I thought lemmy already surpassed this “stage”
This isnt a shitpost
Not only that, but as time goes on, we become more productive and generate more profits, only to see the age of retirement increased
You know, if you lived self-sufficient you’d still have to work for meeting basic needs. Even in pretty much any form of socialism you are expected to work. So yeah, I don’t know what you think you are saying, but I think you are saying a whole lot of nothing here
The problem isnt the work, the problem is you dont get most of the reward for it. It all sits in some nepo baby ceos bank account, probably overseas so they never pay taxes on it either. Every company does this, and competing with them is a risk with a 98% casaulty rate
Obviously work has to be done, but if the 1% wasn’t hoarding all the value we’re creating, we’d be able to work less AND be better off. How is it that in an era of technology and automation, we still have to work 40 hour weeks if not more, yet a large percentage of the population can barely afford the basics? Some will always be wealthier than others of course, but no person needs billions of dollars, especially not while others are starving.
The problem isn’t that people have to do work. The problem is that we live in an economic system where the increase in profit created by technological advances is seized by business owners to make themselves richer, at the expense of the workers who they employ. This allows some to become billionnaires while others have to work multiple jobs or become homeless.
The goal isn’t to be self-sufficient – the goal is to continue to work with others, while abolishing the class of people who would happily seize profit created by your own labour to make themselves an easy buck.
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?
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.
If you want to simplify the thought experiment, imagine being the only person in existence. You would still need to struggle just to meet the basic needs of survival, but you would definitely not be oppressed.
Nature is oppressive, so are billionaires. Working together helps overcome that, both when combatting nature and the asset class
I think that those are different meanings of the word “oppressive”, which has a moral component when referring to human actions but not when referring to natural phenomena. You can only be wronged by another person, not by nature.
Imagine the following scenarios:
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You’re alone on the planet. You struggle to survive.
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Now there’s a wealthy person on the other side of the planet, where his lifestyle has no effect on you. He could rescue you but he chooses not to.
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The wealthy person offers to rescue you on the condition that you must work for him. He would get most of the products of your labor but survival would still be easier than it was when you were alone.
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Now you have no choice except to accept the wealthy person’s offer. Survival is still easier than it would be if you were alone, but there isn’t anywhere left where you could survive alone.
Your life is oppressive in each of these scenarios in the sense that simply surviving is difficult and there’s no possibility of improvement. However, there’s clearly no moral component to that in (1) because you are alone, and (4) seems like it almost certainly has a moral component. However, in every steps from (1) to (4) you’re either better off or not worse off than you were before. Where does the moral component come from?
At step 3. Where the rich person forces conditions onto you and takes most of your production. That is immoral. Especially if he has the resources for both to survive with less effort just by not being selfish
Does it matter what your “default” state is? If you’re safe until I threaten to harm you unless you comply with my demands, then I’m obviously oppressing you. If you’re in danger until I offer to rescue you only if you comply with my demands, your options are the same (either harm or compliance) but the two situations don’t intuitively feel morally equivalent to me.
With that said, humans do innately interpret an offer of rescue contingent on paying a very high price as a form of compulsion. Someone who makes such an offer is going to be viewed much more negatively than someone who simply does not offer to help at all. Maybe it’s a way of making credible threats?
A purely logical person cannot negotiate with the rescuer, because the rescuer knows that purely logical people will pay any price. However, a person known to be irrational and willing to die rather than be taken advantage of can negotiate. There’s a trade-off between the advantage of negotiating and the very high price of failing to come to an agreement, and I suppose the strength of humans’ innate intolerance for unfairness has been tuned by evolution to attain this balance (or perhaps it attained balance in our ancestral environment but no longer does in our civilized state).
If you’re in danger until I offer to rescue you only if you comply with my demands, your options are the same (either harm or compliance) but the two situations don’t intuitively feel morally equivalent to me.
"Wow, your house is on fire! Shame, that.
…Would you like to be rescued, for only three easy payments of $99.99 USD?"
Also, I originally set the fire in the first place, but you don’t know that. Six months after your last payment clears I’m going to do it again and the price will increase.
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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.
https://archive.org/details/huasipungovillag00icaz
The rich guy comes in, forces the poor locals to build the road, and then keeps the profits from all of the new labor he is able to exploit.
