Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 16:00:19 +0100
From: m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se (Hugh Rodwell)
Subject: Re: How much work is necessary?


Here's an interesting question that cropped up on Marxism-Intro, and my
attempt at answering it.

Cheers,

Hugh

______________________________________________________


>I have a question which probably makes no sense, and I have no idea how to
>formulate it properly.  It goes something like this: if we took, say, a
>medium-sized
>country with some resonable natural resources and postulated a certain modest
>standard of living for everyone -- decent housing, decent food, clothes to fit
>the climate, reasonable health care -- all this throughout every person's
>life --
>if we did all this, then how much work would actually need to be done by each
>person (who's capable of working)?  Two hours a day?  More?  Less?
>
>If this question cannot be made enough sense of to generate interesting
>discussion,
>just disregard it.

Trying to answer this gives a good idea of all the intertwined threads
linking world production.

Take Sweden in the late seventies and early eighties, where Sardine's
postulates more or less fit. At that time, given the capitalist system and
a Social-Democratic welfare regime, the work done by the work force was
necessary. There was no alternative.

People were working eight hours a day and five days a week, there was as
near full employment as you'll get under capitalism and there was as good
cradle-to-grave security as you could expect under welfare state
capitalism. (All temporary and on loan of course.)

OK. So how much work was really *necessary* for this if we disregard the
capitalist system and its constraints, and how much was *superfluous*?
Putting the question this way turns the whole business upside-down.

We delete the military as *superfluous*, right? Military personnel of all
kinds, military production personnel of all kinds. I haven't got the
figures. Let's call them m. So the work force gets an additional m people,
and you can divide the work to be done, w, by the current work force, f,
plus m. Working time, t, equals w/c+m.

Then you can delete the whole luxury goods sector as *superfluous*, l
(except for luxury goods for collective consumption which we'll ignore). t
= w/f+m+l.

But you've got to compensate for cheap goods produced by sweatshop labour
in semi-colonial countries! Because I'm sure Sardine doesn't want his
decent society to gouge people forced to work like slaves in other indecent
societies.

In Sweden there would be a lot of goods to compensate for. Most of the
clothes. A lot of the food. This would add a justice factor to the work to
be done. t = w+j/f+m+l.

Since a lot of academics, a, would be freed up from trivial or downright
destructive research (this is ignoring those already dealt with in the
military and luxury goods sectors), we could add them to the work force
producing necessities AND subtract a productivity factor, p, from the work
to be done, since our academics would be able to devote some of their
energies to labour-saving innovations without this throwing people out of
work. (Academics pursuing bona fide research with a point to it would carry
on as they do now.)  t = w+j-p/f+m+l+a.

Extra benefits would be the availability of children and young people for
socially beneficial tasks organized as part of their education -- helping
keep things shipshape in a community, helping old people and handicapped
people, etc. Let's leave this out of the equation, but bear it in mind as a
bonus.

So as a first rough approximation, we get:

        t = w+j-p/f+m+l+a

Perhaps the productivity factor would eliminate the justice factor? That
would simplify the equation:

        t = w/f+m+l+a

I'll leave it to others to quantify the variables.

However, it is obvious that each of the steps involved here is in direct
collision with the existing state of affairs, the capitalist world setup.
Beating swords into ploughshares doesn't only affect the Sweden of our
example, but all its neighbours and contacts, friends and rivals alike.
Likewise the turning of the luxury goods sector to useful production will
necessitate the removal from power of those who live by it. That makes two
very powerful, international vested interests. The academics will only
start being of any use if they feel secure, which means if the community
guarantees their security. This is only possible if the majority of
producers has the power

a) to force the military to demobilize and disarm

b) to force the luxury sector over to the production of necessities

and

c) to guarantee the security of a community producing this way.

It is inconceivable that the ruling class (the imperialist bourgeoisie) of
outside countries still dependent on exploitation and producing luxury and
destructive goods would allow an experiment like this to take place without
attempting to destroy it. Which means that the initial stages of the new
society would be distorted by inherited military needs -- it would have to
defend itself against the attacks of capitalist states whose continued
existence it would threaten by its example.

So we're back at square one. Welfare state Sweden of a couple of decades
ago is about as far as you can go without turning the present capitalist
setup on its head. The difference between our new setup and the prosperity
of capitalist Sweden is that the new setup will be permanent, and Sweden's
general prosperity was only temporary -- a set of concessions to the
working class, given to buy social peace and vulnerable to being snatched
back any time the bourgeois state felt it had the strength or felt
compelled to do so to ward off a crisis of profitability.

However, you can see by the equation we came to that there would be
immediate gains in terms of a reduced working day. The size of the gains
would depend on the efficiency with which the additional labour is merged
with the current labour force, and the productivity improvements which
could be introduced under the new regime.

Cheers,

Hugh