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
You’re forgetting the part where caring about people somehow needs to translate into power for someone. It’s sad and fucked, but that’s where we are.
Someone recently mused that if we provided a way for people to grift off of solving homelessness the problem would be gone. I don’t recall the details, but I thought it seemed true.
This is our only hope for climate change.
Things get better when solar out-competes coal and other fossil fuels. We’re just missing the deployment rate right now I think to be able to just stop fossil fuel use from growing.
But we could have reduced consumption instead and done this much, much faster. The economy might have needed to shift to deal with this and a lot of old industries should have been shut down within only a few years, but it would have had a major impact. Instead we wait for new industries to grow alongside the old, while still growing the old!
Basically if billionaires can capture carbon, they will probably use it as a way to make governments pay to clean the air, which is essentially an ongoing tax from a private entity to a public one, which could conceivably go on forever (or until people try to nationalize it).
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.
Those are rich, educated, liberal cities, not typical of larges swathes of the U.S.
Being alive wasn’t my choice and I’m seeking compensation.
We carve our living out of an uncaring and hostile universe.
Earning a living means doing your share of that.
That implies that we should all expect and deserve a status quo that is uncaring and hostile
It’s not we shouldn’t strive for a society that’s caring. It’s just that it isn’t a given. We have to work to have that kind of society.
Entropy is a removed. Nothing lasts forever without doing work to maintain it.
That used to be the reality of life. It’s only very recently that we’ve produced machines that far outpace what humans can do. The reason we aren’t seeing the benefits is that a select few own those machines and have consolidated their wealth.
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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.
First you suggest that taking out loans when you’ve fallen on hard times is a good solution, as if that wouldn’t just trap you in a neverending whirlwind of debt, then you use a personal anecdote about receiving gifts when you needed them to imply there’s not a problem with how our society functions.
It doesn’t take much reflection to realize your views come from a place of extreme privilege. Are you living under a rock or are you incapable of empathizing with others?
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://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/1*bPvQruhbsPKhRpxUi-sAEA.jpeg
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’d amend that to: “You haven’t earned the right to have other people keep you alive after you grow up”
Sure, and we should define “growing up” as having mental capacity to provide for yourself. That’s kind of getting into the weeds here though.
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.
I think people may be seeing it the wrong way round or at least not taking into account the other side.
I’ve been unemployed two years since a mental breakdown. A lot of people may think I’m living the high life with nothing to do and just chilling. But it destroys you having no work! Everyday is a battle against the dark thought - “what’s the point in life if I’m not DOING something?”
You may think you’d do the hobbies you do at weekend - but you don’t. Not when you’re not working long-term. You just coast with every day exactly the same. Nothing has meaning. Weekends aren’t special Even something as simple as going to the library - I love books! But why bother? I can do that tomorrow. Tomorrow comes and I don’t go.
I’m not saying people need to be wage slaves and work dead-end jobs. But people have to work for their own sanity. It’s why a lot of retired people degenerate and/or go back to light work.
Some people don’t deserve to live, simple as. Point-in-case: Hitler
Hitler broke a vital and important contract with others. Live and let live. The moment they broke that implicit contract they totally opened a can of worms and whoopass upon themselves. They totally earned it
More folk need to understand about the contract of tolerance and the golden rule.
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
Yes. I get what you are trying to say. But earning for a living means diffrent things for people. A lion would try to be a CEO and live a lavish lifestyle off his own dime. A sloth would be happy living off UBI and going to the local grocery store to see what’s on sale that day in order to decide what’s for dinner that night.
People, like animals as you’ve greatly pointed out, live the lifestyle they’ve been given. Some animals (people) go out and live life to the fullest to achieve the most they can (a la a lion going out to get the biggest prey than can catch to feed their pride). Other people (like sloths) are alright eating slightly rotten leaves every once in a while cause they appreciate what the tree has given them (a theoretical situation where people on UBI are happy with the handout life they’ve been give).
Now you may go into that “theoretical” situation I said and say there will be people that aren’t happy on UBI and resort to theft and whatnot. Going back to the animal analogy, hyenas and vultures are a real animal and resort to an unsavory lifestyle according to most. There will always be bad and outliers but you can’t base your whole opinion on them
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Yes, that’s why we care for infants, orphans, injured, disabled and elderly people. We have a progressive tax system that favors low income people and even doesn’t tax a subsistence minimum at all, we take care of poor people. Even disadvantaged people in far away countries.
Able bodied humans should be able to pull their own weight.
They don’t deserve have John break his back growing wheat for them and have Bob come build them a house just because they feel like staying at home playing computer games (badly) all day. Because if they were good at it, they could earn a living with it.
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.
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.
I’m glad you said it, I read this and it bothered me. What about “steal a living” or “hunt a living” or “create a living”. I think the missing word is “for” you do these things “for a living”, that is to say, to get the resources you need to remain alive.
That said, I do get the message. The idea of living in a world so abundant but unfair that you live or die by what you can produce for someone else is pretty wrong
I say make a living, because it implies it being your project that you’re building up as you want and need to.
I mean, yeah, it’s true. Death is the default. If you do nothing, you just die.
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?
You are making a confusion between society (especially the government) doing whatever is reasonably possible to keep people alive as long as they can and being able to defy the second law of thermodynamics.
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’ve got plans later. Dying would seriously mess up my schedule.
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.
Oh, I think it absolutely is a sign of depression.
Life is hard, but I enjoy the vast majority of my time. Here’s my schedule:
- Get up to the sun shining most days, enjoy a breakfast with minimal effort, and dress in clothes I didn’t have to make
- Go to work in a temperature controlled environment with modern conveniences
- Get home, watch shows and play games while machines clean my clothes and dishes
- Go to sleep after listening to some truly great content on a modern marvel that fits in my pocket
Or I could tell it another way:
- Get up late because my phone kept me up at night, and eat crap cereal because that’s all I have time for
- Work in a soulless env with people I don’t like, taking breaks only to piss
- Microwave dinner because I’m too exhausted for anything else, and waste time on shows and gacha games because that’s all I have the energy for
- Doomscroll on my phone because I went to put off doing it all over again as long as possible
Most of life is about perspective. It turns out that you’ll find whatever you’re looking for, whether that’s joy or misery. If you can’t find the good, you’re probably depressed and should seek help.
Which is why it’s a good thing suicide is a human right we all deserve and have available to us, should we wish to take it.
I agree we don’t owe anyone else anything, which is why is see suicide as a right.
There is way more suffering in life than pleasure
If you (or anyome out there reading this) truly feel this way, please seek professional psychological assistance. At the very least make attempts to find a better living situation for yourself, if it’s your current conditions that are driving this belief.
This is blatantly disordered thinking, a sign of trauma, or a sign that there is something seriously wrong with the immediate conditions you are living in.
I’m not talking about the general doom spiral of the world as conditions, but things directly around you day to day. If you can’t live your day to day without awareness of the general doom spiral, see what choices you can make to limit your exposure to it (in short: stop spending so much time online and reading articles about how fucked everything is).
There are always choices available to you to improve the world around you and your position in it, no matter by how small a margin. I’ve been where you’re at, and things don’t have to suck forever.
I don’t want to misrepresent what you’re saying, so correct me if I’m wrong, but are you saying that there is really is much more suffering in life than pleasure, and that the internet simply makes you aware of that fact, and that to improve your mental health you should try and forget about it and shut your eyes to the horrors of this world - but that they really still exist?
