 maybe is enough to account for assembly alone.
If we get into value added along the chain then yeah. I was assuming the company or whoever had already paid out the suppliers.
different jobs have different values
a doctor should objectively be paid more than a salesman
but he isnt
the salesman social engineers society into thinking hes important
he is the definition of a parasite
different jobs have different values
No, fuck that line of thinking. We live in an interconnected world where every worker does something useful for society, and they all have a right to a happy, fulfilling life.
"I as a CEO provide job opportunities and "hours" to spend for TEN THOUSAND people. Obviously my time should be considered worth more than a doctor who does only one person's hours"
There's many reasons why one would claim that their job is more important, but essentially there's 2 kinds of jobs: those that are valuable to the society, and those that are not. Plumber's job is just as important as doctor's
A house costs a year? There's a house being built near me and it's been under construction for about a year by several teams of workers plus the owners every afternoon and weekend. (this is in Germany so it's not made of matches and paper). And that's not counting the hours needed to extract the raw materials and process them into bricks, insulation, glass, cables or pipes. There's a TON of labor to build a modern house.
Skill issue. They build houses out of concrete here in China in like a month, in Japan they use wood and do the same, tho they lose all value after 30 years.
I mean, maybe. But a year seems like a lot for a full team, so either that team is not working as much and as consistently as you'd think OR that house is worth a lot more than a year.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours
Many towns/places have tried doing that as a local currency. It never seems to stick....
Everyone's hours would be equally valued. The problem is not every job's hours is equal.
You would have lots of people in white collar jobs, but you would struggle to fill positions like sanitation worker, oil rig worker etc.
The issue is not with currency, the problem is with capital markets and value that is not directly linked to a product or time.
Isn't that backwards? You would get more sanitation workers if they were paid the same as white collar
Lots of white collar jobs just straight up shouldn't exist. Not all, but a lot of them.
But also hours should be for luxury items and basic necessities should be free for everyone.
The hour system on its own just pushes the issues with capitalism one step back.
Sanitation is definitely one of those jobs that don't get valued and paid enough.
Would you be surprised to learn that a lot of those guys are making 65k with union benefits?
stumbles upon socially necessary labor power…
Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat features a planet like this that was initially governed by a computer. Such a good series, highly recommend as anarchist entertainment.
So how does it work if I spend 10-20,000 hours in medical school and then spend three minutes setting your broken bone?
It doesn't really matter for this point.
The point is that nobody earns ten million hours (1,140 constant years) of work ($1b @ $100/hr).
You can have a lot of leeway with ratios and that'll still never be true.
Healthcare’s goal should not be to be profitable. The government should subsidize both the education and pay of medical staff for the wellbeing of their people.
Ok, now do any other form of higher education.
Ok, now disconnect the ability to live comfortably from one's labor value.
Sure, but that doesn’t answer the question.
I think you can draw a line somewhere between “everyone’s skills are equally valuable” and “billionaires should exist.”
This metaphor doesn’t address the time required to develop skills.
The line I'm drawing is a wall between the value of your skills and the need to spend time using them just to afford to survive. Then if you choose to develop skills and use them for the benefit of others, it will be because you chose to and not because you felt you had no other choice. The time spent will be your own, for your own reasons and no one else's. Its value will be a value you hold, not relying on the value others perceive it to have.
I've played around with this idea, and the best solution I came up with was amortizing hours spent in training over the course of a career. If you spend 20,000 hours in med school, and you have a projected career of (40 years × 2,000 hours per year) 80,000 hours, one hour of your labor would have a value of 1.25 "unskilled" hours.
Yeah but that doesn't really work because it still treats all the hours as fundamentally equal which just isn't true. It may take someone 20000 hours to become a doctor with a particular skillset, but that doesn't mean ANY person can do that. Person X may never, regardless of investment of time, be able to obtain a mastery of that skillset. Moreover, for things like surgery you're talking about the stacking of hours for regular education, med school, specialty, residency, and then surgery. Each of these is a threshold that increasingly fewer people can cross.
It seems that reasonably the best thing to do is to award additional value based on scarcity and necessity of profession, but you might just back yourself back into capitalism I guess? At the end of the day I can dig a ditch but you can't fix your grandfather's heart so that amortization is not a very satisfying split.
I didn't say it was a particularly good solution. It's definitely more complicated than hour-for-hour.
Everybody would be working sooooo sloooowly....
Maybe, but I would probably be excited to pick up other professions. I feel like I could do drywalling as a side hustle.
Good, maybe we wouldn't be such a bunch of wastrels if we weren't running around because a website might go down or meeting might be delayed if we don't rush
My job involves fixing machines that unload container ships.
If one breaks down mid vessel it needs to be up and running, my poor performance has a massive flow on effect around the world
Does it though? Where does the "need" in your sentence come from?
How come the supply chain has no slack to allow for (inevitable) hiccups and accidents? The answer is two part. It used to have them but they were optimized away. It still has them, but you are led to believe they aren't there because putting this pressure on you allows your bosses to extract more work out of you.
And how come the supply chain is so stressed? Is everything that goes through it so essential that a single late ship is a catastrophe? The answer is obviously not, we are shipping gigatons of drivel across the world that gets immediately forgotten in a drawer or tossed in the bin once it reaches its final destination.
If you are shipping essential goods then there is a safety net of supplies at the destination to absorb any issues in shipping (if there isn't, clearly these goods were not essential). If you aren't shipping essential goods, then it's already factored in global insurance markets, and late shipping is merely someone's bank account getting bigger at a lesser rate.
Congratulations, you're one of the few.
Or maybe Just-In-Time supply chains should be heavily regulated. Companies using cargo freighters as warehouse space inevitably leads to everything grinding to a halt when anything gets delayed during shipping. Know how companies used to avoid short-term supply chain issues? They had enough stock in their warehouse to last more than a single fucking day at a time.
But manufacturing companies realized that instead of paying for warehouse space to store excess raw material, they could just throw massive fucking hissy fits whenever a shipping container gets delayed. And the MBAs gave it a nice pretty name (JIT) to make themselves feel smart. And now shipping companies get blamed when manufacturing grinds to a halt, instead of blaming the manufacturers that failed to plan for a single day of shipping delays.
And manufacturing that has the potential to cascade into critical/infrastructure delays shouldn’t be allowed to use JIT. Very little would be impacted when a popsicle stick manufacturer has a JIT delay. But a lot of people would care if chemicals used in water treatment plants got delayed, and they suddenly had no clean drinking water.
Yeah but a day here then the ship leaves late, a day at the next port and the next its never good.
Things tend to always run behind as is. We get notified ships in from 21 to 24ty etc then 2 days before its thr 22nd to the 25th a almost every time
The movie gets panned a lot, but I liked it.
Yeah, it was really ahead of its time.
1 hour of unskilled labor* The labor value produced by an average person without special training in 1 hour.
Unskilled labor isnt a real real thing. It was created to devalue blue collar workers. A construction worker is seen as unskilled but if you were to try and build a home next to a construction worker you'd realize how much skill they have at the matter.
I'm sure the neurosurgeon can learn to lay bricks (or flip burgers, or bring food to tables, or clean floors, or operate a forklift) faster than the other people can learn to operate on brains.
Unskilled labor is a common phrase, not a literal meaning. I doesn't mean "you don't need any skills", it is about jobs where you can quickly learn the skills (usually in under 3 years).
That’s why I defined it the way I did as labor that doesn’t require training. This concept was taken straight out of Marx.
I do think different people, doing different things, under different contexts, will value their time differently
While i do like the dimmension of time and value exchanged via a currency, i think it fair that some labor is considered more valuable than other labor
However i do also think, that to set that reference point, there should be a pool of jobs available that pay at some set wage, that wage by definitiom setting the unit of the currency - so that when you buy something for 2 hours - you know what the meaning of that is - its two hours spent digging a ditch, or being a crossing guard, or a beaurcrat, caretaker, etc - whatever jobs are in that pool that can be fairly easily entered (and left) at any time - and who the government is charged with ensuring there are never more people willing to work than jobs available at this wage
Other jobs might pay more or less than the 1hr$ for 1 hour wage, but a person can always say "screw this, id rather dig a ditch and help my community for 1hr$/hr"
Agreed. A physician who spent a decade earning the ability to do a lifesaving surgery that might take two hours has a different value than someone working two hours at a retail cash register.
Every billionaire is a policy failure.
nice one
LOL. Some people's 1 hour is worth more than other's.
Are you going to pay them 1.5 hours for each hour worked?
If only there was a way we could keep track of how much value people earned in an hour of work.