In our civilized societies we are rich. Why then are the many poor? Why this painful drudgery for the masses? Why, even to the best-paid workman, this uncertainty for the morrow, in the midst of all the wealth inherited from the past, and in spite of the powerful means of production, which could ensure comfort to all, in return for a few hours daily toil? - Peter Kropotkin (1892)
Is it?
If this were the middle ages, then yeah, sure. But modern society is at the point where vast sums of wealth are hoarded by billionaires (who I must point out, do not work as you or I would generally know the word to mean). Huge swathes of land has been industrialised, producing more and more every year with the current system requiring infinite growth.
We are at the point where basic needs can be met with ease. My home is over a hundred years old, and new ones are made every day. Homelessness is not a supply issue, not truly. Homes are hoarded, left empty, left to rot, in the hope of making more profit in future. There’s a supply issue only because humans have decided so, not because we don’t have enough homes.
The same can be said for food. The main employ of the population used to be agriculture because all those people were needed to feed the population. Now a tractor can do in a few hours what would take many people many days. The amount of people working in agriculture now is a tiny tiny tiny percentage of what it once was.
Water, we have learned from industrialisation how to sanitise with ease. How to store enough with dams and reservoirs.
Food, shelter, and water. The basic necessities of life. Can all be provided by society to every person with ease now. And yet, under the current system, and what Sorgan is saying, is you must toil or die.
How is that really different from indentured servitude? From Sisyphean toil? From slavery? When all of these things are easily available to the population if those who controlled them wished it to be?
We have the means to provide these basic necessities, but they’re artificially made scarce by those who wish to make money. Those who hoard wealth, live opulently, and care not one bit for their fellow human.
I’m not saying work is pointless, I’m not saying nobody should work. I’m saying work as we know it should change. We should work because we want not because we need. We should be able to survive without work, basic necessities. And those who do work, can thrive and live life more luxuriously, more to the full.
People don’t have to work for someone else. They can run their own business, however small. They can move to the country and rent some land to farm. They could form a collective to do that. Or get investment to get going. Or help someone else doing the same for a fixed payment. Yes, a wage - whoops - is that slavery? Yes we should have some form of social safety net and the monopolies and billionaires shouldn’t be allowed to hoard wealth and unfairly stifle competition. But without that competitive drive, our innovation would falter.
Nah. Innovation comes from within humans, not from some bullshit competition (no offense meant for you, as you are not the author of this idea)
Normally people should not have to work. We are well past the stage when it was simply undoable
There are other ways, of course, but capitalism is very good at incentivizing innovation. And the complexity of innovation as it typically is these days requires a lot of investment, infrastructure, large teams etc. it’s a risk to do all that investment and work on some idea when one doesn’t know for sure if it will work or be as useful /popular as you think. If we don’t incentivize such investment and effort with a reward such as good remuneration, it won’t happen, at least not at anywhere near the same speed. And all those people working on innovation aren’t’slaves’, they typically enjoy it to some degree. But they wouldn’t put in all that effort if it wasn’t a job that they needed to do to support themselves. And they wouldn’t be able to coordinate such a project and collect required resources without it being through a company like entity. We know government sucks at this sort of thing precisely because there’s no drive to push to make things better and marketable; it devolves to politics, and gaming any metrics. I think the main error of your thinking is that although we could reduce our work load and survive - so we could all work less or some lucky people wouldn’t have to work, that would slow innovation. As a species, we can use the extra bandwidth that technological advancement has afforded us to make more technological advancements. This actually leads to a better quality of life for everyone. Now, there’s still obviously a major problem with the way unfettered capitalism abuses minimum wage unskilled workers and billionaire owners hoard wealth - but I really don’t see how we can effectively run a society where people don’t have to work, where people just do what they want - and then expect things to keep functioning and even progress.
Ok, let’s make some things straight first:
when I say “innovation”, I mean new ideas. To have more people who have more new ideas, we need to bring them up by supporting them and empowering them to explore, not by trying to contain them in some kind of framework (which means I am also against bullshit like “we fucking need communism, or else everything is fucked”, but this detour would have taken a separate paragraph)
when you talk about investment, infrastructure and such, you mean building something. That is application, and capitalism has to do fuck nothing with how effectively this goes.
Now, using extra bandwidth given by technology to build more technology - what kind of closed circle that is?
It does not. Right now I am more comfortable than many kings in the past, but I am not happier. Apart from this, there has been any number of miserable kings. Comfort is not a good life
Ha. Flash news: people who do the hard work of coming up with something new, building prototypes and figuring out how to scale all that are often forced to do that, means include blackmail and any kind of dirt move there is
Nu-uh. In case you didn’t know, some people are so passionate about something they don’t care if they die tomorrow or whether they smell awful. Effort they put in some field - extraordinary still. In case you didn’t know again, what one has to do to survive and what they actually enjoy and are good at are often very different things and even spheres of life
Edit, addition:
We can start at really good social programs (the kind where society reaches for you when you need help, not tries to punish you when you have already gone crazy aggressive and where bad faith actors are sought for and dealt with accordingly), and yes, I did not say “all should just do what they want”. To make the latter part work, “what they want” should be alligned with “what is needed for everyone”, which takes a certain and high enough level of maturity. Humanity can get there, but there are steps to be taken first, like good education, universal housing and nourishment, then add universal physical development, then add universal entertainment (of course, crafted to make everyone involved more balanced). And all along this road, whatever I can afford to give someone who can plan these things and make them work, I am willing to give. Not because I will survive better myself (“afford” means my survival is taken care of), but because someone will benefit from that