this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Capitalism requires coercion to function. Capitalists openly admit this by being staunchly against removing 'incentives' (read the coercion) to work. The 'incentive' is goddamn starvation and being exposed to the raw elements with no shelter. And apparently, if this was a basic human right provided to everyone, we'd all stop working over night and become lazy. It's just such an ass-backwards way to look at the world. People are not inherently lazy. But they need to be forced to work shitty jobs under unacceptable conditions. That's the crux of the matter. The ultra-rich require wage slaves. Not free-thinking, educated people who go after their own interests and are productive in their own ways. I'm interested to see how the system will hold up when all the shitty jobs have been automated away. My guess is that the rich will flee to some kind of Elysium type paradise, while robot police keeps the masses in check and 'poor' people, aka 99% of humanity goes extinct.
This is the wrong argument to make. By normal juridical standards, wage labor is not coercive. Capitalist wage labor's voluntary nature, unlike other systems such as historical slavery, allows for other anti-capitalist critiques. The workers are fully de facto responsible for the results of their actions (the whole product of the firm). This observation makes the flaw in the system clear. Even if wage labor was coercive, the solution to that would be just a basic income
You're thinking of nature. It's nature that does that.
And it's what we humans are fighting against, the natural order of things. Nature doesn't care about the weak, it doesn't care about justice. We're in a battle to design and build systems that we can install on top of nature and which do provide those things. There is still much to be done, but over the course of human history we have accomplished a lot and we are in a better place today than we have ever been.
The term capitalism has become a meme, conveying little meaning, just a word we can invoke to rally others in a brief cathartic moment of finger pointing and doom-saying. If it's what you want to do then fine, go ahead and when you finish, wash your hands and clear your mind, then come back and help think of positive steps forward we can make as a society.
...as long as those "positive steps forward" don't involve redistributing wealth in a way to completely end those things you're attributing to nature, amirite?
No you're confused with communism, most of the time here in America it's actually
Leftism is the positive step forward you're trying to think of, you've just been boogeymaned by capitalism.
I like your message. Have you considered that we are also nature?
We’re definitely a subset of it! And you could argue that any machinations therein are a part of nature, but then again I also think that if you have a computer running a simulation, while the computer is the substrate the simulation is run on, it’s also a bit separate. One way to think about it is that there isn’t really a “place” in the computer you can look and find the simulation. So too is our society. Nature (us) is its substrate, but you can’t really point to anywhere in nature with any kind of precision and say “ah, there is the society”.
Similarly, it's fun to ask people to "point to their mind."
^.^I will say, with more abstract things I do like to take note of the concentrations. Particularly, it's easy to find vortices of stupidity while driving or visiting a grocery store, at least around where I live. Lol