If you think about the brutality of nature, which we are mostly isolated from, then yeah, organisms in general do have to earn their right to life through overcoming and eating other organisms.
Which was the point of civilization. To isolate us from that hell.
Even in a civilization someone has to produce food so you’ll survive. Civilization doesn’t mean no one has to work.
If you do no work but because of civilization you still have food to eat, it means someone else is working to earn your living for you.
This bizarre meme implies work has no value, and was likely made by a wealthy university socialist that had everything paid for by their parents so doesn’t understand the value of work.
This meme does not state no one needs to work. It states you don’t need to earn your place among the living. You’ve already done so by virtue of being born. I think that is a noble goal for a society to uphold. Higher ideals are, of course, what separates us from the realm of animal urges. Once you begin to mix laws of the jungle back into society the point of our isolation from it is subverted. If we truly are the greatest Earth has to offer, surely we can figure so.
In no capitalist society that I know of will you be executed for not working - you have a right to life
What you don’t have the right to is someone else to provide for you if you don’t give anything back
That said I’m fairly sure with the amount of automation we have everyone should need to put in a whole lot less work than they do to keep society afloat
What are you saying? That you wouldn’t give anything back if not for the threat of homelessness and starvation? I don’t need a threat to make the world a better place.
I’m sure I’d give something back but I’m also sure most of it wouldn’t be of much use to anyone else, I’d be working on stuff like mods, niche tools for myself that probably 3 people on earth would find useful, and stupid ideas for fun like some streamers get to
Listen, I don’t think it’d be as disasterous for anyone with a passion. The people who would be fucked and have to adjust are the ones whose only goal is get money. Imo thats not a healthy way to be a human as it usually has a price tag of everyone else. Theres constant suffering every day and most of it is in the name of profits. Shit, my boss acts like it’d murder him to get me 10k more a year so I am not below the american median when in reality the company wouldn’t even count that as pocket change, I see the revenue and expenses every day. The sociopaths control and benefit from this system and you defend it. Its like a strange stockholm syndrome.
What you don’t have the right to is someone else to provide for you if you don’t give anything back
Yes you do. Lots of people are on disability benefits, unemployment, a pension, or are literal children. And those programs should be expanded to cover everyone who doesn’t work, not just those who can justify their existence to a government form.
In the case of someone who can’t work for one reason or another there’s obviously an exception because that’s not something they can help
Children do contribute to society by getting an education and having a childhood to develop into well adjusted adults who contribute later on,
Unemployment benefits presumably are for people actively searching for a job
The elderly have already contributed more than their fair share raising their children
Using the phrasing people who don’t work implies including people who are able but just don’t want to
There’s nobody like that. You’re talking about imaginary people. All human beings have a natural drive to do useful work.
You can’t eat higher ideals.
Even Marie Antoinette wasn’t so disconnected from the peasants to say “let them eat higher ideals.”
Someone has to work so you can survive. If you don’t want to work, society will take care of you. You’ll still be living, but you aren’t earning it, someone else is earning it for you.
Who here is saying “No one should work” no one except maybe the most high on their own farts anarchist is saying that. The end goal of marxism is “From each According to their abilities to each according to their needs” their will be work, The farm will be ploughed. THe difrence is all will be provided for.
And if I were to decide that I didn’t want to work according to my ability, I would still be provided for?
Once again, this is not saying society will take care of you and everyone will just sit on their bussies and no one will ever lift a finger. This is repealing the idea that you have to earn your stake to be considered human and alive in a world that has abstracted everything away to just getting funny paper. People will still farm and cultivate crops. There are people who want to do that now. Are you vehemently opposed to people just feeling and being accepted from birth? I for one think a society built on more welcoming foundations would see less crime and more work.
Sure there are people that want to farm. But are there people that want to want to deal with sewage? Why do you think plumbers earn more money than other trades?
I want to run a cafe instead of what I’m doing right now. I don’t want to be a waiter of wash dishes or anything like that. I just want to design the menus and decide on how it’s decorated. Is that the job I’ll have in a socialist utopia, or will I have to do a job I don’t want to do? What if there’s already too many cafes, or not enough people that want to be waiters or was dishes? I won’t have to do anything but I’ll still be provided for?
In the end there will always be people doing jobs they don’t particularly want to do. Someone’s gotta unclog the sewage when the elite of the socialist society plug the pipes with the overabundance of shit they spew out.
How about capitalism? How many MBAs does the world need? Marketing consultants? Advertising cosultants? IT consultants? Consultant consultants? There are countless jobs that serve the machine and no other purpose that benefits society. Somebody will do the necessary jobs. There are more incentives than you realize. For instance, what if I want more than my UBI pays me? Plumbing has entered the chat. The only reason you defend this system so hard as the epitome is because nobody has experienced anything else but this. Its scary I know, but there are more ways than one to exist, and every system has its trade-offs. But our social contract between our governments in clearly broken, we are clearly strung along on the whims of shareholders and capital. Say what you will, but I think we can do better than “those people deserve to starve son, they have no jobs.”
Less than two steps between that and eugenics, and one step between eugenics and genocide. We’ve seen and documented that. It’s a logical but sociopathic mentality.
Conversely, when we realise that we’re stronger together and act empathetically as a society, every one of us and all of society benefits. When we care for the least of us, crime goes down and we find geniuses who improve life for us all, who would otherwise die in anonymous poverty.
Living like barbarous animals – not rising above the ‘brutality of nature’, as you said – helps sociopaths who take advantage of our better nature to enrich themselves. Indeed, if we structure our society around that, as we have done lately, our society will devolve around the lowest common denominator (people like Musk or Trump).
We can and must do better than that.
You need to consume to live. This means you need to manipulate your surroundings in order to survive. So you need to work to have your basic needs meet. You don’t just get to live with zero effort.
This is the natural order, yet paraplegics live, why? Because we live in a society that attempts to circumvent the natural order in many ways, for the good of all.
You should take a broader materialistic look on society, who does the work (the working class), who benefits from the work (the owner class), and instead of focusing on amping up people to devote their lives to serve the interests of capital, instead focus to reframe the goals of society to serve the interests of workers, which includes working less, or even not at all. Work is not labor.
That’s an entirely different argument. I agree with you on that topic. Reframing capitalism to fit human well being is what we should do. But feeding everyone for free with zero work from anyone just isn’t possible. Saying there are starving people because capitalism is just straight up wrong. There have always been starving people and probably will always be. Feeding everyone is logistically crazy difficult. If it ever did happen it would take a ridiculous amount of work and money from a lot of people.
You should. We’re not cave people, it’s the 21st century. We can provide for everyone easily.
We can provide shitty cheap unhealthy food to everyone sure. It wouldn’t be easy but yeah we could probably do that. But we absolutely would not be able to give people the kind of food they actually need.
Yes we would. And if we can’t, the cheap food should be free.
It should be sure. But that’s not our reality. Even if you take away monetary value things still hold more practical value. Try collecting and making food for 20 people. Go outside and find all that or grow it or whatever you have to do to get it tell me how long it’s you and how difficult it was to do. Now multiply that effort to 8 billion people.
I will play along with your experiment if you give me control of the government. That seems only fair, since we’re talking about the government providing for everyone.
We could be living in a post-scarcity society, but our capitalist overlords can’t profit from that, so, here we are.
I would love to live in a society where robots over produce everything. Unfortunately that isn’t our reality.
We’re always told the people at the bottom rung of society, the people doing “entry level” jobs just need to work harder and harder to earn a proper living…
But how does that work really? Unlike a lot of high level jobs, none of these jobs just exist for the sake of existing, most of these “entry level” jobs are essential to society (we saw that much during the pandemic).
Somebody has to do them or society just doesn’t work, so don’t the people doing these literally essential jobs deserve to be paid a fair living wage? They’re working just as hard as the people above them, yet they’re paid peanuts in comparison
I would say most of them are working harder than the people above them.
Actually, “earning a living” is an example of an idiom, and it is not meant to be interpreted literally. It just means aquiring the income necessary to pay for the basic expenses of modern life. You may also notice that people rarely find themselves inside of pickles or with butterflies in their stomachs, but before you get angry that someone is suggesting you should break your leg, remember that figurative speech is fairly common.
I said this on Reddit and they agreed that you don’t deserve to be alive if you’re not working, it’s really a disease of the mind to believe this shit.
I mean it does make sense if you keep in mind that we traded having to hunt and forage for a system that let’s you buy these things indirectly with currency.
You just need to leave out the whole thing of empathy and morality and reduce the whole system to a exchange of goods and services for money.
It’s more like you haven’t earned the right for other people to do the work of keeping you alive.
Human life requires work to sustain. Someone has to do that work. The most fair system is one in which that responsibility falls on the person benefitting from it.
ie, to be alive, you must contribute work. Because your life requires work to maintain.
I’m so torn on this meme because on the one hand I have the same gut reaction of “yeah, but youll die if you don’t do jack shit in the woods, you kind of have to be useful to live”.
But then I think about our society … the billions of dollars going to rich people who do nothing, the millions of people who work in jobs that are useless, or the millions who work jobs that actively harm society, and in that context, the amount and type of work does seem like bullshit. It’s not like going into your marketing firm 5/7 days of your life means a farmer gets to work less. People like to comfort themselves with vain thoughts like ‘we all just gotta do our partfor the system to work’, but that’s objectively not true. Lots of parts of our system are objectively bullshit and are excised completely through new laws and legislation and society keeps working fine, in some cases much better.
There is a difference between believing everyone owes a debt to the society and civilization you participate in to support those who cannot support themselves, and not deserving to live if you didn’t fit into the rigid hierarchy structures we’ve built for work. But often these sentiments get mixed together.
I don’t think they do. In our society we don’t really let people die just because they don’t fit in. When there’s someone who can’t take care of their self, we take care of them.
Where are you talking about and comparing to what? Cause I see a lot of people dying in the streets because of mental illness or drug addiction when I take the subway to work. We don’t throw them away like ancient Sparta but we definitely don’t come close to providing the services they need to the things they need to begin to get off the street. Cause the solution now is put the homeless in prison and that’s going just fine right? …Right?
I’m talking about basically the entire human civilization, as opposed to a civilization in which people are just permitted to die.
But most of my experience is with the united states. We take care of people left and right, and don’t let them die.
Do you know of a place that isn’t like this? If so, where?
Lmao. What fairy tale society do you live in?
As a selfish conservative you should already know that they are the exact ones who want to steal every single security net from every citizen whilst simultaneously enabling corporations to destroy unions and create monopolies.
I mean c’mon, you have to know this. It’s the core tenet of the traitor supporting party. Thieving, stealing, cheating, and lying are all that the magat traitors have to offer.
I live in reality, and I myself have been given free resources when I’ve been unable to work.
In my country, I have never seen a hungry person who could not obtain food due to lack of fitting in or having money or any requirement other than “oh that person has a stomach and needs food, so let’s feed them”.
That is the reality I see all around me. If you want to call that a “fairy tale”, I challenge you to provide evidence of a person being treated in the way you’re describing. Anywhere other than say a concentration camp or japanese pow camp.
What part of our society is letting people die because they don’t fit in? This is a serious question, because everybody seems to believe what I’m saying is a fairy tale, and yet I see it happening all around me.
How, exactly, are you getting the impression out society is one that doesn’t value the life of people who don’t fit in?
Lmao you do realize Republicans are campaigning on ELIMINATING school lunches for underprivileged children?
They are also planning on cutting social security and other safety nets.
They want poor and disabled people to starve. It’s their only plan.
Talking to someone who justifies this kinda shit is always a trip. They’ll say that people who aren’t earning a living wage just need to work harder and pick up a marketable skill to improve their situation. But you can simultaneously get them to agree that many of these low wage “unskilled” jobs need to exist for society to continue functioning, so which fucking is it?
The answer is that the capitalist parasites and their horde of boot lickers believe it’s totally acceptable for there to exist an underclass of human beings born to work until their bodies give out for the enrichment of their superior employer.
They can’t afford to live a dignified life doing the shit I need them to do? That’s fine, just toss 'em into the hole when they stop working and replace them with the next generation.
Honestly man, I’m getting real sick and tired of pretending to be above violent retribution when it comes to these people. My blood fucking boils each and every time I need to look my boss in the eye and pretend to smile as they say farcical shit like “we’re all a family here” or “let us know if there’s anything you need” while paying me exactly the minimum wage and hiring the exact number of employees it takes for them to avoid giving any of us enough hours to qualify for benefits.
Anyway, Stalin had the right idea with gulags, and we should bring those back. Thanks for coming to my TED talk
This is where the idea of “personal responsibility” is useful for liberals. Flatly admitting that they want a desperate underclass is too mask off for them to feel like good people so they invent a way of blaming individual victims rather than the economic system.
The poor has a theoretical opportunity to pull themselves up by the bootstraps so when they don’t do that it’s really their own fault. Of course that theoretical opportunity doesn’t translate into actual opportunity for most people but that’s fine, as there’s enough window dressing of meritocracy to make the opportunity look real if you are careful not to go into too much detail.
This is also the reason why liberals hate discussing real-world examples. Their logic only works in abstract thought experiments where they get to control the variables. Saying that everyone has the opportunity to succeed is a lot easier than saying that Bob, who has a set of very concrete and undeniable material conditions, has the opportunity succeed.
Anyway, Stalin had the right idea with gulags, and we should bring those back.
Very edgy. Straight outta 4chan
lmao this lemmitors comparing Hexbear users to 4channers shit never gets old. When you liberals meet someone far to your left it must really break your brain for you to lump us in with fascists.
You know what I almost never see referred to as edgy out of hand? People who don’t want to fully abolish the US prison system, which to this day kills far more people far more often than the Soviet gulag system did shortly after the end of WW2. And that’s really strange considering the US prison system is designed from the ground up to maintain a pool of slave labor by incarcerating racial minorities on bullshit drug offenses. Personally, I’d much rather prison be used to keep dangerous reactionaries from causing trouble while they’re being reeducated.
Look mate I don’t live in USA, I have nothing to do with USA. I was commenting on your stupid ass glorification of forced labor camps in soviet shithole
And you clearly don’t seem to have problem with US prison system, only that wrong people are sent there. You’re as full of shit as the people you think you’re criticizing. You’d rather be yelling at people not loving your dear dictators than actually trying to do anything good for the world.
Hey I’m not American either and you’re still a dumbass that doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Lmao
And you clearly don’t seem to have problem with US prison system, only that wrong people are sent there.
No shit? What, you want to send the wrong people to prison? Good one bozo.
You don’t know shit about the Soviets, don’t pretend red scare propaganda wasn’t a thing.
I’m sure life in Russia was great under the Tzars and now under capitalist Putin/oligarchs.
Nah, you’re just being a weenie.
I mean if you think about it, the default of humanity is to die of thirst assuming we were to do nothing so ‘earning a living’ is just a realistic expectation for any society.
If you follow that reasoning, the ultimate conclusion is that it’s perfectly fine to let sick or disabled people die.
Let them … well yes eventually you will have to let them, as you can’t stop them.
Forcing them along that path though, yeah that’s not cool.
I don’t see what point you’re trying to make, unless you think I need a
reindeerreminder that everyone eventually dies.
You do have a right to be alive, if you can gather the food to put in your mouth and get shelter (in most climates), and defend yourself from predators.
‘Earning a living’ is just some way people can do that. But you still need to defend against the predators.
Take your eugenics pseudoscience bullshit and shove it up your ass.
There is no if. We’re a social species, if everyone thought like you, people like Stephen Hawking would have never lived a full life.
We lose so many good people to the “earn it” mentality.
Babies don’t come out the womb walking. Nor are people born with the ability to hunt. Everything you have was given to you by another. Your mother didn’t ask you to earn it until you could, and whether or not people can is largely determined by their environment.
Not to mention, how fucking arrogant do you have to be to demand someone earn the right to live? Who do you think you are, God?
And then there is the little problem of capitalism rewarding people who “earned it” who are actually bad for society. Unless you think people like Biden and Trump somehow are more competent than most people? Both are rich and powerful people. Yet one is a genocidal asshole and the other is a con man. You’d have to be crazy to think they earned their power. I’d wager there are many homeless people that do less harm to the world than either.
That is 100% true in a capitalist society. You are measured by your ability to produce.
Edit: Apparently this needs some clarification. You are measured by your ability to produce for your owner.
It’s also true in the woods, if you don’t do anything useful you’ll just die.