You need to consume to live. This means you need to manipulate your surroundings in order to survive. So you need to work to have your basic needs meet. You don’t just get to live with zero effort.
You didn’t read the article, did you? We already live in a post scarcity society. All of our scarcity, at least the kinds that are meaningful to the working class, is manufactured. We throw away perfectly good food in the dumpsters behind grocery stores because nobody paid for it, while people on the streets starve. Properties sit empty as an investment for corporations while people die out in the elements.
I really don’t think you understand how many people are in this world. Sure grocery stores donating food instead of throwing it away would help some. But providing good quality food to 8 billion people is not possible. Imo.
Is there a point of disability at which you no longer believe someone should be cared for? Like, say someone is colourblind and has no other conditions, do you think that person needs to earn their life?
It’s really hard to actually accept that as a capitalist’s opinion. Liberals tend to say all kinds of nice things, and then turn around and pass policies that completely contradict that. Like, y’all say I deserve to live and then you don’t implement a UBI. It’s like you’re lying to yourselves that you’re actually nice people.
You mean at once? Heroin and cocaine. Over a lifetime? Good health, useful work, kind deeds, meaningful relationships, safety, self-determination, knowledge, and fun.
This is the natural order, yet paraplegics live, why? Because we live in a society that attempts to circumvent the natural order in many ways, for the good of all.
You should take a broader materialistic look on society, who does the work (the working class), who benefits from the work (the owner class), and instead of focusing on amping up people to devote their lives to serve the interests of capital, instead focus to reframe the goals of society to serve the interests of workers, which includes working less, or even not at all. Work is not labor.
That’s an entirely different argument. I agree with you on that topic. Reframing capitalism to fit human well being is what we should do. But feeding everyone for free with zero work from anyone just isn’t possible. Saying there are starving people because capitalism is just straight up wrong. There have always been starving people and probably will always be. Feeding everyone is logistically crazy difficult. If it ever did happen it would take a ridiculous amount of work and money from a lot of people.
Socialists use work and labor to describe different things. Work is the set of actions a worker is coerced to participate in by capitalists to align with the interests of capital. Labor can be something you engage in as part of work, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes people have jobs that are so inefficient or bullshit that they literally don’t labor at all at work (read Bullshit Jobs).
Labor is necessary (currently), work is not. Aligning with the interests of capital is not synonymous with the interests of humanity (think ad work, literally encouraging greater consumption, especially around harmful products like tobacco/alcohol/sugar. Most western countries now have bans on tobacco advertising, but still let advertising in general flourish).
On the topic of feeding everyone, it would be very logistically difficult in the 1600s no doubt. Now we have a massive international trade system, I can easily get massive amounts of goods shipped from the other side of the world in weeks or maybe months at the worst. We also produce enough food currently to feed 12 billion people, and that’s with our incredibly inefficient system of converting edible plant matter (mostly soy) to animals.
The issue is, under capitalism, poor people don’t deserve to eat. If they lack money, they’re better off dead than alive and consuming resources without paying for them, so that’s what the global international capitalist system does, it moves more than enough food great enough distances to feed everyone as it is. It just moves it to the rich countries where obesity has been a massive issue instead of the global south, because people in rich countries have the money to pay for food, and so they deserve to live (and overeat/waste food) but people born in Africa deserve death.
Capitalists often lose sight of what an economy is for. An economy isn’t something of value in and of itself, it’s about setting up incentives and systems to benefit humanity. Capitalism fails to do this in everyway that is uniquely capitalist. Anything it does right is attributed to the general functioning of markets, which existed before capitalism and can exist after capitalism (market socialism is a real thing). There are problems with markets no doubt, but capitalism really has no redeeming qualities when compared to market socialism. If you compare it to feudalism, it does do better at mobilizing productive forces, of course at the massive detriment to workers.
We can provide shitty cheap unhealthy food to everyone sure. It wouldn’t be easy but yeah we could probably do that. But we absolutely would not be able to give people the kind of food they actually need.
It should be sure. But that’s not our reality. Even if you take away monetary value things still hold more practical value. Try collecting and making food for 20 people. Go outside and find all that or grow it or whatever you have to do to get it tell me how long it’s you and how difficult it was to do. Now multiply that effort to 8 billion people.
I will play along with your experiment if you give me control of the government. That seems only fair, since we’re talking about the government providing for everyone.
In any good society everyone who is able should be expected to contribute something though. Even in the wild you have the right to be alive but you don’t have the right to free food, shelter etc without working for it
Similarly under capitalism you’re not going to be executed for not working but also unless there’s a good reason you can’t contribute nobody’s going to work to feed you for nothing in return
You do have a right to be alive, if you can gather the food to put in your mouth and get shelter (in most climates), and defend yourself from predators.
‘Earning a living’ is just some way people can do that. But you still need to defend against the predators.
Gee, I thought our standards of living had raised since the hunter gatherer days. I thought we had an idea of human rights. But it seems that advocates of capital like yourself are more willing to let the disabled die than most hunter gatherer tribespeople would be. All our wealth, and you people are more miserly with it than those who have nearly nothing.
Our standards of living have increased, and that’s nice. But there is no question of whether or not anyone deserves to live. You simply live, until you don’t, like all life.
The increase in standards of living isn’t because we have eradicated the underlying animal needs, but rather, because we have been meeting them effectively. Sadly, this is only in the short term - we have major species-wide issues with our long-term course, but that, perhaps, is another conversation.
In any case, by denying the fundamental system you are based in, and demanding that survival not take any energy, you undercut your own foundation, and that causes problems for you.
Human rights are a social contract. They are nice, and we should keep them. However, they don’t eradicate the animal and natural foundation upon which we stand, and they absolutely must bend to necessity.
You have an animal right to exist until you die by natural processes, like disease, old age, predation, etc. You have a human right not to be tortured, enslaved, etc, because that is a goal we all agree on. But you don’t have a right to have other animals take care of all of your needs when they don’t want to. That would be slavery.
Take your eugenics pseudoscience bullshit and shove it up your ass.
There is no if. We’re a social species, if everyone thought like you, people like Stephen Hawking would have never lived a full life.
We lose so many good people to the “earn it” mentality.
Babies don’t come out the womb walking. Nor are people born with the ability to hunt. Everything you have was given to you by another. Your mother didn’t ask you to earn it until you could, and whether or not people can is largely determined by their environment.
Not to mention, how fucking arrogant do you have to be to demand someone earn the right to live? Who do you think you are, God?
And then there is the little problem of capitalism rewarding people who “earned it” who are actually bad for society. Unless you think people like Biden and Trump somehow are more competent than most people? Both are rich and powerful people. Yet one is a genocidal asshole and the other is a con man. You’d have to be crazy to think they earned their power. I’d wager there are many homeless people that do less harm to the world than either.
Take your eugenics pseudoscience bullshit and shove it up your ass.
How very rational and social of you to make assumptions about what I’m saying and to attack me based on that. Shall we move on?
There is no if. We’re a social species, if everyone thought like you, people like Stephen Hawking would have never lived a full life.
Firstly - you’re making a lot of assumptions about how I think. Secondly - this is like those billboards that say “This baby was destined to cure cancer, but she was aborted.” It has no merit. What happened in reality was, in a world where there are constraints on available energy, some people took care of Stephen Hawking (which is great). I have no problem with that. But those people are not obligated to. They did so for their own reasons, and we’re all the richer for it.
Had they been forced to, that would simply be slavery.
We lose so many good people to the “earn it” mentality.
Perhaps that is because it’s an important facet of life. While not the only facet, it’s an important one. If you deny that, it will simply continue happening, only you’ll feel violated by its existence. If you accept it, you can see that it has areas of applicability, and areas where it’s not applicable. …and the whole us-vs-them fuck-the-man bullshit goes right out the window, along with the whole ‘fuck everyone else, it’s all cold and hard, i’m just gonna get mine’ bullshit.
Babies don’t come out the womb walking. Nor are people born with the ability to hunt. Everything you have was given to you by another. Your mother didn’t ask you to earn it until you could, and whether or not people can is largely determined by their environment.
Absolutely. We all stand on the foundations that have been created by others and by fundamental processes. If we don’t care for others, we lose not just the capacity to pass on what we have built and learned, but also some pretty core stuff that makes the human experience worthwhile.
However, the underlying processes of life and death, of energy requirements, and of rational necessity also cannot be denied without paying a huge cost in quality of life, and in life itself.
Not to mention, how fucking arrogant do you have to be to demand someone earn the right to live? Who do you think you are, God?
I make no demands. I simply state what the underlying reality is. To me, it looks like you are subject to the requirement that you must “earn a living”, or have someone earn a living for you - regardless of whether you are a human in a capitalist society, a socialist one, or one that accepts or denies your sovereignty. Hell, you could even be a plant, and you’d still have to do the things required for survival. One way people think of that is ‘earning a living.’ But, of course, you can think of it (or not) however makes you happy.
And then there is the little problem of capitalism rewarding people who “earned it” who are actually bad for society. Unless you think people like Biden and Trump somehow are more competent than most people? Both are rich and powerful people. Yet one is a genocidal asshole and the other is a con man. You’d have to be crazy to think they earned their power. I’d wager there are many homeless people that do less harm to the world than either.
I don’t think they earned their power. I think they are examples of the way in which our current systemic principles are failing. As our principles fail (all do at some point), they start to leak power, which gets snapped up by whatever form of life (like genocidal assholes and conmen) that is willing to seize that power niche. But, they are like starving people, fighting for scraps rather than ensuring there will be food. Or like drowning people, pulling down anyone who tries to help. I can’t really blame them - that’s the situation they were put into - but I definitely wouldn’t back them. Better to do things a way that does work.
Had they been forced to, that would simply be slavery.
Having a mutual obligation to care for others in your community is exactly the same as being rounded up at gunpoint, ripped from your homeland, shipped to a field or a mine halfway across the world, and forced to toil all day every day for barely enough to survive on until you inevitably succumb to the horrible conditions inflicted upon you
It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
Having a mutual obligation to care for others in your community is exactly the same as being rounded up at gunpoint, ripped from your homeland, shipped to a field or a mine halfway across the world, and forced to toil all day every day for barely enough to survive on until you inevitably succumb to the horrible conditions inflicted upon you
Actually, “earning a living” is an example of an idiom, and it is not meant to be interpreted literally. It just means aquiring the income necessary to pay for the basic expenses of modern life. You may also notice that people rarely find themselves inside of pickles or with butterflies in their stomachs, but before you get angry that someone is suggesting you should break your leg, remember that figurative speech is fairly common.
Yeah! Dumb babies expecting a handout! Fuck em, they need to earn their keep, let’s leave them on a mountain and see if they come back with ore to sell for breast milk.
This is wishful thinking. People are not paid according to their productivity, although it is a minor factor. People are paid accordingly for a variety of factors including region, negotiating ability, charisma, job demand (the more a job is objectively helpful the less it is paid because people are willing to do it for its own merits), and network if they are commoners. If they are born into the ruling class or have amassed enough wealth to live through arbitrage, there is no requirement to produce anything other than the idea that you are productive.
The owner doesn’t pay proportionally to their worker’s ability to produce, they pay according to how little they can get away with since in order to profit it is necessary to minimize expenses. If two employees are important but the less productive employee refuses to work for less than a certain amount and the more productive employee is satisfied with what they’re being paid, the less productive employee will be paid more.
Not true. If I have a group of people and they believe I’m extremely wealthy I don’t have to do anything but promise to share my wealth with them according to how much I value them, making them compete with each other for my affection. This counts as work and it takes skill but I wouldn’t say that doing this is useful.
If you think about the brutality of nature, which we are mostly isolated from, then yeah, organisms in general do have to earn their right to life through overcoming and eating other organisms.
Even in a civilization someone has to produce food so you’ll survive. Civilization doesn’t mean no one has to work.
If you do no work but because of civilization you still have food to eat, it means someone else is working to earn your living for you.
This bizarre meme implies work has no value, and was likely made by a wealthy university socialist that had everything paid for by their parents so doesn’t understand the value of work.
This meme does not state no one needs to work. It states you don’t need to earn your place among the living. You’ve already done so by virtue of being born. I think that is a noble goal for a society to uphold. Higher ideals are, of course, what separates us from the realm of animal urges. Once you begin to mix laws of the jungle back into society the point of our isolation from it is subverted. If we truly are the greatest Earth has to offer, surely we can figure so.
Even Marie Antoinette wasn’t so disconnected from the peasants to say “let them eat higher ideals.”
Someone has to work so you can survive. If you don’t want to work, society will take care of you. You’ll still be living, but you aren’t earning it, someone else is earning it for you.
Who here is saying “No one should work” no one except maybe the most high on their own farts anarchist is saying that. The end goal of marxism is “From each According to their abilities to each according to their needs” their will be work, The farm will be ploughed. THe difrence is all will be provided for.
Once again, this is not saying society will take care of you and everyone will just sit on their bussies and no one will ever lift a finger. This is repealing the idea that you have to earn your stake to be considered human and alive in a world that has abstracted everything away to just getting funny paper. People will still farm and cultivate crops. There are people who want to do that now. Are you vehemently opposed to people just feeling and being accepted from birth? I for one think a society built on more welcoming foundations would see less crime and more work.
Sure there are people that want to farm. But are there people that want to want to deal with sewage? Why do you think plumbers earn more money than other trades?
I want to run a cafe instead of what I’m doing right now. I don’t want to be a waiter of wash dishes or anything like that. I just want to design the menus and decide on how it’s decorated. Is that the job I’ll have in a socialist utopia, or will I have to do a job I don’t want to do? What if there’s already too many cafes, or not enough people that want to be waiters or was dishes? I won’t have to do anything but I’ll still be provided for?
In the end there will always be people doing jobs they don’t particularly want to do. Someone’s gotta unclog the sewage when the elite of the socialist society plug the pipes with the overabundance of shit they spew out.
How about capitalism? How many MBAs does the world need? Marketing consultants? Advertising cosultants? IT consultants? Consultant consultants? There are countless jobs that serve the machine and no other purpose that benefits society. Somebody will do the necessary jobs. There are more incentives than you realize. For instance, what if I want more than my UBI pays me? Plumbing has entered the chat. The only reason you defend this system so hard as the epitome is because nobody has experienced anything else but this. Its scary I know, but there are more ways than one to exist, and every system has its trade-offs. But our social contract between our governments in clearly broken, we are clearly strung along on the whims of shareholders and capital. Say what you will, but I think we can do better than “those people deserve to starve son, they have no jobs.”
In no capitalist society that I know of will you be executed for not working - you have a right to life
What you don’t have the right to is someone else to provide for you if you don’t give anything back
That said I’m fairly sure with the amount of automation we have everyone should need to put in a whole lot less work than they do to keep society afloat
What you don’t have the right to is someone else to provide for you if you don’t give anything back
Yes you do. Lots of people are on disability benefits, unemployment, a pension, or are literal children. And those programs should be expanded to cover everyone who doesn’t work, not just those who can justify their existence to a government form.
What are you saying? That you wouldn’t give anything back if not for the threat of homelessness and starvation? I don’t need a threat to make the world a better place.
I’m sure I’d give something back but I’m also sure most of it wouldn’t be of much use to anyone else, I’d be working on stuff like mods, niche tools for myself that probably 3 people on earth would find useful, and stupid ideas for fun like some streamers get to
Listen, I don’t think it’d be as disasterous for anyone with a passion. The people who would be fucked and have to adjust are the ones whose only goal is get money. Imo thats not a healthy way to be a human as it usually has a price tag of everyone else. Theres constant suffering every day and most of it is in the name of profits. Shit, my boss acts like it’d murder him to get me 10k more a year so I am not below the american median when in reality the company wouldn’t even count that as pocket change, I see the revenue and expenses every day. The sociopaths control and benefit from this system and you defend it. Its like a strange stockholm syndrome.
Passions don’t necessary line up with something that’s beneficial to society is my point.
Absolutely the distribution of wealth at the moment is far from fair and I wish we could fix that, but I still think short of everything being automated even in a utopia where we do everything perfectly as a society people still have to do jobs they don’t want to because there are jobs noone wants to do that need doing
I highly doubt anyone has a passion for working in the service industry, cleaning up the messes kids make at school or collecting people’s rubbish but they’re jobs that need doing and people do them because they’re compensated for them
Less than two steps between that and eugenics, and one step between eugenics and genocide. We’ve seen and documented that. It’s a logical but sociopathic mentality.
Conversely, when we realise that we’re stronger together and act empathetically as a society, every one of us and all of society benefits. When we care for the least of us, crime goes down and we find geniuses who improve life for us all, who would otherwise die in anonymous poverty.
Living like barbarous animals – not rising above the ‘brutality of nature’, as you said – helps sociopaths who take advantage of our better nature to enrich themselves. Indeed, if we structure our society around that, as we have done lately, our society will devolve around the lowest common denominator (people like Musk or Trump).
Your comment would have hit much harder as a rejection of cruelty and advocacy for kindness if you haven’t thrown sociopaths under the bus. Most sociopaths are poor people, and they’re all disabled.
Youths of today discovering idioms of yesteryear going, “mm technically, this implies…” as if that wasn’t the obvious, intended implication to begin with.
We're always told the people at the bottom rung of society, the people doing "entry level" jobs just need to work harder and harder to earn a proper living...
But how does that work really? Unlike a lot of high level jobs, none of these jobs just exist for the sake of existing, most of these "entry level" jobs are essential to society (we saw that much during the pandemic).
Somebody has to do them or society just doesn't work, so don't the people doing these literally essential jobs deserve to be paid a fair living wage? They're working just as hard as the people above them, yet they're paid peanuts in comparison
Id never worked harder than when I was working retail as a HS student. And the worst part is interacting with assholes who thought you were beneath them, which I think it’s what this meme underlines.
was lucky to be well off to get an education which provided a way to land a cushy SW job. Mentally stressful at times sure, but I didn’t have to take shit from somebody and worry if I could afford my next meal. And I see the same ego on the other side here, where people sneer or condescend towards min wage workers.
So many things we take for granted are just down to luck, or lack thereof.
Now I don’t know how it would feel to be wealthy. Where money ceases to be something you need to think about on a day to day basis, but I think that’s when it just becomes a status symbol, and you have to make more only because the Jones bought their 4th yacht, so of course you can’t be seen with less than that! It never ends, and that’s why I think rich-ass capitalists can never have enough, because in their mind the competition never ends and no amount is ever enough.
I’m pro unconditional basic income, but I would argue that it’s more about you having to make sure you have everything you need yourself. No one would say to someone who lives completely self-sufficient that he needs “to earn a living”.
Add comment