The actual premise is that your labor shouldn’t be exploited to produce products for the sole purpose of producing products, which make a few people rich while you get nothing. If we’re working to keep necessary services functioning, thats a different story. We can all do that as a society without a business/corporation telling us to do it.
“We want the zero hour work week!” Vs “nobody needs to work”
“We want the zero hour work week!” implies a desire to reduce the standard work week to zero hours. It suggests people still want to work and contribute value through their work, just with fewer required work hours.
“Nobody needs to work” is a broader statement that questions whether work itself is necessary. It could be interpreted as meaning that people should not be obligated or required to work at all, and that their basic needs should still be met without contributing labor.
Overall, the first sentence focuses more on reducing work hours while still valuing work itself. The second calls into question whether work is inherently needed for people to live and thrive. Both discuss reducing the role of work, but they have slightly different philosophical implications.
so, if people don’t have the conditions of life held hostage by labour-buyers, the world would end? …why would the water be poisoned? what did i say about conflating ‘work’ with ‘labour’ or ‘doing literally anything [at all]’?
there would still be people who want to operate public utilities[0]. there would still be electricians. and plumbers. and what about microgrids?
this also wouldn’t happen overnight, which you make it sound like it would. or is this like when someone suggests phasing out fossil fuels? and some lemmy.world username says ‘if we suddenly abruptly instantly instantaneously directly rapidly CTRL+A-CTRL+X’d all oil in the world right now it’d be just like in the Mad Max!’
less than 27% of paid labour is serving real needs[1]. there is a lot of shit that we don’t need, that provides no social value, and that we could do without[2]. the individualist ratrace separates us from our communities, which are perfectly capable of taking care of us, even and especially in a crisis[3],[4],[5]. a managerial class is not necessary to operate public utilities[6].
if people want electricity, or running water, they will arrange for it. if absolutely nobody in the community knows how, they find someone who does and they make a deal.
most ‘work’ would probably be automated. automation is really more viable in a postcapitalist setting because there is no profit incentive getting in the way of the time for innovation to make reliable, longevous systems that aren’t intentionally cheap and intended to break within 2 – 5 years.
so, i don’t really see how ‘EVERYTHING would grind to a halt’ unless ‘EVERYTHING’ is ‘precisely the way things are now in whatever the present moment is’.
Seems people don’t understand how the world works and instead believe in a fantasy bubble world where everything works as it currently does with no one needing to bust their ass.
Not sure if this is the original intent, but I personally see it as not requiring individuals to work a standard work week to survive. None of this nuance is here so I can’t say for sure, but those wanting a minimal life can spend time on skills development, personal endeavours, teaching, volunteering*, occasional gig work, or just vibing with little and being content with getting by.
Those who want more than getting by, which I can only speculate is a lot of people, and those driven to work, can work. The value proposition of work would change drastically, though, as value for types of labour change drastically.
Right now, many of the most well paid jobs are the cushiest. People want them not just because they are the highest paid with best benefits, but because they are low physical labour, flexible, “clean”. Meanwhile the jobs people argue nobody would do - customer service, waste management, line work (which very well might be mostly replaced with automation in the next 20 years) - the incentive would need to be way higher because now you aren’t working it to live, you’re working it to live better.
I know it isn’t apples to apples by any stretch, but some of the biggest software used today was made by volunteers working alongside their jobs. A huge part of university teaching is done by contractors with terrible wages and precarious conditions because they just love teaching (and of course other pretty awful reasons for many).
A combination of flipping to worker owned co-operatives to minimize administrative/BS-job waste and give labourers ownership over their labour to keep them invested, alongside a minimum income and regulations to flip wages so that the less desirable the job, the higher the financial incentive, forcing companies to actually cut waste and reduce excess production because labour won’t be as ubiquitous, firm regulations to prevent mass wealth accumulation and ensure fair wealth distribution among labourers and allocate funds to industries that meet basic human needs, and embracing automation rather than rejecting it to make up the labour shortage.
All this said - I have no idea if this will work out positively, highly doubtful it could happen at a large scale, recognize there is likely 1000 holes here and new problems to arise, and don’t fully believe it’s feasible nor that I’m remotely intelligent enough to claim this has any real grounding. Speculative, hopeful, a worthwhile thought experiment to mine for ideas, a place to avoid black-and-white thinking on issues like a 0 hour workweek.
Edit: oh yeah, I asterisked volunteering because many of the volunteer efforts we have now are really extremely valuable for survival and I can’t imagine what we see as volunteering now would still be freely provided labour, but I have no ideas what industries would and wouldn’t be volunteer driven (I mean, we likely didn’t anticipate the biggest and most ubiquitous software projects being entirely volunteer based)
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