25-hour workweek and communal property: the debate resurfaces

The communal as an alternative: 25-hour workweek and fewer taxes?

This week, a proposal as radical as it is recurrent has returned to economic discussion: reducing the workweek to 25 hours, combining private property with communal goods, and, in the process, dismantling the State. The idea, which might sound like a youthful utopia, has generated intense debate in alternative circles, with defenders and skeptics clashing over arguments ranging from the history of enclosures to the viability of self-management.

The argument in favor: wage slavery and the communal as a way out

Those who advocate this model argue that a life of consumerism and wage labor of 50 hours per week is a form of modern slavery. The enemy, they say, is the State, which reduces us to taxpayers. They propose a dual property system: private housing and communal property, with minimal tax burden. They calculate that States will implode in 150 or 200 years, but that the revolution must start now. Criticism of the 2030 agenda and crypto-bubbles as substitutes for real organization also appears.

The argument against: from communal to the new caste

Critics, however, recall that communal management historically leads to parallel bureaucracies. The original model of communal goods in Spain worked through direct social control, not through committees of experts with public salaries. They also point out that the so-called collaborative economy has actually been a "digital cheapness" that enriches intermediaries, and that the enclosure of land was legalized expropriation to create cheap labor. The question remains: how to prevent the communal from ending up as another racket worse than the current one?

The deadlock of the debate

The debate has no easy answer. But at least it forces us to ask whether the only alternative to 50-hour capitalism is another State, or if there is a middle path that history has already judged and of which barely ashes remain.