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.
You can't eat higher ideals.
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.
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."
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.
And if I were to decide that I didn't want to work according to my ability, I would still be provided for?
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.
In the case of someone who can't work for one reason or another there's obviously an exception because that's not something they can help
Children do contribute to society by getting an education and having a childhood to develop into well adjusted adults who contribute later on,
Unemployment benefits presumably are for people actively searching for a job
The elderly have already contributed more than their fair share raising their children
Using the phrasing people who don't work implies including people who are able but just don't want to
There's nobody like that. You're talking about imaginary people. All human beings have a natural drive to do useful work.
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.
"Damn, this argument I made up for OP really sucks! What's even worse is the fanfiction I made up for them, woah Nelly!"
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.
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.
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
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.
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 don’t think they do. In our society we don’t really let people die just because they don’t fit in. When there’s someone who can’t take care of their self, we take care of them.
Where are you talking about and comparing to what? Cause I see a lot of people dying in the streets because of mental illness or drug addiction when I take the subway to work. We don't throw them away like ancient Sparta but we definitely don't come close to providing the services they need to the things they need to begin to get off the street. Cause the solution now is put the homeless in prison and that's going just fine right? ...Right?
I’m talking about basically the entire human civilization, as opposed to a civilization in which people are just permitted to die.
But most of my experience is with the united states. We take care of people left and right, and don’t let them die.
Do you know of a place that isn’t like this? If so, where?
Lmao. What fairy tale society do you live in?
As a selfish conservative you should already know that they are the exact ones who want to steal every single security net from every citizen whilst simultaneously enabling corporations to destroy unions and create monopolies.
I mean c'mon, you have to know this. It's the core tenet of the traitor supporting party. Thieving, stealing, cheating, and lying are all that the magat traitors have to offer.
I live in reality, and I myself have been given free resources when I’ve been unable to work.
In my country, I have never seen a hungry person who could not obtain food due to lack of fitting in or having money or any requirement other than “oh that person has a stomach and needs food, so let’s feed them”.
That is the reality I see all around me. If you want to call that a “fairy tale”, I challenge you to provide evidence of a person being treated in the way you’re describing. Anywhere other than say a concentration camp or japanese pow camp.
What part of our society is letting people die because they don’t fit in? This is a serious question, because everybody seems to believe what I’m saying is a fairy tale, and yet I see it happening all around me.
How, exactly, are you getting the impression out society is one that doesn’t value the life of people who don’t fit in?
Lmao you do realize Republicans are campaigning on ELIMINATING school lunches for underprivileged children?
They are also planning on cutting social security and other safety nets.
They want poor and disabled people to starve. It's their only plan.
It’s more like you haven’t earned the right for other people to do the work of keeping you alive.
Human life requires work to sustain. Someone has to do that work. The most fair system is one in which that responsibility falls on the person benefitting from it.
ie, to be alive, you must contribute work. Because your life requires work to maintain.
I'm so torn on this meme because on the one hand I have the same gut reaction of "yeah, but youll die if you don't do jack shit in the woods, you kind of have to be useful to live".
But then I think about our society ...... the billions of dollars going to rich people who do nothing, the millions of people who work in jobs that are useless, or the millions who work jobs that actively harm society, and in that context, the amount and type of work does seem like bullshit. It's not like going into your marketing firm 5/7 days of your life means a farmer gets to work less. People like to comfort themselves with vain thoughts like 'we all just gotta do our partfor the system to work', but that's objectively not true. Lots of parts of our system are objectively bullshit and are excised completely through new laws and legislation and society keeps working fine, in some cases much better.
"Earning a living" doesn't state that people should die if the choose to be a grifter or a thief or some other dishonest person that takes from others and doesn't contribute to society. It just means those people didn't earn their living.
In a functional society everyone should contribute to better the society. "Earning a living" is a statement of pride in contributing to society value equal to or greater than the value you get from it. If someone is making a living through dishonest means so isn't earning a living, it can be something they should be ashamed of
Note that socialist societies have similar expressions like "from each according to their ability to each according to their need". The intent is the same, encourage people to contribute to society. What if I don't contribute according to my ability and just want to take what I need? Does that statement imply I'll be sent to a gulag if I don't contribute according to my ability? OMG socialism says I don't deserve to live!!!
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.
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.
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".
Talking to someone who justifies this kinda shit is always a trip. They'll say that people who aren't earning a living wage just need to work harder and pick up a marketable skill to improve their situation. But you can simultaneously get them to agree that many of these low wage "unskilled" jobs need to exist for society to continue functioning, so which fucking is it?
The answer is that the capitalist parasites and their horde of boot lickers believe it's totally acceptable for there to exist an underclass of human beings born to work until their bodies give out for the enrichment of their superior employer.
They can't afford to live a dignified life doing the shit I need them to do? That's fine, just toss 'em into the hole when they stop working and replace them with the next generation.
Honestly man, I'm getting real sick and tired of pretending to be above violent retribution when it comes to these people. My blood fucking boils each and every time I need to look my boss in the eye and pretend to smile as they say farcical shit like "we're all a family here" or "let us know if there's anything you need" while paying me exactly the minimum wage and hiring the exact number of employees it takes for them to avoid giving any of us enough hours to qualify for benefits.
Anyway, Stalin had the right idea with gulags, and we should bring those back. Thanks for coming to my TED talk
This is where the idea of "personal responsibility" is useful for liberals. Flatly admitting that they want a desperate underclass is too mask off for them to feel like good people so they invent a way of blaming individual victims rather than the economic system.
The poor has a theoretical opportunity to pull themselves up by the bootstraps so when they don't do that it's really their own fault. Of course that theoretical opportunity doesn't translate into actual opportunity for most people but that's fine, as there's enough window dressing of meritocracy to make the opportunity look real if you are careful not to go into too much detail.
This is also the reason why liberals hate discussing real-world examples. Their logic only works in abstract thought experiments where they get to control the variables. Saying that everyone has the opportunity to succeed is a lot easier than saying that Bob, who has a set of very concrete and undeniable material conditions, has the opportunity succeed.
Anyway, Stalin had the right idea with gulags, and we should bring those back.
Very edgy. Straight outta 4chan
lmao this lemmitors comparing Hexbear users to 4channers shit never gets old. When you liberals meet someone far to your left it must really break your brain for you to lump us in with fascists.
You know what I almost never see referred to as edgy out of hand? People who don't want to fully abolish the US prison system, which to this day kills far more people far more often than the Soviet gulag system did shortly after the end of WW2. And that's really strange considering the US prison system is designed from the ground up to maintain a pool of slave labor by incarcerating racial minorities on bullshit drug offenses. Personally, I'd much rather prison be used to keep dangerous reactionaries from causing trouble while they're being reeducated.
Look mate I don't live in USA, I have nothing to do with USA. I was commenting on your stupid ass glorification of forced labor camps in soviet shithole
And you clearly don't seem to have problem with US prison system, only that wrong people are sent there. You're as full of shit as the people you think you're criticizing. You'd rather be yelling at people not loving your dear dictators than actually trying to do anything good for the world.
Don't worry, you may not live in the US, but you're definitely an American in spirit.
And you clearly don't seem to have problem with US prison system, only that wrong people are sent there. You're as full of shit as the people you think you're criticizing
Soviet Union: Sequesters fascists and counter-revolutionaries for reeducation after Nazi Germany murdered millions of people while invading the USSR with the express purpose of genocide.
The US: Uses drug prohibition as a bullshit excuse to systematically arrests racial minorities in their millions in order to continue enslavement after the abolition of chattel slavery. The conditions are so brutal that the death rate for modern US prison inmates exceeds that of the Soviet gulag system just a decade into recovering from the devastation wrought by WW2.
Lemmitor turbolib: Wow, these are morally equivalent. If you replace the words "fascist comprador looking to resume the brutalization of the working class" with the words "black people" then you tankies are starting to look an awful lot like 4channers!
i think billionaires should be shot, not sent to gulags. gulags are for non-bourgeois liberals.
THIS, this is the correct way of doing it, Gulags are not for the highest level offenders
I have nothing good going on in my life, so I’ve adopted an extreme viewpoint
Correct. Oppressed peoples tend to support "radical" movements that would improve their lives, and this is a stupid comment for trying to make that sound like a bad thing.
People who have been fucked over by the system often adopt a position to advocate for radical system change? Wooah, very insightful. If you care about people who are negatively affected by modern systems, then that makes their opinion and lived experience more important, not less.
You even admit that the user may be targeting the right people, so your point is what? That violence is unjustifiable? That strongly believing in a cause leads to disaster? They're not true points, but they'd be much better starting points for constructive discussion, so you can just say whatever you actually mean.
People making such pretentious, word-salad arguments as yours should not be throwing around the term 'self-righteous asshat'.
God are you people so fucking stupid, just a bunch of unwarranted self importance and navel gazing nonsense all crammed into a skull cavity the size of a thimble.
Please note, I've not made any statement on whether you're wrong or right in your targeting. That's a separate discussion.
LMAO
Your entire attitude fucking screams "I have nothing good going on in my life, so I've adopted an extreme viewpoint...".
You mean to tell me that people who are chewed up and shat out by the current order are willing to take drastic measures and radically change the world!??! 
Honestly dude if I lost a debate as hard as you did I wouldn't be spouting this psychobabble diarrhea
"you believe in stuff and that's bad cause I don't believe in anything" is never the place you want to be in a discussion, you basically admitted you have no clue what the fuck you're talking about and because your opponent does that somehow makes them mentally ill???? 
Seriously get a grip
So are only people who are "in a good place" in their lives capable of having "extreme" political beliefs? How do you justify who is in a "good place" and who isn't? Do you think it could ever be related to political or economic forces? Or are "extreme" political ideologies all universally forbidden? How do you qualify what is "extreme"? Are people who are not in "a good place" only able to have conservative positions that maintain status quo or are they only able to be apolitical? How do you think maintaining status quo or not having any political beliefs would help their "life situation [improve] enough" if there is no change to their politico-economic reality which directly impacts their life situation? If one is in a "good place" what kinds of political beliefs would they typically exhibit or are they allowed to have?
Your entire attitude fucking screams "I have no real political analysis but suffer from a great sense of narcissism that leads me to a false sense of intelligence which makes me think I can paternalistically psychologize others' entire lives without knowing them so that I can justify sharing my ignorant opinions that communicate that I believe I have a better life than others do and that makes me a superior person" so that gives me hope you won't be able to help yourself from responding further. Also happy to pay you with Hexbear gold for a similar psychological analysis and thorough breakdown of my political potential if it saves me a trip to the therapist, kind stranger. Thanks.
You'd rather be yelling at people not loving your dear dictators than actually trying to do anything good for the world.
You were the one who scolded them for being "edgy"; so weird how you immediately switch things up when anyone could simply scroll up and see what really happened. And Stalin, the famous dictator who attempted to resign four separate times and who the CIA admitted was not in total control of the USSR.
Hey I'm not American either and you're still a dumbass that doesn't know what they're talking about. Lmao
And you clearly don't seem to have problem with US prison system, only that wrong people are sent there.
No shit? What, you want to send the wrong people to prison? Good one bozo.
You don't know shit about the Soviets, don't pretend red scare propaganda wasn't a thing.
I'm sure life in Russia was great under the Tzars and now under capitalist Putin/oligarchs.
You really had to go and ruin it by praising Stalin right there at the end, didn't you.. 🤦♀️
(to be clear - eat the fucking rich, but that's not what gulags are for)
eat the fucking rich, but that’s not what gulags are for
The "fucking rich" / bourgeois are to be shot, not sent to gulags. That's for the idiots supporting capitalism.
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.
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.
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.
To each one according to their needs, from each one according to their capabilities.
People would still need to work, we are not abolishing the concept of work, what we want is a distribution of the value produced by the workers for the workers, so, for example, a disabled person wouldn't have the same working hours of an able-bodied one, or a person that has to provide for a family of 4 wouldn't earn the same as a person that lives by themselves.
Oh? Why the family ain't workin then, eh? Are we now singling out lonely people, eh? Isn't that lonely guy giving the same from himself as the family guy, ehhh?
Eh, that's why capitalism is better, you earn what your work is worth and fuck your excuses. Pull yerself by yer bootstraps and stop complainin'. Now excuse me, need to go motivate the leech granny to stop living off rent and git back to job.
what about the owning class who does no work yet profits by taking the fruits of your labor by nothing more than saying they own it. Or the land lord who does the same. Capitalism in no way provides you what you earn, the banker did not do more work than the janitor, the Stock broker did not provide society more value than the fry cook.
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.
How much time has personal computing saved in your life? Are you really sure Gates hasn’t produced 48k lifetimes worth of saved time by his efforts?
It doesn't matter. One person can't put forth 48k lifetimes worth of effort, and they don't deserve that much in return.
I promise the dude hasn't worked harder than the combined efforts of 48 thousand people.
We can reward talent, and we can reward effort. But no combination of those two is as ridiculous as our reward structure. Our reward structure is flawed because people with money make the rules, and their primary rule is that people with money should have more money.
What you are saying is true, but there is not a better option for how the economy works that doesnt end really bad. I dont like bill gates, but the idea that he cant have what he has doesnt end well.
The federal tax receipts/gdp were pretty much the same as they are right now in the 50s and 60s. Just because the tax rate was high doesnt mean people pay that much.
Yeah, what a shame it was that people had to invest in the longevity and reputation of their business in order to keep paying them out over a hundred years.
To answer this question seriously, Bill Gates has held back computing by stealing other people's work and ideas and using Embrace Extend and Extinguish.
If Bill Gates had no existed, arguably open source computing and hardware would be even more advanced than what we have now. Windows has been a net detriment to society.
I don't think that's a realistic position to take though. If not Bill Gates it would have been someone else trying to capitalize, not a de facto FOSS utopia.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Compassion is a part of human nature.
I think that people who need to be cared for should be cared for.
I think that’s a different issue than the one presented in the meme.
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?
So… let’s keep this in the context of the general population.
There seems to be a subset of perfectly well adjusted able bodied healthy adults that complain about anything that distracts them from video games.
I think that’s a problem.
How about you?
No, those are imaginary people you made up to complain about. And if you act on the existence of those fake people, you'll harm actual people.
Why am I getting the feeling that the only people you acknowledge as actual are disabled?
You should. We're not cave people, it's the 21st century. We can provide for everyone easily.
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.
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.
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.
Youths of today discovering idioms of yesteryear going, "mm technically, this implies..." as if that wasn't the obvious, intended implication to begin with.
Yes, and fascists will happily say that's a good thing. They like it. They're sadists.
They're morons that don't understand how social species survive and thrive.
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.
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.
-J. Stalin
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.
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
When you become a billionaire you should be forced to earn a living. Prove to the world why we shouldn't eat you this year
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