#furry artisians

[fraymotiff]

Guys its my cringesona whats up

[loving-n0t-heyting]

as someone who does sadly get most of their information through posts (looking to change that but also, busy and bad at reading) can you elaborate/explain the theory behind how artisians should be paid for their labor?

(disclaimer that i am not an expert, and also do not attribute to marx/engels the kind of prophetic status a lot of ppl on here do, but do know enough to spot some truly egregious eisegesis)

a big theme in marx/engels is the "socialisation of production" under capitalism; it comes up in capital, obviously, but also in a lot of shorter works, including eg socialism: utopian and scientific. it refers to the integration of formerly bespoke, domestic, individual productive labour into industrialised, public, mass production whose paradigm case is the industrial textile factory in contrast to women's household production of fabric goods. this is essential to capitalisms ability to reap the efficiency benefits of economies of scale, and to its formation of a large cohesive working class responsible for the tasks of production, while coming at the cost of making any given individual's level of contribution to overall output imprecise and illegible. it stands in contrast to medieval feudal production, in which it makes more sense to think of the labouring peasants as a large number of individualised workers whose productivity scales more or less linearly wrt man-hours of work

marx/engels dont see this process as essentially good per se; they clearly regard it as a very serious exacerbator of exploitation and class inequality. but it is for them bound up with the possibility of a communist transition: the efficiency and wide-scale social integration afforded by socialisation are an important part of what lays the groundwork for a transition to socialism/communism under an organised working class, and it is why socialism was hitherto at best a pious wish detached from economic reality. so in this sense capitalist socialisation is a (latently) revolutionary development, and opposition to it is reactionary

this marxist attachment to the socialisation of production goes hand in hand with a suspicion of peasants and small-scale artisans (both often falling under the reviled heading of "petite bourgeois"). theirs is a form of production incompatible with socialisation: insofar as they are peasants or small-scale artisans rather than proletarians, their way of life is inimical to mass, industrialised, divided labour, and thus is inherently reactionary. this was a source of major friction between marx/engels and other less "scientific" socialists of the time, such as proudhon, who saw in individual artisans a preferable alternative to industrial capitalist barons. and this why ppl talking about marx spinning in his grave over bespoke seamstress hobbyists getting paid poorly are being idiots: handwringing over the payment due to such small-scale, unsocialised producers is antithetical to his core revolutionary beliefs

now you shouldnt take this too seriously purely in and of itself. the fact marx said smth is not in its own right a great reason to believe it if yr not already committed to thinking he was the brilliantest most insightfulest economist ever to walk the earth. he wasnt a fucking oracle. and in particular a lot of the most annoying leftists on this site are eager to import into wholly inappropriate contexts (like bizarre shittings on etsy artists and patreon furry illustrators) sentiments at home in 19th cent. tirades against small textile merchants. but if yr going to invoke the name of one of historys most prominent political philosophers as some sort of socialist talisman its not a good look if you bungle the contents of his writings that badly