- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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Only 8 dudes but we as 300M+ can’t even come together and depose them
Half of them praise those 8 men tho. So you’re 150M of individuals vs 150M of individuals and $3T
Ah, yes, this is only about 'Murica.
Someone says something that applies to the world, 'murica brain can’t comprehend that they aren’t the only ones.
That 300M+is inclusive. Your comment is Proof we can’t come together to depose a few rich assholrs
If you intended all of humanity you should have written 8B+, not 300M+.
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Fucking soft, removing my comment. Remove billionaire heads from their necks or their boot will stay on yours.
Because it isn’t true lol
Ok
My problem with this is that most people think the solution is to ask politely leveraging peaceful protests and waving signs.
When in reality this has been a popular concept that is protested for the past 100 years with ZERO actual progress, and the real solution to properly implement this kind of generous socialist idea of distribution of wealth and food and shelter with equity requires aggressive rhetoric and likely needs to be enforced with actual violence, otherwise fascism and capitalism will continue to persist for generations.
Peaceful protesting does work. But the sit in and get arrested kind. Waving signs doesn’t do much. People aren’t miserable enough yet to misbehave.
Also the don’t work and grind the economy to a screeching halt kind.
Honestly, I think most people don’t even see it as a problem. Anyone who is better off than the average person likely doesn’t want stuff to get handed out for free. It’s easy to think “I struggled to get my stuff and now we’re just going to give it out for free!?”
It’s like someone finally paying off their student loan after years of thrifty spending and going without and then seeing their classmate who didn’t pay a dime towards theirs, instead spending on frivolous luxuries and going on yearly trips, having it forgiven. The person who did things “the right way” feels like they got played.
Unless people who have gone through struggles to improve their situation can avoid feeling slighted, they’re unlikely to be supportive of change.
Okay, so why aren’t people upset that some joker who wasn’t smart enough to get a physics degree and switched majors because it was too hard, then had a sure thing handed to him by the company he was working for arguably because he was bad at his job, started a business that took less than a month of work to become profitable, and then became one of the world’s richest men by exploiting the desperate working class? Why aren’t people angry about that?
Probably because they can’t relate to someone who has lived his whole life in extravagance. But they can relate to the neighbourhood kid whose college debt was excused. They can imagine “It should’ve been me, not him”. That’s their envy.
The likely reason they follow the clowns is in hopes of getting rich quick. They imagine themselves getting free handouts or being buddies with the rich. But the rich will do what they’ve done since time immemorial. Use and throw away when they’re done.
While my anecdotal story won’t mean much in the sea of Internet comments, i look at it from a societal point of view; when I graduated college, I came out with $100k in debt, no job, and no way to make ends meet. I did work hard through jobs and through as many clever ways to move the debt around as much as possible. Eventually, after many years, they were paid off. Student loans are a curse cast by the greedy predatory schools and lenders that make empty promises.
Who am I to get upset when someone figures out a way, or stumbles into a way to release them from that curse? In the long run, the sooner loans are paid off/forgiven, the sooner it will help everyone else.
The most important asset to any country is it’s people, so why wouldn’t we want to take care of each other in every way possible? We all live on the same rock together, so why not try to make life less painful for everyone.
Will people take advantage of it? Of course. There is no way to prevent that, but if resources are provided or made easier to access, then it makes it less likely for people to take advantage of it.
Do I think that will ever happen? Probably not, it’s a utopian ideal and it would take such a major paradigm shift to get people to have empathy for others and to help lift each other up during rough times. I still think it’s something to strive for, even if we only achieve a fraction of that utopia.
Also anecdotally, among my friends the ones who had it paid for/scholarships are against relief while the ones who paid it off themselves are for it. It does kinda feel like those who went through it want to save others from having to do it to
This. You cant give back the thousands of hours studying instead of living life and hanging out with friends, then the lazy person that only partied gets all their shit paid for. That isn’t gonna fly.
Or maybe instead of crying over the spilled milk you can bite the bullet and accept that at the very least future is going to be better. Because otherwise it’s not ‘I got mine you got nothing’, but instead ‘I want to continue suffering just for you to suffer, too’
Im all for that but thats not going to be 99% of people’s reactions. Thats like you working 40 years to afford a small house then your young neighbor shows up and builds a mansion from scratch while they never worked a day (this is why I dont understand why people (IRL) dont hate billionaires more, thats literally their life).
Actual violence was used by the rich to create this current moment too. It is all they know or will understand.
Violence to free us from oppression isn’t violence to oppress. Get your priorities correct. Your food is stored for use, take it. Don’t starve. You were taxed for it, it’s yours.
That’s what I’m saying, I’m sharing perspective that they violently keep us in check all the time. Non-violence can work but most discussion surrounding it is from the ruling class in order to keep us from rising up.
🤝
However I disagree in solely nonviolence tactics, it’s violence to liberate, and nonviolence to collaborate.
What’s happening in the 🇺🇲 is counter-nonviolence tactics.
I was there witnessing all the noneffective protests. Get a back bone, liberate folks in death camps.
though if you stopped working hard, foreigners would come and take your job, and then take your kitchen and land. (they come regardless, no worries, but they’d come faster.)
on top of that, what’s the point of life without adventure and progress? we make great progress through your suffering, so heads up, the 40 hour work week is worth something. also, capitalism is a natural structure based on people’s greed, and you can’t abolish the capitalists because they will simply be replaced by other capitalists.
signed, your friendly capitalist :)
no but seriously … it drained my soul somewhat to write this. i wish so fucking much for a 20 hour work week or less.
I honestly don’t mind working a lot, as long as it benefits EVERYBODY and not just a handful of hoarders. I love improving things for others.
I love teaching for this reason. At least when it’s not administrative bullshit, “fill out the forms for this miraculous new program,” but the actual interacting with and helping young people grow. If I get my third job I’ll be doing that 7 am - 8 pm basically 7 days a week, but I’m okay with that. Sitting next to a kid and getting them to understand how imaginary numbers work is the thing that makes me not want to kill myself. Explaining to a high schooler that yes, dinosaurs were real… saying “hey this time of year it’s really easy to see Orion,” or saying “yes I absolutely LOVE Ender’s Game! Let’s talk about foreshadowing in that book!”
It’s bullshit work that kills the soul. I’ll teach until I’m hoarse and be happy to be alive.
Thank you for sharing that. I think that passionate teachers are the cornerstone of a good society and healthy community!
That made me think about the Finnish model. I think they are doing this somewhat right. A masters degree is a minimal requirement for teaching at all levels except very early education.
If anybody from Finland reading this could share their thoughts on this that would be amazing. In not from Finland myself.
I just don’t want my healthcare tied to a fucking job. Then I could actually work whatever, whenever, and how long I want to.
not to contradict you, just mentioning it:
well i do mind working a lot because it drains my body and i get really really bad sensations after an exhausting work day, including the feeling that everything is shit and such. idk, it’s probably only me, but there is people who struggle with work, independent on what kind of work it is. it’s literally the exhaustion itself that does it.
though it’s good if you made that decision for yourself. doing community service definitely does help the world, especially your local community :)
Yeah that makes sense of course. You are definitely not the only one. Sounds like you know your limits!
In the end, and in my personal belief, we’re all one big community and we have a chance to uplift each other (I know, I know, utopian fantasy much?). It should not be a competition, but a synergy. In my book, it’s the effort that counts, not the hours.
yeah i’m programming a computer game rn and intend to make it open source once i have some substantial amount :)
actually, i think competitiveness is artificially instilled on us based on a thinking in races, i.e. “getting ahead”. not like skin-color, just beating the other guy by being better than him and such. (i.e. like a race-car competition).
actually, i think competitiveness is artificially instilled on us based on a thinking in race
Agreed. Keeping the masses artificially competing with each other over the crumbs the upper 10% leaves us just distracts people from who they’re really in competition with.
i wish so fucking much for a 20 hour work week or less.
No offense but who is stopping you from working only 20 hours?
starvation
Also homelessness.
I bet you could live on less if you wanted to.
But you would have to make some tradeoffs to make it work with 20 hours of work, live downgrading your living situation or moving to a cheaper place to live.
Now I am not saying that’s good, I am just saying you can make 20 hours of work work if you really want to, but really people just like to bitch.
Agreed! Worked 12 years full time. Last 3 years lived in a small forest off grid, working 2 to 3 days a week. In the winter months I rent a room in a cohousing.
It’s a different kind of life. It takes adjusting. The “luxeries” like no running water, electricity being very limited, etc are fine. I honestly prefer the simplicity. I prefer that making a coffee takes 40 minutes, from starting the fire, to boiling water. The ritual is part of the experience.
Most difficult is that friends still do the city hard work, hard (and expensive) play, constant complaining thing, that I can’t relate to or keep up with.
Not sure if I’ll do it forever. But the next couple of years for sure!
Have you seen the cost of the figs???
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
John Steinbeck, “Grapes of Wrath”
Is that Steinbeck?
oh yeah, the attribution fell off when copy-pasting
Thought I recognised it. Crazy how relevant it still is.
It’s relevant for as long as capitalism is relevant because this is what is required to keep an economy motored by the profit motive going.
And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange
Yes unfortunately so. If the system values profit over life, then profit will always be the priority. Even if that leads to (and encourages) acts of inhumanity.
The reason the system values profit over life is because it requires profit to survive. No profit, no capitalism. This is why the people that keep trying to reform capitalism have failed for almost 200 years now, there is no reforming the profit motive away from capitalism.
Capital does not consist in the fact that accumulated labour serves living labour as a means for new production. It consists in the fact that living labour serves accumulated labour as the means of preserving and multiplying its exchange value.
Karl Marx, “Wage Labour and Capital”
Responsibility also lies the people. We have no respect for our belongings, frequently trash working tools, computers and other goods. Replace the old with new, for the sake of keeping up with the times. Even cheap knives and other edged tools can be sharpened thousands of times before requiring replacement. Most are never sharpened at all.
The classic tale of a dining table made to last for generations, paid for by the father, be tossed by the son for something made by Ikea. As a woodworker, ive seen firsthand that the biggest killer of fine, handmade furniture.
It isn’t time, it’s us.
Yeah, so many people seem to buy new shit just to buy new shit. Even when the new thing is lower quality. Hell, my parents did it with their house. I’m constantly surprised by the crap my family and friends spending their money on. Most of my stuff is second hand that they’ve been throwing out.
Dude same. There is NOTHING wrong with old and many times its BETTER because corporate enshittification hadnt reached an all time high until recently because of the invention plateau we are in now.
I partly disagree. I think we are already past the point where people were able to change the world by fiscal choices. The answer is already there: the money people own grows slowly if even in some countries, the money circulating altogether grows somewhat steeper thanks to inflation and (war cost) depts, making peoples choice less and less effective and able to change a fuckingthing. I won’t cease trying to find a way though, just to make it a whiney bit more costly to get to me xD Heads up!
2/3s of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and americans consume multiple X what even wealthy Europeans do.
The issue is that people are unhappy then they try to fill that void with buying stupid shit no one needs, going for fancy cars to match their neighbors, oversized houses they don’t need and can’t afford.
Ofc there are other systemic issues like the racist origins having single family house zoning and lack of public transport which is the most reliable predictor of social mobility.
But still, people make dumb choices, spend recklessly.
Still, in our world and with the available knowledge and technical possibilities it’s so easy to manipulate the masses. Blaming individuals for any structural problems and systemic issues is shifting the blame from the real culprits to the comparatively weak individuals whose main fault is looking for an uncomplicated life in a increasingly complex world.
Why not instead blame a system that is fixed on exploiting any and all resources possible (incl. bodily and mental health} to make more money every year (myth of endless growth) or at least greedy companies misusing their influence.
For my part I don’t believe in capitalism, but I think some effective regulation especially of multinational companies might also do the trick, as long as the concentration of money is reduced.
But then people might get stuff without working for it! The horror!
If only a significant percent of the population didn’t feel the need to control other peoples lives.
If people would organise themselves that percent would be powerless.
The people who would do the organizing in this case are going to have a disproportionate amount of power, and since power corrupt, they’ll become the new elite.
So organise in a way that doesn’t amass power.
Social organization requires hierarchies, and hierarchies are inherently unequal in terms of power and status.
Innovate on that.
Innovate?
Yes, like Greek Democracy only had hierarchies for wars. We most likely haven’t already tried all possible forms of social organizations.
But the rich man’s ego of pretending to be a saint by doing charity. THINK OF THEIR FEELINGS!
COVID taught me Americans enjoy grifting, soo
True… we’re not even feeling sorry for people starving half as much as hoarders
There’s enough hoarders that We have shows about hoarders.
The worst hoarders are the financial hoarders. If someone hoards cats, or old rusty cars, or newspapers, etc., someone gets them psychiatric help.
But if you have a compulsion to hoard money to the point that it is having a negative effect on the entire nation, or even the planet, then they get celebrated as a successful businessperson, and the government shovels even more of our hard-earned money at them.
I’m tired of supporting mentally-ill money hoarders. Take their money away, and medicate them.
Even worse we actively try to make sure they don’t go to our country, because we all know how much we did to become part of our own country (this is sarcasm because we did nothing at all, being born is not something we chose to do)
The only hoarders that need to be scrutinized are the ones hoarding money
Well, we also haveMy 600lb Life. So checkmate?
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guillotine
The right given by the “democratic” capitalist state to own the means of production is the root cause of this problem
I love the quotation marks here. We have two parties that are both team stock-market/GDP, and there is no third option: we can hardly be called a democracy.
I mean, between our FPTT voting system, the electoral college and rampant gerrymandering we have absolutely no right to call ourselves a democracy.
Does anyone really believe the ‘we don’t even need to be working really at all’ part?
I’m taking it as hyperbole.
The amount that technological developments have amplified our productivity over even the past couple of decades, is insane
Yet
Many people are working longer hours for less money (in real terms)
We absolutely should be working less
tech advancements are converted to company profits rather than worker profits. What CEOs try to do with AI (but fail) is a proof of that.
tech advancements are converted to company profits rather than worker profits.
The problem is ownership.
When the capitalist owns the technology that bring an increase of productivity then the capitalist “is entitled” to 100% of the “extra” profit generated by the increase of productivity. Because the workers are not able to output any excess by their own means the capitalist doesn’t believe they deserve anything extra which is why we’re stuck in this shit situation where wages seem stagnant while profits and productivity seem to always increase. :(
You found a long wording there for “the means of production” :)
It was intentional so I didn’t scare anyone with spooky scary Marxist language lol
well - the association was instant for me, and I never even read Marx, just a few wikipedia summaries ^^
Maybe he’s a bee in Rubacava
The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin was written in 1892 and argued then that we labour far more than is actually necessary. Lots of work is work for the sake of work, not necessarily for the necessity of life and society.
Think now on how much technological improvement there has been since then. The industrial revolution continued, flight, computers and automation, even the factory line system didn’t take off until Ford in the early 1900s.
We have so many machines, computers, and processes that never existed a hundred years ago.
The point isn’t that we have no need for work, the point is we don’t need to work anywhere near as much as we do.
A modern book that argues something similar is Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conquest_of_Bread
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs
From the wiki article you cited:
Two studies found that Graeber’s claims are not supported by data: while he claims that 50% of jobs are useless, less than 20% of workers feel that way, and those who feel their jobs are useless do not correlate with whether their job is useless. (Garbage collectors, janitors, and other essential workers more often felt like their jobs were useless than people in jobs classified by Graeber as useless.) The studies found that toxic work culture and bad management were better explanations of the reasons for those feelings (as described in Marx’s theory of alienation). The studies did find that the belief that one’s work is useless led to lower personal wellbeing.
The reality is, almost no jobs are actually bullshit. After all, whether you are a giant corporation or a homeowner paying for a plumber to fix their toilet, no one wants to pay someone money to do nothing useful. Of course, there is slack in the system and sometimes you’ll end up in a sort of sisyphean job. But most jobs exist because someone, somewhere needs or wants something done. And most of the needs and wants of the world, ultimately, come from normal people.
Of course, it is easy to make the argument that what people want is wrong. They could live in smaller houses, ride bikes instead of cars, not eat meat, and stop buying fancy watches.They could repair things instead if throwing them out, learn to be happy living in their neighborhoods rather than travelling around the world, and have fun by spending time with friends instead of going to music festivals.
But the fact is “we are going to solve malaria in Malawi by ending Bonaroo, steak, and shopping malls” is not a line that will play well with… like… anyone.
“Statistics show that most people have not read Graeber’s argument yet and don’t want to believe their time is being wasted. Therefore he is wrong.”
Yeah, not working shouldn’t even be a goal here. What we should strive for is to build a society where work is empowering for the workers rather than alienating, where it benefits the whole society rather than just creating value for a select few
I mean, we couldn’t do that very well even when we had strong families and strong communities, and unions were more common.
The last 30-40 years has seen individual independence grow alongside digital sequestration, communities disappear, families shrink, and unions almost fully evaporate.
What is required is a new revolution where luddites are given control and digital tools are eschewed, so that real community can grow again and total control of digital spaces ceases not because benevolent IT folks take control, but because digital spaces are eradicated entirely until an equitable way of using them without the current totalitarian bent can be agreed upon.
That’s basically fiction at this point. Zero chance that happens. So then what is the option to combat the paradigm of establishing super convenient and useful digital worlds that have real strengths and usefulness, only to then use that strength and usefulness to create dependence and leverage that into data mining and total control of those who rely on the useful digital spaces?
The best hope at this point is a generation where totalitarianism and greed is completely rejected and the current philosophies of the uber-wealthy few are completely abandoned in favor of a decentralized system that uses the same algorithms designed to chisel every last dollar into upward-flowing profit to achieve actual, complete and mathematically-verifiable equality of resource across all people.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk
That was where I stopped reading and taking him seriously. I don’t know if we have enough clothes for 6 generations (and I somehow doubt it but I am happy to be educated) but the claim we don’t need to work anymore is a fucking nonsense.
For the clothes, yeah 6 gens might be stretching it, but definitely multigen. Think of all the fast fashion in the landfills. Think of your average department store of what’s just on the shelves. Think of how often we dispose of perfectly good clothes out of our own closets. It adds up.
Not to mention how far small simple repairs can extend the life of clothing.
Got a hole in your jeans? Many people would bin them. If you instead patch the hole you now have perfectly functional jeans again.
It’s not true at all. Until robotics catches up and real AI is developed, we still need people doing shitty jobs like picking crops
Edit: And it’s not even just shitty jobs. Humans working is essential to society functioning. There’s not a single industry that can operate completely without human labor.
But people hugely overestimate how many of these jobs exist. We went from 90% farmers 150 years ago to like 1-2% now.
That is just an example. Building houses (starting with producing concrete and bricks), fixing cars, producing electricity, water, gas, renewables - the claim about “no need to work” is a complete nonsense.
Also service jobs like taking care of people who needs it, much can be done with robots and “ai” but fuck if I’m going die with only “ai” by my side. As much as I hate other humans, they’re needed.
much can be done with robots and “ai” but fuck if I’m going die with only “ai” by my side
I hate to break it to you, but you better start saving if you want a good human next to you when you die. I did palliative care for developmentally delayed adults, $12/hr in 2018. Fifty cents more than minimum wage. I was watching people die, and I couldn’t even take a vacation.
I went from being a caring person, to wishing people would die faster, to wishing I could die myself because that was the only form of a ‘break’ I could think of getting. Drove into traffic, got t-boned by an SUV going 55mph, and I think the month in the hospital is still the most relaxed I’ve ever been.
Won’t be necessary, my family tradition is drinking our self to death and if that don’t work we die of totally preventable types of cancer 🙃 but yea I’m saving and investing as much as I can, around 20%, not for me but for my fiancée so she can keep up the living.
You’re not going to have much of a say in that decision unless “the market” has within it a selection of nursing homes that use and don’t use AI/robotics.
I seriously doubt that will be the case though. Pretty much any for profit business that can justify the initial expense of the robotics/AI, will do so as labor is a large expense that all businesses seek to eliminate.
Probably not, as everything goes to shit our death might as well too.
I do none of these. So I can just stop working I guess. 😃
you’d be surprised but building houses is less of a trouble than you’d think.
the first big cities were built in late medieval age / early modern times. the great fire of london wiped out large parts of the city in 1666, up to which point most housings were built of wood. Yes, wood. After that, the city decided to rebuild the city in bricks and stones to guard against future fires. That was the first big cities on earth. (apart from some luxury cities for show-off in antiquity).
since then, almost all big cities have been built from scratch within the last 200 years. It was this rapid growth, together with an exponentially growing population, that caused all the demand for human work. Now, birth rates are declining in most of the northern hemisphere, and the population is gonna decline starting sometime around 2040. That means that you need less houses year after year, and if you completely stop building new houses, you’d probably still have enough after that, because old houses and city apartments tend to be freed up by old people dying.
So, no, building houses is not a big trouble. Maintaining houses (that we already have) is significantly less work than building new housing, and we already have a massive number of houses standing around today.
Rowcrops like corn and potatoes is one of those things that is heavily automated.
Ok, so since 2 crops are heavily automated, no human has to harvest crops again.
You’re ignoring the fact that “heavily automated” still means humans are required to work, just not as many.
first of all, picking crops isn’t a shitty job. i did it two times in summer, it was fun. what sucked was the low pay and the bad quality of working colleagues that it caused.
I’m glad it was fun for you. I lived on a farm and working the fields in 110F weather fucking sucks.
