Human productivity has exponentially increased since the beginning of the industrial revolution. We produce far more food and clothing than can be consumed and there are more than enough homes for people to live in. Generic medicine can often be produced for pennies.
There is no reason that we as a society cannot guarantee at least a basic standard of living consisting of sustenance, a safe place to rest and relax, treatment for common ailments, etc.
Still, there are farmers working to produce that food, using fuel, hiring mechanics, etc. Literally millions of people are involved in the research needed to make insulin so efficiently. Millions more are currently involved into making AIDS, Cancer and other diseases less fatal. And obviously homes don’t grow on trees, from raw materials to specialized geologic knowledge, lots of people have to work very hard to build (and maintain) a home that is safe and pleasant.
That’s being said, many countries do guarantee all of that. Capitalist countries, before lemmings jump out with bullshit.
In Germany even if you are unemployed you get your health insurance paid for, your rent covered - up to centra in surface area depending on the family size - utilities paid for, and a certain amount of cash for groceries and basic needs. The only condition is you have to be looking for a job and accept any reasonable offer - and make a good faith effort to keep it. Sometimes the government will ask you to work for them (usually unskilled laborike cleaning parks or something like that).
I mean, you picked like one of the handful of socialist market economies that does that.
Canada nominally provides you with money in the form of social assistance if you’re unemployed. It’s not enough to pay for rent on a studio apartment. Let alone food.
The point is that being alive is not a voluntary contract. We don’t ask to be born, and we are continually told by society that suicide is unacceptable. This is fine, I think that it’s generally a good idea to promote being alive. But capitalism has actually decided that being alive is only half of it. You can’t kill yourself, but you can’t exist if you’re not useful to the capitalist system either.
So basically if you’re mentally ill, if you’re disabled in any way, if like me you have medical conditions that make routine employment significantly harder than it is for people without these conditions - you’re just screwed. Here’s your 600$ a month social assistance check. Rent is 1000$ on the absolute most basic apartment in your area. Bare minimum groceries for a single person are close to 300 a month. You might be able to afford to live in a multi bedroom dwelling with strangers without central heating and lead plumbing that often doesn’t work. At that point, your best bet to eat is at food banks, which are overcrowded and underfunded. Every single person, company, and political group across the entire country will demonize you as being essentially worthless and openly talk about how you should be forced to output labor that you are unable to output.
All this while like 10% of apartments sit empty, we throw out like 30% of the food we produce, and most labor in society has become about capitalist maintenance (office job, desk job, working for companies that essentially do nothing to feed or house people, that produce unnecessary goods in mass quantities for profit motives). Like capitalism has openly determined that we are worthless. We’re worth less than garbage. They’d rather throw food away than feed us. They’d rather leave perfectly functional working apartments empty than give us homes. Capitalism has no use for people who cannot produce capital. This isn’t new, and it is a fundamental aspect of the system. They call it merit. How much merit do you have? How much do you deserve to be alive and be happy?
And I work 40 hours a week and have for years. I take medications that make that possible, and I’m very lucky that medications exist that can essentially make me compatible with the capitalist labor system. But I lived that life before, and have many friends who still do. Barely surviving because society has decided that it’s not worth it for them to live.
Not everyone can output labor. The point of society should be to ensure that all members of society can live healthy safe and happy lives. There is no reason this cannot be the case. It has just been decided by those with majority power that it shouldn’t be the case. Suffering is legally mandated.
Seems like a Canada problem, not a capitalism problem. Germany is a capitalist country where things are kind of okay. France is a capitalist country and they banned throwing away food that’s is still edible. Many countries tax residential properties that are empty, encouraging renting or selling them and fueling supply. There are easy and straightforward solutions to all of those problems. You just need to vote for people willing to implement them.
And those are not tax havens or microstates, BTW. I’m talking about countries with 50+ Million people, a lot of immigration, and not even a lot of natural resources. For countries with oil look what Norway is doing. Also capitalist, BTW.
Yeah, I specified in the first line that Germany is a socialist market economy. As are the Scandinavian countries to varying degrees. Those are not features of capitalism. Those are features of those specific countries. You could do away with market capitalism and still not throw away food, or leaving residential properties empty. Free market capitalism actually dictates that food and housing are private industries that should be controlled by private interests with little (or no) government oversight. Socialism is what says that those thing should be government regulated and that measures should be taken to ensure everyone has access to food and shelter.
The socialist market economy is not the same thing as a capitalist free market. To be clear, I also believe that a socialist market is insufficient. Simply taking half or quarter measures to ensure people don’t starve to death and have homes isn’t enough either. A modest step in the right direction, but not what the end goal should be.
It is an economy centered around capital, so a capitalist economy.
And nobody is talking about half homes. You get something like 50m2 for the first person and 20m2 for each subsequent family member.
These are not black and white capitalist or socialist systems. Each countries economy is different and more often than not a mix of economic ideologies. No pure capitalist economy exists, nor a pure socialist economy. Trying to argue that these are or are not problems with capitalism is a bit of a moot point because of that.
Having a social program is not the same as a socialist economy
That is not what capitalism is lol
I said half measure not half homes. They could just, you know, provide homeless people with homes. Taxing property owners for not renting properties is doing pretty well nothing for people who are homeless and half no income. Over half a million Germans are homeless.
Edit: I see where the half home confusion is coming from, that was a typo meant to say “have homes”.
BTW: The government in Germany offers you a home, but it won’t force you into a home, if you want to be homeless you can be.
That’s the definition of capitalism.
Sounds nightmarish. I bet education doesn’t even saddle you with unforgivable debt.
And they even give you childcare for free or close to it. Monsters.
Nothing you said changes the fact that only a small portion of humans need to work for the rest of humanity to survive. Or everyone could just work 10 hours a week and everything would still be fine. Problem is most people spend 40 hours a week doing bullshit number shifting jobs that just serve speculators to get richer. Nothing being produced. If we actually focused our productive forces into use-value instead of trade-value and completely removed financialization, we could all live lives of abundance while barely working at all. We are at that point, technologically and in the total productive forces of our species. It’s simply a matter of political will. But the ruling classes would never accept that.
Right but I don’t want to survive, I want to have a smartphone, and a car, and a TV, and some steak or sushi every now and then. I even want someone to prepare the sushi for me and maybe even deliver it to my house.
So you and everyone else can have jobs that are actually productive for society (like producing, preparing and delivering food…), and then also work like 10-20 hours a week and have everything you described. I don’t see what’s so hard to understand.
Or do you mean you prefer to have a useless job that adds nothing to society but allows you treats while millions of people live in abject misery?
That’s not how math works…
We produce far more food and clothing than can be consumed
millions of people sarve to death despite this, what a shame this is for us as society
I wish this community were more active.
I’d probably ponder about how the system exists to force evolution by weighing traits and whatnot, but the trait is money. It doesn’t matter what’s in your genes or your head. Money is all.
We actually do provide those things.
I’ve been homeless twice and when I was willing to ask and receive it without flinging shit or attacking people, I was provided with all of those things for free.
I live in the USA. Maybe in other places these things aren’t provided, but they were given to me in Boston and Denver.
Most things die unless they do stuff to not-die
Except for plants. They’re lazy as fuck.
When was the last time you fixed any carbon, you lazy, entitled heterotroph?
They still do stuff, just a bit slower.
I can relate.
EIGHT HOURS A DAY I’M PHOTOSYNTHESIZING AND I HAVE TO COME HOME TO THIS?
12 for those hardworking tropical chads
(Did I use that right? It was uncomfortable.)
Try being a Cannabis plant in a grow box… forced into a grueling schedule of feeding and photosynthesis under lights so bright they could actually be on the surface of the sun. Forced to vegetate and create more leaf surface to photosynthesize even more while bathing in a constant flow of CO2. Only to have your reproductive organs chopped off and burnt. It’s not all fun and games if you’re Mary Jane…
I, too, want to just sit here and photosynthesis all day.
Ahhh yeah. I’m not allowed to do any of that stuff. I’m only allowed to work. Why can’t I do what’s natural instead?
The comment is saying work is natural…
Not when it’s for our owners.
Being alive wasn’t my choice and I’m seeking compensation.
Being born wasn’t your choice, being alive is 🤓
It’s really not.
You can self-terminate at will
Tried that. It went worse than when Dolores tried pulling a trigger in Westworld, and I suspect for the same reason.
It’s more like “you haven’t earned the right to have other people keep you alive”. I daresay it’s related to how, after 40ish years of working and raising a family and being a good citizen you can retire and have the bar for “staying alive” set a lot lower for most.
I think the implication is meant to be getting the living standard by your own effort instead of through dependency on a supporting figure like a parent.
Does it make people who can’t reach that standard for any reason not of their own failing feel shitty? Sometimes yeah, but it’s not like it’s to say that you’re earning the right to keep living itself.
There are people in my family that would hear this and agree 100%. They think Musk is changing the world too and they will vote for Trump a third time.
Musk is changing the world. Some changes are good. Other changes are… not so good.
We carve our living out of an uncaring and hostile universe.
Earning a living means doing your share of that.
Yep. It’s amazing how many people think all this should be handed to them. If everyone thought that no one would have anything.
There’s a certain balance we’ve yet to strike. Not necessarily having a living handed to you, but being in a situation where if a rough couple weeks knocks you out on your ass, you can meet your basic needs while you get back up on your feet.
We have tons of systems like this. The simplest example is that people can borrow money and pay it back later. We extend this option to people, without the government forcing us to at all, but we don’t do it when people are unlikely to be back on their feet after two weeks.
In terms of straight-up gifts, our society is absolutely full of that. On at least ten occasions I’ve lacked the ability to keep going, and have been given resources by public institutions, private institutions, and individuals.
The generosity of our society is off the charts. That’s why people don’t starve here.
People always think they can slip in “food insecurity” to take the place of starvation.
I said nobody starves. I didn’t say it was effortless to get a perfectly balanced diet. I said nobody starves.
And I know for a fact, since I’ve worked for these systems myself, that the people who offer free food make a concerted effort to ensure the food they’re providing is healthy and balanced.
I ate like a king (far better, in fact, than most kings who’ve ever existed), for free at the Denver Rescue Mission for example.
I’m familiar with the fact that getting leafy greens is tough in our society. Not nearly as tough as dining them in nature, but tougher than opening one’s mouth and letting them flow in. The set of circumstances collectively called “food insecurity”, which could also be aptly called “not-yet-completely-effortless access to perfectly optimal diets”, is not at all the same thing as starvation.
So stop trying to equate these things. It doesn’t help.
In case there is any doubt or lack of clarity whatsoever, this is what I’m referring to when I refer to “starvation”: https://lemmy.kya.moe/imgproxy?src=miro.medium.com%2fv2/resize:fit:800/1*bPvQruhbsPKhRpxUi-sAEA.jpeg
This is about as on the nose as any take on the topic that I’ve seen. Holy shit, we’re telling people they don’t deserve to live. Some simple truths are profound when you say them out loud.
They don’t deserve to live if they don’t earn it.
If a lion doesn’t run after zebras, it dies.
Ok but not every animal is a lion.
Sloths just wanna chill in the trees eating leaves.
And they’ll still die if they fail to exert whatever effort is required to obtain sustenance.
So, basically just surviving off of what the tree gives to them? They just have to make a conscious effort to eat and not be killed by other animals?
AKA: Earning a living
Imagine thinking anyone ‘deserves’ to be alive when literally everyone ends up dead.
Like if someone deserved to be alive, wouldn’t they…you know, stay alive?
Yes
This post sucks because it suggests people deserve anything. It’s just religious garbage to make people think they are special because they can’t handle reality
I disagree with your conclusion though, it’s just that nothing matters. If things did matter then staying alive wouldn’t matter
I’m sorry you feel that way.
I don’t understand what there’s to feel sorry about
I mean, yeah, it’s true. Death is the default. If you do nothing, you just die.
By default, you don’t deserve to be alive. But you can’t earn it either. It’s a gift.
More like a punishment, except it’s not even deserved. There is way more suffering in life than pleasure, it is immoral to bring someone into this world, and you have absolutely no responsibility to your parents for doing that, rather the opposite.
Your mileage may vary. Yeah, there are a lot of bad things in life, but that doesn’t mean life as a whole is bad. You don’t get to make that call when there are so many people who enjoy life. Not even if you define life’s pleasures as merely relief from life’s needs and strains.
To be clear, I’m not saying you should be having kids. You’re fully within your rights to judge the circumstances of your own life and where your kid would end up to decide if it’s right or wrong. Obviously it’d be wrong to have a kid in the freezing arctic with no hope of escape or survival for more than a few years. But you can’t say having kids is unequivocally wrong for everyone in every circumstance.
And if you truly believe life is wholly bad, that might be a symptom of depression.
Hallmark card platitudes are not a fitting replacement for philosophy.
Is it a Hallmark card platitude because it’s short or because it sounds cheery? Why can’t it be actual philosophy? Logically, there’s no way for you to earn a shot at life before you’re alive. Since it’s always given undeserved, earning it is entirely irrelevant. There’s no way to earn it, even by living perfectly. If you could earn it, you could earn a second life. I’m not talking about “oh wow, you’re such a good person” kind of earning it. Being a good person won’t earn you the throne of England either.
A good thing given undeserved is a gift.
Or and hear me out, the universe we live in isn’t going to cater to you. It has nothing to do with what you deserve. What an absurd tweet.
That’s certainly what people who expect you to earn your living think. Most of them have inherited their money.
Look you live in whatever imaginary land where we’ve reached some star trek utopia where everyone’s needs are meet; and I’ll touch grass and live in the real world where a vast majority of the planet would kick your ass out for not contributing, and those that would let you live and eat off their work probably live is some of the most impoverished conditions you deal with.
Pragmatic thinking is dead replaced by this vapid rhetoric. You can support you fucking fellow person while expecting them to contribute.
My imaginary land, which I admit is imaginary, is one where we all agreed that people have a basic right to survive and the idea that someone “deserved to die” was not a thing.
But it sure would be nice if the wealthy people who ran this world didn’t make you think it was. Which they apparently have done.
And that fact you’re salty about that shows that you clearly do believe people have some responsibilty to earn their income, rather than laying idle.
You’re under the mistaken belief that people are inherently lazy and need to be compelled to work.
That’s not true, and has been proven again and again.
But the owner class doesn’t want people with free time to plan how to overthrow them, so you have to spend half your waking life making someone else rich.
When left to their own devices, as the pandemic showed, people explore many creative and productive activities.
people are inherently lazy and need to be compelled to work
I don’t believe I ever said that? but to bite the hook anyway:
Certainly people can be creative without compulsion, but that’s a different thing from ‘Work’ in the economic sense. How many of the ‘owner class’, as you call them, take up as hobbies an essential role like Nurse, Farmer or Carpenter? How many even shirk a prestigious roles as managers, designers or artists that can nonetheless be of benefit?
Certain activities essential for society are simply too unpleasent to be done in the quantity needed without compensation (I will not say compulsion) being offered.
Ok first: A very large part of human effort is busy work, there have been several studies you can easily find on google scholar.
As for the ‘owner’s class’ hobbies. Time for an education: Have you noticed that the VAST majority of successful streamers are trust fund kiddies? Something to consider.
I used to be part of a consulting team in Boca Raton that specialized in digital house audio before any of the current ‘smart house’ revolution. Nearly ALL of our clients were wealthy, or very wealthy, because that’s the only people who could afford to drop $30k on a server rack just to store their massive vinyl collection.
And every fuckdamn one of them and their kids had a ‘hobby’. A lot were charity workers, some painters, some carpenters, a few were teachers in high end private schools.
But ALL of them did something, and they worked less hours and had access to better resources than a hundred people who could have done it better with less if they had the opportunity.
THAT IS WHERE THE PETITE RICHE SEND THEIR KIDS! Art jobs, entertainment jobs.
Did you ever consider that the most prestigious school for the arts in the entire united states caters almost exclusively to trust fund kiddies with a tiny handful of charity cases that show exceeding talent?
Sure you’ll never find the kid of a millionaire framing out low cost housing but you DO se them fill their tiktok channels with bespoke art that they make more on the streaming than the selling.
And guess what? If you don’t have a way to cover the YEARS it takes to make it, then you have to juggle a 40 hour job and COMPETE with the trust fund kiddies who DON"T HAVE TO and have professional studio and production help.
I have to stop now I’m starting to see red.
How many more underprivileged talented, more appealing people are losing marketshare to highly funded outrage media content creators?
No, I believe society has a responsibility to make sure the most vulnerable of us, such as the disabled who can’t earn an income, survive.
Why don’t you?
I do, that is included in the term ‘responsibility’, a parent, teacher or guardian has the responsibility the ensure the welfare and safety of the children under their care. Yet, we do not jail anybody if (for example) a child in their care develops cancer.
Likewise, all people have an obligation to do what they can, but are not to be blamed if they are unable to for no fault of their own.
The saying is "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Even the disabled, in almost all cases, have considerable ability. In many cases it might not be enough to cover their cost of living, and the state must subsidize them, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be encouraged from giving back what they can however.
In other words, that child does not need to earn their living. That disabled person does not need to earn their living. They are alive through no fault of their own and society has a duty to keep them alive as much as they can.
Life is not earned. You do deserve to be alive.
No.
In the case of the child, they are expected to earn their living upon adulthood. In the case of the disabled person they are expected to earn their living in the event of a suitable cure or accomodation.
No one, neither me nor you has an inalienable right to be alive, how could we when it is a right that one day nature will in no uncertain terms, deny us?
You might as well declare space flight a human right.No one, neither me nor you has an inalienable right to be alive
I mean… The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (plus, you know, murder laws) may disagree with you. But have fun with your libertarianism.
True… However within this universe we have constructed a society that is capable of doing this very thing if we choose to. It’s people with attitudes like yours though, that prevent that from happening.
Or hear me out, humanity has collectively solved nearly every resource shortage problem but poverty is artificially created to compel people to work for others.
It should be a human right not to starve to death, do you disagree?
