this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Human productivity has exponentially increased since the beginning of the industrial revolution. We produce far more food and clothing than can be consumed and there are more than enough homes for people to live in. Generic medicine can often be produced for pennies.
There is no reason that we as a society cannot guarantee at least a basic standard of living consisting of sustenance, a safe place to rest and relax, treatment for common ailments, etc.
Still, there are farmers working to produce that food, using fuel, hiring mechanics, etc. Literally millions of people are involved in the research needed to make insulin so efficiently. Millions more are currently involved into making AIDS, Cancer and other diseases less fatal. And obviously homes don't grow on trees, from raw materials to specialized geologic knowledge, lots of people have to work very hard to build (and maintain) a home that is safe and pleasant.
That's being said, many countries do guarantee all of that. Capitalist countries, before lemmings jump out with bullshit.
In Germany even if you are unemployed you get your health insurance paid for, your rent covered - up to centra in surface area depending on the family size - utilities paid for, and a certain amount of cash for groceries and basic needs. The only condition is you have to be looking for a job and accept any reasonable offer - and make a good faith effort to keep it. Sometimes the government will ask you to work for them (usually unskilled laborike cleaning parks or something like that).
I mean, you picked like one of the handful of socialist market economies that does that.
Canada nominally provides you with money in the form of social assistance if you're unemployed. It's not enough to pay for rent on a studio apartment. Let alone food.
The point is that being alive is not a voluntary contract. We don't ask to be born, and we are continually told by society that suicide is unacceptable. This is fine, I think that it's generally a good idea to promote being alive. But capitalism has actually decided that being alive is only half of it. You can't kill yourself, but you can't exist if you're not useful to the capitalist system either.
So basically if you're mentally ill, if you're disabled in any way, if like me you have medical conditions that make routine employment significantly harder than it is for people without these conditions - you're just screwed. Here's your 600$ a month social assistance check. Rent is 1000$ on the absolute most basic apartment in your area. Bare minimum groceries for a single person are close to 300 a month. You might be able to afford to live in a multi bedroom dwelling with strangers without central heating and lead plumbing that often doesn't work. At that point, your best bet to eat is at food banks, which are overcrowded and underfunded. Every single person, company, and political group across the entire country will demonize you as being essentially worthless and openly talk about how you should be forced to output labor that you are unable to output.
All this while like 10% of apartments sit empty, we throw out like 30% of the food we produce, and most labor in society has become about capitalist maintenance (office job, desk job, working for companies that essentially do nothing to feed or house people, that produce unnecessary goods in mass quantities for profit motives). Like capitalism has openly determined that we are worthless. We're worth less than garbage. They'd rather throw food away than feed us. They'd rather leave perfectly functional working apartments empty than give us homes. Capitalism has no use for people who cannot produce capital. This isn't new, and it is a fundamental aspect of the system. They call it merit. How much merit do you have? How much do you deserve to be alive and be happy?
And I work 40 hours a week and have for years. I take medications that make that possible, and I'm very lucky that medications exist that can essentially make me compatible with the capitalist labor system. But I lived that life before, and have many friends who still do. Barely surviving because society has decided that it's not worth it for them to live.
Not everyone can output labor. The point of society should be to ensure that all members of society can live healthy safe and happy lives. There is no reason this cannot be the case. It has just been decided by those with majority power that it shouldn't be the case. Suffering is legally mandated.
Seems like a Canada problem, not a capitalism problem. Germany is a capitalist country where things are kind of okay. France is a capitalist country and they banned throwing away food that's is still edible. Many countries tax residential properties that are empty, encouraging renting or selling them and fueling supply. There are easy and straightforward solutions to all of those problems. You just need to vote for people willing to implement them.
And those are not tax havens or microstates, BTW. I'm talking about countries with 50+ Million people, a lot of immigration, and not even a lot of natural resources. For countries with oil look what Norway is doing. Also capitalist, BTW.
Yeah, I specified in the first line that Germany is a socialist market economy. As are the Scandinavian countries to varying degrees. Those are not features of capitalism. Those are features of those specific countries. You could do away with market capitalism and still not throw away food, or leaving residential properties empty. Free market capitalism actually dictates that food and housing are private industries that should be controlled by private interests with little (or no) government oversight. Socialism is what says that those thing should be government regulated and that measures should be taken to ensure everyone has access to food and shelter.
The socialist market economy is not the same thing as a capitalist free market. To be clear, I also believe that a socialist market is insufficient. Simply taking half or quarter measures to ensure people don't starve to death and have homes isn't enough either. A modest step in the right direction, but not what the end goal should be.
It is an economy centered around capital, so a capitalist economy.
And nobody is talking about half homes. You get something like 50m2 for the first person and 20m2 for each subsequent family member.
These are not black and white capitalist or socialist systems. Each countries economy is different and more often than not a mix of economic ideologies. No pure capitalist economy exists, nor a pure socialist economy. Trying to argue that these are or are not problems with capitalism is a bit of a moot point because of that.
Having a social program is not the same as a socialist economy
That is not what capitalism is lol
I said half measure not half homes. They could just, you know, provide homeless people with homes. Taxing property owners for not renting properties is doing pretty well nothing for people who are homeless and half no income. Over half a million Germans are homeless.
Edit: I see where the half home confusion is coming from, that was a typo meant to say "have homes".
That's the definition of capitalism.
No, a market using currency does not make it capitalist. Capitalism is the free market. Capitalism is the economic ideology of private markets. Capitalism is the labor ideology of private ownership of the means of production. That one person can own a hundred factories and be entitled to the fruits of labor of those factories.
A country is more capitalist the less government control of its free market. It is more capitalist the more privatized its industries are. It is more socialist the greater the government control of its markets are, and the more nationalized its industries are.
Communist nations still use currency. Currency, or capital, has existed long before capitalism came into existence.
If you want to know more there are plenty of freely available resources online that explain it in much grater detail than I will here.
Of CAPITAL markets, no need of long winding diatribes.
Communism aspires to a cashless society.
What do you mean long winding diatribes? Or did you just say that cause you think it makes you sound smart lol. You're failing to understand the difference between money and capitalism. Markets predate capitalism. Money predates capitalism. Capitalism is an ideology.
Literally Google and read for five minutes.
Sound smart? What word you don't know? I can explain it to you.
It's the way you used the sentence in reference to my description of capitalism. It was 2 paragraphs, a very short explanation of a socio-economic ideology.
You've just shown yourself to have no idea what you're talking about. I'm not going to teach you what capitalism is. You can do that yourself.
Nice to see that some things are just the same as on Reddit.
You never even actually engaged with anything I said. Just tried to say that capitalism is good because some nations with market economies are less shitty than other ones, failed to understand what capitalism itself actually is, and refused to learn. There's no winner or loser in this discussion. You're just wrong about capitalism. You do not understand what it is. It's not a matter of winning, it's a matter of you trying to engage in discussions about subjects that affect hundreds of millions of lives without even actually understanding what you are talking about. It's okay for you to not understand or know something, but don't act like you're an expert at something you know nothing about. There are loads of resources online. If you want to talk about capitalism and the free market do yourself the service of learning what those things are.
Work on your reading comprehension. I didn't say capitalism is good.
BTW: The government in Germany offers you a home, but it won't force you into a home, if you want to be homeless you can be.
Nothing you said changes the fact that only a small portion of humans need to work for the rest of humanity to survive. Or everyone could just work 10 hours a week and everything would still be fine. Problem is most people spend 40 hours a week doing bullshit number shifting jobs that just serve speculators to get richer. Nothing being produced. If we actually focused our productive forces into use-value instead of trade-value and completely removed financialization, we could all live lives of abundance while barely working at all. We are at that point, technologically and in the total productive forces of our species. It’s simply a matter of political will. But the ruling classes would never accept that.
Right but I don't want to survive, I want to have a smartphone, and a car, and a TV, and some steak or sushi every now and then. I even want someone to prepare the sushi for me and maybe even deliver it to my house.
So you and everyone else can have jobs that are actually productive for society (like producing, preparing and delivering food…), and then also work like 10-20 hours a week and have everything you described. I don’t see what’s so hard to understand.
Or do you mean you prefer to have a useless job that adds nothing to society but allows you treats while millions of people live in abject misery?
That's not how math works...
Sounds nightmarish. I bet education doesn't even saddle you with unforgivable debt.
And they even give you childcare for free or close to it. Monsters.
millions of people sarve to death despite this, what a shame this is for us as society
You're forgetting the part where caring about people somehow needs to translate into power for someone. It's sad and fucked, but that's where we are.
Someone recently mused that if we provided a way for people to grift off of solving homelessness the problem would be gone. I don't recall the details, but I thought it seemed true.
This is our only hope for climate change.
Things get better when solar out-competes coal and other fossil fuels. We're just missing the deployment rate right now I think to be able to just stop fossil fuel use from growing.
But we could have reduced consumption instead and done this much, much faster. The economy might have needed to shift to deal with this and a lot of old industries should have been shut down within only a few years, but it would have had a major impact. Instead we wait for new industries to grow alongside the old, while still growing the old!
Basically if billionaires can capture carbon, they will probably use it as a way to make governments pay to clean the air, which is essentially an ongoing tax from a private entity to a public one, which could conceivably go on forever (or until people try to nationalize it).
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I'd probably ponder about how the system exists to force evolution by weighing traits and whatnot, but the trait is money. It doesn't matter what's in your genes or your head. Money is all.
We actually do provide those things.
I’ve been homeless twice and when I was willing to ask and receive it without flinging shit or attacking people, I was provided with all of those things for free.
I live in the USA. Maybe in other places these things aren’t provided, but they were given to me in Boston and Denver.
Those are rich, educated, liberal cities, not typical of larges swathes of the U.S.