• sir_pronoun@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I know this is going to be an “actually…” post, but I just find it too damn interesting and politically relevant. So, actually stone age tribes got by with 3 around hours of work every day on average.

    So why do we have to work so much today to survive? …yeah, because we’re being fucking cheated.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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      3 months ago

      Well… that and there are far too many people on the planet to be supported through a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Even when you get into the millions, you need agriculture and animal husbandry. And farming and herding is a lot more work.

      • sir_pronoun@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Oh yeah? Industrial farming gives less food per hour of work than collecting wild nuts? Are you sure about that?

        • MonkderVierte
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          3 months ago

          If you convert it to money inbetween and state and distributors take 2/3 of it, yes.

          • superkret@feddit.org
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            3 months ago

            With modern farming, 10% of the people can now produce enough food for everyone. And if everyone had equal income instead of the top 1% syphoning off half the wealth, we could globally support a middle class lifestyle by everyone working 20 hours a week, the same amount that hunters and gatherers “worked”.

            • Tja@programming.dev
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              3 months ago

              Source? Everything we do is more an more complex. A TV show requires hundreds of people. A smartphone, millions if we include supply chains. Same for a car. A modern house requires dozens of highly specialized workers for weeks at a time, plus materials. People live much longer with better health, that’s a lot of labor in research, machines, drugs and raw manpower (nurses, surgeons, etc).

              Maybe you meant a pre-industrial middle class?

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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              3 months ago

              10% of the people, first of all, is around 800 million people. And secondly, that’s a lot of really hard work that can’t be done just 20 hours a week. I’m in Indiana. I know farmers. It’s not even a 40-hour-a-week job. It’s a sunup to sundown job.

              So sure, everyone gets a break. Except farmers. Who earn the same amount as everyone else but have to work a lot harder.

              • brandon
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                3 months ago

                If the required labor was split up more equitably then farmers wouldn’t have to work sunup to sundown.

                The entire point of large scale agriculture is that it’s more efficient than individual peasants working a single field or whatever.

                Nobody is saying that farming isn’t hard work, but modern farming should produce more food per man-hour than neolithic farming (or hunter/gathering), right? So why should it be that farm workers now have to work harder than prehistoric people?

                • MonkderVierte
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                  3 months ago

                  Because the tools are more expensive. But that’s only half of it.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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                  3 months ago

                  So why should it be that farm workers now have to work harder than prehistoric people?

                  Do they? Because what has been said so far is that hunter-gatherers didn’t work as hard. Or do you mean pre-agriculture prehistoric people? Because agriculture predates written history by thousands of years.

                  Once we started farming and herding, the work was harder. But also necessary. That’s just how things are.

                  • brandon
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                    3 months ago

                    The question I am posing is not “do modern farm workers labor harder than prehistoric hunter gathers” (they do).

                    Instead, the question is “should modern farm workers labor harder than prehistoric hunter gathers”.

                    Farming is more efficient than gathering. That’s why we farm. So why is it the case that modern farm workers are working harder?

              • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                I agree with but for one thing. If we doubled the farm workforce then each farmer wouldn’t have to work as hard. And we certainly have another 800 million people to throw at it.

      • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        Also, people tend not to die from infections anymore, or starvation (usually). One bad famine doesn’t wipe out everyone you know. The vast majority of babies survive to old age and only extremely rarely does a mother die in childbirth.

        And the entire population of earth doesn’t live around areas where you can forage anymore.

        Little things like that

        • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          3 months ago

          Infectious disease became a lot worse than in hunter gatherer societies since animal husbandry and sendentary living.

          Only since the advent of germ theory has it been better.

      • EmoDuck@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        This is probably a misleading average. Outside of sowing and reaping, farms need pretty much no work

        But when they need it, they need A LOT of it

        • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
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          3 months ago

          So let me take it easy and do hobbies and participate in the community for 9 months of the year and bust ass writing software for the other 3

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Anthropologists at Harvard did an extensive multi-year study of the !Kung San people in southern Africa who still lived by hunting and gathering in the '60s and '70s. Despite living in near-desert conditions, they spent an average of about 17 hours a week in food-related activities. Granted, this yielded a diet of around 1200 calories a day, but they were relatively very small people and this amount was adequate. Mongongo nuts FTW. Whether this lifestyle (and that of other studied modern hunter/gatherers) is generally representative of pre-historic and pre-agricultural humans is an open question, but it’s hard to imagine that hunting and gathering in less marginal environments would have required more time and effort - especially when there were a bunch of big hairy elephants you could run off cliffs walking around.

        Early agrarians, however, probably had to bust much more ass to make a living, as the farmer’s toolkits of domesticated species were not as well-developed as today.

        • AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip
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          3 months ago

          Early agrarians also likely would not have planted the monoculture fields we plant today. They would likely have worked with nature to encourage growth in an easier, more sustainable way. We do things the hard way because we grow with the intention to harvest a specific crop, not just to ensure there’s adequate food in your local surroundings.

          • Tja@programming.dev
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            3 months ago

            My knowledge might be influenced by video games, but wasn’t crop rotation something discovered in the middle ages?

        • MonkderVierte
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          3 months ago

          who still lived by hunting and gathering in the '60s and '70s.

          But they still do?

          • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Not so much any more. Even during the Harvard studies they did a lot of trading with neighboring horticultural peoples, sometimes worked for them and white settlers, and received some food aid at times. Today they’ve been largely resettled and only occasionally engage in traditional hunting and gathering activities.

    • 𝓔𝓶𝓶𝓲𝓮@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Please always provide sources with such information. Otherwise such interesting content is quite useless and you have to just skip whole chain

      • sir_pronoun@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Some unsung hero in this thread actually provided the source where I got it from, but yeah, I agree

        (Laziness won me over though)

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Eh, they didn’t have clothes, microwave food, video games, air conditioning, cars, air travel, days off, or healthcare though. No ty

      • jorp@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        That’s not what we would have to give up, what we would have to give up is a small portion of the population globe-trotting 24/7 on private jets and buying yachts for their yachts.

        You’re fellating robber-barons and buying into the bullshit propaganda that without our hugely unequal economic system you wouldn’t be allowed to have a computer.

        • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          The numbers don’t add up. There are 2781 billionaires in the world with a combined net worth of $14.2 trillion. If you wiped them all out and spread that wealth evenly across the world’s 8.2 billion people that’s only $1731 per person.

          Sure, that’s going to help immensely for people in very low CoL countries but it’s basically nothing for an average American.

          • jorp@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            The point isn’t just to take their money and redistribute it it’s to get rid of a profit driven and privately owned system in favor of a democratic economy where workers get the value of their labor.

            Think of all the private enterprises that reproduce so much work between themselves. Why does every merger get followed by huge layoffs and restructuring? Because we have so much wasted redundant effort.

            Consider also how much overproduction we have when it comes to basic needs. People don’t go hungry because of lack of food, we waste food on an industrial scale. People don’t go unclothed because of lack of clothes, we have dedicated landfills for “fast fashion” items that don’t even get sold before being tossed let alone worn once. We have more houses than unhoused by a double digit factor.

            All of this waste because we let profit guide production and let private ownership reap all of the value. An economy for the people and owned by the people would give you more benefit than $1000.

            I’m proposing a cooperative economy rather than a competitive economy. I’m proposing socialism.

          • 𝓔𝓶𝓶𝓲𝓮@lemm.ee
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            3 months ago

            That’s not how that works either. Money is an artificial construct. Single billionaire doesn’t have any mythical wealth that could be redistributed because if it happened the wealth wouldn’t be created in the first place in the economic system where wealth gets redistributed.

            Not to mention the wealth equals companies stocks. It is just paper, a database entry. It’s worthless but we all agreed that it isn’t.

            Billionaire wealth is just imaginary situation maintained by sanctioned violence of police and state. There is no mythical wealth that would suddenly cure hunger or homelessness. There are just imaginary digits that would plummet to 0 the moment you want to take them out

      • ChapulinColorado@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        A lot of those are out of reach for many as well still due to cost, or non existent (healthcare). I’m in a pretty stable point in my life and even I get scared by the electric bills related to heating and cooling. Growing up I recall the only option was to go to the mall since we could not afford AC.

        • grte@lemmy.ca
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          3 months ago

          Yeah, a lot of capitalist realism, the way we do things now is the best possible way we could be doing them bullshit. No vision whatsoever.

          • jorp@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            It’s so ingrained in people, we have such an uphill battle as progressives. People worship capitalism like a deity. If it doesn’t get its sacrifices we’ll have droughts and famine!