Perhaps "Everybody Knows" by a certain Leonard Cohen.
There is a point when people won't work hard, even though they did in the near past. If the game is rigged, and everybody knows the game is rigged, and there's no way to even keep the current standard of living by working hard, why work hard?
There is market competition, granted, and the fear of being replaced by those who would work harder, but those replacements also don't have incentive to work hard. So that should all go down the drain over a decade or two. And the only way to make the game less rigged that I'm aware of is war. Because things become honest in war. Or more honest.
But people who were twisted for a long time can't win a war. Importing mercenaries has never worked very well for anyone, I think, but I'm not a historian.
As I'm sure you know, it's not just workers who are forced into the rat race. Capitalists are also forced, as they compete with each other. So they rig the game, but that just amounts to kicking the can down the road. Until the can breaks. And it always breaks.
1. It's wrong to club Chinese and Indian workers together because both are vastly different systems. In India, the toil is totally worthless as India is highly inefficient and unproductive economy where 50% of its workforce is burnt in furnace of rural farm sector which produces very little. The manufacturing and service sector of India is stagnant, backward & unproductive.
China is a different case where manufacturing and cutting edge sectors are rising are workers are productive and efficient.
2. Merz is wrong about China. Merz solution for Europe is DOGE-ing Europe with mass deregulation and reduction of State bureaucracy but this is not the source of problem with Europe in the first place. The problem with Europe is its Neoliberal design which has needlessly paralyzed & constrained itself with deficit limits & austerity doctrine. Moreover, the industrial policy of China is structurally deep because of Chinese State intervention on such a great scale. A market economy & especially of Neoliberal type like Germany cannot match or compete with such powerful industrial policy.
If you recall, the Europe recently had its lost decade after GFC which was mostly due to foolish austerity policy on Southern Periphery. In a Macro system (currency union), a demand deficiency on one side will impact production on the other side. The useless austerity policies as preached by Germans in Europe not only undermined economies of the South (Greece was totally ruined) but it also impacted rich western Nations who supplied goods & services to South.
2. The problem is not work hours. We must remember that although Socialism had complacency starting in its stagnant phase which began in late 1970s, this is not the case in Europe of present. Europe is MARKET ECONOMY, not a socialist one like USSR or Comecon States. The leisure days of European labour is not due to complacency of government but a natural result of labor-Capital relations in a market economy. In theory of markets, if the firms have declining profits, the flexibility market will re-adjust the work-leisure relationship to align with better efficiency.
3. Problem with Neoliberals like Merz & Eurogarchs is that they have a hammer & every problem is a nail. They can only think of economic problems from Neoliberal perspective - unemployment is due to lack of efficiency and laziness of labor, stagnation is due to burdensome regulations, solution to economic problems is more Neoliberal kool-aid.
In modern era where sophisticated automation will dictate production in so many sectors, the TOIL of worker is a worthless thing. Less work and more education & learning will be feature of modern societies, not 70 hours work week on menial jobs. India is a prime example of how worthless TOIL is where majority of population work for long hours in technologically inferior farm sector but produces very little in comparison to other nations.
4. Rapidly moving China also has problems. The technology is deployed at such a rapid pace - the self driving vehicles, new industrial robots & automation etc. That's translating into unemployment & especially youth unemployment. This is not a bad thing per se as youth now needs to spend more time in higher learning. But this underscores the changing economic trends where quality of labour is preferred over quantity of labour.
The bottom line is that leisure is not a bad thing for labour in a MARKET ECONOMY for markets can adjust when necessary. The problem with Socialism was that there was no adjustment mechanism for labour markets in central command economy which was overwhelmingly dedicated to keeping its promises of good life even when their economies were stagnating.
So Europe should be spared from advice of Neoliberals like Merz.
In Mao's China, TOIL was projected as supreme virtue during farm collectivization and later in cultural revolution era. The peasants were preached and forced to work hard to support industrialization and educated people were sent into rural farms to learn from struggles of peasants. This was a disastrous era for China.
It's interesting how Neoliberal politicians in west are now re-discovering the virtue of TOIL in the late stage capitalism.
Let’s suppose there is one society where people rather invite friends home and cook for them and another society where people rather invite their friends to go to a restaurant. Maybe in society one guests even bring fish they caught, another a deer, another his newest criticism. On paper society one would perform less labour and consume less. Seems obvious tho that society two just has the habit to pay for the hunter, the fisherman, the cook and even the critic maybe, while the same work is being performed in both and in both the same things are being consumed. I don’t really see why society two would be more powerful and competitive just because the fishermen etc enter into a relation to capital while they don’t in society one. So maybe Merz and co just want more people to enter into that relation to capital (wage labour) for longer, because that would give the capitalists more power over the time of their workers?
PS: One takeaway from Graebers bullshit jobs should at least be recognized: being paid to work in capitalism doesn’t guarantee that the work you do is useful to anybody; people are very often paid to do nothing at all even in capitalism. I don’t know a thorough study on the actual amount of “being paid to do nothing” in capitalist and socialist societies. Maybe somebody can recommend one?
in your example, the money form is ubiquitous in the second society, while in the first one we see more direct relationships. The second society is a more fertile field for capital accumulation since economic transactions take the shape of monetary exchanges. If these two societies engage in economic exchange, it is not hard to see that the second society will easily "buy" the other society. Once capitalism becomes the default system, economic integration becomes economic subordination. How? following the reasoning of Milanovic, the society with "the habit to pay" has developed the military means to force the first society to be a colony.
"It is a fact, noted by all economists and political scientists, that economic power is correlated with political and military might. So if many European citizens continue to choose watching operas and going to picnics with friends while Chinese and Indians are doing it less frequently, Europe will decline."
I do not see the connection between these two statements? I see both to be independently valid, but connecting them seems to hint at an important point being missed.
Being able to choose to go on picnics with friends is the result of an expression of political power. Namely successful labor movements of the decades. The gains may be taken for granted, but they were won through blood sweat and tears.
Economic power is correlated with political and military might because they are all the same expression of power. Economic power, for example, in the case of the US, was won through decades long protectionism, with anti-protectionism measures being enforced on their trading partners through military might. The post WW2 period, a time of peak power reach of the US, was simultaneously a time of peak middle class luxury in the US. The actual decline of the US power reach has tracked along with a decline of the US middle class, as the US used its military and political power to shift its manufacturing base onto its trading partners, thus gutting its own middle class.
So China has not risen simply because its people worked more, but because the US made China an important part of its manufacturing base. If China did not have the consumer market in the US to sell to, all those extra hours would mean nothing.
The conclusion seems to me to be that It's not work life balance and competition that can define decline; it's the state becoming threatened by the decentralised political power that underlies that work life balance, and choosing to engage in a project of decline of that middle class, by shifting economic power elsewhere.
The lesson here, is you can only shift that power so much before you run out of spaces to shift it to. China is now growing a very strong middle class of its own.
Keynes made another prophecy: “wealth will become abundant and capital will be cheap.” In fact, wealth and capital are indeed abundant, but they are not cheap (specifically regarding the expected return on equity) because we have inflated asset values and introduced excessive leverage. This is our major problem now.
I don’t wish to be disrespectful but this seems an impossibly simplistic way of looking at the issue. First, it assumes that working hours scale in a linear fashion with output / productivity when there are almost certainly thresholds beyond which incremental hours will produce little additional value & may even increase risks. It also ignores critical & often lagging variables. I mean the elephant in the room is energy?? Of course Europe didn’t recover quickly after Covid. Its energy supply was blown up! Indeed we need to go back to 2008 & trace longer term patterns to understand what’s really driven the gap. While cheap capital poured into US tech companies, Europe insisted on banking support & economic belt tightening. The impact of this inevitably lags & then hits hard just as energy costs rise. See Britain for the exemplar case.
And going back to the issue at hand, let’s not forget demography (aging population) & labour market flexibility. It may be easy to force Chinese & US citizens into low wage work which boosts overall output. But the US has exorbitant privilege. It doesn’t have to tax wages to fund the state. If it did, would all this labour flexibility still be tenable? As China redirects its surplus it seems likely that working hours will decline & leisure hours will rise. None of this is about moral virtues in respective populations but rather a function of monetary / energy / demographic / geopolitical factors that have lined up in such a fashion that China & the US can burn through cheap labour & concentrate capital in high end industries while Europe has more rigid workforces that nevertheless perform pretty well under constraints. The only thing I’d agree with in principle, is that yes - countries need to keep up. But the idea that people work less to optimise leisure does not feel true. People will always work longer hours if available & if the marginal benefit from working longer outweighs the costs (health, leisure, family life). Anyone who’s worked in a high paid job knows this. Removing the welfare state & forcing more people into low paid, low skilled, long hours work does not feel like a solution to Europe’s slower growth. Indeed, given the Gov subsidy of middle income in the West (I’m talking about corporate subsidy through wage support) it would arguably be a greater fiscal drag than letting people spend their discretionary income on leisure activities. Rather than destroy the welfare state & force labour costs down (Keynes had plenty to say on this, none of it supportive of trashing wages) it might be better to rebuild continental energy stocks & invest fiscal might into new industrial sectors. Just saying.
'What would Marx say? Was he in favor of working or not working hard? Marx’s view was (obviously) quite sophisticated.'
?
The p**** never worked a day in his life. Relying on mommy/poppy funds and those through his wife...(And when will HE be cancelled as a racist and an anti semite? When wll HIS statues go?)
He reminds me of Dutch billionaire son Paul Rosenmuller (Vendex family) who went to work in the Rotterdam harbour (for a short while) to convince the working classes of the need for a revolution.
Convincing the masses of their need to be led by some upper class guy seems to be a core signaller of elite class. Perhaps this is how hard left elites showboat moral superiority to each other?
In the late 80s Paul the Saviour of Planets then became the leader of the newly formed green left (elites must lead something) to save the planet that way. Since retiring from politics he flies around the world on his Platinum card to pick up a few bucks here and there while advising others to change THEIR lifestyles (to save the planet).
PS this...
'People in the Netherlands are rich because the Netherlands had accumulated large riches through hard work of its past inhabitants and their external conquests. '
...has become quite banal by now. Debunked so many times the debunking becomes as repetitive as the accusation. The Dutch provinces were already extremely wealthy before any NL conquests and while being under foreign rule themselves (Spanish Habsburgs, Holy Roman empire before that, Charlemagne's empire before that, Roman empire before that und so weiter und sofort).
It is however true that today an ever greater segment of Dutch society is entirely unproductive, producing one bs paper after another.
They are called academics. (And let's not even begin about university administrators).
‘Elsevier Shuts Down Its Finance Journal Citation Cartel
12 papers retracted, 7 editor positions removed, and the "open secret" of Elsevier’s elite paper mill exposed. On Christmas Eve, 9 “peer-reviewed” economics papers were quietly retracted by Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher.’
Reading this post saddened me. In fact, it made me realize that there seems to be no way out of competing, competing, competing. When I see two people fighting in the street, when I see the futility of domination, I feel that I belong to a species — the human one — that is cursed: intelligent and at the same time completely idiotic.
In any case, Branko, it seems to me that you indulge excessively in cynicism, which is one of the worst self-fulfilling prophecies I know.
What I think perhaps is missing from Branko’s formulation is that states are “competing” with one another on dimensions beyond simple industrial productivity. At a minimum they must also engage in social reproduction, a basic requirement which our neoliberal polities are currently failing to accomplish. There are also feedback loops across the dimensions, so the simplistic Stakhanovite “we must work harder” will fail in competition with regimes which attend to citizen morale and living standards as well.
Thank you, this is is such a crucial topic. With due respect, I think your reading of Marx on this crucial point may be partly misplaced. The core of Marx's thinking on this is that capitalist "work" is not transhistorical (as neither is the commodity form). It is not "labor as such". It is a phenomenon of the commodity-producing economy, that is, labor measured by socially average labor time expenditure. This form of labor (also as abstract labor) is not to be brought to victory, but to be transcended. As you point out, Marx did indeed emphasize man as Homo Faber. He emphasized the all-round self-actualization of Man is his unique species-being, but shows that this self-actualization becomes alienated in a historically constituted form of production which reverses subject and object, and makes man a cog of the meta-machine. He posits that capitalism's technological advances create the ground for the reduction of "labor-time labor" to a minimum (though man's struggle with nature never ends), and create the possibility of a relatively leisurly, free and creative life. All the contradictions we see with AI is exactly what Marx conceptualized as the inevitable self-contradiction of bourgeois economy. Through the ever-improving application of science and technology it points to beyond itself, but never gets there beacuse its aim is to appropriate value which is a historically specific form of wealth measured by time. As he wrote: "Capital itself is the moving contradiction [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth." Again, thank you for your post.
What you describe (especially the last paragraph) seems to be a kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma, that the dominant strategy of each individual (and state) is to work hard, and so we collectively end up in a suboptimal state. Have I summarised this correctly? If so, I think none of this prevents us from coordinating to make us collectively better of. In the suboptimal state, we work hard because the capitalist system forces us to do so. In the optimal state (which I think Marx would advocate), we work hard to pursue the goals that we have reason to value. In the optimal state (which I think Chinese society is moving towards) we are internally motivated to work hard. In the suboptimal state (which capitalism drives us to and which the German chancellor seems to demand), we are forced (by fear, envy, greed) to work hard.
Do you take "work in freedom" to be incompatible with work within a system whose core feature is competition? And if so, what are the prospects for realizing the former? Is it an "ultimate objective" that is nevertheless unlikely (impossible?) to be achieved at any significant scale?
In recent years, China has been actively pushing an anti-involution campaign. Ordinary people believe that economic development and technological progress should directly benefit workers by helping to reduce working hours. The EU’s Forced Labour Regulation, set to take effect in 2027, has also helped accelerate this process, prompting many companies to start strictly enforcing the 5-day, 8-hour workweek.
But honestly, if some companies follow this while their competitors don’t, it’s very difficult for them to keep it up in the long run. Ultimately, this issue still requires a global consensus to be truly effective.
In China, they work 9-9-6 (from 9 am to 9pm, six days a week)!!??
In high tech startups, 9-9-6 is the rule, as it is in Silicon Valley. Elsewhere, it's 44 hours/week + 20 paid vacation days. Benefits/burden can be 40% on top of paid wage.
What would a poet say?
Perhaps "Everybody Knows" by a certain Leonard Cohen.
There is a point when people won't work hard, even though they did in the near past. If the game is rigged, and everybody knows the game is rigged, and there's no way to even keep the current standard of living by working hard, why work hard?
There is market competition, granted, and the fear of being replaced by those who would work harder, but those replacements also don't have incentive to work hard. So that should all go down the drain over a decade or two. And the only way to make the game less rigged that I'm aware of is war. Because things become honest in war. Or more honest.
But people who were twisted for a long time can't win a war. Importing mercenaries has never worked very well for anyone, I think, but I'm not a historian.
As I'm sure you know, it's not just workers who are forced into the rat race. Capitalists are also forced, as they compete with each other. So they rig the game, but that just amounts to kicking the can down the road. Until the can breaks. And it always breaks.
Prof Branko,
1. It's wrong to club Chinese and Indian workers together because both are vastly different systems. In India, the toil is totally worthless as India is highly inefficient and unproductive economy where 50% of its workforce is burnt in furnace of rural farm sector which produces very little. The manufacturing and service sector of India is stagnant, backward & unproductive.
China is a different case where manufacturing and cutting edge sectors are rising are workers are productive and efficient.
2. Merz is wrong about China. Merz solution for Europe is DOGE-ing Europe with mass deregulation and reduction of State bureaucracy but this is not the source of problem with Europe in the first place. The problem with Europe is its Neoliberal design which has needlessly paralyzed & constrained itself with deficit limits & austerity doctrine. Moreover, the industrial policy of China is structurally deep because of Chinese State intervention on such a great scale. A market economy & especially of Neoliberal type like Germany cannot match or compete with such powerful industrial policy.
If you recall, the Europe recently had its lost decade after GFC which was mostly due to foolish austerity policy on Southern Periphery. In a Macro system (currency union), a demand deficiency on one side will impact production on the other side. The useless austerity policies as preached by Germans in Europe not only undermined economies of the South (Greece was totally ruined) but it also impacted rich western Nations who supplied goods & services to South.
2. The problem is not work hours. We must remember that although Socialism had complacency starting in its stagnant phase which began in late 1970s, this is not the case in Europe of present. Europe is MARKET ECONOMY, not a socialist one like USSR or Comecon States. The leisure days of European labour is not due to complacency of government but a natural result of labor-Capital relations in a market economy. In theory of markets, if the firms have declining profits, the flexibility market will re-adjust the work-leisure relationship to align with better efficiency.
3. Problem with Neoliberals like Merz & Eurogarchs is that they have a hammer & every problem is a nail. They can only think of economic problems from Neoliberal perspective - unemployment is due to lack of efficiency and laziness of labor, stagnation is due to burdensome regulations, solution to economic problems is more Neoliberal kool-aid.
In modern era where sophisticated automation will dictate production in so many sectors, the TOIL of worker is a worthless thing. Less work and more education & learning will be feature of modern societies, not 70 hours work week on menial jobs. India is a prime example of how worthless TOIL is where majority of population work for long hours in technologically inferior farm sector but produces very little in comparison to other nations.
4. Rapidly moving China also has problems. The technology is deployed at such a rapid pace - the self driving vehicles, new industrial robots & automation etc. That's translating into unemployment & especially youth unemployment. This is not a bad thing per se as youth now needs to spend more time in higher learning. But this underscores the changing economic trends where quality of labour is preferred over quantity of labour.
The bottom line is that leisure is not a bad thing for labour in a MARKET ECONOMY for markets can adjust when necessary. The problem with Socialism was that there was no adjustment mechanism for labour markets in central command economy which was overwhelmingly dedicated to keeping its promises of good life even when their economies were stagnating.
So Europe should be spared from advice of Neoliberals like Merz.
Another point I like to add about work hours.
In Mao's China, TOIL was projected as supreme virtue during farm collectivization and later in cultural revolution era. The peasants were preached and forced to work hard to support industrialization and educated people were sent into rural farms to learn from struggles of peasants. This was a disastrous era for China.
It's interesting how Neoliberal politicians in west are now re-discovering the virtue of TOIL in the late stage capitalism.
Let’s suppose there is one society where people rather invite friends home and cook for them and another society where people rather invite their friends to go to a restaurant. Maybe in society one guests even bring fish they caught, another a deer, another his newest criticism. On paper society one would perform less labour and consume less. Seems obvious tho that society two just has the habit to pay for the hunter, the fisherman, the cook and even the critic maybe, while the same work is being performed in both and in both the same things are being consumed. I don’t really see why society two would be more powerful and competitive just because the fishermen etc enter into a relation to capital while they don’t in society one. So maybe Merz and co just want more people to enter into that relation to capital (wage labour) for longer, because that would give the capitalists more power over the time of their workers?
PS: One takeaway from Graebers bullshit jobs should at least be recognized: being paid to work in capitalism doesn’t guarantee that the work you do is useful to anybody; people are very often paid to do nothing at all even in capitalism. I don’t know a thorough study on the actual amount of “being paid to do nothing” in capitalist and socialist societies. Maybe somebody can recommend one?
in your example, the money form is ubiquitous in the second society, while in the first one we see more direct relationships. The second society is a more fertile field for capital accumulation since economic transactions take the shape of monetary exchanges. If these two societies engage in economic exchange, it is not hard to see that the second society will easily "buy" the other society. Once capitalism becomes the default system, economic integration becomes economic subordination. How? following the reasoning of Milanovic, the society with "the habit to pay" has developed the military means to force the first society to be a colony.
"It is a fact, noted by all economists and political scientists, that economic power is correlated with political and military might. So if many European citizens continue to choose watching operas and going to picnics with friends while Chinese and Indians are doing it less frequently, Europe will decline."
I do not see the connection between these two statements? I see both to be independently valid, but connecting them seems to hint at an important point being missed.
Being able to choose to go on picnics with friends is the result of an expression of political power. Namely successful labor movements of the decades. The gains may be taken for granted, but they were won through blood sweat and tears.
Economic power is correlated with political and military might because they are all the same expression of power. Economic power, for example, in the case of the US, was won through decades long protectionism, with anti-protectionism measures being enforced on their trading partners through military might. The post WW2 period, a time of peak power reach of the US, was simultaneously a time of peak middle class luxury in the US. The actual decline of the US power reach has tracked along with a decline of the US middle class, as the US used its military and political power to shift its manufacturing base onto its trading partners, thus gutting its own middle class.
So China has not risen simply because its people worked more, but because the US made China an important part of its manufacturing base. If China did not have the consumer market in the US to sell to, all those extra hours would mean nothing.
The conclusion seems to me to be that It's not work life balance and competition that can define decline; it's the state becoming threatened by the decentralised political power that underlies that work life balance, and choosing to engage in a project of decline of that middle class, by shifting economic power elsewhere.
The lesson here, is you can only shift that power so much before you run out of spaces to shift it to. China is now growing a very strong middle class of its own.
Keynes made another prophecy: “wealth will become abundant and capital will be cheap.” In fact, wealth and capital are indeed abundant, but they are not cheap (specifically regarding the expected return on equity) because we have inflated asset values and introduced excessive leverage. This is our major problem now.
I don’t wish to be disrespectful but this seems an impossibly simplistic way of looking at the issue. First, it assumes that working hours scale in a linear fashion with output / productivity when there are almost certainly thresholds beyond which incremental hours will produce little additional value & may even increase risks. It also ignores critical & often lagging variables. I mean the elephant in the room is energy?? Of course Europe didn’t recover quickly after Covid. Its energy supply was blown up! Indeed we need to go back to 2008 & trace longer term patterns to understand what’s really driven the gap. While cheap capital poured into US tech companies, Europe insisted on banking support & economic belt tightening. The impact of this inevitably lags & then hits hard just as energy costs rise. See Britain for the exemplar case.
And going back to the issue at hand, let’s not forget demography (aging population) & labour market flexibility. It may be easy to force Chinese & US citizens into low wage work which boosts overall output. But the US has exorbitant privilege. It doesn’t have to tax wages to fund the state. If it did, would all this labour flexibility still be tenable? As China redirects its surplus it seems likely that working hours will decline & leisure hours will rise. None of this is about moral virtues in respective populations but rather a function of monetary / energy / demographic / geopolitical factors that have lined up in such a fashion that China & the US can burn through cheap labour & concentrate capital in high end industries while Europe has more rigid workforces that nevertheless perform pretty well under constraints. The only thing I’d agree with in principle, is that yes - countries need to keep up. But the idea that people work less to optimise leisure does not feel true. People will always work longer hours if available & if the marginal benefit from working longer outweighs the costs (health, leisure, family life). Anyone who’s worked in a high paid job knows this. Removing the welfare state & forcing more people into low paid, low skilled, long hours work does not feel like a solution to Europe’s slower growth. Indeed, given the Gov subsidy of middle income in the West (I’m talking about corporate subsidy through wage support) it would arguably be a greater fiscal drag than letting people spend their discretionary income on leisure activities. Rather than destroy the welfare state & force labour costs down (Keynes had plenty to say on this, none of it supportive of trashing wages) it might be better to rebuild continental energy stocks & invest fiscal might into new industrial sectors. Just saying.
'What would Marx say? Was he in favor of working or not working hard? Marx’s view was (obviously) quite sophisticated.'
?
The p**** never worked a day in his life. Relying on mommy/poppy funds and those through his wife...(And when will HE be cancelled as a racist and an anti semite? When wll HIS statues go?)
He reminds me of Dutch billionaire son Paul Rosenmuller (Vendex family) who went to work in the Rotterdam harbour (for a short while) to convince the working classes of the need for a revolution.
Convincing the masses of their need to be led by some upper class guy seems to be a core signaller of elite class. Perhaps this is how hard left elites showboat moral superiority to each other?
In the late 80s Paul the Saviour of Planets then became the leader of the newly formed green left (elites must lead something) to save the planet that way. Since retiring from politics he flies around the world on his Platinum card to pick up a few bucks here and there while advising others to change THEIR lifestyles (to save the planet).
PS this...
'People in the Netherlands are rich because the Netherlands had accumulated large riches through hard work of its past inhabitants and their external conquests. '
...has become quite banal by now. Debunked so many times the debunking becomes as repetitive as the accusation. The Dutch provinces were already extremely wealthy before any NL conquests and while being under foreign rule themselves (Spanish Habsburgs, Holy Roman empire before that, Charlemagne's empire before that, Roman empire before that und so weiter und sofort).
It is however true that today an ever greater segment of Dutch society is entirely unproductive, producing one bs paper after another.
They are called academics. (And let's not even begin about university administrators).
‘Elsevier Shuts Down Its Finance Journal Citation Cartel
12 papers retracted, 7 editor positions removed, and the "open secret" of Elsevier’s elite paper mill exposed. On Christmas Eve, 9 “peer-reviewed” economics papers were quietly retracted by Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher.’
https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/elsevier-shuts-down-its-finance-journal?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=353444&post_id=182657631&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=6mos7&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email&hide_intro_popup=true
There is also the web of unequal exchange left over from the Dutch empire.
Reading this post saddened me. In fact, it made me realize that there seems to be no way out of competing, competing, competing. When I see two people fighting in the street, when I see the futility of domination, I feel that I belong to a species — the human one — that is cursed: intelligent and at the same time completely idiotic.
In any case, Branko, it seems to me that you indulge excessively in cynicism, which is one of the worst self-fulfilling prophecies I know.
What I think perhaps is missing from Branko’s formulation is that states are “competing” with one another on dimensions beyond simple industrial productivity. At a minimum they must also engage in social reproduction, a basic requirement which our neoliberal polities are currently failing to accomplish. There are also feedback loops across the dimensions, so the simplistic Stakhanovite “we must work harder” will fail in competition with regimes which attend to citizen morale and living standards as well.
Dear Professor Milanovic,
Thank you, this is is such a crucial topic. With due respect, I think your reading of Marx on this crucial point may be partly misplaced. The core of Marx's thinking on this is that capitalist "work" is not transhistorical (as neither is the commodity form). It is not "labor as such". It is a phenomenon of the commodity-producing economy, that is, labor measured by socially average labor time expenditure. This form of labor (also as abstract labor) is not to be brought to victory, but to be transcended. As you point out, Marx did indeed emphasize man as Homo Faber. He emphasized the all-round self-actualization of Man is his unique species-being, but shows that this self-actualization becomes alienated in a historically constituted form of production which reverses subject and object, and makes man a cog of the meta-machine. He posits that capitalism's technological advances create the ground for the reduction of "labor-time labor" to a minimum (though man's struggle with nature never ends), and create the possibility of a relatively leisurly, free and creative life. All the contradictions we see with AI is exactly what Marx conceptualized as the inevitable self-contradiction of bourgeois economy. Through the ever-improving application of science and technology it points to beyond itself, but never gets there beacuse its aim is to appropriate value which is a historically specific form of wealth measured by time. As he wrote: "Capital itself is the moving contradiction [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth." Again, thank you for your post.
What you describe (especially the last paragraph) seems to be a kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma, that the dominant strategy of each individual (and state) is to work hard, and so we collectively end up in a suboptimal state. Have I summarised this correctly? If so, I think none of this prevents us from coordinating to make us collectively better of. In the suboptimal state, we work hard because the capitalist system forces us to do so. In the optimal state (which I think Marx would advocate), we work hard to pursue the goals that we have reason to value. In the optimal state (which I think Chinese society is moving towards) we are internally motivated to work hard. In the suboptimal state (which capitalism drives us to and which the German chancellor seems to demand), we are forced (by fear, envy, greed) to work hard.
Do you take "work in freedom" to be incompatible with work within a system whose core feature is competition? And if so, what are the prospects for realizing the former? Is it an "ultimate objective" that is nevertheless unlikely (impossible?) to be achieved at any significant scale?
In recent years, China has been actively pushing an anti-involution campaign. Ordinary people believe that economic development and technological progress should directly benefit workers by helping to reduce working hours. The EU’s Forced Labour Regulation, set to take effect in 2027, has also helped accelerate this process, prompting many companies to start strictly enforcing the 5-day, 8-hour workweek.
But honestly, if some companies follow this while their competitors don’t, it’s very difficult for them to keep it up in the long run. Ultimately, this issue still requires a global consensus to be truly effective.
Working 2500 hours in 100 days seems a little tricky.
In China, they work 9-9-6 (from 9 am to 9pm, six days a week)!!??
In high tech startups, 9-9-6 is the rule, as it is in Silicon Valley. Elsewhere, it's 44 hours/week + 20 paid vacation days. Benefits/burden can be 40% on top of paid wage.
What would Reagan say? "It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?"
Surely, the right compromise is to give people an excellent education so that they can be very productive without over exerting themselves?