David Rolfe Graeber (/ˈɡreɪbər/; February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.
Okay so you might mot like this, but todays society is way more advanced, and there are some good things I can't live without. Dental care is IMO a good example.
Now my theory is that our society is built on egomaniacs, power hungry narcissistic people and outright sadists (used by them). They make the wheels grind, they make you work for 48h a week instead of seeing your family.
But it also furthers society. In a wrong wretched way.
To have anarchy, or communism, we need to do away with those people, but we also must make people get out of bed and work too, I mean in a perfect society where everything is provided, who would like to be a hard working dentist?
And before you jump on me, Marx himself described a fenomena (I'm paraphrasing) where 1 company have normal working conditions and another with the aforementioned conditions. The second company will obviously win in the long run.
So you can't just make a law, or "not letting it happen" because other societies will, and then they will conquer you in some way because they are stronger or maybe just richer or have the equivalent of "dentists".
I'd love living in an all caring nice society, but how? Empirically it just doesn't seem to work.
The syndicalist answer is to get the whole working class into unions. Those unions take over their companies and become worker-owned co-operatives. They preference working directly with other companies doing the same. At some point, this reaches critical mass. The state then becomes unnecessary because the co-operatives handle everything between themselves.
Don't forget, too, that a lot of "work" being done in a modern office takes, perhaps, 10 hours a week. People aren't doing real work for 40 hours. That suggests that a company can be just as successful as any other while substantially reducing hours.
I know about that idea, but it doesn't adress the problem posed, at all?
Those people will just take over unions. I live in France were the unions are strong, and I can tell you the yes, it's way better than no unions but no it isn't lala land either and the battle of the egos is all over the place.
I also know that most office hours are totally wasted, but how come no one seems to have successfully made a job where you only do those effective hours possible?
Unions alone are necessary, but not sufficient. They have to actually take over their companies for this to work. The number of workers in a co-operative in France is about 5%.
That's a very good question for capitalism.
I have worked in Sweden too, heavily unionised at the time being.
What do you mean it's a question for capitalism? If you can't solve it, then it will still be a problem for your syndicalism.
Syndicalisim solves it by reducing hours once everyone is in a co-op. I say it's a question for capitalism because they could just do that right now, there's some good arguments that they could, but don't.
you can’t just hand wave away the problem and say it’s a problem in capitalism and then not tackle it. capitalism solves it with horrible living conditions: work to someone else’s standard or die
game theory exists - the system only works when everyone is honest, and every human system is going to have selfish, egotistical, and sociopathic people
That was the original question. It's so not hard to find a syndicalist answer: when everyone is in a co-op, they all get together and decide that yeah, we don't need to work as long. Job done. We haven't done this yet because not everyone is organized into worker co-operatives.
Capitalism, in contrast, has all sorts of roadblocks to making this happen.
That's why I handwave it away and turn it back on capitalism. It's so easy to solve this in syndicalism once its conditions are met.
sorry! i thought i was reading and replying to part of another conversation about getting big projects done!
you’re absolutely right
Follow some middle managers around for a day. Being a corporate uncle tom has its perks