• exocrinous@startrek.website
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    8 months ago

    We’ve made basic human survival so obtainable that much of the population enjoys living in excess.

    No we haven’t. Most millennials will never be able to afford a house. I know there’s a tendency over time to lower the poverty line and say “well if your heart is beating then you’re living”, but in mediaeval times working wage labour to pay rent would have been seen as destitute poverty.

    • Lowlee Kun@feddit.de
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      8 months ago

      Can we shut up about houses? 8 billion people can not live in american suburbia. If you talk about your own place to live, which includes apartments, then ignore this. Taking medieval times into your argument is also insane. Most people in medieval times were peasents whose land belonged not to them but to their lord. This ment that not only they were NOT free to go somewhere else but that they had to work and create resources for their landlord. So this was an even worse form of wage labour as your lord decided what he will get from you. Imagine saying those people were better off.

      • exocrinous@startrek.website
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        8 months ago

        I’m including apartments in my definition of a house. As well as row houses, terrace houses, duplexes, town houses, flats, and etc. I would never want to live in a detached suburban house, that sounds like absolute shit living. So many chores, such high AC bills, and so far away from amenities. Massive pain in the ass imo.

        Also the government owns your house in 2024, genius. It’s all on land claimed by the government. They charge taxes, and they can bulldoze your home to build a carpark or an airport or a freeway bypass if they fill out the right paperwork. Yes, mediaeval kings were more oppressive than capitalist governments. But in many cases mediaeval kings were less oppressive than capitalist companies put together with the government.

        And a mediaeval master was not a wage labourer. When wage labour became commonplace at the beginning of capitalism, it was a social crisis. People were trapped in a permanent state of social adolescence because they didn’t get to take ownership of their means of production after completing their apprenticeship like in mediaeval times.