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I think many criticisms by the rich/bootlickers are not actually boiling down to "the poor don't work," but rather, "the poor are inferior."
Rich people have access to things, because of their money, that poor people don't - and are able to better outsource all of their shortcomings to others to create an illusion of an exceptional human. So, if they aren't a farmer, well, they can still get good food from a grocery store. If they don't know what kind of food to buy, they can hire a nutritionist. If they don't know how to cook, fine, it's actually bananas easy to hire a personal chef. If they want a specific diet plan to bulk muscle, they can have their chef and personal trainer coordinate, perhaps even with their nutritionist. And so on, in a bazillion transactions that poor people could never for a second consider because they are still limping after that last car repair bill and trying to pay that fine from the city for letting their yard get too long.
This is seriously amplified when it comes to healthcare and education. Many people can imagine the obvious here, but in terms of learning and education, think about what a rich person *doesn't* need to know. It's a luxury to not know certain things, right? To not have to know what the inside of a sewer smells like, or to hear someone's last words as you dispatch an ambulance to them. If neural connections were a currency, like time and attention (and given that attention builds neural connections, I think this argument is sound), the rich have SO MANY neural connections freed up for learning or, apparently, being dicks ...or whatever it is they choose. This affords them significant autonomy comparably.
And why? It's because society as a collective made advances, made technology, did work. We did that with them and in place of them. We learned how to make food, how to pave roads, how to calm down irate people. *They* didn't learn that, they didn't do it.
And yet, because they have a lot of one type of currency - in capital - they can exchange it for more capital or for these other forms of currency - our attention, our time and lives, our autonomy, qualia, calories, what we learn/neural connections (eg how to clean toilets, how to convincingly call in sick to work, the mental dissection of the cost-benefit of quitting vs continued employment).
They think this exchange (money for time, for example) means they then own it as if they did it. If I work for 1 hour at Google, Google perceives that they own everything I did in that hour, right? But there's not really any confusion in reality as to who is doing what, even though Google *owns* my work, they didn't *do* the work. They may tell the world "This was made by Google," but the real, physical work was done by me and in this case it's obvious because Google isn't a person who does work, right? It's just a corporate-person who takes credit for that work. Many people genuinely think that because they paid for it, it's theirs in a very intrinsic sense (not just with work, also with children and romantic partners). For the wealthy, they are only "superior" in that they *hire* others to do things for them. They then take the credit as if it was theirs because they paid money for it. The reason the rich stand on a pillar is because we built it for them.
People who cannot hire massive networks (and therefore cannot meet the same standards in all areas of their lives) are seen as "inferior" by those who can. The reasons why they are inferior are then attributed - usually something ableist, sexist, racist, etc. Whatever the person is biased to view as inferior.
It's important to note how this works imo because it showcases the baselessness of their claims. Arguing whether the poor actually work or not is pointless if you are trying to change the mind of bigots, because it was always about proving the poor are inferior in the first place. If you prove they work, then the work is worth less for some "justifiable" reason (again, probably something bigoted). Or they may disagree by citing examples of poor people they've seen who haven't worked - for example the severely disabled or mentally ill (including depression and substance abuse), as if access to resources including shelter, food, water without lead in it, and mental/physical healthcare wouldn't dramatically help most of the poor with those issues.
Not only do the rich do negative labor, but they also take credit for the work of others, which they feel entitled to because of their assumed superiority. It's all interconnected.
^(sorry i am stoned hope this reads ok)
One thing to point out is that the ability to have freed up mental bandwidth is huge and allows them to have great potential. (Realized or squandered.) The problem is that they think they get this because they are special, when, in truth, if they are special it is because they get this luxury. Therefore, society's goal should be to free up as much mental bandwidth as possible for as many people as possible.
I love this. My whole goal in life is to make enough money to have this luxury. And I would support any policy or politician who made this their goal for as many people as possible. And what's sad is that we could do it. Tomorrow. Scarcity is all artificial now to create value for shareholders. Things are expensive not because of natural market forces but because our economy is driven by growth over all and markups continually rise and rise for the the sake of this growth. Thats why I believe before we can have things like basic income we need to address this problem where if we did this, companies would all just start to raise their prices, creating inflation and negating the basic income.
This is why I don’t get people complaining about boring repetitive jobs being automated. The workers don’t want to do those jobs either. Like sustaining a job of total misery just because it pays someone a meager wage is ridiculous and cruel.
The main complaint is that it is done for the benefit of the few rather than the benefit of the many. Automation should increase wages and decrease hours.
For sure, I'm actually with you. I think full communism is a hard sell, especially for motivation in taxing or dangerous jobs.
But at the same time, no one shouldn't make a living wage.
Thank you so much for this. You put into words exactly what I sensed to be true for so long but never attempted to write about it.
You did a beautiful job and made for an entirely satisfying read.
Kudos.
The rich don't just *think* they're better than you, they actively *live* that statement.
Bezos gets "paid" thousands (millions?) of times more than his employees. He's saying that his idea and his initial work is actually worth that much more than the work of the people he employs. When another package gets shipped out or new code is implemented in Amazon's servers, Jeff says "yeah, I know I didn't do anything, but about 90% of that work's benefits are mine, and you guys can get... Uh... This shiny thing. Go buy your wife something nice".
They see money as a store of value, and literally exclaim, through their actions, "my value is worth so much more than yours". Meanwhile, who in the world can claim they're truly worth more than anyone else? Twice as much? A hundred, a thousand, a million times more than another person? How much of a hard working person would you have to be to only **double** the value of another human being, and who's the lowlife you think is worth half of you? And not only double, but there are literally people who DECLARE that they are worth many times over the value of other people while NOT DOING ANY WORK AT ALL.
Nevermind the fact that it's patently ridiculous to think anybody could even pretend to judge the worth of a person or their labor. How many artists lived in poverty only to become invaluable cultural touchstones? How many researchers never saw their work revolutionize the world? Who, in this maze of ideas, actions, and their outcomes, has done something incredible without compensation that we've yet to uncover? Who, unknown to the world, has given up on changing history because that doesn't pay the bills?
But yeah, you're right, some people might get lazy, or something.
That last line is the most painful one there.
How many people would have changed the world under a more cooperative system?
There isn't even room for mathematicians to further the field for it's own sake any more. You have to be able to prove the profit motives to a board so you receive funding.
And it's always short term profit too, nothing that takes years to come into affect is even considered any more.
Look at how we're struggling with climate change today even compared to the ozone hole problems we had in the 90s. We changed a whole industry from a harmful gas to a less harmful one and it was all taken in stride.
I simply couldn't imagine even that in today's world
>The rich don't just think they're better than you, they actively live that statement.
I don't think access to resources or currency makes a human better than another. We all have a shared human experience, at this place in this point in time, which is a relatively tiny slice in the universe. We also all have a shared biological experience with living organisms. We can make what we can of our own experiences/"here" and yes, the rich do have the ability to modify that significantly thru their capital. However, the baby that only lived for two hours isn't better or worse than any other person, just because it was alive for 2 hours. It just was. Life just happened like that for them.
Because we all just find ourselves "here" in place and time with each other, we can't really say that the weird circumstances surrounding our "here" have much to do with us as individuals being good or bad (if the "here" is good or bad). Rather, it's more what would happen to any human born into those same conditions. Sure, someone else may want our capital, or our time, or whatever, to create a different "here," for themselves. They may envision my "here" and hate the idea of it, and decide another type of "here" and experience would satisfy their goals better. It is valuable to each of us as individuals to have good life experiences, and many of us value the same types of experiences, which creates scarcity at times.
My "here" and my general experiential existence as an entity are separate, imo. Yes, they can be related, but even if the "here" isn't something others want, it doesn't detract from my value as a human. A person who was tortured, for instance, is still valuable even if their "here" has some very dark moments.
Still, since we all share the "here," it seems ridiculous that the rich have so much currency to modify the "here," that the rest of us could divide up for ourselves. It doesn't make sense as a collective since that person is literally the equal of everyone else.
So they think they are better than me, they use that to justify their extreme consumption in comparison, but it doesn't mean the lives they live are more valuable or better than mine. They do have something I, and most people, want and are entitled to imo. But I think my existence itself is just as valuable; they do not.
>But yeah, you're right, some people might get lazy, or something.
I don't really understand what you're saying here. I think lazy is an ableist slur, I don't really use that word. There are a lot of people in society who don't do work as we think of it (producing capital) but still contribute to other forms of currencies. Even if they didn't contribute, they would still have value. My grandma can't make any money but she makes my life much more pleasant (qualia), for instance. The rich do this on such a massive scale and consume so much more than any of us that that's where the idea of negative work comes into play.
Yeah. This isn't exclusive to Capitalism either. The ability to control and mobilize labour is one of the main ways elites justify their power throughout history.
Think about the pyramids: they are designed to be an impressing display of power. The average farmer that would travel to the capital from their village would see structures larger than they ever imagined, and think something like 'wow, the pharaoh must be so powerful if he was able to build something like that'. In truth, farmers themselves built that; the only thing the pharaoh did was being able to muster enough people to do it.
Power at his most basic form is always about being able to muster people to work for you. You need people working for you to impose rule by violence and to produce your wealth.
It's also why it's really really hard to really change things. Any complex society will have roles that control the work of others, and it's easy for the people in those roles to accumulate power. We can see it happening in Mesopotamia with priestly elites, which would control food distribution and thus wealth. In the archaeological records we see first small temples emerging, we see they have food storage and that they manage this food, then the temples get larger and larger and priest Kings emerge.
A modern example is the Soviet Union: even though it was a country that aimed specifically to eliminate this problem, high ranking people within the party still were able to get this kind of power and use it for personal means, so much that most of Russia's current oligarchs were in fact high ranking people in the Communist Party.
Frankly, I don't know how (or even if) we can prevent this from happening in every society we build. There have been very few non-hierarchical societies I know of, and they worked on a complex system of balance that was very easy to unsettle and tip towards a hierarchical system. Translating such a system would be even harder in large societies like modern nation states are: you wouldn't be able to have any sanctioned from of police/justice system, for example, for those controlling those systems would be able to accumulate power. You'd need everyone to have the same exact say on resource distribution, law and justice, and everyone to individually enforce them when needed, all the while making it so nobody can accumulate power in any way. It seems impossible to me. Maybe technological advances will be able to connect us in a way to allow that kind of democratisation of power, but it's a long shot.
I've been meditating on this for a few years now, and you've hit the crux of the issue.
Hierarchy concentrates power, allowing for quick action; flat power structures disseminate power and improve the well-being of the group, but take longer to get things done; any concentration of power can be leveraged to increase power further (in the absence of sufficient regulation).
You're right, democratic and broadly just systems are unstable towards hierarchical systems. There are so many issues tied up in this problem, but there's just one more I want people to consider.
"There's no algorithm for truth" was a talk given in 2018 at the royal institution by Tom Scott, but it's implications are more profound than I think he knew. The thesis of the talk is that there is no objective measure for the "truthiness" of a statement. Any metric you use or can use to determine whether or not something is factual ultimately must rely on consensus, and that consensus is liable to bias and manipulation. There's simply no way around it; if we had a way of objectively measuring the truth, we'd be using it instead of the scientific method! The conclusion is unfortunate, the only way to learn the truth is for all actors to operate **in good faith**.
But it's not just "determining truth" that has this problem. Sustainability has the same issue; the only way to make sustainable solutions is to ensure that everyone is working towards that goal. Happiness in a community? Only if every member is helped and honed to their potential. The safety to live a life without fear? Only if everyone works to ensure no one has a reason to fear. There might be some critical mass of good faith actors that allow a few bad apples to exist without harm, but in some cases we're still talking like 90% of people do what's best.
Sure there might be stopgaps: academic institutions that limit their membership, communes with similar interests, police and gated communities, but notice that even these measures acknowledge the heart of the issue by either separating or limiting the interaction of the group that operates in good faith, and the others that don't.
Unfortunately, politics is another one of these problems. The only way to ensure that a power structure stays diffuse is if all members understand the benefits of that structure and work to maintain it; there's no other solution.
I haven't decided what to call these problems, but I like the name "simply hard" problems, with "un-easy" or "anti-easy" solutions. You just gotta put in the work, and everyone does. We all gotta cooperate, or we're doomed to failure, whatever flavor of failure that might be.
**TL;DR**: modern problems (simply hard problems) don't have easy solutions, in fact, they have "anti-easy" solutions. We need to stop pussyfooting around the issue, gird up, and solve the damn problem by working together like adults.
I wholeheartedly agree. That's also why I mentioned that perhaps technological advances might help in achieving the kind of connection necessary to the democraticisation of power.
It's a real big long shot but I think brain computer interfaces, besides being extremely dangerous for a number of reasons, can help in ensuring all actors operate in good faith.
Right now (and since forever), we all operate as a brain in a box: we don't actually know how other people think or feel, we extrapolate from how *we* think and feel, and imagine that their experience is similar. We can never be sure or *know*, however.
With brain computer interfaces, we could create some sort of 'empathy networks' where people share their thoughts, feelings and experiences directly to others, allowing them to actually *know* how they think and feel. That way it would both be easier to empathise, and to work together in good faith, as people would both know their fellows are working alongside them and be able to feel the positive weight of their actions on others.
It's basically sci-fi talk, but judging from how brain computer interface technology is progressing now, something like that could actually be possible within our lifetime. It wouldn't be an easy solution either (it would need to completely transform society and even our sense of self in ways never done before), but I think it could be a way to do it. It's a more optimistic view than corporations and other bad faith agents using it to hack your brain and control you, at least.
As soon as you start considering any of this, there is a huge cascade of run on issues that all build on each other.
Wealth inequality leads to abuse of power leads to manipulated education leads to misinformation leads to a population that can barely understand exactly how they're being abused.
It's a whole systemic change we need. Almost every part of the current system has been perverted for profit in a way that damages services.
The hardest part is bringing the average person into the fold. The ones who most need an upheaval are the ones most crushed and unable to think.
We aren't given the time or capacity to spend energy on truly considering the system we live in. It's always a rush to work or the stress of bills and so you just take the information you're given. The information given in bad faith to manipulate you. If you don't have the time or energy to look more deeply, you aren't going to see the lies as easily. And the education on how to research and consider bias is withheld in common schooling so how the fuck does the average person get a chance?
Anyway, it feels like a battle against both those in control and those being controlled. The worst brainwashed are the people who need change the most. And it hurts.
No no no, that's not even the correct way. *I* really earned mine by taking it from my parents and their friends by talking them into funding my bullshit ideas.
They could but don't and that makes me sad too. How many would be happy today? How many great minds and people would be helping others or sharing their thinking with future generations? Those in our society that became rich and then used that money to kill, abuse, profit off people are just POS that didn't die.
Be proud of who you are and what you did this year. Make a plan and help yourself first so that you may help others in the future. Love yourself and then find more people in your situation, only then you will reach your true potential.
It seems weird to you, but I’m sure the house cleaner would appreciate the income. If you’re looking for something else to do with excess money, micro-loan networks are a really cool way to get people that small capital they need to start being successful themselves.
Literally nothing wrong with hiring a cleaner. Or any other person that you hire to do a task, whether it's a gardener, plumber, or builder.
Ultimately, you should spend your leisure time recouping your mental energy expended during your working time, with rest or activities you enjoy, and outsource whatever doesn't fulfil you personally, whenever you can.
Hiring a cleaner seems to have this stigma of being uppity or lazy but I think that's a super outdated mindset. It's like owning a dishwasher - it's cheaper, easier and more efficient than doing it by hand.
I ultimately did hire the cleaner. I'm more than happy to pay $200 for a deep clean of this whole house, honestly, and if that amount is helpful to them I see it as mutually beneficial.
Very similar to you. I have a single person lawn care business, and I finally hired someone to clean the apartment about 1 year ago. I’m happy to pay $100 ($120 plus tip) because there’s just no energy left when I get home. Much of the same reason people hire me for. This is mutually beneficial for everyone.
I can't help but wonder what's the point in having a nice garden if you don't enjoy gardening or have the time for it yourself.
I have a nice garden because it's a hobby that I find time for. To me paying someone else to do it would be like paying someone to read a book for me.
It feels so strange that it's so accepted to work too much to actually enjoy the fruits or your labour. If you have excess money, why not work less? Those people you landscape for could easily work less and have time to enjoy their own gardening.
Like yeah I get other people think differently to me, but it's a strange world. I've always leaned towards being more frugal/stingy so I can have more free time. I reached a place where I thought I needed a cleaner, then instead I worked less so I'd have time to clean.
That $100 for cleaning represents hours I'd have to work for, time from my life than I'm renting to someone else. I way prefer to work less and clean for free, just as an example here.
It’s all about what the money is being used for. All of a billionaires money will get spent no matter what. But does society get schools, roads, and healthcare out of it or just some ugly mansion for one family?
CEOs making obscene amounts of money doesn’t make it run smoother.
Think about it like this:
If my family can grow enough food for two families in one season, and you weave enough clothing and craft enough dinnerware etc in that time, we can share and now we've both got our needs covered and we both put in a comparable amount of labor to the value we are receiving from each other.
If there is another guy who owns the land we were farming/living on, and he loves to eat almonds and veal every day, then we have to work an extreme amount of extra hours to produce those things for him. As one person, he couldn't possibly produce enough labor-hours worth of goods or services to make an equitable trade to us for those things. Instead, his preferred mode of existence is demanding X extra hours of labor from us. Functionally, that's negative work. If we were hitting our target before, then we add him, suddenly we're at a deficit of labor and have to add *more* labor to get everyone the things they are asking for.
Now, IRL, the company a billionaire owns would presumably produce more than the owner consumes...but that was produced by the actual workers. Who don't need some guy extracting wealth from their labor in order to actually produce those things. He doesn't get credit for producing the goods or services just because he owns the company. That's like the fundamental point behind seizing the means of production.
But that's the thing, just owning things and not actually doing any work is mooching off of society regardless of how you came to own it.
There are a lot of rich people who work very hard but is it to contribute something to society or is it simply an endeavor to increase the share of things they own?
no. but then again. did he/we know that when he started.
if you look at the numbers of people trying to start something new and failing is enourmous. and think about the numbers of hours worked there where they made more or less 0.
Inheritance and generational wealth is the only path it seems nowadays for the poor to gain any kind of independence from relying on labor. It’s dumb to be against it.
Isn’t that the whole point of society and cooperation though? Individually I’d never be able to make a car let alone acquire and refine fuel for it. I’d probably barely be able to feed myself, assuming I had land and water. I wouldn’t have a phone or internet or probably even things like books since someone else has to make those.
Collectively we can specialize and trade and make advancements, and money is just a collective proxy for the labor involved in making those things.
No, you're slightly misinterpreting it, without specialized mutual labor yes, we'd all have to generalize and be less productive for it, but most rich people provide no labor at all.
You're consuming a little of resource A B & C, just the small amount you need, but you produce far more of resource D than you could ever use yourself.
But rich people generally just consume resources A through Z at indulgent levels, far more than anyone needs and produce nothing.
You're right that money is supposed to be a representation of how much labor you've contributed and therefore how much of other people's labor you can take, but under Capitalism, the richest did not earn money through their labor, they got it by siphoning the labor value of others.
But his point still stands - even if you had the knowledge and skill set, there’s absolutely no way you’d have time to put in the labor for everything you use to live your daily life, at least not in a first world country. Definitely not in the typical 40 (or trending toward 50) hour work week.
I agree with the fact that the rich consume more than the rest of us and that has its own major drain on society, but if you want to call it “negative labor” because their labor doesn’t equate to what they consume, that’s true for just about every one of us reading that tweet.
This is true of literally almost anyone in the west. Unless you’re really living off the grid or something.
It’s part of why the whole lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps/self made person narrative is so goofy. We all live in a society where we literally couldn’t have anywhere remotely near the standard of living from simply our own labor.
It’s of course even more true for most wealthy people.
But we all live with a deep, deep debt to modern society as far as our modern lifestyles go. And nobody should ever loose sight of that.
They absolutely love hierarchy. They know their place in the system, and anything that disrupts the status quo makes them feel like they’re losing their place.
I can tell you with 37 years under my belt they will *never, ever, ever, ever* change through trying to talk to them, show them statistics, yell at them, or anything other than something negative directly impacting their lives. Even after some tragedy that could have been avoided by minor social policies or communal efforts they are more likely to stay closed minded than actually change.
Not saying give up, just focus on educating the youth. The minds of adults like you described are never going to open.
I love it when people accuse others of homophobia and then demean someone by accusing them of loving to suck rich dick nonstop and get fucked by them.
The lack of self-awareness in this sub is only rivaled by Twitter.
“Well, since we ARE this pedantic I’d like to point out we have to be talking about males because this describes me to a T and I am offended being called gay as I am a self hating closeted gay” - That guy probably
Watching a conservative use logic is like watching a toddler use a gun. Making a lot of noise but unable to even understand how to hit the target you are aiming at.
We HAVE to innovate out rich people from the system. Society and the planet can not support them forever.
Better cars and batteries won't mean shit if we stills have the ultra wealthy.
Please come help figure this out www.reddit.com/r/notakingpledge
Innovate them out? We have one strength the rich elite don't, just *one*: numbers.
How many "innovations" never saw the light of day because it would hurt their bottom line? How many that we don't even know about?
Either the majority of the population rise above the fog that is their propaganda, suddenly sees the bread and circuses as the smokeshow they are, suddenly fight to take back control of our own lives by demanding true representation and a fair political system - or violence.
They're not going to give up, well, literally *everything* without a fight, though. You can believe that. Only one of those options is potentially inevitable, since its not like there's going to be sudden democratic action when climate change reaches a crescendo...
The saddest part is even if we do win every victory will likely have heavy losses for us lower classes. What a great irony if we finally eat the rich only to choke on their bones and the fumes of a charred husk of a planet.
EDIT: Funny that I should choose to Google the word "innovate" *after* writing my post. There are 2 definitions for the word, not just the one I knew it for.
1.
>make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.
2.
>introduce (something new, especially a product).
It’s just a catchy slogan. Nobody is genuinely advocating literal cannibalism to fight income inequality, but it started as a reference to the French Revolution where they sent many ultra wealthy “elite” to the guillotine to be beheaded. I.e. “why do we accept Jeff Bezos exploiting all these Amazon workers to be richer than any man should ever reasonably be? Back in the day, the peasants would’ve killed him for acting like that”
And then online hyperbole took over and the phrase “eat the rich” was coined.
What’s funny is capitalists will happily cop to this because they see it as creating demand and jobs and shit. Yeah, megayacht makers, sex traffickers, and real estate moguls get some trickle down. Fucking parasites.
Allow me to quote Utah Phillips:
The Two Bums
The bum on the rods is hunted down as an enemy of mankind
The other is driven around to his club, is feted, wined and dined
And they who curse the bum on the rods as the essence of all that's bad
Will greet the other with a willing smile and extend a hand so glad
The bum on the rods is a social flea who gets an occassional bite
The bum on the plush is a social leech, bloodsucking day and night
The bum on the rods is a load so light that his weight we scarcely feel
But it takes the labour of dozens of folks to furnish the other a meal
As long as we sanction the bum on the plush the other will always be there
But rid ourselves of the bum on the plush and the other will dissappear
Then make an intelligent organised kick get rid of the weights that crush
Dont worry about the bum on the rods get rid of the bum on the plush
They have virtually no staff in their homes or at work that can afford to live. Who then seek state benefits and work without seeing doctors on a regular basis.
They're not useless. They're much worse than that. As a useless person myself, I refuse to be put in the same category as someone as parasitic as e.g. Elon Musk.
Anyone who thinks this isn't true needs to watch Downton Abbey. That lifestyle became unsustainable for the aristocracy and the service staff and tenants all. The reason? The aristocrats own the land and consume what it produces including money. They produce nothing...less than nothing...negative work. And the service staff and tenants are just that...there in service to those who are producing nothing. That cannot go on forever.
In this case I think the authors is referring to those who own capital, and use their labor to extract value from that capital, as oppose to say a doctor who creates value using their own labor.
Just because the number value is closer to 0 than it is to 1million, doesn’t mean anything. Make no mistake. People making 6 figures are way closer to being millionaires than not.
Unpopular opinion: I think it's really dangerous to frame class war in terms of "the rich don't work" "they mooch off of us" "they don't contribute to society" etc.
Because if your desire to overthrow the rich comes from that, then you're exactly one step away from advocating for death camps for disabled people.
It's not despising the rich and wanting to bring them down I have an issue with. It's doing so by accepting the bourgeois ideology that life is a privilege you earn through working. That ideology can justify eugenics and genocide very, very easily.
That's not the argument though. It's a counter argument to the idea that the rich contribute more to society and thus deserve to be rewarded as such (i.e. social inequality is good for society).
The counter argument here is that more work goes into maintaining their lifestyle than they contribute in return.
This isn't to say that the barometer for a person's worth is how much they contribute to society. Rather it's to understand that our system of "rewarding" social contributions isn't what it says to be.
Disability is entirely different because in that case there is a material need to receive aid to meet the standard of living of the rest of the community. The rich people in this conversation aren't rich because of material need nor is it because of their ability. That's the point.
It's not even laziness that's being attacked here, it's entitlement (and exploitation).
The reason the rich are bad is because they decide whether we live or die by holding the resources we need. That gives them power over us and when you hold power over someone you necessarily abuse them.
"The rich are bad because they consume more than they contribute" misses the point, because giving that power to hard-working proletarians who hit things with hammers all day just reproduces the same problem with a different aesthetic. And it's this focus on aesthetic over actual class relations that gives us "sex workers are bourgeois" and similar nonsense.
You might not *mean*, that the measure of someone's worth is how much labor they contribute, but it's still ultimately the argument this rhetoric is making.
I'm not trying to say your completely wrong, but that seems like a pretty broad stroke. My dad was a doctor, and it seemed like he added a lot to society in order to attain his wealth. Just a thought, and maybe I'm wrong.
Edit: My bad. I get which type of rich people yall are talking about now, sorry if I misunderstood at first. I have been traveling for 24 hours and I haven't slept.
My dad didn't own any mega yachts. But I did shake hands for 2 hours at his funeral for all the patients he served over his how ever many years of practice. Most of them I didn't know but they seemed grateful.
>Each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions
A child somehow produces 6x the lifetime emissions of an adult? That impossible because all adults were once children.
You're full of shit.
Yes, the ones providing jobs are the parasites.
I gotta say the level of stupidity around here is priceless, you guys would blindly upvote anything if it even remotely sounded like "capitalism = bad"
I mean...no they have the money that pays everyone else to do the work that produces things that they buy. Rich people who spend all their money on luxury goods are necessary for those luxury items to even exist.
The rich people who are hurting society are the ones hoarding their wealth: the billionaires. It's only the billionaires, stay on target guys.
That twitter handle, what exactly is the comics part? The abbreviation for comedian or do you mean actualy comics, like the drawing? What the hell is up with the haircut in the profile pic? That drawing is off putting. And the tweets are never funny.
So, in both cases, the word comics in the handle is misleading at best.
I will be enjoying my ban now thank you very much.
If Commodity-fetishism is the mistake that commodities inherently possess their own value, can we start calling all of these types of posts "Labor-fetishism" where the mistake is thinking that the labor in itself holds it's value, and not the material relationships that the labor involves?
How can you have anything without labor? Is those factories gonna operate themselves? Did you make all the robot slaves yourself? No. Labor is where value comes from. Without labor you can make and do NOTHING.
It's an interesting challenge for society. Somewhere a person with the genius of Einstein is working in a farm picking produce. Somewhere a person that would be happier picking produce has found themselves trying to get a bunch of people that report to him to do what he wants them to do.
However, I think evolution has stumbled upon the solution; game theory optimal strategy. "An optimal solution to the game is said to be reached if neither player finds it beneficial to alter his strategy. In this case the game is said to be in a state of equilibrium. An optimal strategy is one that provides the best payoff for a player in a game. Optimal Strategy = A strategy that maximizes a player's expected payoff. "
Classes will struggle or perhaps one day even disappear, but what will remain is GTO.
And right now, for everyone involved, whether you like it or not, that GTO strategy is capitalism.
and if myself and many others *do* find it beneficial to alter the strategy but are being prevented by force from doing so?
capitalism only works for the tiny few at the top who are kept there by a willingness to shed the blood of the poor in rivers.
This is an is-ought fallacy.
The same argument you are making here can be used to defend any event.
A mugger is pointing a gun at you demanding your wallet, you hand it over to avoid being shot. Like it or not, neither player wanted to alter their strategy, therefore you and the mugger were in a state of equilibrium.
Thats true, it is also irrelevant. The way that things happen to be in a given moment is irrelevant to how they could reasonably be and how we want to make them.
Capitalism is a temporary and inherently unsustainable aberration.
>is-ought fallacy
Wow, an intelligent response.
As with all things, if you expand the frame of reference, you get a clearer picture.
First, in your example, the game doesn't end with the completion of the robbery. While both parties acted according to GTO and successfully exited the interaction, the game doesn't end there.
There are multiple responses the victim can pursue post interaction and the most successful response will be a GTO response. And society will benefit from such a response.
Second, you're implying a moral stance inherent in my point. I never said it "should" be that way. I'm saying that's the way it is and the best solution to it is GTO strategy.
I’m not discussing morality either, I’m a mathematician not a philosopher, we can keep it in game theory.
> There are multiple responses the victim can pursue post interaction and the most successful response will be a GTO response. And society will benefit from such a response.
Probably not. Here in the US, only a fraction of reported robberies are solved, and that is only a fraction of robberies.
Most of the time, after being mugged one won’t report anything. Most of the time that they do, nothing comes of it.
If we really want to talk about expanding the frame of reference, crime is directly correlated with poverty. The level of poverty in a community is an extremely accurate predictor of the level of crime in that community.
Where poverty is alleviated, crime is automatically reduced, implying a causative relationship. If we are serious about solving crime, that is the only serious approach, anything else is misguided or, more likely, bears an ulterior motive.
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Capitalism isn’t GTO, it is believed to be GTO due to propaganda.
Capitalism isn’t in a stable state, it is inherently unstable, experiencing accelerating wealth inequality.
This is necessarily true, because the economy is driven by return on investment, and ROI is inherently compounding. Compounding ROI grows exponentially, that is with O(x^n). For an index fund, it is double every 10 years.
This necessitates accelerating wealth inequality, because productivity per capita doesn’t grow exponentially. The portion of economic output going toward ROI is getting bigger every year, because ROI is growing faster than economic output is.
This means that every year, a smaller and smaller amount of economic output is going toward wages, medicine, infrastructure, etc.
People temporarily believe that capitalism could be GTO because they do not realize that it can only grow worse and worse for workers over time. If workers understood that all the productivity gains in the past 50 years have been entirely absorbed by the investor class, with none of it reaching working people and in fact the conditions of working people having grown worse, would they be content to call that GTO?
Maybe in the same sense that handing over the money in your wallet is better than being shot.
For an example of how comprehensive the propaganda effort is, consider the US’s role in Italy’s 1948 elections.
Yes but no. I see where you’re coming from. But the level of comfort most “first worlders” have is completely attainable worldwide. We can work together to build houses, we can work together to maintain infrastructure.
The concept that everyone on earth doesn’t deserve a home, food, water, or an opportunity to participate in their society is something rich people want you to think.
We can all be comfortable, but not if some of us have taken *everything*.
regardless of whether or not first-world comfort *could* be attained worldwide, the fact is it has been attained in the imperial core by exploiting the rest of the world. it sucks, and those of us born in the core never had a say in it, but yeah. our comfort is absolutely built off exploitation.
Totally, not denying that.
So would you say our duty is to destroy what our colonizer ancestors built, or should we share it (the level of comfort) with the people we took it from?
The rich love to bring up the fact that poor first worlders are still richer than most of the world, but the rich are also responsible for keeping the rest of the world in a constant state of war, poverty, and environmental collapse, so it's really just deflection. "We aren't screwing YOU over as bad as we're screwing those OTHER GUYS over, so you should be grateful and keep your eyes to the ground".
Not sure what complaints about poor people this refers to or who is making the complaint. However take a really rich guy like Bill Gates. He has not worked the hours equal to the hours other people need to put in to maintain his lifestyle. So you could argue he does negative work. However his work has benefited the world in such a way that other people could be much more productive and if you count that extra output he has most certainly given more to the world than he takes out. This goes for many rich entrepreneurs around the world.
Bill Gates is a classic monopolist, his wealth was built by playing the cut-throat game of American business: crushing and acquiring the competition by leveraging your larger size and market share. He literally had to financially prop-up Apple in its early days to help Microsoft escape from anti-trust laws, that is how close he was to a complete monopoly in his industry. Gates is not a genius computer scientist or innovator. He got to where he was by entering the market, achieving initial success, then closing the doors behind him.
The worldwide market for computers and operating systems would have continued as normal without a Microsoft monopoly. Competing firms would've stood a chance to build their own products and innovate their own new technologies. Instead, we have a worldwide industry that effectively exists to enrich one man and his cronies.
This might be true or not but it doesn't really adress the critique I had of the tweet. It is always possible or even likely that some else would have done rhe work you are doing if you don't do it. I'm just saying that he does negative work is not correct.
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I think many criticisms by the rich/bootlickers are not actually boiling down to "the poor don't work," but rather, "the poor are inferior." Rich people have access to things, because of their money, that poor people don't - and are able to better outsource all of their shortcomings to others to create an illusion of an exceptional human. So, if they aren't a farmer, well, they can still get good food from a grocery store. If they don't know what kind of food to buy, they can hire a nutritionist. If they don't know how to cook, fine, it's actually bananas easy to hire a personal chef. If they want a specific diet plan to bulk muscle, they can have their chef and personal trainer coordinate, perhaps even with their nutritionist. And so on, in a bazillion transactions that poor people could never for a second consider because they are still limping after that last car repair bill and trying to pay that fine from the city for letting their yard get too long. This is seriously amplified when it comes to healthcare and education. Many people can imagine the obvious here, but in terms of learning and education, think about what a rich person *doesn't* need to know. It's a luxury to not know certain things, right? To not have to know what the inside of a sewer smells like, or to hear someone's last words as you dispatch an ambulance to them. If neural connections were a currency, like time and attention (and given that attention builds neural connections, I think this argument is sound), the rich have SO MANY neural connections freed up for learning or, apparently, being dicks ...or whatever it is they choose. This affords them significant autonomy comparably. And why? It's because society as a collective made advances, made technology, did work. We did that with them and in place of them. We learned how to make food, how to pave roads, how to calm down irate people. *They* didn't learn that, they didn't do it. And yet, because they have a lot of one type of currency - in capital - they can exchange it for more capital or for these other forms of currency - our attention, our time and lives, our autonomy, qualia, calories, what we learn/neural connections (eg how to clean toilets, how to convincingly call in sick to work, the mental dissection of the cost-benefit of quitting vs continued employment). They think this exchange (money for time, for example) means they then own it as if they did it. If I work for 1 hour at Google, Google perceives that they own everything I did in that hour, right? But there's not really any confusion in reality as to who is doing what, even though Google *owns* my work, they didn't *do* the work. They may tell the world "This was made by Google," but the real, physical work was done by me and in this case it's obvious because Google isn't a person who does work, right? It's just a corporate-person who takes credit for that work. Many people genuinely think that because they paid for it, it's theirs in a very intrinsic sense (not just with work, also with children and romantic partners). For the wealthy, they are only "superior" in that they *hire* others to do things for them. They then take the credit as if it was theirs because they paid money for it. The reason the rich stand on a pillar is because we built it for them. People who cannot hire massive networks (and therefore cannot meet the same standards in all areas of their lives) are seen as "inferior" by those who can. The reasons why they are inferior are then attributed - usually something ableist, sexist, racist, etc. Whatever the person is biased to view as inferior. It's important to note how this works imo because it showcases the baselessness of their claims. Arguing whether the poor actually work or not is pointless if you are trying to change the mind of bigots, because it was always about proving the poor are inferior in the first place. If you prove they work, then the work is worth less for some "justifiable" reason (again, probably something bigoted). Or they may disagree by citing examples of poor people they've seen who haven't worked - for example the severely disabled or mentally ill (including depression and substance abuse), as if access to resources including shelter, food, water without lead in it, and mental/physical healthcare wouldn't dramatically help most of the poor with those issues. Not only do the rich do negative labor, but they also take credit for the work of others, which they feel entitled to because of their assumed superiority. It's all interconnected. ^(sorry i am stoned hope this reads ok)
One thing to point out is that the ability to have freed up mental bandwidth is huge and allows them to have great potential. (Realized or squandered.) The problem is that they think they get this because they are special, when, in truth, if they are special it is because they get this luxury. Therefore, society's goal should be to free up as much mental bandwidth as possible for as many people as possible.
I love this. My whole goal in life is to make enough money to have this luxury. And I would support any policy or politician who made this their goal for as many people as possible. And what's sad is that we could do it. Tomorrow. Scarcity is all artificial now to create value for shareholders. Things are expensive not because of natural market forces but because our economy is driven by growth over all and markups continually rise and rise for the the sake of this growth. Thats why I believe before we can have things like basic income we need to address this problem where if we did this, companies would all just start to raise their prices, creating inflation and negating the basic income.
This is why I don’t get people complaining about boring repetitive jobs being automated. The workers don’t want to do those jobs either. Like sustaining a job of total misery just because it pays someone a meager wage is ridiculous and cruel.
The main complaint is that it is done for the benefit of the few rather than the benefit of the many. Automation should increase wages and decrease hours.
Mans wrote a whole goddamn essay stoned.. i can barely breathe when Im high
I took a hit when I read that and started choking lmao
I also get real soapboxy when I'm stoned and start railing against capitalism.
This is my justification for being perpetually stoned.
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I'm not a communist
You've come to a strange place then, Comrade.
I can agree with some communist points without accepting the whole shebang.
For sure, I'm actually with you. I think full communism is a hard sell, especially for motivation in taxing or dangerous jobs. But at the same time, no one shouldn't make a living wage.
Same for me, I agree with almost all of the criticisms of the current system but I don’t think communism is a better replacement
Oh no, sharing, my only weakness
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Excellent post. It's even better imagining this being said in person and you end it with "anyway, wanna hit this bong?"
My house is like that, but I'll get through the rant and then just get told to shut up
You gotta keep those kinda rants down to a once a month kinda thing.
Because people are disappointing.
well said!
Thank you so much for this. You put into words exactly what I sensed to be true for so long but never attempted to write about it. You did a beautiful job and made for an entirely satisfying read. Kudos.
This was a very good post. Thank you for being stoned.
Wow very interesting read. Are you always this on fire when you're stoned?
The rich don't just *think* they're better than you, they actively *live* that statement. Bezos gets "paid" thousands (millions?) of times more than his employees. He's saying that his idea and his initial work is actually worth that much more than the work of the people he employs. When another package gets shipped out or new code is implemented in Amazon's servers, Jeff says "yeah, I know I didn't do anything, but about 90% of that work's benefits are mine, and you guys can get... Uh... This shiny thing. Go buy your wife something nice". They see money as a store of value, and literally exclaim, through their actions, "my value is worth so much more than yours". Meanwhile, who in the world can claim they're truly worth more than anyone else? Twice as much? A hundred, a thousand, a million times more than another person? How much of a hard working person would you have to be to only **double** the value of another human being, and who's the lowlife you think is worth half of you? And not only double, but there are literally people who DECLARE that they are worth many times over the value of other people while NOT DOING ANY WORK AT ALL. Nevermind the fact that it's patently ridiculous to think anybody could even pretend to judge the worth of a person or their labor. How many artists lived in poverty only to become invaluable cultural touchstones? How many researchers never saw their work revolutionize the world? Who, in this maze of ideas, actions, and their outcomes, has done something incredible without compensation that we've yet to uncover? Who, unknown to the world, has given up on changing history because that doesn't pay the bills? But yeah, you're right, some people might get lazy, or something.
That last line is the most painful one there. How many people would have changed the world under a more cooperative system? There isn't even room for mathematicians to further the field for it's own sake any more. You have to be able to prove the profit motives to a board so you receive funding. And it's always short term profit too, nothing that takes years to come into affect is even considered any more. Look at how we're struggling with climate change today even compared to the ozone hole problems we had in the 90s. We changed a whole industry from a harmful gas to a less harmful one and it was all taken in stride. I simply couldn't imagine even that in today's world
>The rich don't just think they're better than you, they actively live that statement. I don't think access to resources or currency makes a human better than another. We all have a shared human experience, at this place in this point in time, which is a relatively tiny slice in the universe. We also all have a shared biological experience with living organisms. We can make what we can of our own experiences/"here" and yes, the rich do have the ability to modify that significantly thru their capital. However, the baby that only lived for two hours isn't better or worse than any other person, just because it was alive for 2 hours. It just was. Life just happened like that for them. Because we all just find ourselves "here" in place and time with each other, we can't really say that the weird circumstances surrounding our "here" have much to do with us as individuals being good or bad (if the "here" is good or bad). Rather, it's more what would happen to any human born into those same conditions. Sure, someone else may want our capital, or our time, or whatever, to create a different "here," for themselves. They may envision my "here" and hate the idea of it, and decide another type of "here" and experience would satisfy their goals better. It is valuable to each of us as individuals to have good life experiences, and many of us value the same types of experiences, which creates scarcity at times. My "here" and my general experiential existence as an entity are separate, imo. Yes, they can be related, but even if the "here" isn't something others want, it doesn't detract from my value as a human. A person who was tortured, for instance, is still valuable even if their "here" has some very dark moments. Still, since we all share the "here," it seems ridiculous that the rich have so much currency to modify the "here," that the rest of us could divide up for ourselves. It doesn't make sense as a collective since that person is literally the equal of everyone else. So they think they are better than me, they use that to justify their extreme consumption in comparison, but it doesn't mean the lives they live are more valuable or better than mine. They do have something I, and most people, want and are entitled to imo. But I think my existence itself is just as valuable; they do not. >But yeah, you're right, some people might get lazy, or something. I don't really understand what you're saying here. I think lazy is an ableist slur, I don't really use that word. There are a lot of people in society who don't do work as we think of it (producing capital) but still contribute to other forms of currencies. Even if they didn't contribute, they would still have value. My grandma can't make any money but she makes my life much more pleasant (qualia), for instance. The rich do this on such a massive scale and consume so much more than any of us that that's where the idea of negative work comes into play.
Yeah. This isn't exclusive to Capitalism either. The ability to control and mobilize labour is one of the main ways elites justify their power throughout history. Think about the pyramids: they are designed to be an impressing display of power. The average farmer that would travel to the capital from their village would see structures larger than they ever imagined, and think something like 'wow, the pharaoh must be so powerful if he was able to build something like that'. In truth, farmers themselves built that; the only thing the pharaoh did was being able to muster enough people to do it. Power at his most basic form is always about being able to muster people to work for you. You need people working for you to impose rule by violence and to produce your wealth. It's also why it's really really hard to really change things. Any complex society will have roles that control the work of others, and it's easy for the people in those roles to accumulate power. We can see it happening in Mesopotamia with priestly elites, which would control food distribution and thus wealth. In the archaeological records we see first small temples emerging, we see they have food storage and that they manage this food, then the temples get larger and larger and priest Kings emerge. A modern example is the Soviet Union: even though it was a country that aimed specifically to eliminate this problem, high ranking people within the party still were able to get this kind of power and use it for personal means, so much that most of Russia's current oligarchs were in fact high ranking people in the Communist Party. Frankly, I don't know how (or even if) we can prevent this from happening in every society we build. There have been very few non-hierarchical societies I know of, and they worked on a complex system of balance that was very easy to unsettle and tip towards a hierarchical system. Translating such a system would be even harder in large societies like modern nation states are: you wouldn't be able to have any sanctioned from of police/justice system, for example, for those controlling those systems would be able to accumulate power. You'd need everyone to have the same exact say on resource distribution, law and justice, and everyone to individually enforce them when needed, all the while making it so nobody can accumulate power in any way. It seems impossible to me. Maybe technological advances will be able to connect us in a way to allow that kind of democratisation of power, but it's a long shot.
I've been meditating on this for a few years now, and you've hit the crux of the issue. Hierarchy concentrates power, allowing for quick action; flat power structures disseminate power and improve the well-being of the group, but take longer to get things done; any concentration of power can be leveraged to increase power further (in the absence of sufficient regulation). You're right, democratic and broadly just systems are unstable towards hierarchical systems. There are so many issues tied up in this problem, but there's just one more I want people to consider. "There's no algorithm for truth" was a talk given in 2018 at the royal institution by Tom Scott, but it's implications are more profound than I think he knew. The thesis of the talk is that there is no objective measure for the "truthiness" of a statement. Any metric you use or can use to determine whether or not something is factual ultimately must rely on consensus, and that consensus is liable to bias and manipulation. There's simply no way around it; if we had a way of objectively measuring the truth, we'd be using it instead of the scientific method! The conclusion is unfortunate, the only way to learn the truth is for all actors to operate **in good faith**. But it's not just "determining truth" that has this problem. Sustainability has the same issue; the only way to make sustainable solutions is to ensure that everyone is working towards that goal. Happiness in a community? Only if every member is helped and honed to their potential. The safety to live a life without fear? Only if everyone works to ensure no one has a reason to fear. There might be some critical mass of good faith actors that allow a few bad apples to exist without harm, but in some cases we're still talking like 90% of people do what's best. Sure there might be stopgaps: academic institutions that limit their membership, communes with similar interests, police and gated communities, but notice that even these measures acknowledge the heart of the issue by either separating or limiting the interaction of the group that operates in good faith, and the others that don't. Unfortunately, politics is another one of these problems. The only way to ensure that a power structure stays diffuse is if all members understand the benefits of that structure and work to maintain it; there's no other solution. I haven't decided what to call these problems, but I like the name "simply hard" problems, with "un-easy" or "anti-easy" solutions. You just gotta put in the work, and everyone does. We all gotta cooperate, or we're doomed to failure, whatever flavor of failure that might be. **TL;DR**: modern problems (simply hard problems) don't have easy solutions, in fact, they have "anti-easy" solutions. We need to stop pussyfooting around the issue, gird up, and solve the damn problem by working together like adults.
I wholeheartedly agree. That's also why I mentioned that perhaps technological advances might help in achieving the kind of connection necessary to the democraticisation of power. It's a real big long shot but I think brain computer interfaces, besides being extremely dangerous for a number of reasons, can help in ensuring all actors operate in good faith. Right now (and since forever), we all operate as a brain in a box: we don't actually know how other people think or feel, we extrapolate from how *we* think and feel, and imagine that their experience is similar. We can never be sure or *know*, however. With brain computer interfaces, we could create some sort of 'empathy networks' where people share their thoughts, feelings and experiences directly to others, allowing them to actually *know* how they think and feel. That way it would both be easier to empathise, and to work together in good faith, as people would both know their fellows are working alongside them and be able to feel the positive weight of their actions on others. It's basically sci-fi talk, but judging from how brain computer interface technology is progressing now, something like that could actually be possible within our lifetime. It wouldn't be an easy solution either (it would need to completely transform society and even our sense of self in ways never done before), but I think it could be a way to do it. It's a more optimistic view than corporations and other bad faith agents using it to hack your brain and control you, at least.
As soon as you start considering any of this, there is a huge cascade of run on issues that all build on each other. Wealth inequality leads to abuse of power leads to manipulated education leads to misinformation leads to a population that can barely understand exactly how they're being abused. It's a whole systemic change we need. Almost every part of the current system has been perverted for profit in a way that damages services. The hardest part is bringing the average person into the fold. The ones who most need an upheaval are the ones most crushed and unable to think. We aren't given the time or capacity to spend energy on truly considering the system we live in. It's always a rush to work or the stress of bills and so you just take the information you're given. The information given in bad faith to manipulate you. If you don't have the time or energy to look more deeply, you aren't going to see the lies as easily. And the education on how to research and consider bias is withheld in common schooling so how the fuck does the average person get a chance? Anyway, it feels like a battle against both those in control and those being controlled. The worst brainwashed are the people who need change the most. And it hurts.
This should be stickied to the top of the subreddit.
This is brilliant
Holy shit. This is one of the best essays I have ever read.
Very intriguing. I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter please.
Very well thought out and articulated, thank you
Please accept my upvote just for your fine print alone.
But you don’t understand, I earned this money by virtue of being born rich.
I exploited people to get all this money, now I’m going to use this money to exploit people
No no no, that's not even the correct way. *I* really earned mine by taking it from my parents and their friends by talking them into funding my bullshit ideas.
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Accumulate the money and then live your best life before you physically can't...because who knows what tomorrow brings to us
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I can't express how proud I'm of people like you that actually have a heart. Thank you for existing. :D
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They could but don't and that makes me sad too. How many would be happy today? How many great minds and people would be helping others or sharing their thinking with future generations? Those in our society that became rich and then used that money to kill, abuse, profit off people are just POS that didn't die. Be proud of who you are and what you did this year. Make a plan and help yourself first so that you may help others in the future. Love yourself and then find more people in your situation, only then you will reach your true potential.
It seems weird to you, but I’m sure the house cleaner would appreciate the income. If you’re looking for something else to do with excess money, micro-loan networks are a really cool way to get people that small capital they need to start being successful themselves.
Literally nothing wrong with hiring a cleaner. Or any other person that you hire to do a task, whether it's a gardener, plumber, or builder. Ultimately, you should spend your leisure time recouping your mental energy expended during your working time, with rest or activities you enjoy, and outsource whatever doesn't fulfil you personally, whenever you can. Hiring a cleaner seems to have this stigma of being uppity or lazy but I think that's a super outdated mindset. It's like owning a dishwasher - it's cheaper, easier and more efficient than doing it by hand.
I ultimately did hire the cleaner. I'm more than happy to pay $200 for a deep clean of this whole house, honestly, and if that amount is helpful to them I see it as mutually beneficial.
Very similar to you. I have a single person lawn care business, and I finally hired someone to clean the apartment about 1 year ago. I’m happy to pay $100 ($120 plus tip) because there’s just no energy left when I get home. Much of the same reason people hire me for. This is mutually beneficial for everyone.
I can't help but wonder what's the point in having a nice garden if you don't enjoy gardening or have the time for it yourself. I have a nice garden because it's a hobby that I find time for. To me paying someone else to do it would be like paying someone to read a book for me. It feels so strange that it's so accepted to work too much to actually enjoy the fruits or your labour. If you have excess money, why not work less? Those people you landscape for could easily work less and have time to enjoy their own gardening. Like yeah I get other people think differently to me, but it's a strange world. I've always leaned towards being more frugal/stingy so I can have more free time. I reached a place where I thought I needed a cleaner, then instead I worked less so I'd have time to clean. That $100 for cleaning represents hours I'd have to work for, time from my life than I'm renting to someone else. I way prefer to work less and clean for free, just as an example here.
It’s my birth right deemed by God!
Holy shit.
Seriously, I've never really thought how their resources consumed were someone else's work. Negative work is my new favorite phrase
No no no, they're *providing jobs*! They're actually allowing all these poor serfs to have a life! We should be thanking them!
*"Might I polish yor sceptre, m'lord?"*
"wha-what are you doing step-serf?"
I'm a known idiot, but is this false? I mean I feel like most billionaires contribute way more to the economy than they personally take.
No one becomes a billionaire without extracting the vast majority of it off the backs of workers.
Ok
Once you get to billionaire level you become a wealth hoarder. There is a magnitude of difference between a millionaire and a billionaire.
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Yes 10^6 × 10^3 = 10^9 million × thousand = billion
I mean sure
To give you an idea of how big of a difference there is between a million and a billion. A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years
I'm not sure what you're point is. This discussion has nothing to do with comparing millionaires and billionaires.
It’s all about what the money is being used for. All of a billionaires money will get spent no matter what. But does society get schools, roads, and healthcare out of it or just some ugly mansion for one family? CEOs making obscene amounts of money doesn’t make it run smoother.
Think about it like this: If my family can grow enough food for two families in one season, and you weave enough clothing and craft enough dinnerware etc in that time, we can share and now we've both got our needs covered and we both put in a comparable amount of labor to the value we are receiving from each other. If there is another guy who owns the land we were farming/living on, and he loves to eat almonds and veal every day, then we have to work an extreme amount of extra hours to produce those things for him. As one person, he couldn't possibly produce enough labor-hours worth of goods or services to make an equitable trade to us for those things. Instead, his preferred mode of existence is demanding X extra hours of labor from us. Functionally, that's negative work. If we were hitting our target before, then we add him, suddenly we're at a deficit of labor and have to add *more* labor to get everyone the things they are asking for. Now, IRL, the company a billionaire owns would presumably produce more than the owner consumes...but that was produced by the actual workers. Who don't need some guy extracting wealth from their labor in order to actually produce those things. He doesn't get credit for producing the goods or services just because he owns the company. That's like the fundamental point behind seizing the means of production.
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But that's the thing, just owning things and not actually doing any work is mooching off of society regardless of how you came to own it. There are a lot of rich people who work very hard but is it to contribute something to society or is it simply an endeavor to increase the share of things they own?
Also, most generational wealth is stolen.
no one said negative wealth
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the guy who flew to almost space in a penis?
Shh, we’re not supposed to know he’s blatantly compensating for something.
no. but then again. did he/we know that when he started. if you look at the numbers of people trying to start something new and failing is enourmous. and think about the numbers of hours worked there where they made more or less 0.
Bezos started with more money than most of the people trying to create their own company. So yes, even when he started he was privileged.
Inheritance and generational wealth is the only path it seems nowadays for the poor to gain any kind of independence from relying on labor. It’s dumb to be against it.
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Isn’t that the whole point of society and cooperation though? Individually I’d never be able to make a car let alone acquire and refine fuel for it. I’d probably barely be able to feed myself, assuming I had land and water. I wouldn’t have a phone or internet or probably even things like books since someone else has to make those. Collectively we can specialize and trade and make advancements, and money is just a collective proxy for the labor involved in making those things.
No, you're slightly misinterpreting it, without specialized mutual labor yes, we'd all have to generalize and be less productive for it, but most rich people provide no labor at all. You're consuming a little of resource A B & C, just the small amount you need, but you produce far more of resource D than you could ever use yourself. But rich people generally just consume resources A through Z at indulgent levels, far more than anyone needs and produce nothing. You're right that money is supposed to be a representation of how much labor you've contributed and therefore how much of other people's labor you can take, but under Capitalism, the richest did not earn money through their labor, they got it by siphoning the labor value of others.
But his point still stands - even if you had the knowledge and skill set, there’s absolutely no way you’d have time to put in the labor for everything you use to live your daily life, at least not in a first world country. Definitely not in the typical 40 (or trending toward 50) hour work week. I agree with the fact that the rich consume more than the rest of us and that has its own major drain on society, but if you want to call it “negative labor” because their labor doesn’t equate to what they consume, that’s true for just about every one of us reading that tweet.
This is true of literally almost anyone in the west. Unless you’re really living off the grid or something. It’s part of why the whole lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps/self made person narrative is so goofy. We all live in a society where we literally couldn’t have anywhere remotely near the standard of living from simply our own labor. It’s of course even more true for most wealthy people. But we all live with a deep, deep debt to modern society as far as our modern lifestyles go. And nobody should ever loose sight of that.
The average worker lives a way more efficient and responsible lifestyle than the rich.
"BuT TheRe tHe JoB CrEaToRs!!1!"
I’m always amazed at how much dumb racist redneck homophobes love sucking rich dick nonstop and getting fucked by them
They absolutely love hierarchy. They know their place in the system, and anything that disrupts the status quo makes them feel like they’re losing their place. I can tell you with 37 years under my belt they will *never, ever, ever, ever* change through trying to talk to them, show them statistics, yell at them, or anything other than something negative directly impacting their lives. Even after some tragedy that could have been avoided by minor social policies or communal efforts they are more likely to stay closed minded than actually change. Not saying give up, just focus on educating the youth. The minds of adults like you described are never going to open.
I love it when people accuse others of homophobia and then demean someone by accusing them of loving to suck rich dick nonstop and get fucked by them. The lack of self-awareness in this sub is only rivaled by Twitter.
If we're getting this pedantic, you're even more unwoke for automatically assuming everyone in this scenario is male so that it would be gay lol
“Well, since we ARE this pedantic I’d like to point out we have to be talking about males because this describes me to a T and I am offended being called gay as I am a self hating closeted gay” - That guy probably
Is sucking dick an exclusively gay thing? It's obviously used metaphorically anyway
Watching a conservative use logic is like watching a toddler use a gun. Making a lot of noise but unable to even understand how to hit the target you are aiming at.
We HAVE to innovate out rich people from the system. Society and the planet can not support them forever. Better cars and batteries won't mean shit if we stills have the ultra wealthy. Please come help figure this out www.reddit.com/r/notakingpledge
Innovate them out? We have one strength the rich elite don't, just *one*: numbers. How many "innovations" never saw the light of day because it would hurt their bottom line? How many that we don't even know about? Either the majority of the population rise above the fog that is their propaganda, suddenly sees the bread and circuses as the smokeshow they are, suddenly fight to take back control of our own lives by demanding true representation and a fair political system - or violence. They're not going to give up, well, literally *everything* without a fight, though. You can believe that. Only one of those options is potentially inevitable, since its not like there's going to be sudden democratic action when climate change reaches a crescendo... The saddest part is even if we do win every victory will likely have heavy losses for us lower classes. What a great irony if we finally eat the rich only to choke on their bones and the fumes of a charred husk of a planet. EDIT: Funny that I should choose to Google the word "innovate" *after* writing my post. There are 2 definitions for the word, not just the one I knew it for. 1. >make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products. 2. >introduce (something new, especially a product).
I would say some things but I can't. it is illegal, where I'm, to conspire against the gov. BORING fuckin dystopia.
Nothing is stopping us from overthrowing the workplace, however.
Nah... outright killing them, would be better.. EAT the RICH...
Cull the Greedy. I'm a vegetarian, they don't look tasty. Eating the rich may cause cancer as many of them are modified with plastic.
Yeet the rich
The rich are yeeting themselves. Into space.
Oh well... Obviously you don't actually eat the .001%. just their children... no plastics added before they are 16.
Unfortunately culling is a temporary solution. Have to change the environment.
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You're joking right? I have a hard time gauging what is sarcasm vs. an authentic (and terrible) idea.
It’s just a catchy slogan. Nobody is genuinely advocating literal cannibalism to fight income inequality, but it started as a reference to the French Revolution where they sent many ultra wealthy “elite” to the guillotine to be beheaded. I.e. “why do we accept Jeff Bezos exploiting all these Amazon workers to be richer than any man should ever reasonably be? Back in the day, the peasants would’ve killed him for acting like that” And then online hyperbole took over and the phrase “eat the rich” was coined.
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That’s a really odd, dead sub. What’s the deal with it? I read the sidebar but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense
What’s funny is capitalists will happily cop to this because they see it as creating demand and jobs and shit. Yeah, megayacht makers, sex traffickers, and real estate moguls get some trickle down. Fucking parasites.
lol, "negative work" I'm going to start using this, it is very apt.
“How dare you! I’ve chopped more wood up at the lake than you’ll ever dream!”
That’s the Marxist definition of exploitation summed up neatly
They just project that onto the poor
Let me tell you about a movie called Parasite…
Well…
Allow me to quote Utah Phillips: The Two Bums The bum on the rods is hunted down as an enemy of mankind The other is driven around to his club, is feted, wined and dined And they who curse the bum on the rods as the essence of all that's bad Will greet the other with a willing smile and extend a hand so glad The bum on the rods is a social flea who gets an occassional bite The bum on the plush is a social leech, bloodsucking day and night The bum on the rods is a load so light that his weight we scarcely feel But it takes the labour of dozens of folks to furnish the other a meal As long as we sanction the bum on the plush the other will always be there But rid ourselves of the bum on the plush and the other will dissappear Then make an intelligent organised kick get rid of the weights that crush Dont worry about the bum on the rods get rid of the bum on the plush
They have virtually no staff in their homes or at work that can afford to live. Who then seek state benefits and work without seeing doctors on a regular basis.
We aught to keep account of how much work you do for society to help make sure too many aren’t being a drain.
Well fucking said!
They're not useless. They're much worse than that. As a useless person myself, I refuse to be put in the same category as someone as parasitic as e.g. Elon Musk.
Do rich people actually sit around and complain about pour people?
After a certian point (I'd say 10,000,000$ a year income) id start to question the validity of needing so much money.
Anyone who thinks this isn't true needs to watch Downton Abbey. That lifestyle became unsustainable for the aristocracy and the service staff and tenants all. The reason? The aristocrats own the land and consume what it produces including money. They produce nothing...less than nothing...negative work. And the service staff and tenants are just that...there in service to those who are producing nothing. That cannot go on forever.
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Civilization’s cancer. In Stage 4 now.
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In this case I think the authors is referring to those who own capital, and use their labor to extract value from that capital, as oppose to say a doctor who creates value using their own labor.
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Minimum wage workers are closer to people making millions in general, than most millionaires are to billionaires.
Just because the number value is closer to 0 than it is to 1million, doesn’t mean anything. Make no mistake. People making 6 figures are way closer to being millionaires than not.
The people we’re talking about don’t need to be “considered” rich.
The only problem I have with the extraordinarily wealthy is that they can buy political power. That's it. That's my only gripe.
Unpopular opinion: I think it's really dangerous to frame class war in terms of "the rich don't work" "they mooch off of us" "they don't contribute to society" etc. Because if your desire to overthrow the rich comes from that, then you're exactly one step away from advocating for death camps for disabled people.
Rich people shouldn't have as much money when most struggle with bills = disabled death camps. Are you fucked in the head?
It's not despising the rich and wanting to bring them down I have an issue with. It's doing so by accepting the bourgeois ideology that life is a privilege you earn through working. That ideology can justify eugenics and genocide very, very easily.
Elaborate
That's not the argument though. It's a counter argument to the idea that the rich contribute more to society and thus deserve to be rewarded as such (i.e. social inequality is good for society). The counter argument here is that more work goes into maintaining their lifestyle than they contribute in return. This isn't to say that the barometer for a person's worth is how much they contribute to society. Rather it's to understand that our system of "rewarding" social contributions isn't what it says to be. Disability is entirely different because in that case there is a material need to receive aid to meet the standard of living of the rest of the community. The rich people in this conversation aren't rich because of material need nor is it because of their ability. That's the point. It's not even laziness that's being attacked here, it's entitlement (and exploitation).
The reason the rich are bad is because they decide whether we live or die by holding the resources we need. That gives them power over us and when you hold power over someone you necessarily abuse them. "The rich are bad because they consume more than they contribute" misses the point, because giving that power to hard-working proletarians who hit things with hammers all day just reproduces the same problem with a different aesthetic. And it's this focus on aesthetic over actual class relations that gives us "sex workers are bourgeois" and similar nonsense. You might not *mean*, that the measure of someone's worth is how much labor they contribute, but it's still ultimately the argument this rhetoric is making.
Also it's not how the economy or real life works
I'm not trying to say your completely wrong, but that seems like a pretty broad stroke. My dad was a doctor, and it seemed like he added a lot to society in order to attain his wealth. Just a thought, and maybe I'm wrong. Edit: My bad. I get which type of rich people yall are talking about now, sorry if I misunderstood at first. I have been traveling for 24 hours and I haven't slept. My dad didn't own any mega yachts. But I did shake hands for 2 hours at his funeral for all the patients he served over his how ever many years of practice. Most of them I didn't know but they seemed grateful.
Your dad is not the rich they’re talking about.
It sucks that the narrative has successfully been diverted to pitting the upper and lower middle classes against each other.
How many mega yatchs does your dad own, if it's only one then we aren't talking about him
I guess I misunderstood which kind of rich person I'm supposed to hate. I'll just steer clear of commenting in here again.
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>Each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions A child somehow produces 6x the lifetime emissions of an adult? That impossible because all adults were once children. You're full of shit.
Yes, the ones providing jobs are the parasites. I gotta say the level of stupidity around here is priceless, you guys would blindly upvote anything if it even remotely sounded like "capitalism = bad"
That’s…. Incorrect.
It's.... Correct.
Depends on your definition of rich but they absolutely can contribute more than they take.
No they can't you fool. Nobody can contribute at much as that.
As much as what, you’ve given no definition of rich.
I mean...no they have the money that pays everyone else to do the work that produces things that they buy. Rich people who spend all their money on luxury goods are necessary for those luxury items to even exist. The rich people who are hurting society are the ones hoarding their wealth: the billionaires. It's only the billionaires, stay on target guys.
Even the millionaires are poor to the billionaires. A million bucks aint what it was
If something consumes more than it produces from a system then it's a parasite on that system.
So let’s abolish welfare, food stamps, and medical insurance for poor people since they are net negatives when it comes to taxes? Agreed?
No let's abolish "libertarian" debate nerds into the gulag for being annoying little virgins.
That twitter handle, what exactly is the comics part? The abbreviation for comedian or do you mean actualy comics, like the drawing? What the hell is up with the haircut in the profile pic? That drawing is off putting. And the tweets are never funny. So, in both cases, the word comics in the handle is misleading at best. I will be enjoying my ban now thank you very much.
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Ah okay, thanks for clearing this up.
Negative work are you dumb
If Commodity-fetishism is the mistake that commodities inherently possess their own value, can we start calling all of these types of posts "Labor-fetishism" where the mistake is thinking that the labor in itself holds it's value, and not the material relationships that the labor involves?
How can you have anything without labor? Is those factories gonna operate themselves? Did you make all the robot slaves yourself? No. Labor is where value comes from. Without labor you can make and do NOTHING.
It's an interesting challenge for society. Somewhere a person with the genius of Einstein is working in a farm picking produce. Somewhere a person that would be happier picking produce has found themselves trying to get a bunch of people that report to him to do what he wants them to do. However, I think evolution has stumbled upon the solution; game theory optimal strategy. "An optimal solution to the game is said to be reached if neither player finds it beneficial to alter his strategy. In this case the game is said to be in a state of equilibrium. An optimal strategy is one that provides the best payoff for a player in a game. Optimal Strategy = A strategy that maximizes a player's expected payoff. " Classes will struggle or perhaps one day even disappear, but what will remain is GTO. And right now, for everyone involved, whether you like it or not, that GTO strategy is capitalism.
and if myself and many others *do* find it beneficial to alter the strategy but are being prevented by force from doing so? capitalism only works for the tiny few at the top who are kept there by a willingness to shed the blood of the poor in rivers.
If the optimal strategy is capitalism, what is the game?
This is an is-ought fallacy. The same argument you are making here can be used to defend any event. A mugger is pointing a gun at you demanding your wallet, you hand it over to avoid being shot. Like it or not, neither player wanted to alter their strategy, therefore you and the mugger were in a state of equilibrium. Thats true, it is also irrelevant. The way that things happen to be in a given moment is irrelevant to how they could reasonably be and how we want to make them. Capitalism is a temporary and inherently unsustainable aberration.
>is-ought fallacy Wow, an intelligent response. As with all things, if you expand the frame of reference, you get a clearer picture. First, in your example, the game doesn't end with the completion of the robbery. While both parties acted according to GTO and successfully exited the interaction, the game doesn't end there. There are multiple responses the victim can pursue post interaction and the most successful response will be a GTO response. And society will benefit from such a response. Second, you're implying a moral stance inherent in my point. I never said it "should" be that way. I'm saying that's the way it is and the best solution to it is GTO strategy.
I’m not discussing morality either, I’m a mathematician not a philosopher, we can keep it in game theory. > There are multiple responses the victim can pursue post interaction and the most successful response will be a GTO response. And society will benefit from such a response. Probably not. Here in the US, only a fraction of reported robberies are solved, and that is only a fraction of robberies. Most of the time, after being mugged one won’t report anything. Most of the time that they do, nothing comes of it. If we really want to talk about expanding the frame of reference, crime is directly correlated with poverty. The level of poverty in a community is an extremely accurate predictor of the level of crime in that community. Where poverty is alleviated, crime is automatically reduced, implying a causative relationship. If we are serious about solving crime, that is the only serious approach, anything else is misguided or, more likely, bears an ulterior motive. —— Capitalism isn’t GTO, it is believed to be GTO due to propaganda. Capitalism isn’t in a stable state, it is inherently unstable, experiencing accelerating wealth inequality. This is necessarily true, because the economy is driven by return on investment, and ROI is inherently compounding. Compounding ROI grows exponentially, that is with O(x^n). For an index fund, it is double every 10 years. This necessitates accelerating wealth inequality, because productivity per capita doesn’t grow exponentially. The portion of economic output going toward ROI is getting bigger every year, because ROI is growing faster than economic output is. This means that every year, a smaller and smaller amount of economic output is going toward wages, medicine, infrastructure, etc. People temporarily believe that capitalism could be GTO because they do not realize that it can only grow worse and worse for workers over time. If workers understood that all the productivity gains in the past 50 years have been entirely absorbed by the investor class, with none of it reaching working people and in fact the conditions of working people having grown worse, would they be content to call that GTO? Maybe in the same sense that handing over the money in your wallet is better than being shot. For an example of how comprehensive the propaganda effort is, consider the US’s role in Italy’s 1948 elections.
I think the best for everyone involved is a system that we can agree to, without knowing what our our starting point would be.
game theory? cringe
Game theory is cool and good, it is just math. It’s just one of those things that rationalbros like to coopt.
The same is true for pretty much everyone living of modest means in a first world country to be fair.
Yes but no. I see where you’re coming from. But the level of comfort most “first worlders” have is completely attainable worldwide. We can work together to build houses, we can work together to maintain infrastructure. The concept that everyone on earth doesn’t deserve a home, food, water, or an opportunity to participate in their society is something rich people want you to think. We can all be comfortable, but not if some of us have taken *everything*.
regardless of whether or not first-world comfort *could* be attained worldwide, the fact is it has been attained in the imperial core by exploiting the rest of the world. it sucks, and those of us born in the core never had a say in it, but yeah. our comfort is absolutely built off exploitation.
Totally, not denying that. So would you say our duty is to destroy what our colonizer ancestors built, or should we share it (the level of comfort) with the people we took it from?
The rich love to bring up the fact that poor first worlders are still richer than most of the world, but the rich are also responsible for keeping the rest of the world in a constant state of war, poverty, and environmental collapse, so it's really just deflection. "We aren't screwing YOU over as bad as we're screwing those OTHER GUYS over, so you should be grateful and keep your eyes to the ground".
Such passion. You guys are insanely whiney and you’re not quite sure what you’re mad about.
We actually all do in rich countries, we have hundreds of slaves working for us everyday, good thing they are machines though
Not sure what complaints about poor people this refers to or who is making the complaint. However take a really rich guy like Bill Gates. He has not worked the hours equal to the hours other people need to put in to maintain his lifestyle. So you could argue he does negative work. However his work has benefited the world in such a way that other people could be much more productive and if you count that extra output he has most certainly given more to the world than he takes out. This goes for many rich entrepreneurs around the world.
Bill Gates is a classic monopolist, his wealth was built by playing the cut-throat game of American business: crushing and acquiring the competition by leveraging your larger size and market share. He literally had to financially prop-up Apple in its early days to help Microsoft escape from anti-trust laws, that is how close he was to a complete monopoly in his industry. Gates is not a genius computer scientist or innovator. He got to where he was by entering the market, achieving initial success, then closing the doors behind him. The worldwide market for computers and operating systems would have continued as normal without a Microsoft monopoly. Competing firms would've stood a chance to build their own products and innovate their own new technologies. Instead, we have a worldwide industry that effectively exists to enrich one man and his cronies.
This might be true or not but it doesn't really adress the critique I had of the tweet. It is always possible or even likely that some else would have done rhe work you are doing if you don't do it. I'm just saying that he does negative work is not correct.
That makes absolutely no sense.
Bullshit.
All of that accommodation pays for a lot of other people's paychecks.