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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)
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.