Not only that, but as time goes on, we become more productive and generate more profits, only to see the age of retirement increased
Age of retirement goes up, working hours stay the same(or sometimes even get worse), wages go down(compared to inflation), and we still only have two measly weekend days. And the real kicker is that we know for a fact that we’d actually be even more productive if we soent less time at work.
It’s all horseshit.
Literally a modern serfdom
See, it's not the working that's the issue. It's the lack of control over our surplus value. It's the lack of control over the means of production.
Can't forget the terrible consequences of failing to meet "quota" (make enough to pay the bills).
But thanks for pointing this out, it really is similar, just with enough layers of abstraction to make the structure hard to see.
I thought lemmy already surpassed this "stage"
This isnt a shitpost
I agree, this is simply stating fact.
You should tell this to subsistence farmers living in Sub-saharan Africa that farm nearly every calorie they consume. It's a negotiation between them, the earth, and the uncaring sky. Same as its been for millennia. No rich people necessarily involved.
Are they free because no rich people are involved?
We live in an economically connected world. An argument can be made that they're forced to subsistence farm in a backbreaking and cruel way due to the natural resources of their country extracted by oligarchs that don't even live in Africa.
Wherever poverty exists, rich people are involved by their sheer unwillness to share enough to meet everyone's basic needs.
I thought bill gates cured poverty in Africa because he’s such a nice guy.
Is every person in those communities required to work to eat and have shelter, or does the community take care of those that are unable to contribute labor due to health conditions/old age?
I can imagine by some stretch you can still blame the rich, maybe without the rich people they'd have more access to better farmland, cheap water, etc.
Rich people are very likely at fault, too, given that shitty countries are handy for cheap labour and materials, like coltan...
Explain how that works with a village of 350 people 4k from a paved road, where no one can or does work outside of the village doing farming work.
The lack of rich people doesn't imply freedom - people who are forced to hunt, gather, fish or farm for subsistence only with no reward beyond that are enslaved to the need to produce food and find shelter, but that differs from a society where there's sufficient food and shelter, it's just hoarded by those who have too much
Additionally the presence of rich people doesn't imply a lack of freedom - you could have a "safety net" system where everyone is guaranteed housing and enough grains and beans/similar to survive, and if they want more they can work for it (some of the taxes from this go towards compensating farmers and builders), giving people the freedom to not have to worry about survival, while also allowing for people to earn lots of money and buy nice things if they want and/or can
Is there anyone who genuinely believes that working for basic needs is freedom?
I imagine the people who actually think about how they are working just for basic needs are mostly a different group of people than those yelling about freedom.
I don't know how many conservatives wake up in the morning with the feeling that everything they do is just to make some rich guy richer until they eventually die. Because why would they be a conservative at that point?
From my experience they believe that it’s an executive’s right to do shitty things for money if the law allows for it. They also believe that it’s some other person(who generally has it much worse and can’t easily fight back) who is making their lives hard for them.
A charicature(though not by much) to make my point clear would be: “it’s the immigrants’ fault that my boss needs to deny my raise and dodge their taxes again! It’s regulation’s fault that I can’t afford anything, not my shit wage combined with landlords and real-estate speculators working tirelessly to fuck everyone over! I’d get to work faster if they took out that bike lane! The woke mind virus is why I can’t find a “female”, not my shitty personality that they’re finally able to have the freedom and unity to not put up with anymore!”
This ain’t a shitpost, but it is a realpost
Yeah, I was confounded as to what about this was a shitpost.
A society must consist of individuals willing to perform labor- that much I know. I also know the current system isn't working
Yeah the deal is, you do a sensible and helpful amount of work, and get taken care of in return, like (almost) everybody else.
If you work long hours, it's because it's thrilling and you choose to, even when money isn't involved.
You're free to use your enormous wealth to secure a comfortable life for yourself and your ilk, just like they are.
That's the logic. Law of the jungle. The strongest survive. And that's why freedom absolutists are either moronic or evil.
I do wonder what the alternative is... Would that be growing/hunting your own food and making your own clothes and building your own shelter? I don't know about anyone else, but I would not live long in that scenario.
The context is that there is enough wealth in most western countries that not everyone must work to survive. Working should be for having access to more things that just surviving, and not everyone should be required to work all the time just to survive.
Basic needs are basic, like food, shelter, and healthcare. If everyone had access to those basic things they would be free even if they need to work to attain more.
Someone still has to work for those things to be produced.
True, but how many people actually work to make that happen?
Most people I know work for a company that works for a company to increase the profit of another company.
There is a vast gap between "most people need to work for everyone in society to live comfortably" and "every individual needs their own personal income to survive".
The amount of brainwashing and propaganda is incredible. People actually just can't imagine a world where they're not toiling for their bosses.
It's insane. And any attempt to argue against it is shut down immediately. This post (https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/?v=3) is one of the most digestible things I've seen for the scale at which those people hoard wealth. It's so easy to follow and understand how the world could be better if those people didn't exist. But anyone I try talking to says "oh I'm not going to read all that" or "scrolling through that will take too long" ...which is exactly the fucking point. And this is from 4 years ago! Their wealth has only increased while our buying power has gone down.
While I don’t disagree. there don’t have to be dragons hoarding all the wealth making us fight among ourselves to survive
The point is that technology means a fraction of the population can feed and house the rest, and that fraction doesn't need to live like royalty, and the rest don't need to live in servitude for that exchange to happen.
Don't you want others to enjoy your success with you? Apply that principle to all of humanity the world over, and you have what could be, if we just stopped waring over hoards.
Surely there isn't an economic system in which people don't work for a top 1%, but for everyone, you could say a communal, or a social, economic system...
I mean, that experiment has been run and it is wildly difficult to manage (humans are quite wily!).
People said the same thing about not having kings
Well, we will need some different, better minds on it to see success. I'd embrace it if I thought someone had any vague idea of how to execute it.
There are lots of people with very precise ideas about how to execute it, and most of these people are not widely studied. The communist states that arose in the 20th century are all representatives of a narrow slice of authoritarian statist communism called Marxism-Leninism. If you want to learn about other ways of organizing a communist society, you can read the writings of other figures like Bakunin, Kropotkin, Pannekoek, Öcalan, etc. Many of these people were outspoken critics of existing communist states.
When you're in a crowd waiting to get on a bus, do you shove and claw your way past the crowd, or do you wait your turn like everyone else? Is there anyone telling you to do that?
When a natural disaster strikes and we watch the news of cities being flooded/destroyed, do you see people raping and murdering eachother en masse because society broke down? Do you see them rebuilding only because someone above them on the hierarchy told them to? Or do people rebuild because they need to?
If your village was thirsty and didn't have a well, would you ask someone for permission to dig the well so only that it benefits the person you're begging to? Or do you and the village just build the damn well?
I'm more atheists than most atheists, because I go two gods further - Money and the "State."
The alternative is all the wealth and resources hoarded by top 1% are shared among people so that everyone has access to basic stuff like food, shelter and healthcare regardless of whether they're able to work.
Which isn't to say this would be easy to achieve, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
It's called democratic socialism.
It's way more complicated than that. Say hypothetically, we have an abundance of milk which we don't but assume we do, so everyone can have as much milk as they wanted, and nobody needs to pay for it. First of all, the entire supply chain of milk production, packaging, & distribution must still exist & function efficiently, & maintain quality standards, much like it does in the current developed world. People will still need to work, farmers must still milk the cows, factories must still produce and package, goods must still be transported to and shelved on retail outlets for customers to access it. Someone still needs to clean the retail floor, and someone still needs to engage with the customers, and you need a way to reasonably compensate everyone involved. Second of all, what about milk derivatives that are not abundant, like cheese or butter or your favorite Greek yogurt? They are not in abundance, so you're back to a scarcity economy and you need to figure out how to reasonably distribute them based on need.
Many people sincerely believe certain kinds of labor to be valued at less than the cost of a decent human livelihood.
Modern Slavery
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