i am so incredibly used to defending good things by explaining how they help people and make their lives better because, yeah obviously that’s why good things are good and people with empathy would want that. i get that modern Western bourgeois “morality” is fucked, but if you tell people that they just think you are amoral or don’t think morals are good or just don’t care about them.

i’m so used to describing things and “good” and “bad” and the fact that Marxist theory just doesn’t seem to bother with that throws me for a loop. and then comes the question of “well REALLY what IS morality” and whether its objective (which i dont think it possibly could be? i’m a hard atheist) and its just kind of a mess in my brain as i’m trying to parse it all out.

edit: i get that the immorality of exploitation is apparent in Marxist analysis and should be to anybody, i’m more talking about how the argument isn’t framed as a moral one, because then you can get really annoying people in there trying to facts-and-logic their way out of it, if that makes sense

  • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    An increase in productive forces doesn’t mean an increase in human labor and as such an increase in what is required to reproduce the worker.

    Marx made it clear that the advancement of automation reduces the required amount of human labor necessary to produce any commodity. This is what results in the reserve army of labor. However, the problem becomes that automation doesn’t create new value, and under capitalism that is a problem.

    Under communism however, that isn’t a problem. The only metric that is of any interest is the use value of a given commodity. Without the constraints of capitalism you can strive to drive the socially necessary labor time Into the floor, since by this stage of development it would require only a fraction of the laborers necessary to supply the world with food, shelter, and medical care.

    This naturally halts the capitalist imperative for endless quantitative accumulation. Production stabilizes around actual human needs, shifting from expanding output to improving quality and reducing unnecessary waste. With the working day drastically shortened, the population (now freed from economic coercion) can make conscious, democratic decisions about reproduction and resource use, reaching a sustainable steady-state through social planning. You must remember just how wasteful capitalism is, and how under Communism that waste can be eliminated through collective planning.