Do you think the capitalistic system is going to just pay people fairly out of the goodness of the hearts of the ruling class?
How can people be paid the value of their labor while still generating profit? Profit is, by definition, the extraction of surplus labor value. Under capitalism, inherently and definitionally, no member of the working class is ever paid fairly.
No, never even implied that. But in any system we need something that can be exchanged for labor in carrying quantities so we can give more to the people who do the shittiest jobs. Whatever system you come up with, it’s not going to work without money.
If a medium of exchange for labor is indeed necessary, I’d say it should be measured in labor hours. We live finite lives, measured in minutes. A minute of your life is worth as much as a minute of mine, wouldn’t you say?
I would have no inherent problem with a system that tokenizes labor hours in some way. The problem is private ownership of the means of production and profit itself.
That’s been one of the goals of just about every socio-economic system, but since are not yet at the point where we can completely automate away all undesirable jobs, it all circles back to being shit.
I believe that there’s a way we can fairly share out all the shitty work among everyone, rather than a few at the top who do no work and exploit everyone, and a lot of people at the bottom who do all of the dirty work.
We don’t need to automate everything, we just need a fair system to distribute the work evenly. We have the technology. We can do it. The reason we haven’t is because those in power benefit too much from the current system.
I don’t think I can see a way to actually accomplish that without still ending up with negative outcomes.
Take for example a surgeon, one who is a specialist who’s time is 100% occupied saving people. Does he get taken away from that to do his time as a garbage collector? Do you tell the patient “sorry, you are going to die. You could have been saved, but we needed your surgeon to go pick up garbage.”, or do you have an exemption list?
And if there’s an exemption list, you will never convince me that people wouldn’t start abusing who is and isn’t on that list. You arrive right back to having a class society.
Why would you cancel a surgery to do trash collection? Why not just make it so everyone has one day a week dedicated to chores, for example? We all do our chores at home, right? Why not for the benefit of our communities? The surgery can be scheduled for a day a surgeon is available. I’m sure there would be many surgeons in a world without student debt, enough for them each to spare a few hours mucking in just like everyone else, right?
I’m sure someone has the ability of figuring out some kind of schedule to ensure adequate emergency medical coverage despite medical personnel having other obligations. I know we can do that because we already do it. Surgeons take time off work and people don’t die because of it.
If you schedule that surgeon for garbage duty there won’t always be another surgeon available, so you’re basically telling the patient they have to wait to get surgery because the surgeon is on garbage duty.
Surgeons take time off work and people don’t die because of it.
Actually this does happen. The workload for most surgeons is maxxed out to the point where taking less time off would cause more deaths because of errors due to exhaustion.
Okay, so at worst the system would be as bad as the currently one, but with more surgeons because education would be free, and healthcare would be free, no medical debt, and so on. Do you realize that Cuba has socialized medicine and their health outcomes are far better than the United States? There are cures for lung cancer and alzheimers available in Cuba not available anywhere in the west, despite the US imposed blockade and decades of terrorism by the US?
This is a really silly discussion at this point, so I’m just going to leave it here. If you truly think that people would die just because surgeons have to do a few hours of chores every week, I’m not going to try and change your mind on that. Have a great day, much love, solidarity forever!
ubi, competitive wages, strict caps on profits. there is lots of ways to mitigate capitalism. but basically no way to completely remove it at this point in time.
And all of those reforms will be resisted and then removed by the ruling elite, who control politicians and the media through capitalism. Reform is just short term harm reduction. I agree we are just at the start of our journey to abolish capitalism, but we need to reach our destination, or we will be cursed to forever live through cycles of fascism rising and falling inevitably again and again.
Don’t you think there is some way we could structure society to counteract that without creating an underclass of wage slavery?
Yes, paying more for the shitty jobs.
Do you think the capitalistic system is going to just pay people fairly out of the goodness of the hearts of the ruling class?
How can people be paid the value of their labor while still generating profit? Profit is, by definition, the extraction of surplus labor value. Under capitalism, inherently and definitionally, no member of the working class is ever paid fairly.
No, never even implied that. But in any system we need something that can be exchanged for labor in carrying quantities so we can give more to the people who do the shittiest jobs. Whatever system you come up with, it’s not going to work without money.
If a medium of exchange for labor is indeed necessary, I’d say it should be measured in labor hours. We live finite lives, measured in minutes. A minute of your life is worth as much as a minute of mine, wouldn’t you say?
I would have no inherent problem with a system that tokenizes labor hours in some way. The problem is private ownership of the means of production and profit itself.
That’s been one of the goals of just about every socio-economic system, but since are not yet at the point where we can completely automate away all undesirable jobs, it all circles back to being shit.
I believe that there’s a way we can fairly share out all the shitty work among everyone, rather than a few at the top who do no work and exploit everyone, and a lot of people at the bottom who do all of the dirty work.
We don’t need to automate everything, we just need a fair system to distribute the work evenly. We have the technology. We can do it. The reason we haven’t is because those in power benefit too much from the current system.
I don’t think I can see a way to actually accomplish that without still ending up with negative outcomes.
Take for example a surgeon, one who is a specialist who’s time is 100% occupied saving people. Does he get taken away from that to do his time as a garbage collector? Do you tell the patient “sorry, you are going to die. You could have been saved, but we needed your surgeon to go pick up garbage.”, or do you have an exemption list?
And if there’s an exemption list, you will never convince me that people wouldn’t start abusing who is and isn’t on that list. You arrive right back to having a class society.
Why would you cancel a surgery to do trash collection? Why not just make it so everyone has one day a week dedicated to chores, for example? We all do our chores at home, right? Why not for the benefit of our communities? The surgery can be scheduled for a day a surgeon is available. I’m sure there would be many surgeons in a world without student debt, enough for them each to spare a few hours mucking in just like everyone else, right?
I’m sure someone has the ability of figuring out some kind of schedule to ensure adequate emergency medical coverage despite medical personnel having other obligations. I know we can do that because we already do it. Surgeons take time off work and people don’t die because of it.
If you schedule that surgeon for garbage duty there won’t always be another surgeon available, so you’re basically telling the patient they have to wait to get surgery because the surgeon is on garbage duty.
Actually this does happen. The workload for most surgeons is maxxed out to the point where taking less time off would cause more deaths because of errors due to exhaustion.
Okay, so at worst the system would be as bad as the currently one, but with more surgeons because education would be free, and healthcare would be free, no medical debt, and so on. Do you realize that Cuba has socialized medicine and their health outcomes are far better than the United States? There are cures for lung cancer and alzheimers available in Cuba not available anywhere in the west, despite the US imposed blockade and decades of terrorism by the US?
Yes, I’m not in the US. And Cuban surgeons don’t have garbage duty.
This is a really silly discussion at this point, so I’m just going to leave it here. If you truly think that people would die just because surgeons have to do a few hours of chores every week, I’m not going to try and change your mind on that. Have a great day, much love, solidarity forever!
ubi, competitive wages, strict caps on profits. there is lots of ways to mitigate capitalism. but basically no way to completely remove it at this point in time.
And all of those reforms will be resisted and then removed by the ruling elite, who control politicians and the media through capitalism. Reform is just short term harm reduction. I agree we are just at the start of our journey to abolish capitalism, but we need to reach our destination, or we will be cursed to forever live through cycles of fascism rising and falling inevitably again and again.