If you think about the brutality of nature, which we are mostly isolated from, then yeah, organisms in general do have to earn their right to life through overcoming and eating other organisms.
Which was the point of civilization. To isolate us from that hell.
Even in a civilization someone has to produce food so you’ll survive. Civilization doesn’t mean no one has to work.
If you do no work but because of civilization you still have food to eat, it means someone else is working to earn your living for you.
This bizarre meme implies work has no value, and was likely made by a wealthy university socialist that had everything paid for by their parents so doesn’t understand the value of work.
This meme does not state no one needs to work. It states you don’t need to earn your place among the living. You’ve already done so by virtue of being born. I think that is a noble goal for a society to uphold. Higher ideals are, of course, what separates us from the realm of animal urges. Once you begin to mix laws of the jungle back into society the point of our isolation from it is subverted. If we truly are the greatest Earth has to offer, surely we can figure so.
You can’t eat higher ideals.
Even Marie Antoinette wasn’t so disconnected from the peasants to say “let them eat higher ideals.”
Someone has to work so you can survive. If you don’t want to work, society will take care of you. You’ll still be living, but you aren’t earning it, someone else is earning it for you.
Once again, this is not saying society will take care of you and everyone will just sit on their bussies and no one will ever lift a finger. This is repealing the idea that you have to earn your stake to be considered human and alive in a world that has abstracted everything away to just getting funny paper. People will still farm and cultivate crops. There are people who want to do that now. Are you vehemently opposed to people just feeling and being accepted from birth? I for one think a society built on more welcoming foundations would see less crime and more work.
Sure there are people that want to farm. But are there people that want to want to deal with sewage? Why do you think plumbers earn more money than other trades?
I want to run a cafe instead of what I’m doing right now. I don’t want to be a waiter of wash dishes or anything like that. I just want to design the menus and decide on how it’s decorated. Is that the job I’ll have in a socialist utopia, or will I have to do a job I don’t want to do? What if there’s already too many cafes, or not enough people that want to be waiters or was dishes? I won’t have to do anything but I’ll still be provided for?
In the end there will always be people doing jobs they don’t particularly want to do. Someone’s gotta unclog the sewage when the elite of the socialist society plug the pipes with the overabundance of shit they spew out.
How about capitalism? How many MBAs does the world need? Marketing consultants? Advertising cosultants? IT consultants? Consultant consultants? There are countless jobs that serve the machine and no other purpose that benefits society. Somebody will do the necessary jobs. There are more incentives than you realize. For instance, what if I want more than my UBI pays me? Plumbing has entered the chat. The only reason you defend this system so hard as the epitome is because nobody has experienced anything else but this. Its scary I know, but there are more ways than one to exist, and every system has its trade-offs. But our social contract between our governments in clearly broken, we are clearly strung along on the whims of shareholders and capital. Say what you will, but I think we can do better than “those people deserve to starve son, they have no jobs.”
Who here is saying “No one should work” no one except maybe the most high on their own farts anarchist is saying that. The end goal of marxism is “From each According to their abilities to each according to their needs” their will be work, The farm will be ploughed. THe difrence is all will be provided for.
And if I were to decide that I didn’t want to work according to my ability, I would still be provided for?
In no capitalist society that I know of will you be executed for not working - you have a right to life
What you don’t have the right to is someone else to provide for you if you don’t give anything back
That said I’m fairly sure with the amount of automation we have everyone should need to put in a whole lot less work than they do to keep society afloat
What are you saying? That you wouldn’t give anything back if not for the threat of homelessness and starvation? I don’t need a threat to make the world a better place.
I’m sure I’d give something back but I’m also sure most of it wouldn’t be of much use to anyone else, I’d be working on stuff like mods, niche tools for myself that probably 3 people on earth would find useful, and stupid ideas for fun like some streamers get to
Listen, I don’t think it’d be as disasterous for anyone with a passion. The people who would be fucked and have to adjust are the ones whose only goal is get money. Imo thats not a healthy way to be a human as it usually has a price tag of everyone else. Theres constant suffering every day and most of it is in the name of profits. Shit, my boss acts like it’d murder him to get me 10k more a year so I am not below the american median when in reality the company wouldn’t even count that as pocket change, I see the revenue and expenses every day. The sociopaths control and benefit from this system and you defend it. Its like a strange stockholm syndrome.
What you don’t have the right to is someone else to provide for you if you don’t give anything back
Yes you do. Lots of people are on disability benefits, unemployment, a pension, or are literal children. And those programs should be expanded to cover everyone who doesn’t work, not just those who can justify their existence to a government form.
In the case of someone who can’t work for one reason or another there’s obviously an exception because that’s not something they can help
Children do contribute to society by getting an education and having a childhood to develop into well adjusted adults who contribute later on,
Unemployment benefits presumably are for people actively searching for a job
The elderly have already contributed more than their fair share raising their children
Using the phrasing people who don’t work implies including people who are able but just don’t want to
There’s nobody like that. You’re talking about imaginary people. All human beings have a natural drive to do useful work.
“Damn, this argument I made up for OP really sucks! What’s even worse is the fanfiction I made up for them, woah Nelly!”
Less than two steps between that and eugenics, and one step between eugenics and genocide. We’ve seen and documented that. It’s a logical but sociopathic mentality.
Conversely, when we realise that we’re stronger together and act empathetically as a society, every one of us and all of society benefits. When we care for the least of us, crime goes down and we find geniuses who improve life for us all, who would otherwise die in anonymous poverty.
Living like barbarous animals – not rising above the ‘brutality of nature’, as you said – helps sociopaths who take advantage of our better nature to enrich themselves. Indeed, if we structure our society around that, as we have done lately, our society will devolve around the lowest common denominator (people like Musk or Trump).
We can and must do better than that.
Your comment would have hit much harder as a rejection of cruelty and advocacy for kindness if you haven’t thrown sociopaths under the bus. Most sociopaths are poor people, and they’re all disabled.
We’re always told the people at the bottom rung of society, the people doing “entry level” jobs just need to work harder and harder to earn a proper living…
But how does that work really? Unlike a lot of high level jobs, none of these jobs just exist for the sake of existing, most of these “entry level” jobs are essential to society (we saw that much during the pandemic).
Somebody has to do them or society just doesn’t work, so don’t the people doing these literally essential jobs deserve to be paid a fair living wage? They’re working just as hard as the people above them, yet they’re paid peanuts in comparison
They’re working just as hard as the people above them
Woah woah woah, let’s not get out of hand here. We all know they’re working way harder than the people above them.
only one way… come on lets not do flattery to the capitalist class here
I said this on Reddit and they agreed that you don’t deserve to be alive if you’re not working, it’s really a disease of the mind to believe this shit.
I mean it does make sense if you keep in mind that we traded having to hunt and forage for a system that let’s you buy these things indirectly with currency.
You just need to leave out the whole thing of empathy and morality and reduce the whole system to a exchange of goods and services for money.
There is a difference between believing everyone owes a debt to the society and civilization you participate in to support those who cannot support themselves, and not deserving to live if you didn’t fit into the rigid hierarchy structures we’ve built for work. But often these sentiments get mixed together.
I don’t think they do. In our society we don’t really let people die just because they don’t fit in. When there’s someone who can’t take care of their self, we take care of them.
Where are you talking about and comparing to what? Cause I see a lot of people dying in the streets because of mental illness or drug addiction when I take the subway to work. We don’t throw them away like ancient Sparta but we definitely don’t come close to providing the services they need to the things they need to begin to get off the street. Cause the solution now is put the homeless in prison and that’s going just fine right? …Right?
I’m talking about basically the entire human civilization, as opposed to a civilization in which people are just permitted to die.
But most of my experience is with the united states. We take care of people left and right, and don’t let them die.
Do you know of a place that isn’t like this? If so, where?
It’s more like you haven’t earned the right for other people to do the work of keeping you alive.
Human life requires work to sustain. Someone has to do that work. The most fair system is one in which that responsibility falls on the person benefitting from it.
ie, to be alive, you must contribute work. Because your life requires work to maintain.
I’m so torn on this meme because on the one hand I have the same gut reaction of “yeah, but youll die if you don’t do jack shit in the woods, you kind of have to be useful to live”.
But then I think about our society … the billions of dollars going to rich people who do nothing, the millions of people who work in jobs that are useless, or the millions who work jobs that actively harm society, and in that context, the amount and type of work does seem like bullshit. It’s not like going into your marketing firm 5/7 days of your life means a farmer gets to work less. People like to comfort themselves with vain thoughts like ‘we all just gotta do our partfor the system to work’, but that’s objectively not true. Lots of parts of our system are objectively bullshit and are excised completely through new laws and legislation and society keeps working fine, in some cases much better.
“Earning a living” doesn’t state that people should die if the choose to be a grifter or a thief or some other dishonest person that takes from others and doesn’t contribute to society. It just means those people didn’t earn their living.
In a functional society everyone should contribute to better the society. “Earning a living” is a statement of pride in contributing to society value equal to or greater than the value you get from it. If someone is making a living through dishonest means so isn’t earning a living, it can be something they should be ashamed of
Note that socialist societies have similar expressions like “from each according to their ability to each according to their need”. The intent is the same, encourage people to contribute to society. What if I don’t contribute according to my ability and just want to take what I need? Does that statement imply I’ll be sent to a gulag if I don’t contribute according to my ability? OMG socialism says I don’t deserve to live!!!
This meme is mainly talking about workers who are worked to death to “earn a living”. Capitalists who leech off of workers do not deserve to be alive.
Of course, that’s not the case for those who are physically unable to work to the same extent as others. Basically, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
We have more than enough resources for everyone, so long as the working class can control the means of production instead of the capitalists who try to hoard all the wealth.
I’m pro unconditional basic income, but I would argue that it’s more about you having to make sure you have everything you need yourself. No one would say to someone who lives completely self-sufficient that he needs “to earn a living”.
I mean if you think about it, the default of humanity is to die of thirst assuming we were to do nothing so ‘earning a living’ is just a realistic expectation for any society.
If able, you should provide enough to society to make it worth meeting your basic needs. They give you food, water, shelter, you give them back enough to compensate them for that effort.
At its root, this is what cash should be, a measure of what society owes you. You make other people’s lives X much better, and they do the same for you.
We should really be trying harder to get cash to meet this goal. A person making 60k a year for 45 years is $2.7 million dollars. You can buy a person’s lifetime of effort for $2.7 million.
Bill Gates is worth $131 billion. That’s the lifetime effort of 48,500 people. He hasn’t improved our lives that much. Something is clearly out of sorts. There’s nothing one person can do to deserve the lifetime effort of a thousand people.
Being evil pays really well. Sometimes.
How much time has personal computing saved in your life? Are you really sure Gates hasn’t produced 48k lifetimes worth of saved time by his efforts?
It doesn’t matter. One person can’t put forth 48k lifetimes worth of effort, and they don’t deserve that much in return.
I promise the dude hasn’t worked harder than the combined efforts of 48 thousand people.
We can reward talent, and we can reward effort. But no combination of those two is as ridiculous as our reward structure. Our reward structure is flawed because people with money make the rules, and their primary rule is that people with money should have more money.
What you are saying is true, but there is not a better option for how the economy works that doesnt end really bad. I dont like bill gates, but the idea that he cant have what he has doesnt end well.
It turns out we can have the tax rates of the 1950s and 1960s without the segregation.
The federal tax receipts/gdp were pretty much the same as they are right now in the 50s and 60s. Just because the tax rate was high doesnt mean people pay that much.
Yeah, what a shame it was that people had to invest in the longevity and reputation of their business in order to keep paying them out over a hundred years.
Everyone died before computers, it’s a fact.
To answer this question seriously, Bill Gates has held back computing by stealing other people’s work and ideas and using Embrace Extend and Extinguish.
If Bill Gates had no existed, arguably open source computing and hardware would be even more advanced than what we have now. Windows has been a net detriment to society.
If you follow that reasoning, the ultimate conclusion is that it’s perfectly fine to let sick or disabled people die.
Actually, “earning a living” is an example of an idiom, and it is not meant to be interpreted literally. It just means aquiring the income necessary to pay for the basic expenses of modern life. You may also notice that people rarely find themselves inside of pickles or with butterflies in their stomachs, but before you get angry that someone is suggesting you should break your leg, remember that figurative speech is fairly common.
Yeah whatever. You still don’t get to justify sitting on your ass and doing literally nothing unless crippled or ancient.
Yeah! Dumb babies expecting a handout! Fuck em, they need to earn their keep, let’s leave them on a mountain and see if they come back with ore to sell for breast milk.
That is 100% true in a capitalist society. You are measured by your ability to produce.
Edit: Apparently this needs some clarification. You are measured by your ability to produce for your owner.
It’s also true in the woods, if you don’t do anything useful you’ll just die.
Not true. If I have a group of people and they believe I’m extremely wealthy I don’t have to do anything but promise to share my wealth with them according to how much I value them, making them compete with each other for my affection. This counts as work and it takes skill but I wouldn’t say that doing this is useful.
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… or by your ability to steal from others and getting away with it.
This is wishful thinking. People are not paid according to their productivity, although it is a minor factor. People are paid accordingly for a variety of factors including region, negotiating ability, charisma, job demand (the more a job is objectively helpful the less it is paid because people are willing to do it for its own merits), and network if they are commoners. If they are born into the ruling class or have amassed enough wealth to live through arbitrage, there is no requirement to produce anything other than the idea that you are productive.
The owner doesn’t pay proportionally to their worker’s ability to produce, they pay according to how little they can get away with since in order to profit it is necessary to minimize expenses. If two employees are important but the less productive employee refuses to work for less than a certain amount and the more productive employee is satisfied with what they’re being paid, the less productive employee will be paid more.
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To each one according to their needs, from each one according to their capabilities.
People would still need to work, we are not abolishing the concept of work, what we want is a distribution of the value produced by the workers for the workers, so, for example, a disabled person wouldn’t have the same working hours of an able-bodied one, or a person that has to provide for a family of 4 wouldn’t earn the same as a person that lives by themselves.
Oh? Why the family ain’t workin then, eh? Are we now singling out lonely people, eh? Isn’t that lonely guy giving the same from himself as the family guy, ehhh?
Eh, that’s why capitalism is better, you earn what your work is worth and fuck your excuses. Pull yerself by yer bootstraps and stop complainin’. Now excuse me, need to go motivate the leech granny to stop living off rent and git back to job.
what about the owning class who does no work yet profits by taking the fruits of your labor by nothing more than saying they own it. Or the land lord who does the same. Capitalism in no way provides you what you earn, the banker did not do more work than the janitor, the Stock broker did not provide society more value than the fry cook.
Thank you Mr. Skeletor. It is important to get the occasional outside perspective on living from an undead evil villain. Nyeh.
You need to consume to live. This means you need to manipulate your surroundings in order to survive. So you need to work to have your basic needs meet. You don’t just get to live with zero effort.
This is the natural order, yet paraplegics live, why? Because we live in a society that attempts to circumvent the natural order in many ways, for the good of all.
You should take a broader materialistic look on society, who does the work (the working class), who benefits from the work (the owner class), and instead of focusing on amping up people to devote their lives to serve the interests of capital, instead focus to reframe the goals of society to serve the interests of workers, which includes working less, or even not at all. Work is not labor.
That’s an entirely different argument. I agree with you on that topic. Reframing capitalism to fit human well being is what we should do. But feeding everyone for free with zero work from anyone just isn’t possible. Saying there are starving people because capitalism is just straight up wrong. There have always been starving people and probably will always be. Feeding everyone is logistically crazy difficult. If it ever did happen it would take a ridiculous amount of work and money from a lot of people.
Socialists use work and labor to describe different things. Work is the set of actions a worker is coerced to participate in by capitalists to align with the interests of capital. Labor can be something you engage in as part of work, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes people have jobs that are so inefficient or bullshit that they literally don’t labor at all at work (read Bullshit Jobs).
Labor is necessary (currently), work is not. Aligning with the interests of capital is not synonymous with the interests of humanity (think ad work, literally encouraging greater consumption, especially around harmful products like tobacco/alcohol/sugar. Most western countries now have bans on tobacco advertising, but still let advertising in general flourish).
On the topic of feeding everyone, it would be very logistically difficult in the 1600s no doubt. Now we have a massive international trade system, I can easily get massive amounts of goods shipped from the other side of the world in weeks or maybe months at the worst. We also produce enough food currently to feed 12 billion people, and that’s with our incredibly inefficient system of converting edible plant matter (mostly soy) to animals.
The issue is, under capitalism, poor people don’t deserve to eat. If they lack money, they’re better off dead than alive and consuming resources without paying for them, so that’s what the global international capitalist system does, it moves more than enough food great enough distances to feed everyone as it is. It just moves it to the rich countries where obesity has been a massive issue instead of the global south, because people in rich countries have the money to pay for food, and so they deserve to live (and overeat/waste food) but people born in Africa deserve death.
Capitalists often lose sight of what an economy is for. An economy isn’t something of value in and of itself, it’s about setting up incentives and systems to benefit humanity. Capitalism fails to do this in everyway that is uniquely capitalist. Anything it does right is attributed to the general functioning of markets, which existed before capitalism and can exist after capitalism (market socialism is a real thing). There are problems with markets no doubt, but capitalism really has no redeeming qualities when compared to market socialism. If you compare it to feudalism, it does do better at mobilizing productive forces, of course at the massive detriment to workers.
Thank you brave friend. I came here to say this.
I’m so fatigued by the sentiment behind this meme and so many others.
Ergh… there’s something intruding on my video game playing… what an inconvenience… boo hoo…
You’re infantilising disabled people.
Compassion is a part of human nature.
I think that people who need to be cared for should be cared for.
I think that’s a different issue than the one presented in the meme.
Is there a point of disability at which you no longer believe someone should be cared for? Like, say someone is colourblind and has no other conditions, do you think that person needs to earn their life?
So… let’s keep this in the context of the general population.
There seems to be a subset of perfectly well adjusted able bodied healthy adults that complain about anything that distracts them from video games.
I think that’s a problem.
How about you?
No, those are imaginary people you made up to complain about. And if you act on the existence of those fake people, you’ll harm actual people.
Why am I getting the feeling that the only people you acknowledge as actual are disabled?
You should. We’re not cave people, it’s the 21st century. We can provide for everyone easily.
We can provide shitty cheap unhealthy food to everyone sure. It wouldn’t be easy but yeah we could probably do that. But we absolutely would not be able to give people the kind of food they actually need.
Yes we would. And if we can’t, the cheap food should be free.
It should be sure. But that’s not our reality. Even if you take away monetary value things still hold more practical value. Try collecting and making food for 20 people. Go outside and find all that or grow it or whatever you have to do to get it tell me how long it’s you and how difficult it was to do. Now multiply that effort to 8 billion people.
I will play along with your experiment if you give me control of the government. That seems only fair, since we’re talking about the government providing for everyone.
We could be living in a post-scarcity society, but our capitalist overlords can’t profit from that, so, here we are.
I would love to live in a society where robots over produce everything. Unfortunately that isn’t our reality.
We live in interesting times. Every year it gets more interesting.
You didn’t read the article, did you? We already live in a post scarcity society. All of our scarcity, at least the kinds that are meaningful to the working class, is manufactured. We throw away perfectly good food in the dumpsters behind grocery stores because nobody paid for it, while people on the streets starve. Properties sit empty as an investment for corporations while people die out in the elements.
I really don’t think you understand how many people are in this world. Sure grocery stores donating food instead of throwing it away would help some. But providing good quality food to 8 billion people is not possible. Imo.
Youths of today discovering idioms of yesteryear going, “mm technically, this implies…” as if that wasn’t the obvious, intended implication to begin with.
“Your system is functioning as intended - no maintenance necessary.”
And yet we get born. Motherfuckers!
When you become a billionaire you should be forced to earn a living. Prove to the world why we shouldn’t eat you this year
In any good society everyone who is able should be expected to contribute something though. Even in the wild you have the right to be alive but you don’t have the right to free food, shelter etc without working for it
Similarly under capitalism you’re not going to be executed for not working but also unless there’s a good reason you can’t contribute nobody’s going to work to feed you for nothing in return
The wild and capitalism both suck. Let’s have communism instead.
You do have a right to be alive, if you can gather the food to put in your mouth and get shelter (in most climates), and defend yourself from predators.
‘Earning a living’ is just some way people can do that. But you still need to defend against the predators.
Gee, I thought our standards of living had raised since the hunter gatherer days. I thought we had an idea of human rights. But it seems that advocates of capital like yourself are more willing to let the disabled die than most hunter gatherer tribespeople would be. All our wealth, and you people are more miserly with it than those who have nearly nothing.
Our standards of living have increased, and that’s nice. But there is no question of whether or not anyone deserves to live. You simply live, until you don’t, like all life.
The increase in standards of living isn’t because we have eradicated the underlying animal needs, but rather, because we have been meeting them effectively. Sadly, this is only in the short term - we have major species-wide issues with our long-term course, but that, perhaps, is another conversation.
In any case, by denying the fundamental system you are based in, and demanding that survival not take any energy, you undercut your own foundation, and that causes problems for you.
Human rights are a social contract. They are nice, and we should keep them. However, they don’t eradicate the animal and natural foundation upon which we stand, and they absolutely must bend to necessity.
You have an animal right to exist until you die by natural processes, like disease, old age, predation, etc. You have a human right not to be tortured, enslaved, etc, because that is a goal we all agree on. But you don’t have a right to have other animals take care of all of your needs when they don’t want to. That would be slavery.
