this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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Antiwork
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We're trying to reduce the numbers of hours a person has to work.
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We talk about the end of paid work being mandatory for survival.
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It really doesn't tho, not inherently. I've worked ag throughout my life and there's nothing about food production in and of itself that's quantitatively a lot of work.
The hardest it gets historically is subsistence farming with no commons/wilds, and that generally isn't gonna be close to the 2,000 hours of labor a year that we now consider the minimum. Hunter/gatherer is gonna average less than 4 hours a day (large variations globally and historically ofc). In a well-maintained food forest even less than that.
Technology has increased food production efficiency like a thousandfold, to where a single person's worth of labor can produce enough food for dozens to hundreds of people.
What is a lot of work, though, is being forced to produce surplus value for a non-working owner class. That held true for the peasants working 1,000-1,500 hours a year to feed themselves and their lords, and it holds true for the workers currently working 2,000-4,000 a year to feed themselves and fatten bosses and landlords. That's the whole point of the post, to describe the enclosure of the commons.