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.
Which was the point of civilization. To isolate us from that hell.
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).
We can and must do better than that.
I said this on Reddit and they agreed that you don't deserve to be alive if you're not working, it's really a disease of the mind to believe this shit.
I mean it does make sense if you keep in mind that we traded having to hunt and forage for a system that let's you buy these things indirectly with currency.
You just need to leave out the whole thing of empathy and morality and reduce the whole system to a exchange of goods and services for money.
There is a difference between believing everyone owes a debt to the society and civilization you participate in to support those who cannot support themselves, and not deserving to live if you didn't fit into the rigid hierarchy structures we've built for work. But often these sentiments get mixed together.
I could see why tho. What happens today is not the same as this ideal probably. You could argue that if your a fit, 20s, healthy, etc. and you just sit home all day, your kinda a waste, but then again siting somewhere else 9-5 is also a waste so.
Eh, I can see why would someone think that. There are things that I disagree with more.
This meme is mainly talking about workers who are worked to death to "earn a living". Capitalists who leech off of workers do not deserve to be alive.
Of course, that's not the case for those who are physically unable to work to the same extent as others. Basically, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
We have more than enough resources for everyone, so long as the working class can control the means of production instead of the capitalists who try to hoard all the wealth.
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
I would say most of them are working harder than the people above them.
Ain't that the truth.
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.
They're working just as hard as the people above them
Woah woah woah, let's not get out of hand here. We all know they're working way harder than the people above them.
only one way... come on lets not do flattery to the capitalist class here
That is 100% true in a capitalist society. You are measured by your ability to produce.
Edit: Apparently this needs some clarification. You are measured by your ability to produce for your owner.
It's also true in the woods, if you don't do anything useful you'll just die.
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.
... or by your ability to steal from others and getting away with it.
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.
I mean if you think about it, the default of humanity is to die of thirst assuming we were to do nothing so 'earning a living' is just a realistic expectation for any society.
If able, you should provide enough to society to make it worth meeting your basic needs. They give you food, water, shelter, you give them back enough to compensate them for that effort.
At its root, this is what cash should be, a measure of what society owes you. You make other people's lives X much better, and they do the same for you.
We should really be trying harder to get cash to meet this goal. A person making 60k a year for 45 years is $2.7 million dollars. You can buy a person's lifetime of effort for $2.7 million.
Bill Gates is worth $131 billion. That's the lifetime effort of 48,500 people. He hasn't improved our lives that much. Something is clearly out of sorts. There's nothing one person can do to deserve the lifetime effort of a thousand people.
Being evil pays really well. Sometimes.
If you follow that reasoning, the ultimate conclusion is that it's perfectly fine to let sick or disabled people die.
Let them ..... well yes eventually you will have to let them, as you can't stop them.
Forcing them along that path though, yeah that's not cool.
I don't see what point you're trying to make, unless you think I need a ~~reindeer~~ reminder that everyone eventually dies.
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 whatever. You still don't get to justify sitting on your ass and doing literally nothing unless crippled or ancient.
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".
Thank you Mr. Skeletor. It is important to get the occasional outside perspective on living from an undead evil villain. Nyeh.
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.
Thank you brave friend. I came here to say this.
I’m so fatigued by the sentiment behind this meme and so many others.
Ergh… there’s something intruding on my video game playing… what an inconvenience… boo hoo…
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 could be living in a post-scarcity society, but our capitalist overlords can’t profit from that, so, here we are.
I would love to live in a society where robots over produce everything. Unfortunately that isn't our reality.
We live in interesting times. Every year it gets more interesting.
Youths of today discovering idioms of yesteryear going, "mm technically, this implies..." as if that wasn't the obvious, intended implication to begin with.
"Your system is functioning as intended - no maintenance necessary."
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.
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
And yet we get born. Motherfuckers!
I suppose it was the same back in the ancient times but you had to ask the saber kitty if you were worthy of passing your genes or not. /S
Sword Logic
