- cross-posted to:
- shitposting@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- shitposting@lemmy.ml
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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.
Basic needs and the infrastructure required should be covered by taxes. “Luxury” items like greek yogurt can be capitalized.
FuckYouDontTakeMyGreekYoghurt!!
Many people sincerely believe certain kinds of labor to be valued at less than the cost of a decent human livelihood.
Not only that, but as time goes on, we become more productive and generate more profits, only to see the age of retirement increased
This productivity increase has been happening since the start of humanity.
It’s kind of accumulative effect given the gains from technology we have
It makes sense that people will be able to work then more years, as your qol is also increasing as well
We’re more productive than ever and there’s more of us than ever and your conclusion to that information is that of course we should also be working more than ever?
You don’t question that if there’s more of us and we’re all more productive, then we should be doing less work? Because if we were able to meet our needs before then it should be even easier to meet our needs now as we’re more productive per person than before and we also have even more people capable of doing the work.
What you’re saying makes sense only if you put the production of goods above the wellbeing of the people producing the goods. So ask yourself, what’s the purpose of producing goods? If it’s not for us then who is it for?
Wtf indeed
deleted by creator
Modern Slavery
I thought lemmy already surpassed this “stage”
This isnt a shitpost
I agree, this is simply stating fact.
You know, if you lived self-sufficient you’d still have to work for meeting basic needs. Even in pretty much any form of socialism you are expected to work. So yeah, I don’t know what you think you are saying, but I think you are saying a whole lot of nothing here
The problem isnt the work, the problem is you dont get most of the reward for it. It all sits in some nepo baby ceos bank account, probably overseas so they never pay taxes on it either. Every company does this, and competing with them is a risk with a 98% casaulty rate
Which is funny and sad because keeping the fruits of your labor instead of contributing to some collective is the argument for capitalism and against socialism in standard American politics.
Obviously work has to be done, but if the 1% wasn’t hoarding all the value we’re creating, we’d be able to work less AND be better off. How is it that in an era of technology and automation, we still have to work 40 hour weeks if not more, yet a large percentage of the population can barely afford the basics? Some will always be wealthier than others of course, but no person needs billions of dollars, especially not while others are starving.
The problem isn’t that people have to do work. The problem is that we live in an economic system where the increase in profit created by technological advances is seized by business owners to make themselves richer, at the expense of the workers who they employ. This allows some to become billionnaires while others have to work multiple jobs or become homeless.
The goal isn’t to be self-sufficient – the goal is to continue to work with others, while abolishing the class of people who would happily seize profit created by your own labour to make themselves an easy buck.
It’s pretty clear to me that the original theme was that capitalism can and will ignore your basic needs. In the US capitalism is the way our economy works and the way people provide for their basic needs. Yet, at the same time, we claim to represent freedom. The original point, I think, is the juxtaposition of freedom and capitalism. We have the illusion of freedom. Our true freedom is really just a choice to participate in the machine, to be a criminal, or to die.
You can’t complain about freedom and then participate in a platform like Lemmy, full people who claim to advocate for freedom of speech and information, who actively demand for information shared on social networks to be controlled, networks to be shutdown and people to be censored based on unknown and ambiguous criteria, without even understanding the implications of it.
Are you not also complaining about freedom while also participating on Lemmy? Lol
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.
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.
Almost all white collar work is now and has been for a long time goal based. There are people who, since they started working in modern times, don’t even know what a quota is
And with automation, more and more will become as such
I don’t mean a literal work output “quota”, that’s what I meant with layers of abstraction. A better question to ask yourself is how many Americans live paycheck to paycheck? The expensive nature of the modern world, the difficulty in being paid well enough to achieve not just stability but some personal forward progress - getting the resources for these is what I mean about needing to hit a “quota”.
What proportion of Americans are unable to hit the quota, described this way? What are the consequences, both to them and to wider society? Pretty bad situation, reminds me of just more complicated/obfuscated, “fuzzier” feudalism.
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.
This ain’t a shitpost, but it is a realpost
Yeah, I was confounded as to what about this was a shitpost.
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?
I don’t think anyone does. When people talk about freedom, they talk about being able to travel, do whatever they want in their spare time, say whatever they believe, buy a gun and a hummer, go BASE jumping.
That kinda stuff.
So why are u guys so against communism?
This problem was solved in ussr.
Ah yes, the USSR, a state which considered homosexuality to be a mental disorder and a sign of fascism, and then subsequently criminalized it, arrested queer people, and sentenced them to years in labour camps.
People oppose communism because we don’t trust authoritarians to make good decisions, and when they inevitably make bad decisions, the effects are disastrous and widespread due to how centralized the system is.
It’s unrelated to Ussr.
Many countries criminalized it and still do including US until very very recent times.Nothing to do with communism vs capitalism.
Tankie, you could discredit the USSR for not being accepting and still be a good faith communist but nevermind
I don’t really care.
I think ussr had a lot of unique positive things.Like putting Jews and Red Army POWs let out of Nazi camps in gulags. Very positive.
Like putting Jews and Red Army POWs let out of Nazi camps in gulags. Very positive.
that’s not a real thing.
you wouldn’t be able to find an example of systematic jews transfers to gulags - search if u wanna.
kidding me - many people in ussr leadership were jewsyou wouldn’t be able to find an example of systematic jews transfers to gulags - search if u wanna.
Ok:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_of_Jews_in_the_Soviet_interior_during_World_War_II
https://www.jewishhistory.org/jews-in-the-gulag-after-wwii/
https://kennedy.byu.edu/jewish-life-and-anti-semitism-in-the-soviet-gulag-2024-02-14
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo246026242.html
https://academic.oup.com/hgs/article-abstract/34/3/393/6020133
Let me guess- those are all Jewish lies. Just like the Holocaust.
I’m sure these survivors telling their stories are the biggest liars of all: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23531219
Just can’t trust those shifty Jews, can ya?
I get, you’re saying the benefits of communism are well worth the sacrifice of a few minorities. That’s an argument you can make, but who decides who the minority is? What if they decide that you’re the minority? Seems like that’s gonna be a fun little twist in your little utopia, won’t it?
the minority
not sure what u talking about.
there hasn’t been mass ethnic deportations after about ww2 - which I think we can all agree was a very special unique case.
besides - supposed democracy of the time were putting peaceful japanese into concentration camps and segregating negros - so how are they better.
A nation that, for most of its existence, did not successfully produce toilet paper.
I always had toilet paper growing up in ussr.
Not sure where u got that from.But what it did have - you could walk everywhere - any lake, any shore any seafront is public. Medical system for everyone. Housing for everyone.
Yes - light industry had issues.
How was the housing? Did some people get a nicer house than others? How was that decided? If you had another kid and needed more space what would happen? I generally have no idea. I saw pics of some crappy apartments but I would love to know what it was really like for most people
How was decided? By number of children. 1 kid - 2br apartment, 2 kids - 3 bedroom apartment.
There was also wait list. No - I wouldn’t say housing was different based on income - actually 100% sure it wasnt.I find that USSR housing much better than 2x4 framed house I live in now in US. Cmon- cant beat 3m ceilings - in US its reservd for the rich.
One thing they really fucked up planning is parking - noone knew everyone would drive a car in 30 years
Is there some correlation between communism and toilet paper?
It’s like food in Soviet Russia
Not everybody gets it
If you can’t eat, you can’t get the shits…silver linings.
Yeah dead people don’t shit
Communism is just a different sort of fucked up. It’s just as bad for people in its own way.
Lol no
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.
Also, at what point do you tip into you-dont-get-choose-your-job land? Is it still considered freedom if you are required to have a job to serve basic needs of the larger community? For example, we need more doctors even without universal healthcare in the US. If we covered the basic needs of everyone, wouldn’t we have to require some people to become doctors, who are not on that trajectory today?
If doctors would be paid what managers are paid today, I’m sure there will be enough incentive. Essential jobs need to pay what they’re worth, which is more than any other jobs
A lot of those businesses still need to exist for society to function. They could be restructured into non-profits, but they’ll still exist.
There will always be a need for jobs that people aren’t going to just do for the hell of it. No one enjoys breaking their back harvesting crops or digging ditches.
I’m not saying the current system is any good, but the idea of no one having to work if they don’t want to is not obtainable without some serious advances in robotics.
If harvesting crops would pay six figures, I’m sure there’d be enough willing people
Where’s that money going to come from?
The point of UBI isn’t to allow anyone to not work if they don’t want to. It’s so that everyone can live securely while still contributing to keeping society running, and allow those who can’t work to live without worry about survival.
You can’t have UBI without workers. It’s still working to survive, just with a massive safety net.
From net worth of all millionaires and billionaires, where it’s not currently being used for anything worthwhile.
UBI is only the first step towards actual redistribution of wealth
I specifically mean those companies that do not directly add to the jobs that “need” to be done.
My feeling is that more people work bullshit jobs because they pay better than e.g. harvesting crops or driving a bus.
Those are low requirement jobs
Almost every body able citizen with a license can drive
Almost every body abled citizen can harvest a crop
Not EVERYONE wants to do it, so they invest time and money into themselves to get a skill level that will allow them to get a job in something else not related to the thing they don’t like
But that was in the old days or with low ROI enterprises
Now most modern agriculture is done with automation, gps tracking and smart systems
Your average crop picker doesn’t matter anymore
They’d need to be more knowledgeable to not only be in a new harvester cabin, but understand the training that comes with it
They work bullshit jobs because harvesting crops and driving a bus are shitty jobs that basically no one wants to do.
I used to work those shitty jobs, and pay wasn’t the issue
If more people would work those jobs, each would have to do less of it
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
An asset appreciating in value does not deprive anyone else of money in their wallet.
If you bought a rookie baseball card for $5, the player had a great year and now the card’s worth $100, your net worth increased by $95. But who is down $95 as a result of your card becoming more valuable?
Nobody. Wealth is not zero sum. And the vast majority of increases in wealth among the wealthiest is newly-created wealth. You literally can’t become a billionaire in a human lifetime simply by short-changing your workers. A linear increase like that just will not get you there.
Also, wealth in the form of purchased investments into businesses that run within the economy, is literally the opposite of hoarding. If you buy things with your money, you’re not hoarding your money.
but an asset appreciating in value off the back of another persons labor deprives the laborer of their fair share
Were they not paid for their time in a consensual agreement?
That’s not the gotcha you think it is. They get the shit end of the stick and if they ask for more they get shown the door and if people gang up and try to form a union the capitalist police state send goons to break it up because how dare the proles ask for more money.
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.
Nowhere in your comment did you refute the fact that it’s currently not possible to have a society where no one has to work. There still has to be human labor.
I said nothing about the distribution of wealth or supporting our current system.
I don’t think even OP or OC meant that nobody would work. But “work” as we imagine it now need not exist. Most specialist roles are fulfilling enough that people do them enthusiastically and with passion. It would be first and foremost a worker lead economy, rather than people being desperate for jobs. Companies need to buy talent in a more competitive market instead, in all industries not just the specialisations.
I imagine there’s still a wealth hierarchy but it’s a lot less dispirate and follows meritocratic lines, including the merit of being willing to get your hands dirty doing dirty or dangerous work not currently possible to automate. And obviously being very talented at sport, music, art, comedy, etc such that people want to spend any excess wealth they have on supporting them or buying access to their content (like now).
It’s not so different from now, it’s just the continued progressive advancement of what we see in many European nations already.
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!).
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.”
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.
Oh they will execute!
Not the experiment mind you, but the participants
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.
Taxing people appropriately is obviously the right way to go. But it actually doesn’t change the dynamic identified in the meme substantially. Rich people still hoard resources (albeit less after taxes). And basic needs are only met if enough people keep working to pay taxes or enrich their employers who pay taxes.
If people are taxed appropriately, there will be no hoarding
Maybe… Is saving considered hoarding? Is leaving a small inheritance to your kids considered hoarding?
Even without the semantic confusion or disagreement, it doesn’t change the fundamental dynamic identified in the post.
It’s considered hoarding if the money you’re saving was stolen from other people (and I’m including wage theft in there). If you’ve actually earned the money you’re leaving to your kids by hard work, I don’t see the problem there. Because there’s no way anyone can become a billionaire without stealing.
It’s called democratic socialism.
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.
Pretty sure you’re thinking of AIDS, not poverty.
That really isn’t the case for large parts of rural Sub-Sahan Africa. For literally millions of people, they are growing crops basically about the same as their ancestors, in the same area. Maybe now they have mobile phones. It was ALWAYS hard labor.
Is everyone in this thread rich American college kids or something? Why do you all think the natural state of the world is Utopian paradise where leopards and impallas are best friends?
Because we had the technology and the money to create that world back in the 90’s. Now we’ve got twice as much money and twice as good tech in the world and yet 95% of people still have to fight for their survival. This could be a reality if it weren’t for hoarders.
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?
Everyone works, it’s just a matter of on what.
In the community where I lived, usually the guys did the farming, which was back-breaking work, leaning over hoeing land manually. Men would also raise livestock, be tailors, teachers, traders, barbers, and a few other jobs. Don’t get too wound up over “traders” - a guy would borrow money to walk to a large town and buy things he would sell to neighbors out of his home. He would do this until so many people said they would pay him back for the things from the “store” that he didn’t have any money to buy things in town anymore, so the town would be without things like salt or kerosene for lanterns for a couple weeks, and then people would get fed up, and one new guy would start the cycle over again.
Women pounded the millet and sorghum into flour to make food, did gardening, made every meal, raised the kids, pulled water from the well, and some other micro-level cottage industry-ish type things.
But people worked every day. Old people worked every day. Unless you got malaria or had a severe injury, every day was work until you died, and even then you tried to do something because there was always so much work to do.
Some people took care of meals and the household. That isn’t the kind of work to live that we are talking about because it isn’t directly paid.
Not to mention people with severe injuries or illnesses that can’t do hard labor. Someone with crippling arthritis will still be provided for by the community.
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.
If you want to simplify the thought experiment, imagine being the only person in existence. You would still need to struggle just to meet the basic needs of survival, but you would definitely not be oppressed.
Nature is oppressive, so are billionaires. Working together helps overcome that, both when combatting nature and the asset class
I think that those are different meanings of the word “oppressive”, which has a moral component when referring to human actions but not when referring to natural phenomena. You can only be wronged by another person, not by nature.
Imagine the following scenarios:
-
You’re alone on the planet. You struggle to survive.
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Now there’s a wealthy person on the other side of the planet, where his lifestyle has no effect on you. He could rescue you but he chooses not to.
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The wealthy person offers to rescue you on the condition that you must work for him. He would get most of the products of your labor but survival would still be easier than it was when you were alone.
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Now you have no choice except to accept the wealthy person’s offer. Survival is still easier than it would be if you were alone, but there isn’t anywhere left where you could survive alone.
Your life is oppressive in each of these scenarios in the sense that simply surviving is difficult and there’s no possibility of improvement. However, there’s clearly no moral component to that in (1) because you are alone, and (4) seems like it almost certainly has a moral component. However, in every steps from (1) to (4) you’re either better off or not worse off than you were before. Where does the moral component come from?
At step 3. Where the rich person forces conditions onto you and takes most of your production. That is immoral. Especially if he has the resources for both to survive with less effort just by not being selfish
Does it matter what your “default” state is? If you’re safe until I threaten to harm you unless you comply with my demands, then I’m obviously oppressing you. If you’re in danger until I offer to rescue you only if you comply with my demands, your options are the same (either harm or compliance) but the two situations don’t intuitively feel morally equivalent to me.
With that said, humans do innately interpret an offer of rescue contingent on paying a very high price as a form of compulsion. Someone who makes such an offer is going to be viewed much more negatively than someone who simply does not offer to help at all. Maybe it’s a way of making credible threats?
A purely logical person cannot negotiate with the rescuer, because the rescuer knows that purely logical people will pay any price. However, a person known to be irrational and willing to die rather than be taken advantage of can negotiate. There’s a trade-off between the advantage of negotiating and the very high price of failing to come to an agreement, and I suppose the strength of humans’ innate intolerance for unfairness has been tuned by evolution to attain this balance (or perhaps it attained balance in our ancestral environment but no longer does in our civilized state).
If you’re in danger until I offer to rescue you only if you comply with my demands, your options are the same (either harm or compliance) but the two situations don’t intuitively feel morally equivalent to me.
"Wow, your house is on fire! Shame, that.
…Would you like to be rescued, for only three easy payments of $99.99 USD?"
Also, I originally set the fire in the first place, but you don’t know that. Six months after your last payment clears I’m going to do it again and the price will increase.
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Lol, so desperate to be the victim of an imaginary rich person that you don’t even understand that it universally takes work to do things like eat food.
How do you think people got food 10,000 years ago? Or 30,000?
Do you think being a hunter-gatherer society is a vacation? Who were the rich people before money was invented that apparently caused things like drought?
The kind of comments I’m reading here explain a lot of why Dems lost the election
They are willfully disconnected from the reality of their fellow Americans
They don’t see it
I know, right?
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
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.
