Wobbly times number 163

“It is above all necessary to avoid postulating ‘society’ once more as an abstraction confronting the individual."  Karl Marx



MONEY MAKES THE WORLD GO ROUND

Money is a commodity.  The commodity is the seed from which the collective product of labour is turned into private property.  Money is the commodity which allows traders to trade their wares and services for something easy to carry and which can be used to obtain other commodities and pay taxes.  To abolish money, you need to abolish commodity production and institute production of goods and services for use with distribution of natural and human created wealth based on need. Money exemplifies the abstraction of commodification which rules today.  Everything which can be commodified will be turned into a commodity under the rule of the capitalist class, while the actual power relationship between the producers and the collective product of their labour will continue to be mystified.  

"How?" you ask.

How much labour time is embodied in a Euro, a hog, a dollar, a Mercedes Benz, a yen, a can of beer, a house and so on?

This is why Marx would promote 'labour time vouchers' to replace money in a socialist society, as labour time vouchers would make the relation between product and producers' time at wealth production transparent, just after the social revolution from class dominated society to a classless democracy of social ownership of the collective product of labour. 

Commodity production itself would be abolished in a classless association of producers who would democratically plan what they themselves need in the way of goods and services.   Abstractions confronting the individual today are e.g.: 'debt', 'the government', 'corporations', 'bureaucracy' and 'human nature', all of which are used by conservatives ideological justifications for all the social ills which flow from unequal political power between people. 'The economy' which is actually produced by employing commodified human and using private property in nature, is THE ABSTRACTION.  Embodying abstractions with human power is the stuff of reification.  It is the bane of revolutionary subjectivity.

Common ownership of the collective product of labour is socialism, in my book. There is no socialism as such in the world, nor has there ever been more than attempts to establish it, beginning with the Paris Commune of 1871. With wage labour, the producer sells his or her skills on the labour marketplace for a price over an amount of time. In this sense, labour power, just like any other commodity, is sold for a price. The difference is that commodified labour power produces more wealth, when at work, than it is bought for in wages. This social relation of product and its producer is obscured by the vast division of labour necessary for industrial production; still it applies. 

As a class, those who work for wages in order to make a living and their dependents make up 90% of the population and produce 100% of the wealth. The resulting fact is that 10% of the people in the world own and control 71% of the wealth produced. A system of common ownership of the collective product of labour would see 100% of the people owning/enjoying and controlling 100% of the product of their labour.  

Wobbly times number 112

What can replace the wage system?

"Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work,' we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wage system.' from the Preamble to the IWW's Constitution.

I maintain that the left lost its way sometime after 1910, fishing in the vote getting markets of liberal reformism and shutting out the revolutionaries who spoke of common ownership of the collective product of labour and the abolition of the system of exploitation known as wage labour. The official Marxist-Leninist and Social Democratic left replaced the 'abolition of the wage system' with liberal reformism i.e. with accepting, 'a fair day's wage for a fair day's work' all in the name of 'borng from within' the business unions and the established political States. 'Boring from within' was meant as a tactic; but soon became the strategic goal of the left i.e. to get elected to bourgeois or Marxist-Leninist institutions of politcal power over the wage slaves of the world. To the degree that this point of view triumphed, political amnesia struck the workers' movement. Forgetting that the abolition of wage-labour was the goal of the social revolution, along with common ownership of the collective product of labour, has gotten us to where we are today: with a left composed of radical liberal moralists waiting for a Castro (or fill in some other messiah) to save them, a left that has lost all sense of being part of a social revolution made by themselves and their fellow workers, for themselves as a class. As Marx and Engels put it in THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO:

"When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished [hebt auf (aufheben)] its own supremacy [Herrschaft, rule] as a class."



QUESTION NO. I.
"How will the Co-operative Commonwealth determine the income of each worker?"

ANSWER: --
In order that the answer to the question be understood, two things must first be grasped, and kept in mind. One is the factor which determines the worker's income today; and that involves the worker's status under Capitalism. The other thing is the worker's changed status in the Co-operative Commonwealth; from which status flows the factor which will then determine the worker's income.

How is the worker's income determined today, under Capitalism?

The income of the worker is his wages. That which determines the wages of the worker today is the supply and demand for Labor in the Labor market. If the supply is relatively large, the price of labor-power, that is, wages, which means income, will be relatively low. If the demand is relatively large, then the income, that is, wages, will rise. As the Law of Gravitation may be, and is, perturbed by a number of perturbing causes, so with the Law of Wages: -- combinations of workers, on the one hand, may counteract an excessive supply of Labor in the Labor market, and keep wages up; on the other hand, capitalist outrages, such as shanghaing, not to mention innumerable others, may counteract a small supply of Labor in the Labor market, and keep wages down. In the long, run the perturbing causes cease to be perceptible factors, and the Law of Supply and Demand re-asserts itself.

It follows that, under Capitalism, the status of' the worker is not that of a human. His income being his price, and his price being controlled by the identical law that controls the prices of all other articles of merchandise, under Capitalism the worker is a chattel. In so far as he is a "worker" he is no better than cattle on the hoof -- all affectation to the contrary notwithstanding.

What, on the contrary, is the worker's status in the Co-operative Commonwealth ?

"Co-operative Commonwealth" is a technical term; it is another name for the Socialist or Industrial Republic. He who says "Co-operative Commonwealth" means, must mean, a social system that its advocates maintain flows from a previous, the present, the Capitalist regimen ; a social system that its advocates maintain is made compulsory upon society by the impossible conditions which the Capitalist regimen brings to a head; finally, a social system which its advocates maintain that, seeing it is at once the offspring of Capitalism and the redress of Capitalist ills, saves and partakes of the gifts that Capitalism has contributed to the race's progress, and lops off the ills with which Capitalism itself cancels its own gifts. The issue of wages, or the worker's income, throws up one of the leading ills of Capitalism.

The Co-operative Commonwealth revolutionizes the status of the worker. From being the merchandise he now is, he is transformed into a human. The transformation is effected by his pulling himself out and away from the stalls in the market where today he stands beside cattle, bales of hay and crates of crockery, and taking his place as a citizen in full enjoyment of the highest civic status of the race.

The means for the transformation is the collective ownership of all the necessaries for production, and their operation for use, instead of their private ownership by the Capitalist, and their operation for sale and profits.

The worker's collective ownership of that which, being stripped of under Capitalism, turns him into a wage-slave and chattel, determines his new status. The revolutionized status, in turn, determines his income.

Whereas, under Capitalism, the very question whether the worker shall at all have an income depends upon the judgment, the will or the whim of the Capitalist, whether the wheels of production shall move, or shall lie idle, -- in the Co-operative Commonwealth, where the worker himself owns the necessaries for production, no such precariousness of income can hang over his head.

Whereas, under Capitalism, a stoppage of production comes about when the capitalist fears that continued production may congest the market, thereby forcing profits down, and never comes about because there is no need of his useful articles, -- in the Co-operative Commonwealth, use and not sale and profits being the sole purpose of production, no such stoppage of production, hence, of income, is conceivable.

Whereas, under Capitalism, improved methods of production have an eye solely to an increase of profits, and therefore are equivalent to throwing workers out of work, -- in the Co-operative Commonwealth, use and not sale and profits, popular wellbeing and not individual richness, being the sole object in view, improved methods of production, instead of throwing workers out of work, will throw out hours of work, and keep steady, if they do not increase, the flow of income.

Consequently, and finally --The Co-operative Commonwealth will not determine, the Co-operative Commonwealth will leave it to each worker himself to determine his income; and that income will total up to his share in the product of the collective labor of the Commonwealth, to the extent of his own efforts, multiplied with the free natural opportunities and with the social facilities (machinery, methods, etc.) that the genius of society may make possible.
In other words -- differently from the state of things under Capitalism, where the worker's fate is at the mercy of the capitalist -- in the Co-operative Commonwealth the worker will himself determine, will himself be the architect of his fate.

Excerpt from the pamphlet
"Fifteen Questions About Socialism"
by Daniel De Leon (1914)

(see also Engels' supplement to Marx's CAPITAL Volume III.  In it you will read an historical materialist analysis of how labour time developed as the socially recognised value which products of labour were exchanged.)
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What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

Karl Marx from Critique of the Gotha Programme

"The bourgeoisie has thus made irreversible historical time known and has imposed it on society, but it has prevented society from using it. “Once there was history, but not any more,” because the class of owners of the economy, which is inextricably tied to economic history, must repress every other irreversible use of time because it is directly threatened by them all. The ruling class, made up of specialists in the possession of things who are themselves therefore possessed by things, is forced to link its fate with the preservation of this reified history, that is, with the preservation of a new immobility within history. Meanwhile the worker at the base of society is for the first time not materially estranged from history, because the irreversible movement is now generated from that base. By demanding to live the historical time that it produces, the proletariat discovers the simple, unforgettable core of its revolutionary project; and each previously defeated attempt to carry out this project represents a possible point of departure for a new historical life."
Guy Debord 'The Society of the Spectacle'

My point is that the whole conceptual orientation of Marx, especially concerning the interchangeable use of the terminology of 'socialism' and 'communism' was changed in the left public mind by the weight of the Soviet propaganda machine, along with Marx's notion that socialism meant the abolition of wage-labour and its replacement with a system which would have the transparency of socially necessary labour time vouchers in the first phase of socialism.

"But democracy means only formal equality. And as soon as equality is achieved for all members of society in relation to ownership of the means of production, that is, equality of labor and wages, humanity will inevitably be confronted with the question of advancing farther, from formal equality to actual equality, i.e., to the operation of the rule “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”." Lenin THE STATE AND REVOLUTION.

Equality of wages is something Marx ridiculed e.g.:

"What are the mistakes committed by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and in this way to improve the situation of the working class, or regard equality of wages (as Proudhon does) as the goal of social revolution?" WAGE LABOUR AND CAPITAL

"Indeed, even the equality of wages demanded by Proudhon only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labour into the relationship of all men to labour. Society is then conceived as an abstract capitalist.

"Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labour, and estranged labour is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one aspect must therefore mean the downfall of the other." Marx ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS

"Lenin¹s dictum that 'socialism is nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people,' who must of course trust the benevolence of their leaders, expresses the perversion of ‘socialism’ to the needs of the State priests, and allows us to comprehend the rapid transition between positions that superficially seem diametric opposites, but in fact are quite close." I.W.W. member Noam Chomsky

As you may know, equality of wages was more or less the rule in the 1920s in the USSR and inequality of wages was introduced in the 1930s. Marx's critique of the wage system was more or less forgotten:

"One form of wage labour may correct the abuses of another, but no form of wage labour can correct the abuse of wage labour itself."
GRUNDRISSE by Karl Marx


So, nowadays after decades of boring from within, not only are we under attack from Capital, we’re not even worth being bought off. The fear that workers of the world would unite under the banner of M-Lism has well and truly gone with the wind. And what are we left with? I mean the left. We have a left which is 99% un-conscious of which class they’re in or why it would matter in the first place. We have a left hopelessly tied to liberalism, albeit a more radical form than the official liberals in the Democratic Party. We have a left in the unions and political organisations who never mention the wage system other than to demand a fairer version of exploitation. We have a left guilt ridden about the workers who they claim are suffering from ‘affluenza’. We have a left hopelessly mired in searching for identity and bowing to others’ self-proclaimed identity politics. We have an intellectual left in horror, grasping at a grand narrative which claims to be against all Grand Narratives. We have a left waiting for Godot to emerge from the less industrialised political States. We have a left which has so thoroughly become respectful of religion that it has become religiously authoritarian itself, complete with classless moral trappings and finger waving. In short, we have a left which has been tamed by the dominant ideology: TINA.

Lifting the Veil from S DN on Vimeo.

Wobbly times number 97

ELEVEN PRINCIPLES


1. There is no afterlife, so stop worrying about death.


2. Eventually, everyone is forgotten.


3. If love doesn't develop out of some of your friendships, you're doing something wrong with your life.

4. Politically oppressive power can only really be destroyed by equalising political power amongst all men and women.


5. Use the materialist dialectic to pry various unities apart and examine them in their unities and so on to the last particularity you can find.


6. In any initial stage of communism (aka socialism), a producer should be able to draw from the associated producers' social store of goods and services in proportion to what she or he creates, quantified by society-wide, democratically approved/recognised labour time. Four hours of this sort of labour time into the social store gets the producer four hours worth of goods and services from the social store.

7. Never willingly give others the right to censor what you want to say.

A man took a boy to the cemetery saying, "Behold! They all followed the rules. They were good. They didn't complain. Don't you admire them?"

8. Advertising is capitalist graffiti.

9. A wage-slave has no security as an isolated individual which is just another reason why One Big Union of the working class is necessary.

10. There are lots of things and events in life-- motion between people, natural and human made disasters and so on.... Wisdom is having the capacity to choose which to remember and which to forget.


11. Sadists hate free individuals. Puritanical sadists are the worst.

Wobbly times number 89

What the word, 'revolution' means to me and what I'm for.


Revolution is a change in the mode of production based on a change in social relations. Revolution has nothing to do with the violence or peacefulness of societal change. Revolution is not a tactic. A cooperative commonwealth (aka socialism and communism) is the strategic goal of revolutionaries in the modern age. Because we human beings make history, if we're not class conscious enough to demand and organise: the abolition of the wage system; common ownership of the social product of labour, with production based on use (as opposed to commodity exchange), there will be no revolution. At best, those workers actively participating in the class struggle will achieve a continual leftist reform of the capitalist mode of production or perhaps another form of State capitalist production of commodities. [As Marx observes in CAPITAL Volume I, chapter one: "Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself."] At worst, humanity will step backwards into harsher forms of dictatorship under dogmatic, sadistic rulers, out of fear of realising their own freedom and the false notion that they can best survive by embracing the authority of those they find already in established positions of political power over the majority.

In this day and age, achieving more freedom on a societal level lies in the direction of embracing: common ownership of the social product of labour; production for use and need; distribution of collectively produced wealth based on labour time (not the mystifications associated with commodified sale); abolition of wage labour (wage-labour is commodified sale); a classless association of free producers (not a class dominated political State). These are the positions I take in relation to the question of revolution for what I'm talking about is a social revolution, not merely a political revolution where one class replaces another as ruling class of a political State.

Again, my position on revolution has nothing in common with notions about violence, random or otherwise. Nor does it have anything to do with small minorities bravely seizing the State and exercising political power over the majority. I won't become another Blanquist who thinks a tiny core of activists and revolutionaries are all that is needed to effect the most profound change in history: social revolution from class divided society to a classless, free association of producers. Learn this from historical experience: Without the corresponding need for majority support, any political project based on Blanquist tactics and strategy has always ended in the maintenance of class domination, not its sublation. Class rule is the existential condition individuals find themselves under even within a capitalist democracy and its political State. The aim of a revolution is to extend democracy beyond these limitations and can only be achieved by a conscious classwide organisation of democracy within the womb of capitalist class rule. Under the conditions where producers are organised as a class of wage-slaves by employers to produce wealth for the capitalist class, there is little in the way of democratic practice in society.

A free association of producers which is capable of organising as a class, as the overwhelming majority of the population, to take, hold and operate the means of production for themselves would also be quite capable of defending itself, as an organised, classless, Stateless society, from attack from reactionary forces attempting to preserve the condition of wage-slavery over the majority. A classless, grassroots-democratic governing structure is not a political State. Face it, most capitalists and landlords would never take up arms against the majority of a population, class consciously organised and in control of both the means of production and their own collective product of labour. Outside of a few psychopaths, most of our old rulers would just put in their four hours or less labour time like the rest of us and resign themselves to lives without servile politicians and other lackeys to enforce their political power over us as they do nowadays.

Communism means individualism. Not narrow individualism, the 'hooray for me, devil take the hindmost' individualism. Capitalist or narrow individualism is based on a negative dynamic for freedom: My freedom is your un-freedom. We need communist individualism, an individualism firmly based on the principle of equal political power amongst all men and women. Nobody should have more political power than anyone else in a classless association of free producers. This principle, consciously enforced by the association of free producers themselves in a spirit of solidarity will ensure that people attempting to impose political power over others are shunned by consensus, up to and including exclusion from the society for periods of time.


"Thus things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence. This appropriation is first determined by the object to be appropriated, the productive forces, which have been developed to a totality and which only exist within a universal intercourse. From this aspect alone, therefore, this appropriation must have a universal character corresponding to the productive forces and the intercourse.


"The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of the *individual capacities* corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the *individuals* themselves."

from THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY


Again, I was inspired by Marx's notion of communism. I was not attracted to Lenin's nor his followers notions of socialism. Unlike Marx, Lenin, his followers and other ordinary non-leninist social democrats (for example: those in the Social Democratic Party of Germany) all these self-described socialists and communists continually make the case that socialism and communism are different systems. Marx and Engels made the case that socialism and communism were interchangeable terms identifying the same system: a classless society where production would be based on creating use-values with distribution taking place on the basis of the socially necessary labour time put into the creation of total wealth in society. In other words, commodity production would cease in a communist organisation of society. I'm really not that interested in living in a State capitalist society, a society where wage-labour and commodity production continues nor, am I interested in promoting any of the existing State capitalist societies.

My position is that you'll never, 'implement a new society' or 'find ecologically-sustainable solutions' without changing the way social relations are arranged and you can't do that without abolishing wage labour and instituting a mode of production based on what humans find to be useful (for example, it is useful not to destroy the Earth with climate changing technology), as opposed to marketing commodities for sale as is the case within the capitalist matrix of market wage-slavery. Anything less than changing the mode of production, is merely another proposal for the reform of the capitalist mode of production, the mode of production based directly on wage-labour. To be sure, liberal reform is preferable to conservative reform; but reforms do not overturn the set of social relations which result in the vast majority of the population having little or no political power over their own conditions of existence including the enormous quantity of wealth they produce: Wealth which politically empowers ruling classes to control government and the laws we are all supposedly equal under.

I also think that socialism can only come from a conscious act/praxis (the unity of theory and practice) of the workers themselves organised as a class for themselves. Thus, socialist praxis precludes the need for 'goons' or other monsters, like secret police or for that matter for ruling elites. In a classless, democratic society, politically equal human beings can discuss the issues which surround the distribution the product of their collective labour. As for myself, I prefer socially necessary labour time as a transparent solution for handling distribution and contribution in a newly created communist society and that's where my vote goes for the moment.

Commodity production and wage-labour fetishise the individual's social relations within the community of producers. We see ourselves as workers or 'middle class' 'worth' so and so much money. Worth is tied up and mystified with sale: I fetch this and so price on the labour market whereas Joe Blow only gets this much in wages at his job. Alienation of each from each becomes the rule of everyday life. The reality is that we all participate in a giant division of labour to produce the wealth of society and that if one part in the division of labour stops, say through a strike, the other parts suffer which can even lead to a breakdown of society. This reality is forgotten in the narrow indvidualists' fetishised rush to keep their own jobs in the rat race and impress their masters, their employers, and perhaps get a rise in pay in recognition of subaltern obedience. Meanwhile, in spite of all our supplications, mutual throat cutting (in our negative pursuit of freedom) and efforts at liberal reform, the social relation of Capital reproduces the exploitation inherent in the wage system with 10% of the population owning and controlling 88% of the wealth which 90% of the population produces. Along with the unequal distribution of wealth, goes a similar UNEQUAL share of political power in capitalist democracies.

Of course, in a communist democracy 100% of the wealth is owned and controlled by 100% of the people. In such a classless society, where labour time is obvious and open, everyone can see that they put in so an so much time into the creation of the social store of goods and services and that they are entitled to withdraw what they've put in from their own communal store of wealth. The specifics of how this is accomplished is left to the free association of producers deliberating at that time, in other words the society of that time. Unfortunately, there are no such societies today. This is what Marx meant when he quipped that he wasn't about making up recipes for the cook shops of the future as a Utopian Socialist might. The details are left up to the democratic organisation of the people who make the revolutionary change in the mode of production. For instance, a society-wide free association of producers decides how much labour time to deduct from the individual producer's time share in the social store in order to maintain and develop the means of production and social infrastructure. These formulas are not made up in advance of the functioning communist society by self-appointed vanguards.

The concrete knowledge that one contributes, one is actually the producer of society, is a very important aspect of daily life to maintain as it would solidify the philosophical basis of the socialist mode of production and distribution. The subject-object relation would finally be put right-side up in a classless society because this can only be done in a society based on the principle that the product belongs to the producer. Despite the propaganda of the various rulers in the history of class societies, neither kings nor slave masters nor captains of industry have created the wealth of society. Wealth is produced at the grassroots of class society, no matter what sort of class society is under examination. There is nothing against human nature in this principle. Before class societies began to appear some ten thousand years ago, our ancestors associated freely on the basis of kinship, without class division between haves and have not. They enjoyed a direct social relation with each other and held the collective product of their labour in common. This went on for tens of thousands of years. To be sure, class societies were historically necessary to achieve the level of wealth production required to create the potential for modern socialism's level of free-time from necessary labour. But, class societies have reached an historical point where they have become fetters on the greater freedom possible in the here and now and have even become dangerous to the survival of the human race.

Again, I'm for* common ownership* of the collective product of labour. Private ownership of personal goods is fine and in keeping with the individualism of communism e.g. one's home, one's garden, one's shovel, one's vehicle. Private ownership of nature is out of the question. The Earth is not a commodity. One does not own land or the means of production or cities in a classless society. One uses the land one's home is on. One uses the means of production in combination with other producers to create wealth and use that wealth for needs. These collective products of labour are owned socially: They are not sold. Labour time vouchers demystify our relation with what we produce. They are not traded on markets. They are not money. They are not accumulated and passed down in wills; neither is the land we used while we live.

How much labour time is in a dollar or a pound or a euro? Of course, money is a commodified, mystified abstraction. How much labour time is in a voucher which says one hour of labour time? This relation is transparent. How much labour time is in a can of tuna, a house, a car, a bottle of beer? Not many know. They do know how what the prices of various commodities are, including their skills. Skills are commodities in the market for wage-slaves thus, our labour time is estranged in our minds from each other in the division of labour and further, from the total product of labour. And where does this put us but into a mode of selfish, narrowly individualist thinking where each is potentially at the competitive throat of the other in the labour market.

As for slackers in a classless society, they can go off and live on their own as far as I am concerned. I doubt whether many people would be averse to shunning them. I certainly wouldn't be averse to it. Of course, some may feel guilt ridden enough to continue to support them through their own charity. Go ahead. However, my view is that if we don't do our bit, the revolution will never be made. Solidarity is about doing your bit to get a free society going. Scabs and slackers act the role of thieves within the working class movement for freedom from wage-slavery and for social ownership of the common product of labour. A four hour day max is all we need put in, probably a whole lot less. Four hours or less, shouldn't be a problem for anyone, unless they're sick or too young or too old and of course, solidarity with those members of society is a given. A classless society cares for its own. As with everything else, it takes nothing but our labour time in solidarity and love: There are no prices. Production is carried on for use and need and with a view toward, 'living in harmony with the Earth.'