- 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.
Many people sincerely believe certain kinds of labor to be valued at less than the cost of a decent human livelihood.
Modern Slavery
Not only that, but as time goes on, we become more productive and generate more profits, only to see the age of retirement increased
I thought lemmy already surpassed this “stage”
This isnt a shitpost
I agree, this is simply stating fact.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I thought bill gates cured poverty in Africa because he’s such a nice guy.
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 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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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
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.
It’s called democratic socialism.
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.
