Do you get money by working (most people) or do you get money by making other people who work give you theirs (e.g. landlord, CEO, banker (not teller), politician)?
I've had a job all my life but with the proceeds from that job I've bought a house I rent to a local association, and I also have a retirement plan (as pretty much everyone else), so I'm a shareholder in almost all the biggest megacorps through the indexes my retirement account buys.
This is the problem with trying to fit a political doctrine written more than 100 years ago by an academic who spent most of his time in libraries into modern life.
There is a reason 'it was a good idea so I wrote it all down, thought of everything, and then forced everyone to do it' has never worked.
You don't need to follow everything to a T to grasp the fact that 99.99% of us exist to feed the capitalists, the ruling class, to keep them satisfied.
Do you mind pointing out where that was stated or implied?
Anything and everything I do is to satisfy my own curiosity and desires, but that's only because I got lucky. Everyone who didn't get lucky, well, they have to slave away in jobs that may not be fulfilling, or are menial, etc; and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
I have never claimed nor implied that their lives are meaningless (point where). On the contrary, because everyone's life is meaningful and important, they shouldn't have to slave away or do scutwork just to survive. This is what I am advocating for.
I want people to live, to be free, to enjoy the same things I am. This is literally the opposite of paternalistic.
I am also not a tankie if that's what you concluded from my first remark.
I'm honestly curious why you wrote this and if you can explain what it means, because to me it means 'people who labor for others are wasting their lives as slaves and we need to remedy this'. What have I misread?
The desire to survive is a fundamental instinct of all animals, and thus you'd do almost anything to survive. Effectively we are slaves of our own biology and wiring. Thus, due to resource allocation, most of us have to or had to work in order just to survive.
Our utility and thus QoL is measured in how the surrounding system values us. In a capitalist society that is visible through our salaries and our income as provided by other parties. In a marxist-leninist-like society, your value depends on your connections and how much you get done for the rest of the ruling party.
Thus, because we need to survive, we are forced into working for the system in any of the different ways it materializes.
When we are no longer useful to the system as productive members, we are forced into becoming useful for it.
Rooflessness is very much a solvable problem, but the roofless' purpose within the system to exist as examples for avoidance. "Stay in life or you will end up like them". "Be productive", "work hard in this rat race", "keep grinding", or you will end up like them.
When we are old and no longer productive, we are sent to hospice care, which costs a lot of money, it involves very expensive healthcare, and thus any money we have accumulated go to our care and back to the system, recycled to be used by consumers, and recycled all over again. Our kin and their love for us gets exploited, we become money sinks.
What for? We spend 40 years working to do what, live hopefully 20 years later, old frail and weak? To become a money pit? So that our loved ones and their love for us gets exploited?
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I am laboring for others, but that doesn't mean I see myself as a slave. I am very lucky. I get paid a relatively excellent salary, and I get to work a nice and interesting job that satisfies my curiosity.
But very few people are as lucky as I am. Most people are not living and thriving, they are surviving, and I don't want that.
It's not the fact that they labor, it's the fact that they need to do that in the first place.
In the end, the only way to allow people to "thrive" and not "survive" is by reallocating capital from those that are already "surviving", right?
So the solution is to steal from those that have. How is working for capitalists different than working for those that don't want to work? In the former, everyone has a shot at winning. In the latter, nobody does.
You could already be a bad person, but for now, you're being taken advantage of about as much as you're taking advantage of others.
I think squatting land to make people rent from you to be able to live is already pretty bad, so you could easily already be a bad person, but the concepts of individual ownership over public goods is the really problem,
Are you really suggesting that land is a public good? If it was, how would anyone ever develop it? How could I keep anyone away from my family at night?
