Spurred from this post about The Office where I saw some back-and-forth about potential occupation-shaming(?), like why are people getting heated over being able to work?
I understand there's mental health, physical disability, learning disability, or just general lack of opportunity for some people or situations, but shouldn't everyone's drive be to contribute to society as a byproduct of participating in it?
Yeah, capitalism is fucked up, but at the end of the day, shouldn't everyone be motivated to contribute something back to earn their keep? Or can we just say "fuck it" and get mad at people who shame us for choosing not to submit to the 9 to 5?
I suspect that this isn't a problem, if people were allowed to live a dignified life and benefit from the fruits of their labor. I'd say like less than 10% would choose to do nothing with their lives for their entire lives.
But for those tiny few, give them a small apartment, a basic income, food and healthcare. Maybe in a few years they'll decide to make something we'll all benefit from, or maybe not.
We currently let billionaires exist and they do nothing (actually they do many magnitudes of negative things) for society.
We can spare a few apartments and some food for those they would rather not work.
Also, who decides what is work/contributing? Best just to be safe and let people live their lives in peace.
Edit: if I'm wrong, and it's a problem, we'll figure it out then. Probably making them work a job, I don't know
I live with a roommate who lost their job with the pandemic and is utterly checked out and just wants to play video games all day. It's literally just Overwatch 12 hours a day who can afford to have zero ambition because his parents pay his rent (he's 35). He's kind of a libertarian chud too. Like what are we supposed to do with him?
I feel that in an actual socialist society there would be way less of the type of just given up type. I mean look at the guy you're talking about he lost his job through no fault of their own and just kinda realizes they have no control over society and themselves so why even try. In a socialist society people would have actual control over government and workplace so they would feel ownership of it and thus actually go to work and shit.
I guess part of it is I see my own reflection in that mirror. Like if the only "optimism" in this world is looking unto China to fulfill their pledge towards a socialist utopia by 2050... the average worker bee in China works 70 hours a week doing some thankless, redundant tasks to barely eek above the poverty line.
In the US, we're headed towards disaster, and the idea of working the next 30 years doing menial bullshit just kinda makes me... not wanna participate.
I think if you took a cross-section of average Americans working 60 hrs a week versus Chinese citizens working 70 hours a week, there would be a chasm of difference in QOL/opportunity.
Do they have decent social services in Aus? I assume Capitalism will take care of that soon...
Of course. But the idea is to use that menial money to fund the organization which will emancipate us. Even to be honest the idea of social democracy is something that seems just as hard to achieve in the US as communism so might as well go all the way.
Sounds like he's probably depressed and needs the spark put back in his life. Therapy and emotional support would probably be a good start.
Most people, when they are happy and healthy, will want to 'give back'.
Find him a productive hobby. Right before covid really blew up I quit a job that was absolutely destroying me mentally, I was like that for about a month but then made a hobby of clearing fallen branches and dead trees from the woods behind my house. Since then, whenever im out of work, I end up doing it again within a week, about when my exhaustion from capitalist exploitation wears off. I dont do it every day, and when I do I dont do it all day, but its roughly what should be the communist's ideal work week. I only found this hobby by chance, I very well could have gone on doing nothing until I ended up employed again. In a society where needs are met by communicating those needs to everyone, and voluntarily working to meet those needs, it would be much easier to find something you can do to be productive that you can also enjoy.
People 'give back' in a lot of ways that aren't appreciated enough. I have yet to meet a single 'useless' person in my life and I personally don't think I have the right to determine someone's value and judge if they're 'contributing' enough.
At some point though, especially with mounting environmental damage, isn't generally sitting around and taking up/consuming resources doing damage to "the greater good"?
The amount of 'damage' the unemployed do to society is minuscule in the grand scheme of things. They take up little resources and do far less damage than the ultra-wealthy.
The amount of money and resources taken up by the unemployed pales in comparison to the sheer wastefulness and consumption done by the rich and large corporations. Things like money laundering, wage theft and tax breaks do far more harm to society than the unemployed.
They aren't as big a drain as the capitalists like to convince people they are.
Yeah, capitalism is fucked up, but at the end of the day, shouldn’t everyone be motivated to contribute something back to earn their keep?
I mean this is a false premise - capitalism is horrible at motivating anyone to do anything other than exploit others for profit, and the vast majority of people "earning their keep" have it taken from them by someone who didn't do the labor. The future I want is one where people spend most of their time enjoying being humans - traveling, exploring, learning, creating art, making social connections - instead of toiling away for a capitalist to prove that they "deserve" to eat that night. We could eliminate entire industries of useless or redundant labor, and that would allow that populace to positively contribute to society in a way that they weren't able to before, with no loss in our productive capacity. So basically, "people unwilling to work" is only a crisis if you narrowly define "contribution to society" as the capitalist's definition. Socialism is liberating because hand wringing over who is or isn't a "burden" is pointless when we already have enough to give every person a comfortable life.
The only useless social parasite I'm worried about is this guy :porky-happy:
I'm reminded of that Ned Flanders quote.
"Daddy, what do taxes pay for?"
"Oh, why, everything! Policemen, trees, sunshine! And let's not forget the folks who just don't feel like working, God bless 'em!"
Just stick em on whatever welfare system you've built for those who can't work
if somebody wants to just eat from their ration card and hang out all day, smoking cigs on their porch, playing dominoes with neighbors and just being a chatty cathy, who gives a shit? there's plenty of housing and plenty of food. i went to cuba and there was a shitload of what we in the US call "loitering" going on, in Havana and elsewhere. just people hanging out and having idle conversations watching the world going by, or maybe chilling in the shade watching some telenovela on a little tv.
like seriously, who gives a shit? they aren't hurting anybody. in fact, they are doing that thing that americans are too busy hustling to do: community. yeah, sure, if you want some pimp shit, you gotta earn. maybe go to school of some kinda shit or figure out some tourist angle. but all your basics are covered, so your relation to work is far less haunted by desperation. so maybe you want to spend your late 20s reading and writing and taking random buses. i am not worried about this person.
the person i worry about is the one who dedicates all their brain power to figuring out how to take advantage of people. in america, we let these people run wild.
Or can we just say “fuck it” and get mad at people who shame us for choosing not to submit to the 9 to 5?
Not all jobs are 9 to 5. Service jobs are considered "2nd shift" because they tend to have a late, PM curfew to catch the table scraps of the 9 to 5 crowd. And that's not even considering the thankless night crews and graveyard shift workers. Come on now.
I work service jobs, I get it. I meant "9 to 5" more as a colloquialism.
This reminds me of a story my mid-Western friend (a liberal, lesbian holistic type) told me. In her grampa’s day, one of the farmers got maybe depressed (although that wasn’t a framework for that then and there), and just sat on the porch day after day instead of working the fields. Eventually a bunch of the other farmers got fed up and roughed him up — and he went to work after that.
I’m not sure what her point was, but she seemed to be telling it in a favorable light.
I’m more of the view that we have sufficient resources now to give people a clean room, 3 squares and an internet connection. I also think most people want to contribute. Look at all of internet moderators and curators who work for free or for fake internet points/cred.
Look at all of internet moderators and curators who work for free or for fake internet points/cred.
Turning a hobby into a job changes those parameters, though. Like the difference between some kid who plays WoW for 10 hours a day for fun versus the foreign gold farmer who "plays" 10 hours a day gathering resources to sell on a secondary market to subsist off of.
what if there was a social good register system and things like curating a wiki, or archiving digital media, or modding a pro-health internet forum counted, as did all sorts of other things, helping your elderly or disabled neighbors, reading to children, fostering children, fostering pets, helping in the community garden, staffing a community tool library, etc etc I hear in Japan, people must keep parts of the street clean, taken as a daily shift for some number of months of the year, and they also take turns shepherding kids to school and it’s just a part of the culture that you’re raised with.
That said if someone really wants to opt out, I think society could support a basic apartment subsistence at our current level of wealth, especially if we stopped wasting like 90 percent of energy on warring.
I think about this a lot. You'd probably want to cultivate a culture around wanting to work and contribute to society, but I don't think a healthy human being would just not work, I think one would have to be suffering from some kind of mental health problems to not want to do anything with their life. But I'm wondering if you don't risk creating a culture of people just not working if they know they don't have to at all, especially in a society were all your needs are met that's less conserned with material goods. But then again maybe that's me being stuck in a capitalist mindset about "human nature". It reminds me of a part in Blackshirts and the Reds by Michael Parenti where he's talking about in the DDR how the way they had set their industry up it kind of de-incentivized innovation and hard work because if they did a good job they'd just get bigger quotas without much more compensation.
Like, in the USSR didn't they have a saying something like "He who doesn't work, shall not eat"? I think that made pragmatic sense for Russia at that point in history but I also have to imagine a lot of people who just had mental health problems no one cared to understand got fucked over.
lol it goes by so many names, I only just learned about GDR too
shouldn’t everyone’s drive be to contribute to society as a byproduct of participating in it?
Oh ffs, I realized I just memed myself.
Point still stands. What are we to do with people who want to eat, drink, do drugs, consume, prosume, and generally self-medicate without giving anything back?
Lots of questions would need to be asked. A few that I can think of...
How detrimental to the community is it that they don't do "x" consistently?
Do we get to know why they are refusing to do "x"? Is there any negotiating that can be done with them?
Is their refusal to do "x" abstinence or violence? (Do they just not show up or show up and slack off or show up and actively sabotage the work effort.)
If its just an inconvenience, then probably some simple and minor bullying might be called for. If its violent dissent, everything from sequestration to their home to a more extreme exile from the community could be attempted.
Jesus, I know I'm getting dark here...
But what if social outreach programs dry up? What of prison labor? What of developmentally-disabled sorts who bag groceries or sling peanuts at a ball game, where does society place them when the well dries up?
Jesus dude, you're talking about people, not cattle.
Shall we start carting the elderly to the death camps too when they can no longer work?
If it was voluntary, sure. I've already made peace with the idea that when I outlive my usefulness, it's time to go.
I'm talking involuntary, as you were talking about what 'we' should do with the 'useless' implying they don't get a say.
You will never outlive your usefulness friend. You are a human being and everything you do touches someone else's life regardless of if you deem it useful or not. You are valuable simply by existing. Even if it's just by spending time with someone who needs a friend or feeding a hungry dog.
Anyone have some non-Cold War insights into “social parasitism” in the USSR? Was it a thing? I’ve read about a few artists being charged with it, only to leave the USSR and be embraced for their infinite genius by the accepting capitalist nations and given Nobels and shit. But I’ve never seen sources from the USSR about it.
Edit: to answer the post, I hope that somewhere in a transition to socialism, people’s relationship to “work” will be vastly different when it isn’t a matter of exploitation for profit.
