I agree that most of us are used and abused by the rich pricks, it’s why I joined this community in the first place.
But it’s taken to an aburd extreme here where it seems people want to live a care free happy life without burdens, yet at the same time expect life to continue as it currently is with all the benefits we all receive.
Fact is, it won’t.
If people don’t bust their ass, and get paid well for it, most would not do anything of value (I know you said you would work for free, but you’re a very very small minority).
But it’s taken to an aburd extreme here where it seems people want to live a care free happy life without burdens, yet at the same time expect life to continue as it currently is with all the benefits we all receive.
this is a strawman. you do yourself a disservice by fighting with scarecrows.
anyone but the ignorant or deeply unserious who want a world without work fully expect to labour to make that happen and to keep it running. the difference is they don’t want to be forced to do things — usually things no one but Moloch asked for, and that they don’t want to be doing — and then threatened with precarity and social murder because the skills they have aren’t profitable, or a machine has made them obsolete (when it should have freed them to do something else), or they have a ‘disability’, or the job they’re filling isn’t needed anymore (or, more likely, is eliminated to bolster the end-of-year profit numbers).
i think you’ll find people still want to do stuff and help each other when they’re not being atomised and forced to compete for scraps. if food and housing were a right, just as many nations in the economic core enshrine a right to life: the ‘rich pricks’ would lose their leverage. people could choose the type of work they want to do, and could do socially beneficial and necessary work that is ‘unprofitable’, because they’re no longer threatened with precarity for failing to bolster someone else’s already comfortable life.
i have never had a job i wanted to do, because i grew up in precarity and the types of things i want to do wouldn’t pay the bills, or pays too little to live on, or is too expensive to certify for, or there’s more than enough people doing them already. i can’t spend too much time looking for jobs, because i gotta eat, so i take the best of the first few of a handful of options, and the jobs (plural) are usually something that only exists to serve rich pricks and their extravagent, imperialist lifestyles, or to serve a need that only exists because everyone is too busy with their bullshit jobs to organise something better. then, when i have a job, that’s all i have time and energy left to do. i don’t have time left over to look at another job, or to learn a new skill, or take a course, or get to know my neighbours, or meet new people at all, or work on my mounting health issues. i don’t have time left over for my hobbies or my interests or to take care of my loved ones or make something useful for my community, because it’s 12 hours of attendance for work that could be done in four, or i’m expected to do more work than is reasonable in a single day and so most of it’s rushed and done to the minimum. and for everything i don’t have time to be doing, that’s more money i have to make paying someone else to do what i could already be doing for myself but i can’t because i’m not a fucking farmer and my apartment has no space for a balcony garden and zoning laws prohibit community gardens and the food banks only take the completely destitute or people willing to convert to their religion.
so imagine i work myself to the bone and now i’m practically disabled, but — and i’ve been thru this and i take care of people who’re going thru this — to be elligible for welfare i need to act like i’m borderline ascetic living at below-subsistence, and then i get to work a different fulltime job: the fulltime job of filling out all the paperwork, keeping an accurate accounting of all my activity, dealing with ‘lifestyle inspectors’ and housing audits, trying to comply with ever-increasingly complex living requirements, renewing my diagnoses several times per quarter and having monthly status calls to answer the question ‘so why aren’t you working’ for the millionth time. all while an entire government apparatus fulfils its primary purpose of making me feel like a parasite and a fuckup because i should be out there affording some guy his fifth yacht with my lifeforce. all that, and the cheque doesn’t even pay the rent.
meanwhile, i still do have time and skills to offer, but not in a way that makes someone else a 30% markup, or that fills an entire 8-hour workday with bullshit. and everyone around me is so taken by their own temporal enslavement to notice me, offering my services for a little bit of food. and the few who hear me are so brainrotted by money that they reject this lowly, mangy beggar, and because no one ever does a good job for no less than two digits of currency. and if it’s ever found out that i do anything with my life other than sleep and feel sorry for myself, or that i’m getting help from a neighbour, a friend, or a loved one: they take the money away and force me into a work programme on an assembly line that i’ll fail out of into homelessness, and refusal means i go homeless, or get put in jail for ‘welfare fraud’ so i can be released three years later into homelessness. in every case i end up homeless: i end up back in jail anyway because being homeless in public is illegal.
how much we could all collectively fucking save — on commuting, on groceries, on equipment, on time — if we shared responsibilities, brought the ‘work’ closer to home, and came together to ask “what does everyone need, and who can do it?”. when Marx borrowed the phrase ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’, he intended there to be a second part: ‘what one person can’t do can be done by another; what no one wants to do can be done by everyone.’
[…] where everything works as it currently does with no one needing to bust their ass.
the way everything works now is that it doesn’t. if it works for you: great. it’s not working for me, and it doesn’t work for 6 billion other people. you talk about working plumbing and electricity; i didn’t have that for most of my life.
what a bad faith take, to look at this forum or this thread and come away from it thinking that the dispossessed are just too uneducated to get it, that they don’t expect a fundamental shift in our way of thinking and the way society is organised. you see an effortful comment and you superimpose the strawman over it. ‘they’re just lazy,’ the WASP cop in your head says. ‘they just want everything for nothing. they’ll just live like pigs, and worse yet they’ll like it!’ you give selective, low-effort retorts. you claim they don’t ‘understand’, but then ignore real examples of a different way of living because ‘that’s not how it works in the here and now’ (no shit!). you’re given ideas of how it might work, and then say ‘well if it’s so great why aren’t we doing that already?’.
not everything constructed under capitalism is capitalist; just as a book written in a café isn’t a sandwich. capitalism doesn’t get to take credit for everything just because the person who put in the labour ate at McDonalds for lunch that day, or because someone’s expressive art can sell for $100 on eBay. people can want to do things for more than one reason, and people can have multiple priorities, and those priorities aren’t always the same as yours, and we know that people can be motivated by things other than money when the money isn’t essential to unlocking the hierarchy of needs.
if you really care about improving anything more than the shit-eating grin on your shitty boss’s face: you might want to stop fighting scarecrows and make a real effort to engage your imagination for once. if you just came here to say ‘i like capitalism; i don’t want anything to change’, you could just say that instead of pretending to care. if you only care about keeping your treats and ‘valour’, and dangling them over everyone else: your time would be better spent JAQing off to a mirror. reproducing shitty beliefs because ‘well that’s what everyone believes’ and purity testing every idea for change against the majority is circular reasoning that ensures the shitty belief and associated shitty behaviour continues unopposed by deliberately shutting off your heart and mind to the idea for irrational reasons. your majoritarian nonsense is cowardice, and you deny others as much as yourself the possibility of a better society.
if you want there to be tokens and prizes for extra effort: great! that’s fine. but don’t lock belonging and love in a storage closet, and don’t put essential food and shelter on the same fucking shelf as the teddybear and the bouncy ball.
I agree that most of us are used and abused by the rich pricks, it’s why I joined this community in the first place.
But it’s taken to an aburd extreme here where it seems people want to live a care free happy life without burdens, yet at the same time expect life to continue as it currently is with all the benefits we all receive.
Fact is, it won’t. If people don’t bust their ass, and get paid well for it, most would not do anything of value (I know you said you would work for free, but you’re a very very small minority).
this is a strawman. you do yourself a disservice by fighting with scarecrows.
anyone but the ignorant or deeply unserious who want a world without work fully expect to labour to make that happen and to keep it running. the difference is they don’t want to be forced to do things — usually things no one but Moloch asked for, and that they don’t want to be doing — and then threatened with precarity and social murder because the skills they have aren’t profitable, or a machine has made them obsolete (when it should have freed them to do something else), or they have a ‘disability’, or the job they’re filling isn’t needed anymore (or, more likely, is eliminated to bolster the end-of-year profit numbers).
i think you’ll find people still want to do stuff and help each other when they’re not being atomised and forced to compete for scraps. if food and housing were a right, just as many nations in the economic core enshrine a right to life: the ‘rich pricks’ would lose their leverage. people could choose the type of work they want to do, and could do socially beneficial and necessary work that is ‘unprofitable’, because they’re no longer threatened with precarity for failing to bolster someone else’s already comfortable life.
i have never had a job i wanted to do, because i grew up in precarity and the types of things i want to do wouldn’t pay the bills, or pays too little to live on, or is too expensive to certify for, or there’s more than enough people doing them already. i can’t spend too much time looking for jobs, because i gotta eat, so i take the best of the first few of a handful of options, and the jobs (plural) are usually something that only exists to serve rich pricks and their extravagent, imperialist lifestyles, or to serve a need that only exists because everyone is too busy with their bullshit jobs to organise something better. then, when i have a job, that’s all i have time and energy left to do. i don’t have time left over to look at another job, or to learn a new skill, or take a course, or get to know my neighbours, or meet new people at all, or work on my mounting health issues. i don’t have time left over for my hobbies or my interests or to take care of my loved ones or make something useful for my community, because it’s 12 hours of attendance for work that could be done in four, or i’m expected to do more work than is reasonable in a single day and so most of it’s rushed and done to the minimum. and for everything i don’t have time to be doing, that’s more money i have to make paying someone else to do what i could already be doing for myself but i can’t because i’m not a fucking farmer and my apartment has no space for a balcony garden and zoning laws prohibit community gardens and the food banks only take the completely destitute or people willing to convert to their religion.
so imagine i work myself to the bone and now i’m practically disabled, but — and i’ve been thru this and i take care of people who’re going thru this — to be elligible for welfare i need to act like i’m borderline ascetic living at below-subsistence, and then i get to work a different fulltime job: the fulltime job of filling out all the paperwork, keeping an accurate accounting of all my activity, dealing with ‘lifestyle inspectors’ and housing audits, trying to comply with ever-increasingly complex living requirements, renewing my diagnoses several times per quarter and having monthly status calls to answer the question ‘so why aren’t you working’ for the millionth time. all while an entire government apparatus fulfils its primary purpose of making me feel like a parasite and a fuckup because i should be out there affording some guy his fifth yacht with my lifeforce. all that, and the cheque doesn’t even pay the rent.
meanwhile, i still do have time and skills to offer, but not in a way that makes someone else a 30% markup, or that fills an entire 8-hour workday with bullshit. and everyone around me is so taken by their own temporal enslavement to notice me, offering my services for a little bit of food. and the few who hear me are so brainrotted by money that they reject this lowly, mangy beggar, and because no one ever does a good job for no less than two digits of currency. and if it’s ever found out that i do anything with my life other than sleep and feel sorry for myself, or that i’m getting help from a neighbour, a friend, or a loved one: they take the money away and force me into a work programme on an assembly line that i’ll fail out of into homelessness, and refusal means i go homeless, or get put in jail for ‘welfare fraud’ so i can be released three years later into homelessness. in every case i end up homeless: i end up back in jail anyway because being homeless in public is illegal.
how much we could all collectively fucking save — on commuting, on groceries, on equipment, on time — if we shared responsibilities, brought the ‘work’ closer to home, and came together to ask “what does everyone need, and who can do it?”. when Marx borrowed the phrase ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’, he intended there to be a second part: ‘what one person can’t do can be done by another; what no one wants to do can be done by everyone.’
so, when you said in another comment:
the way everything works now is that it doesn’t. if it works for you: great. it’s not working for me, and it doesn’t work for 6 billion other people. you talk about working plumbing and electricity; i didn’t have that for most of my life.
what a bad faith take, to look at this forum or this thread and come away from it thinking that the dispossessed are just too uneducated to get it, that they don’t expect a fundamental shift in our way of thinking and the way society is organised. you see an effortful comment and you superimpose the strawman over it. ‘they’re just lazy,’ the WASP cop in your head says. ‘they just want everything for nothing. they’ll just live like pigs, and worse yet they’ll like it!’ you give selective, low-effort retorts. you claim they don’t ‘understand’, but then ignore real examples of a different way of living because ‘that’s not how it works in the here and now’ (no shit!). you’re given ideas of how it might work, and then say ‘well if it’s so great why aren’t we doing that already?’.
not everything constructed under capitalism is capitalist; just as a book written in a café isn’t a sandwich. capitalism doesn’t get to take credit for everything just because the person who put in the labour ate at McDonalds for lunch that day, or because someone’s expressive art can sell for $100 on eBay. people can want to do things for more than one reason, and people can have multiple priorities, and those priorities aren’t always the same as yours, and we know that people can be motivated by things other than money when the money isn’t essential to unlocking the hierarchy of needs.
if you really care about improving anything more than the shit-eating grin on your shitty boss’s face: you might want to stop fighting scarecrows and make a real effort to engage your imagination for once. if you just came here to say ‘i like capitalism; i don’t want anything to change’, you could just say that instead of pretending to care. if you only care about keeping your treats and ‘valour’, and dangling them over everyone else: your time would be better spent JAQing off to a mirror. reproducing shitty beliefs because ‘well that’s what everyone believes’ and purity testing every idea for change against the majority is circular reasoning that ensures the shitty belief and associated shitty behaviour continues unopposed by deliberately shutting off your heart and mind to the idea for irrational reasons. your majoritarian nonsense is cowardice, and you deny others as much as yourself the possibility of a better society.
if you want there to be tokens and prizes for extra effort: great! that’s fine. but don’t lock belonging and love in a storage closet, and don’t put essential food and shelter on the same fucking shelf as the teddybear and the bouncy ball.
Holy cow batman, I appreciate the details, but please don’t type novels for responses.
I disagree with your sentiments however, and we’ll leave it at that.