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In our civilized societies we are rich. Why then are the many poor? Why this painful drudgery for the masses? Why, even to the best-paid workman, this uncertainty for the morrow, in the midst of all the wealth inherited from the past, and in spite of the powerful means of production, which could ensure comfort to all, in return for a few hours daily toil? - Peter Kropotkin (1892)
Having lived in subsistence farming communities, this is such an ignorant rich bitch take.
Food doesn't just show up at your house. Someone somewhere has to engage in agriculture to get you that food you want to eat. Someone has to wait around for rains. Someone has to till the earth to get the food you eat. You don't deserve free food any more than a farmer does who had to grow it from the soil.
Not sure what this has to do with arguing against capitalist exploitation of labor. The person tilling the soil to grow food has more aligned interests with the office worker than the owners.
Because the OP doesn't mention it. Spending hours of your life to survive is necessary, even with modern mass production.
That was the subtext I picked up.
It just shouldn't be limited to farming.
Think of all the things you currently pay for. How much of that do you expect to be provided for you while you do nothing in return?
Garbage collection, water, electric, and yes, housing and food.
The idea seems to be that all these kinds of things would be provided, and you only have to work enough to buy your Xbox.
We're not children and the government isn't your parents.
I do think there should be more of a balance between these things. It is in everyone's interest to provide really basic housing, even if just to keep the homeless off the streets.
But we also all have to work.
How much of your 40 hour work week do you think gets absorbed by the billionaires? I expect for most people it's much less than half.
We should be able to handle healthcare, education, maybe minimal housing, meals on wheels was a great program. But we don't want half of our people to just stop working. Your life requires upkeep, and that can't all come from other people.
I really don't understand how people read the title and read the quote from Kropotkin and think that the post is somehow anti-work. We have always had to secure the material goods of our existence whether we lived in hunter-gather societies, villages, feudalism, capitalism, etc. No one is arguing that we live in a post-scarcity Star Trek society.
The point is we shouldn't have to work for someone who owns that physical/intellectual labor and gives wages in return. That is an economic system that has outgrown its usefulness.
China seems to be working hard on accomplishing it, with putting AI and robotics to better development and utilization, for the greater whole. I have my personal criticisms and if I lived there and had a vote, I would voice them, but when our society decides to come together for the greater whole, I can voice them then.
JFC - I'm talking about people that live in a village in West Africa. They own the land and work fucking hard just to survive and have never seen the inside of an office in their lives. Their lives are not bucolic fantasy, their lives are, at their core, not much different than yours and mine. They want to work less and have more and just be left alone. But they're farming millet and sorghum in literal sand, prone to the weather to dictate if they starve or not.
Or maybe you tell me more about the value of their labor and how somewhere far far in the distance someone is keeping them poor against their will and best efforts.
Ok, but why are you talking about people that live in a village in west africa? The post's original subtext, to me, is pretty clearly about people selling their labor for less than its true value to survive, while the ownership class tremendously profits. Farmers working their own land aren't being exploited (not counting interactions with the outside world that might affect them if they try to sell crops).
I'm not an expert but I imagine colonialism and such might have an impact.
I'm talking about people who farm and need labor to survive, and placing that labor in the context that sometimes you can be left alone, have relatively little direct impact from colonialism or even capitalism, and that doesn't make one's labor somehow special or magical. You can do everything right and free from most trappings of capitalism and life can still be hard and suck.
Posts like this push some socialist farm worker fantasy, as if Soviet era propaganda of smiling peasants was how things were - I've lived like that. It's not pleasant on average, which is why people leave those communities unless something specific keeps them there. It works as a method of basic survival of the species, but so does having 7 or 8 kids per woman to try and get 3 to reach adulthood so you can sell off one girl for the dowry payment.
I'm also talking about places where no French or English is spoken, where the currency they use isn't even the one for the country where they live, and none of that changes the fact that rain-fed subsistence agriculture is backbreaking labor. There's no one to blame but the Earth itself, and climate change on a long enough scale, but desertification of the Sahara has been taking place for thousands of years. Climate change is simply speeding up the inevitable, but population growth is making that worse. Trees only grow so fast, and they don't grow fast enough for a village of 20 cook fires to suddenly expand to 50 cook fires in 20 years and not impact the environment.
Whatever, we'll all end up experiencing it ourselves in the next 10 years or so anyway.
People that build the machines. The chips used in those machines. Etc. All the stuff that goes into everything and how things depend on each other is absolutely mind blowing complex.
Market investment, including short selling. Foreign manipulation of markets, including fighters paid to keep conditions the same or worse for farmers...
I never said we should stop working. Read the title.
We have the machines to produce enough food, water, clothing, housing, etc. for everyone. And yet we live under an economic system in which millions around the globe do not have access to these goods. People are incentivized to throw food away or keep houses empty when the alternative is unprofitable. But we no longer need to organize society such that that the products of our labor is based around price and profit.
WE DON'T have the machines! John Deere and Case and AGCO and Claas have the machines. What open source non-profit modern machines are there out there you're talking about? Because I'd love to buy one.
Also, no one is incentivized to throw food away, people are lazy AF and rich westerners somehow don't seem to mind waste. Don't attribute to malevolence what incompetence will explain.
I used to live in a place that was at the bottom of the UNDP development scale. When I would go "out" to eat basic rice and sauce, I would usually have 2-6 kids, like actual children, standing next to me waiting to eat the scraps. And they would fight over a few handfulls of rice because they were starving and that was the system of alms-giving. And while I feel guilt now for every bite of food I waste, and I try not to, I'm not about to expend 200 times the energy to DHL cooked rice to West Africa. You have to balance resource use at a local level with the resources needed to move food other places. Even shipping all that soy that China didn't buy from the US to anywhere in need incurs huge costs, plus significant CO2 emissions.
You are literally describing capitalism, and why it's fucking us all over. You are agreeing with the original quote.
The people who build those machines have zero ownership or control of them. Yeah, no shit that's the problem.
How does one expect to build a tractor without materials? Like a mine to get iron ore from the ground, foundries to smelt it, machine shops to craft parts, rubber or oil processing to make tires, etc.? Supply chains under a command economy have been much worse slavery just as much as you would say they are when people are paid for their labor.
Let's look at examples. Albania's socialism was incredibly closed off, and the Hoxha regime a full on analogue surveillance state because they didn't trust their neighbors because they weren't socialist enough. They bought tractors from other socialist countries for decades (socialists doing capitalism with the government, so it doesn't count), until in 1978 they finally just made a factory to copy the Chinese tractors they were buying because of their paranoia about other socialist countries trying to infiltrate them.
Of course I'm describing capitalism, because I'm telling you that you genuinely can't expect some noble socialist utopia to actually get you tractors without conscripting people who don't want to build tractors into receiving rations - or money, take your pick - to work in a factory.
So supply chain economics don't work without capitalism? Is that the claim?
Recall how much food was thrown away during COVID. Or how the crops were left to rot in the fields during the Dust Bowl (1930s). It costs money to harvest and distribute food so the incentive is to dump it and try again hoping for a better market in the future.
Who said anything about buying their machines? There is another option.
I don't know which specific country you lived in, and yet I would bet my life savings that the poverty of this country is a result of the (past) colonialism and (present-day) exploitative agreements from Europe/U.S. This colonialism made the ruling class wealthier while extracting value from the land, labor, and resources of developing nations.
The Sahel states are exploring solutions that seem to show progress.
While every country in Africa has varied levels of impact from colonialism, there are places where the local economy is relatively untouched when you push down to the local level.
I lived on the border between 1 country that was poor with nearly no resources to be extracted, and 8km from another country with resources where the poverty deepened as you left the coastal area. And while in the 80's mining money paid for a few roads, that's about as far as it got. The village used the currency of the other country because they would walk 10km to the market there once a week because the markets where they lived didn't have anything much worth buying because it was all the same stuff they grew at home. One guy spoke about 6 words of English, no one spoke French, which is supposed to be the colonial language. So the local economy for most villages really were a perfect example of a post-apocalyptic world where the apocalypse was living in a place that barely supports humans anyway. Short of radios, batteries, lanterns, one bicycle, and canned tomato paste, life went on exactly like it did 100 years ago or 500 years ago, long before any Europeans every actually breezed through the area, which is a history I'm deeply familiar with.
To further explain the isolation, everyone grows seeds from the previous year, so there's no nefarious Monsanto to blame. It's the same millet and sorghum varieties they've grown since as far back as anyone can remember. There is no export, no international trade of their crops. During harvest season people who try and get some diversity in their diet and buy things like cooking oil sell some of their harvest at the worst time of the year, when everyone else is also trying to get cash. The grain they produce doesn't go farther than 15km from the field where it's grown, maybe 25km into a nearby town if someone comes out to buy it. Which is the modern version of caravans from the oasis towns of the Sahara coming down to buy it 150+ years ago. Cars using roads that follow caravan paths are one of those new developments, which actually reduce labor and resource needs to get food to people.
Your life savings will help educate young women in this country, so feel free to send that over when you get a chance. When you educate a woman, you educate a community.
Also, yes, please tell me what this "other option" is regarding mechanized farming. Man, if you tell me it's animal traction, I swear....