this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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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…
You're infantilising disabled people.
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?
Projection.
In case you’re worried: you deserve to be alive.
It's really hard to actually accept that as a capitalist's opinion. Liberals tend to say all kinds of nice things, and then turn around and pass policies that completely contradict that. Like, y'all say I deserve to live and then you don't implement a UBI. It's like you're lying to yourselves that you're actually nice people.
I personally would support UBI.
Promise.
Even knowing the lazy gamers you believe in would use it to play video games all day if they existed? Big if true.
What do you feel gives a person the greatest feelings of true contentment, confidence, and achievement?
You mean at once? Heroin and cocaine. Over a lifetime? Good health, useful work, kind deeds, meaningful relationships, safety, self-determination, knowledge, and fun.
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.
Yes we would. And if we can't, the cheap food should be free.
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.
We live in interesting times. Every year it gets more interesting.
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.