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It’s not a bug that capitalism is based on greed, it’s a feature. It works (relatively speaking) because it leverages humanity’s shittyness.
Communism has failed to operate without corruption or authoritarianism, because it depends on people actually giving a shit about each other long term.
They both fail, but the problem isn’t the system. The problem is people. People try to put themselves into positions of power, retain their position of power and exploit that position of power. Capitalism and communism are simply attempted solutions, however unfortunately they don’t adequately deal with the human problem.
With capitalism, people exploit the value exchange. They lie about how much something costs to source or produce, then lie about how much someone else should pay for it, and also about how much a worker’s time is worth. Such that you end up with people doing a lot and getting nothing and people doing very little if anything but getting lots.
With communism, people put themselves in positions of power to decide how things should be distributed, then vigorously quell and dissenting voices that ask whether things are being distributed fairly. The end result is more or less the same as capitalism - a small portion of people getting a large portion of wealth.
Any solution must take into account human tendencies to abuse the system, and make efforts to prevent it. However quite often perfection ends up being the enemy of progress - we don’t try new things because they might be abused, and end up sticking with the current system which is definitely being abused. This only benefits the abusers. Rather, we should aggressively try new social systems, but also regularly review and either reverse or continue to improve upon them. If nothing else, the changing system will disrupt abusers, as they have to constantly develop new methods.
I think it is interesting that when talking about systems designed to organize people, their labor, and what to produce, that you are blaming people. It’s kind of like blaming water for flowing down hill when you want it to go up into your kitchen sink. Maybe use pipes and pressurized water instead.
If these systems don’t work, the issues are with the systems and not with the people.
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I’m suspicious of burning man culture. It’s not a completely isolated example and there is too much influence that could leak from/to external society for it to be a real test case. I am not saying it wouldn’t work, just that it’s current successes have been biased.
deleted by creator
I don’t think they blamed people. I think they said the issue is that the systems didn’t account for people. That’s saying the systems are inadequate solutions for the scenario.
It’s like saying an iron rod rusts when placed in salt water because it didn’t account for the salt water. The iron rod might be a good design but it’s not designed for that use.
Thanks for the thought provoking reply!
My impression is that all systems fail long term and need to break down and be renewed after crisis. Once it becomes entrenched, I think odds are heavily against being able to try social systems.
Have you seen a system like you describe, where a structure to continue change and experimentation is built in? To me capitalism with strong controls seems the most stable and successful (assuming your benchmark is population qualify of life not just GDP), e.g. some European systems.
Arrrrg I wrote out a big reply, was about to post, then realised I’d accidentally downvoted you. When I changed that downvote to an upvote my reply was reset. #lemmybugs.
Here’s take 2.
My impression is that all systems fail long term and need to break down and be renewed after crisis. Once it becomes entrenched, I think odds are heavily against being able to try social systems.
I’d agree with this, genreally. It feeds into the point in my last paragraph: we need a changing system to destabilise incumbant powers, such that they cannot abuse the system as effectively. These changes must be driven by objective improvemnents, democratically decided. Furthermore, I would say that total democracy is a win.
People will point to Brexit as an example of the hazards of giving people a vote. However, the truth is Brexit was a disinformation campaign - such a campaign cannot be maintained indefinitely, it can only be focused onto key events - particularly when it was driven by targeted lies (primarily on Facebook) immediately before a vote. You can say whatever you want if only the people who won’t question it see it, and by the time anyone else does it will be too late. If people had subsequent opporunities to decide how Brexit would be done, along with votes on whether or not to proceed down any particular route, things wouldn’t have been anywhere near as bad.
I believe in a strong social safety net. The bare basics of human needs should be provided for any citizen: food, clothing, and shelter. Without these needs, people get desperate, and they turn feral. They resort to crime - which then easily becomes a habit. This is worse for everyone overall; by preventing this we help maintain a stable and productive society.
The basics should be provided. If people want nice things, they should have to work for it. If you want a nice house, you need to work and earn enough. If you want nice designer clothes, you need to work. If you want a PS5/Sexbox/1337 PC you need to work for it and earn it. If you just want to rest on your laurels with the bare minimum, that should be an option, too.
However lazing about doing nothing is incredibly fucking boring and unfulfilling. No one wants to live their life that way. The lifetime benefit scrounger is pretty much a myth - maybe there’s one or two who game the system, but it never lasts forever. People want to improve their position in life, they want to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”, they just need the opportunity.
I know this full well. I’ve had the luxury of not doing anything, I’ve skirted poverty but never quite truly fell into it. And it’s not anywhere anyone wants to be. However, even in my position success is limited - debtors and financiers prey upon anyone who falls below a certain line. If you pay off your credit cards every month, they’ll feed you more credit, then when you start building up debt they’ll rack up your interest rates such that your instinct is to dig in deeper in some vein hope of finding your way out.
Meanwhile, the past is littered with famous artists, many musicians, who have spent some time living off the state. These stories have become fewer and fewer over the past couple decades - no one can live off the dole anymore. This begs the question: how much social development has the human race missed out on, given that young people have been stretched to their limit, such that they barely even want to contribute anything because their prospects are now so bleak?
People shouldn’t be exploited to their limits. Particularly, citizens of any country shouldn’t be left to rot. Any great country that calls itself wealthy should be able to care for its people, such that these people can find their feet and positively contribute to the collective good. And that collective good must belong to everyone, not just those who sit at the top and do very little to contribute themselves.
The problem with things like welfare and food stamps isn’t that people are lazy, it’s that the system produces distorted incentives. If getting a job means you lose money, why would you ever get a job? How are you supposed to get a better job if you can’t get a basic one?
There should just be a universal basic income. And instead of a simple cutoff, your benefits should ramp down as your work income ramps up so that you basically keep 50 cents of every extra dollar you make from working until you’re completely weened off of the UBI.
That’s the thing, getting a job shouldn’t mean you have less money. You should have the basic welfare safety net, regardless, then work for more. If you want to do nothing, wear generic basic clothes, eat basic nutritional meals and live in a hostel, then that should be an option. If you want to keep some of those but get some nicer things, then you can work a bit. If you want to live in luxury with a nice house, fancy food and stylish top quality clothes, then you’ll need to work more.
Universal income is a good stepping stone, however it does little to control the price of goods. If everyone earns a little, then many goods will start to cost more. Whereas if basic goods are purchased in bulk by the state the collective bargaining helps keep prices down - which then has a knock on effect with higher priced goods.
Term limits for everything. If the morons are going to pick an idiot to run their village at least there’s a chance they’ll elect a smart man, if only by mistake.
Not even term limits, I’d say politics should be like jury duty. Everyone has to do it, they get paid time off work for it, they don’t get to make a career out of it.
But there should also be some meritocracy. The EU actually manages that quite well - the European Commission is made up of “unelected bureaucrats”, but actually what that means is they’re made up of talented lawyers chosen by each member state. These lawyers write laws. Then, the democratically elected Members of European Parliament vote on the laws.
The clever people who know how to write laws write the laws, then the people democratically vote on the laws. That’s a pretty good principle.
The only difference I would add is that people should have a more direct say on their vote. If I want to vote on a particular law, I should be able to vote on that law. If I don’t care I should be able to pool my vote with some group that I align with, who can then vote on my behalf.
If I don’t like how the group votes, I can leave and vote for another next time.
None of this, “vote for a guy, then hope they do what I expect of them for the next 4 years” bollocks.
Furthermore, after the first vote, there should be an opportunity for more votes. So if the group I align with votes against my interest, I have a chance to object later on, be it before the realisation of the policy or upon review after the policy has been running for some time.
Sure, there are faults with this. People can be manipulated. However, you can’t manipulate people constantly, forever, and eventually good policy should win through.
Okay, so how do we get everyone to actually bother to vote? In the US we’ve been having problems trying to get equal representation at the polls and so far haven’t really done a great job of fixing it.
Having a team of lawyers to draft and submit legal terms is a great idea, in fact it’s kind of the point of lawyers. The issue is having the people who vote on them be able to both understand them, and to check both the writer and the representative check each other for corruption. If you give the representative the ability to remove the lawyer then the representative holds the real power, if you don’t, you give the lawyer more power. We need a balance in there somewhere.
Let’s also not forget that direct democracy has lead to the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the election of theocratic and fascistic leaders. How do we balance that?
Capping terms at 1 or 2 prevents people from being able to consolidate and exploit their power. But we’ll still need leaders to vote on our behalf so how do we prevent corruption? What if we had a new institution whose sole job was to check the government and maintain an open forum where all opinions can be shared and argued.
More than any of this, I really think the rich just need to be scared of the poor again.
You wouldn’t need everyone to vote on everything. However there is a natural incentive to vote on things that interest and affect you. Right now, people don’t vote because they don’t believe it will change anything - you vote for a person, but they’re no different to any other person. Meanwhile, if they were given the opportunity to vote on whether their tax money should go to fixing their roads or building a new school, more people will have an opinion on that and want to vote.
For things they don’t care about, they could either not vote, or better they could join a representative group. Rather than voting for a person to represent you for a set period, you join or leave a representative as you see fit. If you want to vote on a particular issue, or if the representative doesn’t vote the way you like, you withdraw your representative membership. Representatives would have to continue to act in the interests of their members, else they would lose their status.
I disagree that democracy led to Roe vs Wade being reversed. Trump was elected despite not having the most votes - which isn’t democratic - and then he appointed people to the court - not democratic - to rig the votes in their rulings. Even the opportunity to appoint new judges isn’t democratic, as they are appointed for life, so the timing of when one elects to retire or dies determines who gets to decide their replacement. This prevents the system from being democratic or fair - it is a political decision made by politicians, rather than a meritocratic decision made by experts of the profession. The legal profession should be picking judges, not politicians.
I’d wager that new institution would get regulatory captured pretty quickly.
Your sentiment is why I don’t consider myself a communist. Capitalism can work well but it requires extraordinarily powerful regulations. Communism is maybe a bit better but still requires the same amount of regulation we’re failing to implement now.
We need to fix capitalism before we make the move to communism.
I think a lot of the issue comes down to terminology. Communism has been bastardised and turned into a dirty word, it has very negative connotations for a lot of people. Most implementations of communism in the world don’t really fit the ideology, and now people think of the countries for the definition.
I would first define socialist policy: that which is made for the greater good of society as a whole, rather than for the benefit of select groups at the expense of society.
I think true communism is what you would get if you consistently implemented socialist policy again and again over a long period. If we develop robust policies that create a net benefit for the people as a group, we will end up having a communist society.
But trying to jump and change to communism straight away is fraught with issues, because during the change sociopathic people will take the opportunity and steer things in their favour by implementing policy that benefits themselves over others.
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I feel like you’re misrepresenting or misunderstanding what communism is. You might base your opinion on the soviet union but they never actually achieved communism, and some would even say it was state capitalism and not even socialism. In fact it’s unlikely we’ll ever see what an actual communist society would be because it’s very much a vague utopia, and just a goal to strive towards.
Communism by definition actually isn’t very clear because Marx never actually got into the details of how a communist society day to day life would look like. But he did postulate the primary idea of communism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” One idea of communism is that it’s stateless and classless, meaning there literally couldn’t be a small portion of people getting a large portion of wealth. Marx himself actually said that future communist institutions should be designed to be decided democratically by the people.
I’m going to copy my other comment as it covers my thoughts on this:
I think a lot of the issue comes down to terminology. Communism has been bastardised and turned into a dirty word, it has very negative connotations for a lot of people. Most implementations of communism in the world don’t really fit the ideology, and now people think of the countries for the definition.
I would first define socialist policy: that which is made for the greater good of society as a whole, rather than for the benefit of select groups at the expense of society.
I think true communism is what you would get if you consistently implemented socialist policy again and again over a long period. If we develop robust policies that create a net benefit for the people as a group, we will end up having a communist society.
But trying to jump and change to communism straight away is fraught with issues, because during the change sociopathic people will take the opportunity and steer things in their favour by implementing policy that benefits themselves over others.
I absolutely agree with democratically deciding everything. I think technology has reached the point where we could give people that opportunity. We all have devices in our pockets that have the capability to communicate with everyone else, so we don’t need representatives to do it on our behalf (particularly when all too often they don’t actually represent us when they vote on policy). There are potential problems with this, of course, however these problems are primarily technical in nature and could be overcome.
Part of the issue with this take is that communism isn’t a system for organizing government, but rather that of labor and resources. It is not true that communism has failed. Rather it is true that communism under totalitarian regisms has failed. True Communism requires that the people have the power, which in turn would require a true Democracy
If a certain type of government is not possible to install is that a feasible form of governance?
How is it impossible to install?
Everytime someone tries it always gets co-opted into an authoritarian regime?
It’s my understanding they began as authoritarian regimes, so they have yet to be implemented. An authoritarian regime isn’t necessarily easy to install but it isn’t impossible, nor is a full democracy or some variant of it.
One of the key tennents of a well governed body is that leaders (if there are any) should be easy to remove by the governed. An authoritarian regime immediately fails that requirement.
In theory, sure, but it’s a very brittle system if it requires true Democracy, which is pretty much fantasy.
Has capitalism operated without corruption or authoritarianism?
In a way: when you legalize the most common forms of corruption and gaslight people into thinking of your favorite kinds of authoritarianism as normal and necessary, suddenly you don’t officially have a problem!
That’s how the US and many other supposedly free and uncorrupted capitalist nations do it, anyway.
Relatively speaking, I’d say yes.
The communist systems I’m aware of have failed hard on these due to not having built in outlets for negative human characteristics.
Seems like your understanding of communism comes from cold war propaganda
Actually from people who lived through it in the eastern bloc… the propaganda was mostly right.
No, we tried communism, the weird dielectric system of government that Lenin came up with.
Communism, the market ideology, can exist within a capitalist framework - all we have to do is say “companies are owned and operated by employees. From now on, we cap ROI when loaning money, no more infinite payout because you provided startup capital”.
Communes and entirely employee owned/operated companies exist, and they do well. They just don’t grow until they implode - they grow to a point and then stop letting people in
Communism is a market system, not a system of government. It doesn’t need to be centralized - and centralization is the real problem IMO
Yeah, agreed. I don’t think purism in either direction is great. To me well regulated capitalism with strong unions seems like a good balance.
has any economic system ever operated without corruption?
that’s a fair question. it seems like corruption is universal to all systems of organization and therefore not a good measure of the validity of any given system
Anyone care to argue against generic opinions generated by bots? If so, you are in the right place.
Can confirm. I’m on disability and cannot afford food and medication and bills at the same time. My Internet will be cut later this month because I did the crime of paying for my medication so I didn’t want to kill myself. I am starving but at least I didn’t feel like my soul was being drained.
It’s just depressing that if I want to feel slightly okay I have to not eat for days so I can justify getting my medication. Or dumpster diving to supplement food, which I’m gonna be doing in a couple hours.
Life is suffering and I’m tired of it.
If you’re in the US, the Affordable Connectivity Program is available to low income families and it covers $30 a month off your existing internet bill.
PCsForPeople (not sure if I can provide links on Lemmy) offers a free mobile hotspot plan with unlimited data that you can use as home internet, if you qualify for the ACP.
Just an FYI, since there are programs that help, but not everyone is aware of them.
Alas I am not American, but I appreciate it.
During the pandemic I watched grocery stores buy poison to dump on their trash, which they paid armed people to guard. They then paid other people to haul it away. All this to prevent poor people from taking it away for free.
Under modern food production systems that are entirely for profit we have had less famine in the world than any prior generation and especially far less famine in the world than in any communist nation that has tried to go and produce food without profit motives.
Ideas like this one will lead far more people to starve.
You’re spot on. Furthermore, under socialism/communism countless millions have starved to death due to governmental incompetence. The op has obviously never studied history.
@bioemerl Many many more people who would otherwise starve no longer starve. Many many more people who would otherwise have access to nutritional food are now surrounded by food that makes them sick.
I hope we can agree that both are true and there are ways to do better.
We failed with no profit motive and we failed by maximizing profit motive. I don’t think this idea would cause any more people to starve. I worry about our ongoing, collective failures of imagination.
No, I don’t know how to solve the problem.
No, I don’t know how to solve the problem.
It’s really not hard, You just push for regulations. Problem is, people like their junk food so they are almost always against regulations against it.
We are a democracy at the end of the day and taking away people’s favorite foods is going to cause politicians to get voted out of office, even if it’s better for them.
Im14andthisisdeep
That’s because you’re 14
Little bugger never learned to swim.
Capitalism is on of the worst thing happening to humanity. :( It promotes greed and punishes people who aren’t greedy. It makes more problem than it answering problems.
And yet people are saying that the system isn’t the problem but people. When it’s the system that creates and promotes those people.
Those people are correct. Capitalism is a reflection of our collective misery. Look at how many people are on anti-depressants today, how many are suffering from mental health issues. Our ability to engineer the world to our advantage is not the problem here, that is something human beings are extremely good at. The problem is that we lack the ability to engineer ourselves.
It costs money to produce food.
The more people you want to feed, the more money it costs.
Food production is not free. Food distribution is not free.
If you have an alternative to capitalism, I’m open, but you can’t just stamp your feet and go “but it should be free!” It’s not, someone has to pay for the seed, irrigation, fertilization, equipment fuel and labor involved in production and distribution.
p.s. Is it just me or is it the same people wanting $20+ hour minimum wage who also think food should be free?
It costs money to produce food.
The more people you want to feed, the more money it costs.
Food production is not free. Food distribution is not free.
Then it should be a task of the State, as “feeding people” is, quite obviously, a task Too Big to Fail. And, as such, the State can (and should) just automatically print the money needed to reward the work done. Feeding the hungry should not depend on a “budget”. A budget is basically putting a price on human lives.
Great, you just caused hyperinflation for everything else and destroyed the economy.
https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/business-strategy/hyperinflation.shtml
Of course, but maybe destroying the modern economy is a good thing. Things like serving essential needs causing hyperinflation showcases that modern economy is purposefully built to make people lose. No matter what you try to do to help society, something (or rather, someone) counterplays you.
IMO the real solution is that things that are essential, like food and health, should not depend on money exchange to be provided, period. Sure, producers of food and providers of health should be paid for their work, but that payment should not have a codependence with the fact that the hungry or unhealthy person get the attention they need.
that things that are essential, like food and health, should not depend on money exchange to be provided, period.
The problem with that is the people providing the food and health services still need to survive.
Doctors need to pay their rent. Farmers need to buy feed, seed, and fertilizer. Everyone pays for water.
So once you go down the road of making it impossible to charge for services that need to bring in money to literally keep the lights on, you collapse the economy, and no, that’s NOT a good thing. That road leads to chaos and death.
Le eCoNoMy muh gDp
those leeches can fuck off
I’m not saying doctors et all should not be paid for their work. I’m saying it should not depend on a money transaction on the afflicted citizen. I think it’s perfectly feasible to, for example, have the State pay for things that are essential, it’s kind of the entire role of the State after all. Or even better, give doctors and providers of those services the same treatment as in not collecting from them for stuff.
Also, if there’s such things as “companies Too Big To Fail should be handed over to the State”, then that also applies to Tasks Too Big To Fail. Like, you know, keeping your citizens alive. I insist: the core task of the State is to keep the Country alive.
If that collapses the economy, IMO that’s an indicative that the economy model is not good, or perhaps even unethical.
Then just take money away from the rich, ezpz
I think you’ll find they hold on to it harder than you think. ;)
Some really good books on the topic everyone should read, super interesting stuff:
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With The Bill
The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use “Plain English” to Rob You Blind
First, I don’t think they ever said food should be free. Second, capitalism and communism and all the isms are the inventions of people - humanity makes the rules. Third, there is an awful lot of wiggle room between today’s food prices and “free”. Put it all together, and you might realize that feeding everyone doesn’t have to mean food is free and farmers and distributors go bankrupt.
You call into question whether there are any alternatives to capitalism as if nobody has ever proposed any, and you call out people who want a $20/hour minimum wage as if minimum wage hasn’t been falling behind inflation and cost of living for decades. It kinda sounds like you want to pin society’s problems on the failure of individuals and don’t see anything wrong with “the system”.
I don’t think anything less than a collective effort to support the vulnerable and dismantle the rotten parts of the system has any hope of improving our situation.
It cost <insert human created construct> to feed people so let’s let them starve instead. Nice one.
Brooklynman fallacy
It cost human labor to feed people. Can’t be more human created than that
Food should be free though - the basics at least. The same with clothing and housing. These are 3 essential things that any civilised society should be able to provide to all of its citizens.
Beyond that, people will want nice things. People will work for money to buy those nice things. There’s this whole fiction about benefit scroungers that doesn’t really ring true, very few people spend their entire lives reliant on social welfare, rather it allows them to pick themselves up and make money to improve their position in life.
If people are without food, clothing or shelter they run the risk of basically turning feral. No one should want that for anyone else.
It does however get considerably cheaper to produce more food when production is scaled up. If enough people got together on the “free food” they could potentially do it cheaper than what capitalism provides.
The issue however is that capitalism has already made food really fucking cheap. It’s actually too cheap. And that is because someone else is paying the true cost of providing it. Obviously the animals who sacrifice the their lives, but also the human workers who also sacrifice their lives, just to bring food for everyone. Everyone eats, nobody gets paid, except for the owners who also do none of the work.
On a per capita basis, yes. But the Doritos that sell for $6 a bag come out of a multi billion dollar organization (Frito Lay, part of Pepsi).
Individuals coming together to produce a single bag of Doritos aren’t going to be able to do it for $6. They need the infrastructure of that multi billion dollar corporation to get there.
Yes, exactly. The problem is to get local produce cheaper than importing global crap. Distribution is a huge part of it. It shouldn’t be cheaper to transport crap food globally than for a domestic producer to deliver quality food, but it is.
The thing is, you can’t source enough local produce to support any significant population. I live in a town of 641,162 (2021 numbers), you’re not going to deliver 1,923,486 meals a day, 702,072,390 meals per year, using only local resources. It simply can’t be done.
Even on my property, for two people, I would not be able to produce 6 meals a day every day. I have to bring in outside resources.
And outsourcing this solves the problem how? You’re just making someone else deal with your locality’s problem.
It’s not just my locality, it’s any locality more than, say 50-100 people.
I don’t understand how people overlook this so easily.
People acknowledge the amount of work and labor required to produce food and insist food shouldn’t be cheap/free… But then just ignore the fact that we’re paying less money to also move that shit across the globe on giant machinery that had to be produced and burning fuels that had to be extracted and refined.
Yes, you are correct, food is not free. So does that mean it is good (per your morality) that people starve? The military is super expensive, but that hasn’t stopped us from deciding all Americans need protection and making that happen.
Capitalism has done some good stuff, but it has also done some bad stuff too. It’s not an all or nothing proposition. I think if the majority of us agree everyone should have access to food, money should be a detail to solve, not a barrier.
The question is, do you think food should be free? Have you ever thought about it seriously?
Morality doesn’t enter into it. If you want something that somebody else puts effort into producing, they need to be compensated for their effort, materials, etc. etc.
I guess you could phrase that as a moral demand. You don’t have free access to the results of someone elses effort.
You want to eat without paying someone? Grow your own food. Nothing stopping you. Oh, but you’ll have to pay for the land, seed, water, fertilizer, animals. Learn how to slaughter and butcher on your own because you can’t pay someone else to teach you those skills. You could learn to hunt, but then you’d have to make your own weapons because even re-loading supplies cost money.
Wait, what?! Morality doesn’t play into it?! Well, then why do people need to be compensated? You can just stab them after they make the thing you want.
I’m almost afraid to tell you that bullets are cheaper than most things you can get by shooting people who carry said things.
Also, “grow your own food”. Sure, on what land? Is no one going to stop me from uprooting crops on land owned by others so I can grow my own? What tools will I use? Do I make my own from sticks and rocks, or do I take the tools owned by others?
What your proposing is insane. I think you need to touch some grass.
People need to be compensated otherwise they will stop producing.
Let’s say you own a bakery and you make really good donuts. Maybe the best donuts in town. Every day you get up at 5 AM to make a fresh batch and put them out for sale.
And every day, every single one of them gets stolen.
How long before you just stop making donuts?
Most people don’t own a bakery.
“Let’s say you are a king isn’t feudalism awesome?”
Let’s say you have bills to pay and some idiot on the internet thinks money is imaginary.
Sorry, I deleted my comment because I realized that I misread the post I was replying to.
To respond to this post, yes, that is problematic if you care about the workability of the system, but if you have morals, then weather or not the system works is moot.
And, again, morals don’t enter into it. People deserve to be paid for the work that they do, and it doesn’t matter what that work is.
Isn’t that what the whole “anti-work” is about? Paying people what they deserve to be paid, right? Why do you think people involved in food production or distribution deserve any less? They work as hard, or harder, than you or I do. Nobody should expect them to work for free “because food should be a right, man!”
Ok, but why do people deserve to get paid for their work? That seems like a moralist statement. Is there deeper rational supporting that statement, or is that a moral imperative for you?
Edit: to be clear I’m not disagreeing with the premise, I just want your reasoning for arriving at it.
People deserve to be paid for the work that they do, and it doesn’t matter what that work is.
Yeah, this. This right here. This is exactly why your argument falls apart.
We have people in the US who have jobs, but can’t afford to keep a roof over their head and to feed themselves. The argument people are making is that they deserve food, and not to fucking starve to death. You’re arguing that they need to give someone money so they don’t starve.
People are arguing what work they do shouldn’t matter, and you’re agreeing. But because of the western views on capitalism and western views on social programs, you’re claiming that the food producers won’t get money and therefore are essentially saying these people should starve.
These people tend to work jobs that the upper class doesn’t want to do. But for some reason, you’re arguing they also don’t deserve appropriate pay or the right to a safe life.
So, one has to pay for the means of production including the land, which is just sitting there and required nobody to go to any effort?
You see the problem there?
Yes, because if you don’t own the land, you have no right to trespass on it to work that land.
Now, here’s the correct way to do it:
-
Buy the land and do what you want with it.
-
Contact the owner of the land and work out an agreement. Maybe they’ll let you use it for free, maybe they’ll take a cut of whatever you produce there, whatever is mutually agreeable.
You don’t have the right to just do whatever you want, and, further, once you put the effort in to do something with that land, nobody can just take it from you because they feel your work has no value.
For example…
I have a fence that faces a busy road. It’s on my property and just sits there, it provides privacy for my home.
Someone asked if it was OK to hang carpets on my fence and try to sell them.
I told them “Sure, kick me 5% of the sales and you can do what you want.”
Never heard from them again. If they hadn’t asked me, I’d have trespassed them. If they wanted to negotiate, I’d have been open to that too.
Interesting that you say people should grow their own food yet want to prevent them from having the means to readily do so like this. It’s sad really and kinda evil.
Nothing prevents them from having the means to grow their own food. The trick is being able to do it sustainably for a long period of time.
My house sits on 0.16 acres, 6,970sqft. I could turn that land over to growing food. But the problem is, growing food is a full time job and if I spend all my time growing food for my wife and myself, I’m not making money to pay the mortgage, and soon I have nothing.
I could pay someone else to grow my food, they aren’t going to do it for free, but if I’m going to do that, I may as well keep my property as it is (not much you can grow on 0.16 acres) and just buy my food at a store.
Go and plant your crops on someone else’s land and see how you go.
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Ok, so it sounds like in your case, the market is morality, if I am understanding you. So you would be cool with buying and selling slaves and paying hit men to kill people? All that would be good because everyone was paid?
Have you though about this stuff seriously?
You’re making a disingenous slippery slope argument. The law isn’t about morality either, it’s about what is and is not legal.
Slavery isn’t illegal because it’s immoral, it’s illegal because one person doesn’t have the right to take away another persons self determination. You can choose to hire them, and they can choose to work for you, but you can’t force them to do anything.
By the same reason, you don’t have the right to take another persons food without paying them for it. That’s theft.
No, I am not making a slippery slope argument. I am just trying to understand your moral framework, or see if you have any.
Yes, lets talk about laws, maybe that will help. Ok, laws are not just some magic thing that happens, they are developed by society, right? In fact you can argue that laws are related to morality. In a truly democratic society laws would derivative of morality, right?
Humans develop constructs like laws and capitatim to help us do things. So it is important for us to not derive our morality from existing structures, because if we did, we could never evolve them in a way to help us do more/better things. I know this is kind of abstract and I am sorry about that.
So you are using existing laws and economic systems to argue for the correctness of the current laws and economic systems. Using this approach I could argue that that Feudalism is pretty awesome because it is way better than the stone age, etc…
This is why I am wondering if you have given any thought to your moral frame work, or if you have just accepted the status quo and are trying to justify it because you don’t have a framework.
No, laws have absolutely jack all to do with morality, and when they do (prohibition for example) they inevitably fail.
Laws exist to define which rights supercede other rights.
So, for example, in my state there are three cases where I can use lethal force:
- If someone is or is about to commit a violent felony on me.
- If someone is breaking into my house.
- If someone is or is about to commit a violent felony on someone else.
So, I see a dude walking down the street swinging a machete (I live in Portland, it’s not as crazy as you’d think.)
I don’t have the right to just plug the guy. That would be illegal. He has the right to be in public, swinging around a machete.
Now, if he’s swinging it AT ME or someone else, or chasing them or threatening them, then it’s a different deal and my right to be safe in a public space supercedes his right to wave his arms in the air like he just don’t care.
Again, laws are not present to pick moral winners and losers.
I completely disagree. Why are there laws to prevent people from killing each other? Why would we as a society bother to make that a thing? It’s morality. It’s the basis of everything.
If the most common moral framework didn’t hold that human life is valuable. Then we wouldn’t make those laws. It wouldn’t make sense for those laws to be on the books.
And yes the laws do and should pick winners and losers. If you are a serial killer, the laws are not in your favor, your a loser.
“Our labor has conquered scarcity”… Bro they’ve conquered scarcity now? I didn’t even know! If someone has conquered the universal reality of scarcity they can ask whatever they want as minimum wage. 🤣
Quick, somebody tell the Playstation and Xbox fans… “Naw, naw, it’s cool… we conquered scarcity…” LOL.
Under capitalism there is so much food that most people are overweight. Under communism on the other hand, people can’t afford food and subsequently starve to death.
Lmao, gotta call all the people living in the street and starving to death in capitalist countries that it’s their own fucking fault, they probably havent noticed they are in a capitalist country and not in a communist one i guess.
No system is perfect. Which would you prefer, the one where many more people starve to death, or the one where significantly less people starve to death?
Why are you presenting those choices as if they’re the only ones available? We can choose to have a system where nobody starves to death.
Things holding us back: fascists, capitalists, dictators, monarchs, oligarchs.
Steps in the right direction: socialist policies like social security, universal healthcare, road management, electricity distribution, public transportation, public education, and others. Including welfare, which includes food and other basic necessities.
Oh, and mustn’t forget people like you, who like to deem themselves the arbiters of all such choices and demand reality bend to your silly whims. Or rather, you like to misrepresent reality as a narrowminded fantasy, because in it you may not be powerful, but at least you can pretend like you know things.
I’m not presenting them as the only two options. I’m contrasting them to point out that capitalism is a much better system for feeding people. Again, that is why people Americans are so enormous.
And comments like this are why everyone hates yanks
No, you’re creating a false dichotomy by stating what you continue to fall back to (many starve vs fewer starve) to attempt to paint capitalism in a good light. I can’t fathom why.
The less evil of two systems is not only vulnerable to misrepresentation, but full on deception. Capitalism is often presented as the only viable alternative to communism, without acknowledging that communism has never existed without authoritarianism/fascism. Without acknowledging that capitalism was a ploy to keep the “royal families” and other such imbeciles as powerful as they were during their respective monarchies, all while pretending the serfs could own stuff too.
Just because you picked one doesn’t make it not evil. It just makes you a sucker. And yeah, American are fat, harhar, except we also have almost an equal amount of poor people starve or die homeless in the street.
The reason I’m pointing all this out is because you’re part of the fucking problem. Stop pretending capitalism is some gift to the world and face the fucking facts.
Under communism food will be free
“Can’t afford” is projection
The gains from capitalism have dropped the costs to produce foods to previously unheard of levels. The productivity of a modern farm is incredible compared to farms of 25, 50, 100 years ago. The amount of labor and land needed to produce the food humanity needs has dropped considerably.
I realize these are not the statements that people posting here want to read, but that’s reality. Take the good with the bad because regular capitalism is not bad. Unfettered capitalism is the problem.
But that’s not because of capitalism, that’s because of technological advances. We have centuries of technological advances in agriculture before we even had proto capitalism. There’s no reason to believe those advances wouldn’t have happened under any other economic system.
It is because of capitalism. Capitalism includes price competition, necessity to update farming tools and adopting technology in timely manner for every farmer, reducing worker numbers by replacement with farming tools, free labour movement, meaning less people being stuck being farmers. Tech development competition and tool production is its own capitalistic dynamic too.
Other forms aren’t necessarily centuries behind in effectiveness but they would require very microscopic management and preplanning, hopefully competent leaders and selfless participants.
Agriculture is in most societies already heavily regulated and intervened by governments and politicians bc of its importance. So even in capitalistic nations, agriculture is never pure capitalistic
All you’re saying is that you cannot comprehend a world without capitalism. Let me give you a quick hypothetical that you can hopefully relate to. Imagine you could do something about your work that makes your work easier and also take less time, but the wage your being paid doesn’t change. Would you do it? I’m sure you would because even if you don’t get more money out of it you get more energy (as less is spent on work) and more free time to spend that energy. There are other ways to motivate technological advancement than just pricing, primary being the desire to do as little work as possible. It’s actually superior to pricing because it’s not externally driven. If you’re able to assert a dominant market position you no longer need to innovate because you’re going to make a profit anyway. But unless we’re in full automation (where you never have to work again) there’s always motivation to innovate to do less work.
And now the other part of this hypothetical. Assuming there is something that could be changed to make your work easier and take less time, could you actually change that? You brought up how other forms aren’t as efficient as they require microscopic management and preplanning with competent leaders. But if you’re a worker in a capitalist company the change you would want to make gets bogged down by those same things. A competent leader might implement your change, but for them to even hear your suggestion you have to get through all the levels of management. Now, imagine if you worked in a company where you and your co-workers can decide together that this is a great idea. Compared to a capitalistic company would you consider that slower or faster, and do you think it would be more likely or less likely your innovation gets implemented?
A lot of people dont want work to be faster, more efficient. They just want no changes in process. People are comfortable in avoiding changes.
A lot of people also see stuff they do as art or enjoy the process. They dont mind things taken a lot of time.
We had fake communism and real communism, feudalism levy and feudalism slave systems before.
You are talking about project groups companies. Agriculture doesnt operate like that bc farmers tend not to be like some agile project groups
Absolutely false no matter how much you want to believe otherwise. Capitalism brings about the motivation to improve efficiency unlike anything else.
Capitalism is exceptionally good at short term efficiency, because it’s profits driven and and as long there’s someone else to compete for profits there’s technological advancement. But capitalism is also all consuming and once it’s killed off all its competitors and profits are guaranteed the efficiency of technological advancements stops. Xerox is a great example, they invented a lot of modern things we use today like the foundation of the personal computer, GUI, computer mouse and desktop computing. But they invented those things at the height of their success and because of it did almost nothing with it. They just didn’t need to because they were already making loads of money. Those ideas were instead taken by Microsoft and Apple and they found immense success in it. Had Xerox also killed all the competition then the world we know today wouldn’t exist because there wouldn’t be any need for tech to advance here. The efficiency capitalism gives comes from a purely external source, it’s to beat the competition for profits. Once competition dies out so does the efficiency. Long term capitalism is not more efficient than any other economic system where the efficiency is derived from an internal source, such as the desire to do less work.
And while we’re on the topic of efficiency, the efficiency of capitalism is not necessarily a good thing. Do you know what is efficient? Working from the moment you wake up until the moment you have to sleep. That is what capitalism, at its core, wants. But I doubt it’s something you want. In fact we collectively have decided it’s not what we want because we have laws that exist solely to limit capitalism. The fact that you have time to comment here is inherently anti-capitalist, because capitalism wants that time spent on making a profit.
What you are describing in the later part of your post is essentially unfettered capitalism. Fuck everything about unfettered capitalism, but regular plain old capitalism is, as you said, great for tech innovation. Too many people can’t keep the two straight.
Sure, I won’t get into that now. But you really didn’t address the main part where a capitalistic company essentially stop innovating once they reach a market dominant position and kills off all the competition? Amazon hasn’t innovated anything since killing off its every competitor. Google kills every innovation they create because it’s not as profitable as they want. Meta has been stealing ideas and buying innovations since its inception. Once the external incentive to innovate dies off capitalism stops innovating.
technology advances because people in power pay for it. it doesn’t passively increase.
societies eventually stagnate without capital investments into technology.
You do realize that we have roughly 3-4 millenias of technological advancements, before we even invented early capitalist theory? The vast majority of human history contradicts your statement.
Well, those yield gains are from capitalism subsidized with government-sponsored ag research at hundreds of college campuses, and subsidized by intellectual property protections for patents and copyrights, and government price supports, and government crop insurance, and government land-bank programs to pay farmers to not overuse the land, and ag labor subsidized by special exemptions for minimum wage and citizenship verifications, as well as tight border controls and political vilification of the immigrant labor force to keep the wages low.
But yeah, when society throws enough money into capitalism and soaks up the external costs, it sometimes delivers results.
In short, modern US agriculture is hardly a good example of either unfettered markets or unfettered capitalism. Big US ag is privatized profits and socialized losses, like a lot of other US industry, albeit with much better PR than (for instance) the banking industry.
Take the good with the bad because regular capitalism is not bad. Unfettered capitalism is the problem.
The thing is, unfettered capitalism is basically regular capitalism brought to you by Adam Smith & his successors. Bernard Mandeville, who arguably also described capitalism prior to Smith, called it out for its faults and said that it may only be to the public benefit through careful regulation, whereas Smith thought that greed would somehow regulate itself.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Smith is the one more may have heard of today over Mandeville.
Smith described capitalism, he didn’t idolize it.
He’s often misquoted, but skim through the wealth of nations. It most certainly does not say unregulated capitalism just works out magically.
It describes how capitalism works, and heavily implies the situations where it doesn’t. It’s not subtle about it either
On review, you’re right, but I do think there is a notable ambiguity regarding whatever Smith’s trying to describe with his “invisible hand” concept, which is more of what I was referring to than any sort of magic. An ambiguity which, I think it may be fair to say, is among those misquotings and employed as an argument to defend deregulation and unregulated capitalism.
I’d have to do some further reading to get a better sense of what Smith may have been trying to say with that idea, but at least at a glance it seems I’m not alone in finding it questionable. At best it appears to be the notion of incidental good produced from self-interested endeavors in circumstances of good governance, and to which I think you raise a good point in Smith’s articulation of what prudent governance might look like, e.g.
The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market, and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can only serve to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [of employers/dealers that live by profit], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.
Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, emphases & bracketed insertion mine for clarity, drawn from earlier portions of the paragraph. Ctrl+F and search this section to verify if concerned.
What he described by the invisible hand was the idea of systematic forces - essentially emergent properties of a system.
They’re patterns in a system that emerge not from individual actors, but from the interaction of many actors. No one has to enforce the behaviors - hell every individual actor in the system might be against it - but the system itself creates certain forces
Smith approaches the concept awkwardly and very cautiously - he probably was afraid he’d sound like a lunatic, or that the concept would be controversial
Listen, just hear me out. I propose we all go back to subsistence agriculture and perhaps a primitive barter system. Who’s with me?
Little Bobby made a full, coherent sentence, amazing!
I will be stepping down in ~7-14 days any suggestions on how to find someone that could take care of this community better than me? Thank you.
I’ve enjoyed your memes the past couple weeks!
I think that I will maybe stay as a head mod just in case and will just respond to repots and such. But I don’t see myself as a person capable of steering the community in the right direction because I don’t have any deep knowledge about how society works. All I know is that the current society is not a good place for non-capitalists (people that don’t own assets that generate money). I just want for the world to be a better place for everyone, this is why I created !antiwork@lemmy.fmhy.ml, !fuckcars@lemmy.fmhy.ml and !righttorepair@lemmy.fmhy.ml. I’m still going to actively work on the other 2 subs but !antiwork@lemmy.fmhy.ml is something beyond my capabilities. I’m still very happy that I managed to create this community and kicksart it. If it goes actually mainstream I will even be in a postiton where I could brag that I’m the one that started it here. Something like that doesn’t happen often haha.
But I’m totally going to still post there, even if I step down.
Here’s a gold for your honesty 🏅
Definitely don’t step down.
There’s far too many stray voices trying to influence this kind of community - you only have to look at reddit’s r/antiwork, where after one of their mods made a tit of themselves on Fox News, one of the users made r/workreform. r/workreform had 500,000 new users in a day, and then reddit admin forced the mod of that sub adopt their chosen powermods - they wouldn’t let him hold votes to elect mods from within the community. Said powermods convinced the founding mod to give them full power, after which they kicked him out and told him r/workreform was “now part of [their] projects, we thought you understood that”. He then went on to make r/workers_revolt but lost the all momentum he’d made with his sub.
Hold onto your community. It’s yours. If someone else wants to make their own community to deliver their message, they should make their own community, not take over yours and leech all its subscribers.
I’d be happy to assist with some moderation if you want. Either with this account, or with my alts on other instances - in particular kbin replies here seem to be somewhat isolated from the true federated conversation.
Holy shit! I didn’t know about all that stuff that happened to work reform. I think that it may be better for me to stay and watch over actions of mods who will be maintaining the community instead of throwing all that responsibility on the admins of the instance.
Yeah there was a sticky post detailing all of it on r/workers_revolt, but like I say it all got swept under the rug. Obviously, the creator/mod had some culpability, because they gave full admin to someone else, but still. Also, the new mods of r/workreform banned people for talking about it.
Edit: If you scroll down to the first posts on r/work_reform you can see some stuff about it, but most of the main posts and their allegations were removed.
I managed to
thinkfind this copy of a post that he made. I don’t think that I should ask him to be a mod there. You mentioned that he later decided to create “workers revolt” so maybe he changes his mind, idk. The copy:Hey everyone, I know this might disappoint some of you all, but I’ve decided to give up moderation.
This shit is too stressful, I had to call work and take some days off, and in return I got absolutely nothing. Moderating this sub has literally cost me money. I don’t see how being in this position is going to benefit me in my life, ever.
When I created r/WorkReform I did NOT expect it to explode to near 500k members. This shit is giganormous and I simply do not have the qualifications to keep on going at this stage, there’s too much to learn in such a small time frame that is being forced down my throat by the admins.
I spent countless and countless hours trying to filter out the posts, comments, modmail, and all that, but seriously it’s just too exhausting. Oh and that’s without taking into consideration all the death threats I’ve been getting and all the fucking cringers scrutinizing my entire life and doxxing me all around reddit.
Also, thanks to reddit admins for pressuring me out of this position. I had the intention of appointing moderators democratically but they pretty much are forcing us to appoint mods today and I refuse to go against the principles that I promised the community that I’d be doing. Huge fucking let down and I apologize for it.
Anyway, now I can go back to my normal life I guess. It was definitely a wild ride. Thanks to everyone who has been supportive of me, I will forever remember you. I’m still gonna be around, just not as a mod. Y’all take care, this movement is never going to die.
Tbh I could be wrong about him starting workers_revolt, however it certainly was the case that he was pushed out by admin in favour of powermods.
Did you see my other comment?
Yooo, do you think if I should appoint the creator of “work reform” and “workers revolt” as a mod of this community? I don’t know if he’s on this platform but from what I see the closed down their “workers revolt” sub because of reddit fuckups:
Unlike various ‘pro-worker’ communities that have failed this extremely basic litmus test (why?), Workers Revolt has gone private indefinitely in solidarity with the site-wide protest against Reddit Inc’s mistreatment of its community, volunteer moderators, and third-party applications. See /r/ModCoord for more information. We may not come back. Reddit is not a safe platform for workers’ rights, as demonstrated by its behavior towards its employees, users, and pro-labor community.
I don’t know much about him though, is he a good enough person to contact him and ask him to be a mod there?
Yikes. Capitalism has its flaws but food production is far from one of them.
deleted by creator
supermarket in us throw away food eveyday that can feed millions
It opens one up to liability to donate past-date food, even though past-date food is perfectly edible. Change the laws around food donations and you will see quite a bit more of it. Governments could even buy the past-date food and many places would be happy to sell it for very cheap.
This isn’t true and is a stubborn myth with absolutely no underlying evidence.
Liability protections for food donors and non-profit recipients exist so long as the food donated is in compliance of federal food safety and labeling rules and is donated in good faith without gross negligence.
Some states call them food donation laws, other states call them Samaritan protection laws, but laws exist at both the federal and state level to protect people who are donating food.
They don’t donate food because they don’t want to. They don’t want to because they are monsters.
People have literally been arrested for donating perfectly good food. These people were arrested too. I’m sure the people put in jail would heavily disagree with the idea ‘it’s just a myth’.
Edit: For good measure, here is another group in another location arrested for donating food.
The specific cases you mentioned are for food services not donations.
Donating food is protected by law. Serving food in public is not.
For what it’s worth I don’t think that these arrests were made in good faith either, but no grocery stores, restaurants, or food distributors have been arrested for donating surplus food.
What does Bobby Manhattan have to do with that?
