- cross-posted to:
- mop@quokk.au
- cross-posted to:
- mop@quokk.au
You must log in or register to comment.
Volunteer firefighters do actually still get paid a lot of the time.
Source: Was volunteer firefighter. Was paid per-call.
Reddit mods?
Capitalism and so called meritocracy have brainwashed humanity.
I would gladly fix and assemble home appliances as hobby if I didn’t have to worry about money.
Hell, I’d teach for free if I didn’t have to worry about rent.
I would like to do that too but it is so bad in my country.I have to work hard for the university and the job that i don’t even want when you graduate from the university. its soo hard to live properly in a third world country.
They lock essential things (e.g. food, water, shelter, medical services, etc.) behind a paywall because they know it is not true that people do not always—or even usually—want money.
But people do need essentials to live, and if they’re the only ones who can give you money to get those, then they can order you to do what they want instead.
The fantasy-story of profit motive: Without capitalism, people are just lazy, unproductive and die eventually. But with capitalism, there is great innovation, motivation and excitement.
Cool story, but absolute nonsense.
It’s a few bad players that are extremely greedy who ruin the whole game for everyone else. Most people don’t want to be that rich, they just want to live without starving to death, being healthy and have a roof over their head.The studies about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation suggest otherwise, and that monetary rewards can even have a negative impact on productivity and creativity. Ultimately, we want a society of intrinsically motivated people doing their best, most inspired work, not a society following financial incentives.
I’m convinced people who believe that are some of the biggest shit stains on the planet.
Personally, I was one of the people who used to believe that, because I was born and raised in a society that taught me that since birth. I can totally understand that there are people out there who still believe it, and I do everything I can to try and bring them up to speed. It’s hard to unlearn everything you have learned, especially if you’ve already made big, irreversible decisions in your life based around the lies you believed. I think the key is to try and find common ground, and to empathize with people, even when they’re not acting their best. I believe nearly everyone is redeemable.
So did I, but I’m more referring to the Wall Street and CEO as well Billionaire types who wouldn’t do anything if they didn’t get more out of it.
Yeah, that’s totally valid. There may be some of us who don’t make it, billionaires are probably too far gone, it seems to me that living for long enough surrounded by sycophants and people who can’t say no to you warps your brain and fundamentally robs you of your humanity. In a way, it must be extremely alienating.
I think people misunderstand the use of money. Money is just a point system we use to decentralize coordination and resource distribution questions.
Only idiots would claim that it’s the only motivator for humans. But the more complicated and contentious resource distribution questions become, the more important money becomes as a system.
In basically all the examples given here, the resource inputs in question are individuals personal time and expertise. They of course face opportunity cost considerations, but can ultimately decide to sacrifice their own time individually.
Money and the desire to get more of it (in absence or other specific needs) is pretty much necessary to keep any society with more than 50 people or so running.
Money and the desire to get more of it (in absence or other specific needs) is pretty much necessary to keep any society with more than 50 people or so running.
How did we manage for thousands of years without it?
Don’t you think there are alternative systems we could use for the allocation of scarce resources? Alternatives which do not inevitably cause the rise of fascism, for example?
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that a tokenized medium of exchange for labor hours is necessarily a problem, but rather the system of private property ownership, where the means of production are privately owned for the benefit of the few. A system where profit is possible, is the problem.
I mean, the earliest known currency is almost exactly as old as the earliest known cities. Farmers would deposit a large amount of grain at the local temple (which were effectively the tax collection sites of the time) and were given clay tokens on exchange, which could be used in place of actual goods at tax time.
This system was set up because of the nature of farming: you make a lot of product in a short time, but most of the year you’re just waiting for your crop to grow. These tokens allowed farmers to pay their tax duties up front, and then have physical proof that they’d done so when paying taxes outside of harvest season. But it was only a matter of time before people started trading those tokens amongst each other. “Give me a goat and I’ll give you these tokens so you don’t have to pay tribute next season.”
Before that, villages were pretty much just hand-to mouth communities of just a few families. Surviving, sure, but not in the kind of complex society where one needs to draw equivalence between extremely different forms of labor.
Well for the majority of time when we did not use money, communities were quite small and/or ressources were so scarce that money lost it’s value, as people lose trust that you can actually exchange it for goods later on (e.g. during a famine the incremental value of food in monetary terms is astronomical). Money hence emerged first in situations where value needed to be conveyed over large distances, where punitive mechanisms of governance (i.e. someone more powerful than you puts you in a box or lobs off your hands) become ineffective - it emerged along the first trade routes, and means of control by distant power centers (such as in China).
There are alternative systems for the distribution of scarce resources, but they ultimately require centralized governance bodies - this is where most communist states failed in practice. If something belongs to ‘everyone’, it belongs to the one with the biggest stick, usually the state; If something should be used for the common good, someone qualitatively needs to decide what that is.
I can’t think of any alternative forms of resource distribution that don’t rely on a central decision making party.
The key issue with money, and why it leads to the emergency of fascist ideology imo, is when money pools with a powerful class of people that or filthy rich, somehow ‘own’ entire organisations including the media, and then become politicians as well. Concentration of power is the actual evil here, not private ownership.
So what should we change?
- Wealth tax and high inheritance tax tied directly to monetary redistribution mechanisms such as a basic income
- 100% income tax above a certain level of income but lower or no takes on most income
- Taxing of inhuman productivity (if elegantly possible)
- No owning of land, just renting it from the state.
- Price-based mechanisms to account for negative externalities such as greenhouse gasses
- Limits to allowed pay disparities in companies
- Company types that disincentive value extraction and financialization
- Limits to stock buybacks
- Limits to the complexity of financial products
- Hard upper limit of how much you can own lol
- etc.
Long story short, what Social Market Economy was originally intended to do
Concentration of power is the actual evil here, not private ownership.
Concentration of power happens because of private ownership of the means of production. If you own a factory, you get the profits of that factory. As you gain more profits, you can invest in more factories, and get more profit. If you have a system where money is power and money can be used to generate more money, you end up with fascism.
Reforms are all well and good, but they will be reversed as soon as the wealthy regain a grasp of power. Look at the history of social democracy in Europe and the US for examples of this.
How does capitalism inevitably lead to fascism?
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
As I said, a system of labor hour tokenization would work fine, so long as profit and private ownership of the means of production are not possible.
I can’t think of any alternative forms of resource distribution that don’t rely on a central decision making party.
Just for some ideas - democratization and collectivisation, social ownership of the means of production, with bottom up consensus based decision making. For more information, and more ideas, check out an anarchist FAQ
Thanks for the link to the anarchist FAQ, seems very interesting, I’ll have a deeper look.
That said, we know that society-scale capitalism has led to the rise of fascism because it has happened before and we can empirically observe it.
We have no idea what e.g. society-scale anarchist economics would look like, how to implement it peacefully and sustainably in the real world and which pathologies or injustices might emerge as a result - because we have never observed it on a large scale (so we must be careful to not fall subject to the argument from ignorance fallacy here).
So yea in theory it’s interesting and I’m always glad to see housing communes, community gardens and various kinds of collectives that people experiment with - But such experiments are always local and highly limited in scope. They certainly improve the quality of life for those involved, but imo the experiments of small groups of idealistic and altruistic people say little about the feasibility on a larger scale and so not prove that it’s a valid mechanism to distribute resources in large and diverse societies with antagonistic actors.
Maybe the anarchist FAQ might be a good basis for our descendents to rebuild society once 95% have died in one apocalypse or another^^
Edit: Interesting discussion btw, thanks for sharing and taking the time to explain your opinion :)
There are larger scale examples of anarchist communities, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico for example, and there’s a section on an Anarchist FAQ about anarchist projects.
Of course, we’ve never had long term national scale anarchism implemented in recorded human history, with the Spanish commune coming the closest, tragically crushed by civil war and external authoritarian dictatorial rule supported by the Nazi regime - so you’re absolutely correct that there might be unforeseen issues and flaws, but the underlying principles is that the fundamentals of the system is that we need to collaborate to build the best functional society we can, and that means a society that adapts, grows as we do, and is responsive to our changing needs as our civilizations and communities themselves change.
It’s really important to emphasize that anarchism isn’t some blueprint for a society that we follow by rote and dogmatically implement, but rather a base layer of ideas we can use. As per an anarchist FAQ
Anarchists have always been reticent about spelling out their vision of the future in too much detail for it would be contrary to anarchist principles to be dogmatic about the precise forms the new society must take. Free people will create their own alternative institutions in response to conditions specific to their area as well as their needs, desires and hopes and it would be presumptuous of us to attempt to set forth universal policies in advance.
Thank you for the engaging and civil discussion and for sharing your ideas, it’s nice to chat with someone where we clearly both want the best for everyone, and we all have our ideas of how we can get there. That’s how we build a better world, I think, by discussing, learning, and working together productively to build consensus.
Much love and solidarity, all the best!
Fucking hate that myth
My Minecraft survival world is awesome, but I think in this context “productive” is usually referring to, you know, farming and stuff.
You might like this initiative: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/uncensored-library
I think it serves as an illustration that people will do difficult and tedious computer work for reasons other than money it specifically being Minecraft isn’t really the point to me
Honestly if people didnt need to take the first job they could under threat of homelessness i truly believe enough people will just end up doing everything we need done out of the sheer need to do something
I think UBI would give us a lot more artists.
Yeah for sure, it took me a couple decades but i finally got a data job, where i really just enjoy the work, after starting from the bottom minimum wage and working up a bit in two other careers first lol
Finally im somewhere where if i get laid off inwould literally just happily work on a data analysis portfolio while applying to jobs. My two prior careers (law and education) I left them because i just hated the day to day work.
I dream of swimming in data with a few clear questions, a rudimentary sketch of the preferred output format and the side quest to note patterns or things that stick out and offer suggestions for improvement in SHORT FORM (caps needed)
As long as you enjoy data cleanup lol, that’s the unglorious part, getting a shitshow of manually entered data from a few different sources and then answer some clear questions lol. AI helps a lot with that though nowadays, you feed it a bunch of manually entered garbage and it does like 80-90% of the job for you!
I thought there was a ton of farming in Minecraft
For sure, but people have lots of incentives to do farming and stuff even without the profit motive, otherwise human civilization wouldn’t have made it out of the paleolithic era. Humans are actually the most co-operative species on the planet, it’s biologically hard wired into us to work together to improve our living conditions for our communities and to share what we have with others.
This altruistic instinct rapidly tapers beyond one’s immediate community. Sure, we have the instinct to try helping others, even those who are very distant. But without reinforcement of our good behaviors, any given behavior will peter out.
Like, suppose you are making enough money to live comfortably. You then hear about a charity that builds wells to provide clean drinking water to people in impoverished parts of the world, and decide you can spare $5 per month to help them. So you donate $5. However, this charity focuses entirely on doing the actual charitable work, so you have to remember to donate and manually type in your credit card information each month. And they don’t do any PR. No monthly emails with personal stories about the people they helped or anything like that. Instead, they simply have a publicly accessible spreadsheet that has data on wells built and people served. Almost everyone would stop donating to this charity after a month or two, simply because they would forget or procrastinate until they forget, because our brains don’t assign relevance to things which don’t create an emotional impression on us. Compare this with, say, helping your child and their new partner build a home with your own hands. This kind of project provides lots of positive reinforcement - exercise, time outside, time spent with others, seeing progress being made day by day, the appreciation of others, the knowledge that you have helped someone who is important to you.
Hence why most people find most jobs to be unpleasant in one way or another. Not many people want to spend their days pumping a stranger’s septic system. The unpleasant work (aka, “work”) is what is left over after everyone does the pleasant work for free.
Also, some anthropologists theorize that the beginning of labor intensive agriculture and large permanent settlements was only possible via forced labor, coerced by violent, authoritarian leaders. Evidence shows that early agrarian life was significantly worse in just about every way than nomadic hunter-gatherer life, which explains why hunter-gatherer tribes almost universally fought against or fled from agrarian settlements.
Do you not believe that we can structure society in such a way that our best instincts are leveraged for the benefit of as many people as possible, rather than leveraging our worst instincts for the benefit of a select few?
I think the more automated the job is, the easier it is for people to get started. So with better farming technology I would expect more people interested on it.
We already have better farming technology. People prefer to grow gardens in their back yard with compost made from their coffee grounds instead. Iirc, John Green calculated that - even excluding the cost of his own labor - one tomato that he grew in his garden cost him $18.
There are certainly a lot of problems with modern agriculture. But food is far cheaper than it has been for pretty much all of human history, when the collection and preparation of food took up the vast majority of most people’s time.
I think that’s a disingenious estimate to say that food is far cheaper now than it was previously in human history. Before industrialization, growing food did take up a large portion of people’s time but their yearly work hours were much smaller.
As the other commenter said, even if your claim about having more free time is true (I highly doubt it, more likely we simply aren’t counting the various tasks historical peoples had to do which were still “work”, but not their main job, and overcounting the “work” that modern people do when they are actually just scrolling tiktok), as a society we spend far less time making food than we used to. This is obvious by the fact that in the past century, worldwide levels of famine and hunger have dropped lower than they have ever been in recorded history.
What do work hours of people not in the farming industry have to do with the raw costs of food?
The “cost of food” abstracted from the “amount people have to pay downstream to afford food” by companies desire for profit. One guy can manage acres of land with a few good machines. Food is cheap: that is why people can afford to ship it around the world to be processed in one country and then sold across the ocean in another country. We don’t have to work as many hours as we do to sustain ourselves to the level they did back then. Industrialists have just countered work efficiency improvements with…more work.
All of these people have motives… Their motives simply aren’t money
I do believe this was the message that was intended to be conveyed by the post itself
Sure, but some people really need it spelled out.
Like in the title of the post? Or in the image comprising the post?
Show me where in the post title or anywhere in the rest of the post it says “their motives aren’t money”.
Maybe I just missed that part?
Because “spelled out” and “implied“ are not the same thing. But I guess some people just need that spelled out for them.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“without a profit, no one would be productive”
It’s cropped out the top of the image unless you open it lol.
Don’t blame me for someone else cropping it.
Speaking of motivation, my motivation was to add clarity, not to start petty arguments
What’s yours?
In the image itself, it directly calls it a “profit motive,” not just a general motive. I figured you may have missed that by mistake, wasn’t trying to be rude.
Then the rest the of the post implies that these other people are able to do stuff without a profit motive, though yes it doesn’t state they have other motives i suppose? But i think that’s the point
wasn’t trying to be rude.
Sure, but why pass up the opportunity for some petty bickering?
No need to reply
I don’t think I was involved in any bickering. I meant to clarify my thoughts from earlier.
deleted by creator
Hence: without profit motive.
This is how you tell rich people have some serious mental health issue.
Decent people would rather a world where people worked because they enjoy that type of work rather than being forced to do it because they need money to live.
If you removed money, imagine where we’d all be as a society without the toxicity of money, wars and hate! :(
If you removed money, imagine where we’d all be as a society
Probably dead or living in the stone age.
There’s so many jobs that people don’t enjoy but are necessary. Nobody enjoys working in the middle of an australian desert at 40°C in a lithium mine. Nobody enjoys collecting your stinking trash. Nobody enjoys sitting in a store for 8 hours a day, scanning groceries. Nobody enjoys working in a warehouse for 8 hours.
However, these jobs and many more are vital for todays society.
toxicity of money, wars and hate!
You make it sound like wealth and wars are an invention of capitalism and not something that has existed basically since the dawn of time, even as something you can observe in primates, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Capitalism is different from a regular market in that it is not just trying to make a profit in order to have enough money to exchange for useful goods and services.
Capitalism demands that your profit grows and grows and grows. It’s growth for it’s own sake. A capitalistic economy like our world economy needs to grow 3% or so every year or it gets into a recession. 3% doesn’t sound like much, but it’s exponential growth, doubling every 25 years or so. This growth doesn’t come out of thin air, but from extracting from value from other people, our world and so on.
And measuring an economy by GDP is incomplete, because it doesn’t take uncompensated labor, human happiness and wellbeing, and public goods (like a healthy nature) into account. When a factory owner pollutes and dries up the river while employees have no choice but to work 16 hour weeks, GDP goes up.
In nature, things grow until they are mature. That does not mean progress halts. Adults don’t grow anymore, but continue to learn.
My try to explain why money and markets are okay, but growth for it’s own sake (growthism you may call it) is destroying our societies, making us unhappy, and is also killing us with the climate and biodiversity crises.
Nobody enjoys working in the middle of an australian desert at 40°C in a lithium mine.
Believe it or not I’ve actually met someone who enjoys this line of work. He lives in the middle of nowhere in Paraburdoo Australia and loves the heat. So not exactly nobody…
Okay, let me rephrase it: Not enough people enjoy working the middle of an australian desert at 40°C in a lithium mine to cover the global demand of rare earths.
The reasons those jobs are such shit is also money. A lot of people enjoy cleaning, nobody enjoys being overworked. Normal functioning societies don’t leave heaps of stinking trash around, they neatly pack it and the work of a janitor of garbage collector becomes actually enjoyable if you’re a proper type of personality.
Hell, my uncle right now works as a part time street sweeper basically for free. He has his basic needs met by other means, and his “job” pays him enough to get a cup of coffee before the shift and a sandwich after. He just enjoys making the world cleaner, chatting with locals, taking care of stray cats, and having a routine. All of that is possible in a world that doesn’t revolves around squeesing every bit of labour from people so some pedos can buy themselves another island and fill it with sex slavesNormal functioning societies don’t leave heaps of stinking trash around, they neatly pack it and the work of a janitor of garbage collector becomes actually enjoyable if you’re a proper type of personality.
Idk if you noticed, but people won’t behave that way if there is no repercussion for it.
He has his basic needs met by other means, and his “job” pays him enough to get a cup of coffee before the shift and a sandwich after. He just enjoys making the world cleaner, chatting with locals, taking care of stray cats, and having a routine.
Great but some people have more aspirations than your uncle. And I think they should have the chance to achieve that. And I don’t think having a clean neighborhood should depend on having that uncle that enjoys cleaning for free.
All of that is possible in a world that doesn’t revolves around squeesing every bit of labour from people
I mean, yes, absolutely possible without squeezing every bit of labor from people. However, it’s not possible in a world without money or capital. The wide-spread introduction of capitalism has DRASTICALLY reduced the amount of people living in extreme poverty. According to https://ourworldindata.org/end-progress-extreme-poverty , from 1990 - 2025, the amount of people living in extreme poverty dropped by 65%, from 2.3 billion to 800 million. If we extend the timeframe a bit further, according to https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-data-appendix , the number went from 53.9% in extreme poverty to only 5.5% - meaning an almost 90% reduction in extreme poverty. Unless I’m too stupid to do math now.
(ourworldindata.org is a non-profit funded by the university of oxford btw - so it’s fairly reliable)
Now, capitalism isn’t the sole reason why poverty dropped - it’s the combination with effective social policies. Capitalism creates wealth, taxes take a part of that wealth and spread it to the rest of society. That’s how it should work and that is also by far the best system we could ever have in place. The fact that america fails on that tax-part is not the fault of capitalism. It’s a failure of the government.
It’s insane that so many people tried to flee from communist terror regimes, and still try to flee to this day out of North Korea or Cuba, yet people on lemmy will just close their eyes and pretend that communism is the perfect system and every system that fails is just because of the “CIA”.
And you think your uncle is a scalable solution to a city of millions of people. These positions dont scale. Some quick googling show about a half a millions workers in waste remediation in the us in 2023. Do you honestly think you could find half a million people like your uncle that all live spread out enough to fill all the positions (thats on the low end of need also fyi, not surprisingly they have high turnover and difficulty keeping staff for extended periods) around the entire us and that those people would never lose motivation or get burned out or just tired or stop caring. Because that is what we need and that is a single job for a single industry.
Its not scalable
I just think it’s boring that you think money is the only reasonable motivator for these people. There are other forms of compensation and appreciation. And it’s not the only option available to us. It’s crazy to me that people understand the idea of countries that have military conscription but can’t fathom the idea of a system of workable civil conscription.
As I see it you successfully identified a problem and a solution, but that does not suggest that that is the sole or even best solution.
When you do your scaling you need to scale everything. The adult population of the US is estimated as 266 million people as of now. Half a million is roughly 1 adult in 530 people. Let’s quadruple it up so they have nice relaxed works schedule. Let’s say now you need 4 people per 530. If you think you can’t find 10 out of 1000 people who would do some sanitation work, with no stress and without having to think where their next meal comes from, you just never met people.
And this is the most important part that you seem to ignore - when people’s basic means are met, they want to fulfill higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. For some that means doing arts or doing some engineering or running a company. For some, and there are s many of those some, that means “it’s not much but it’s honest work”. Doing small visible changes that make the world the better place one picked up piece of rubbish at a time, is exactly, precisely what significant portion of humanity will be doing.
This also works in another direction: billions of people who would be doing something grand and moving humanity further, are stuck in mundane repetitive broken jobs they hate, because they’re stuck in this cycle of needing to grind to survive, without having a moment to breath, which slowly kills every bit of light they once had a potential to have.
Would you enjoy being a garbage man or a plumber? Or is that work you’re saving for others to enjoy?
Doctors make good money and we don’t have enough of them because it takes so much time and dedication. You think getting rid of money would help there?
Do kids need to go to school? Five days a week?
It’s not that gotcha that you think it is. I worked a lot of hard jobs, for 10 years I did very hard and complicated work in very unpleasant environments for very very little money only because I loved what we did and the results of our labour, and I was good at it. I would be doing that still if I didn’t need money to feed my family. In my years I’ve met a lot of people who were enjoying, properly enjoying jobs that other people will call hell. My job at the time, and to a big extend my job now, is something other people will never want to do for any amount of money.
Doctors make good money and we don’t have enough of them
And your conclusion isn’t that the system of people working for money and only for money is a broken system that demonstrably doesn’t work, but that we need to conserve it as long as we can because it was always done like that?
Yes, getting rid of money will absolutely help. Many people want to be doctors but can’t afford the time or resources to either become one, or to actually put their existing education to use.
And as an example I’ve personally witnessed, being a doctor in Russia in the 90s was about the worst job you can get, you don’t get any money, and I mean none, they were going multiple consecutive months without any salary. The shortage was about on par with the doctor’s shortage in US right now. Trapping people in jobs they don’t want to do is not something that helps humanity in any way.Do kids need to go to school? Five days a week?
I struggle to understand how this is relevant to the conversation.
Doctors make good money and we don’t have enough of them because it takes so much time and dedication. You think getting rid of money would help there?
Yes. There are easier ways of making money. If you do it just for the money you won’t have the mental fortitude to get to the point of making money. Profit motives is about the path of least resistance.
Lol what MD is the goto job for making easy money. Getting the degree is difficult because everyone wants to do that job, not because it’s difficult per se
the degree is difficult because everyone wants to do that job, not because it’s difficult per se
Pretty much says everything about why your wrong on this. Being a doctor is hard. There are far easier career and business if profit is the motive.
Beyond that are doctors that rich? They are wealthy, but the Zucc ain’t no MD. Neither is Warren Buffet.
My point is that someone motivated by money will drop out of the MD path. Being a doctor is a career of passion that also happens to pay well.
Engineer is similar. Take some differential equations or read Jackson EM. There are easier things to do for money.
I know someone who make similar to a doctor with a seafood restaurant. Particularly when you consider fewer hours.
Like, half of the jobs you listed would be automated out pretty quick in a world without money, out of the other ones, a few would be rendered obsolete without profit motive (pretty sure we can find something better for batteries than lithium, and why would you need someone scanning groceries if there was no money?). What’s left can be rotated out or done by lottery, and those doing the undesirable labor get to have more luxury items or whatever. It’s not hard to imagine, people have been doing it for centuries.
Like, half of the jobs you listed would be automated out pretty quick in a world without money
If that was even remotely possible, companies would’ve done that already. Every company tries to cut staff as much as possible.
pretty sure we can find something better for batteries than lithium
Which requires research, which requires investment. Much of the research we currently have only exists exactly because of funding, and a lot of funding is done by companies, not by the government.
What’s left can be rotated out or done by lottery, and those doing the undesirable labor get to have more luxury items or whatever
I like the “whatever”. Let’s just introduce a shitty system that also potentially forces people to do work they don’t want to do and they get like a bar of soap or “whatever” as reward…
It’s not hard to imagine, people have been doing it for centuries.
I don’t know where these people lived that you talk about, but it certainly wasn’t on this planet. Such a system has never existed.
pretty sure we can find something better for batteries than lithium
Trust me, bro
would you need someone scanning groceries if there was no money?
Because this is the most efficient way of keeping track of how many goods leave your moneyless store, and ensuring assholes aren’t just taking everything for themselves and hoarding it. Tracking how many goods leave the store at any given time allows you to order an appropriate amount to keep things in stock so that people who need things don’t go without, and is especially important for perishable goods like fresh produce.
What’s left can be rotated out or done by lottery,
People have different skill sets and specialties. Many jobs take years of training and practice to reach an acceptable level. Also, you just invented state-sanctioned slavery/a non-military draft. What do you do with someone who refuses to perform their lottery-assigned job?
and those doing the undesirable labor get to have more luxury items or whatever.
That’s literally the system we have now, but more authoritarian, since someone has to decide what is a “luxury good” and how much undesirable work is required to attain a given level of luxury.
people have been doing it for centuries.
Citation needed. Concerns: authoritarianism; scaling; maintenance of the modern standard of living
I didn’t cite sources because the literal decades and decades of refutations to your arguments already exist.
But I will leave you with this: Why do libraries work?
Automated by who?
We do need incentives to work. As technology and efficiency advances we should be able to work less, but we still need people to do work they/we don’t want to do.
Personally I think people are pretty happy working 24 hours a week even if their job isn’t something they love doing. I’m more interested in working towards that, slowly, over time, than just going to “nobody needs to work”.
What a child-like view of society.
I wish i was so naive.
I don’t think you understand. I want my boat to be bigger than your boat.
Society would collapse.
While working out of enjoyment instead of necessity is a noble and good goal. There are jobs that no one enjoys. Money can be used as an incentive to motivate people to work on jobs that aren’t that enjoyable, but still necessary.Which jobs? Most of the time there are people enjoying something you wouldn’t expect
I build rockets that go on satellites and scientific missions. I enjoy my job; I find it extremely interesting and often quite fulfilling. In the grand scheme of things, I really wouldn’t change much. But like my boss said on the first day of the job, “This job is awesome, but it’s not worth doing for free.” If you told me I could still enjoy the same level of comfort at home that my job affords me, but I wouldn’t be paid, I would quit. I’d rather be at home reading, spending time with my family, playing around with my hobbies, etc.
My wife is a nurse. She loves her job, but she wouldn’t do it for free either. Her love for the job prevents her from quitting when she’s abused by the public for 12 hours, the pay makes her come in.
Some people are motivated by enjoyment alone to do jobs for free, but many are not. Or the thing they love doesn’t help society in a meaningful way. Or they just don’t want their hobby to turn into a job. I don’t think there’s a big enough overlap to have a functioning society.
I daresay there’s a few people out there who might enjoy going into the sewers to manually remove the fatbergs, but probably not enough.
Some yeah, but undoubtedly not enough to keep it working. For example i doubt that many people enjoy working at garbage disposable or basically any waste disposal. Of course these jobs should be fully operated by machines. Or any assistant jobs in manufacturing or jobs that operate in shifts.
Uncle worked down at city dump. He loved it. He was kind of a garbologist in a way. He was fascinated by all the things folks threw away. Retired there too. Got a job right out of high school and worked until he was 62 and retired. Dude has so many “trash” sculptures. That is to say, sculptures made out of trash. I think you’d be surprised the jobs folks enjoy doing.
Do you think your uncle was in any way representative of the millions of people employed in waste disposal? The city of Birmingham’s bins have gone partially uncollected for over a year due to a dispute over pay. If waste disposal workers were, in general, doing it for the love of it, they’d surely be happy to do it for minimum wage.
Seems more likely your uncle was the odd one out, and most people need to be paid to do stinky work.
I think that mostly happens because it’s a hard job and because people need money to live. If they didn’t they wouldn’t need more pay
If it’s so enjoyable, why don’t they do it as a hobby and have a different paying job?
To be clear, I think the answer is obviously that, to most people, it’s not that enjoyable.
Most people need to be paid to do work. Bad argument. I won’t be responding further, if this is how you argue.
If you agree most people need to be paid to do work, then we have no disagreement on the topic at hand, so there is no need to argue at all.
For example i doubt that many people enjoy working at garbage disposable or basically any waste disposal
Ehhh I bet you’d be wrong. Only anecdotal obviously, but at practice and games for the kids, a lot of dads just chat when there isnt much going on. A couple of them work for the local garbage company. One of them commented that he doesnt know how I stay inside and work all day, he really enjoys being outside with the trucks in the morning, then enjoying the afternoon outside with the kids. Another one is a mechanic for them, he always thought the trucks were cool, and he still enjoys working on them (though he will 100% tell you, in great detail, which manufacturers suck for various parts). Haven’t talked much with the last one about work, I think he is the only one just straight up doing it for money though.
And who knows, maybe the guy who likes being outside says that to be positive about his choices in life, but I see him at the park with the kids a lot, I’ve run into him heading out to the trails on his mountain bike, etc, so I believe him that he’s perfectly happy doing it.
Automation for unwanted tasks is great though, I agree, and where automation should be focused.
One of them commented that he doesnt know how I stay inside and work all day, he really enjoys being outside with the trucks in the morning, then enjoying the afternoon outside with the kids.
He could be taking the local kids out for hikes in nature instead - an activity which also gets him outside, provides a benefit to society, and lets him spend time with his kid and their friends. If he didn’t get paid, do you think he would prefer picking up garbage, or going on hikes with his kid? And even if he finds picking up trash meaningful now, do you think he started the job for the money, benefits, and schedule, and then learned to appreciate the good he was doing for the community after years of doing the work?
I’m not him so I couldn’t say, but considering I know he does volunteer cleanup days at the trails, I really dont think he looks down on garbage pickup the way you and others seem to be, that its only fulfilling because of money.
I met a guy last week who was unusually passionate about water filtration and wanted to make a business globally. People are wonderfully weird.
Would you really trust podiatrists or proctologists who were in it just for the love of the game?
Tbh I’d kind of trust them more. Even if they got off thinking of my feet later (which, who cares, have at it), they are going to put a lot more effort and get a lot more knowledge than someone just doing it for the high billing rate, dont you think? And probably care more about the quality of my arch than the guy writing a prescription for orthotics because the manufacturer just bought him a nice dinner.
Just because they are pervs doesnt mean they’d be bad at it, I’d say they’d be even better at it than most. Wouldn’t you think?
On the contrary, I don’t trust any medical profession that is in it for the money.
I can’t imagine anyone enjoying being a correctional officer enough to do it for free. Or waste management (sewage).
Why do you assume that we’d need correctional officers in a world without money?
Because people murder each other for reasons other than money.
Oh I dunno, people are still inclined to uh probably murder and/or rape people for fun, steal things, commit any other unlawful acts society may deem against the law that doesn’t involve monetary situation. I understand money is the root of all evil but some people are evil just because.
I was also thinking that. As an example, retail work seems to me to be a kind of hell I don’t think I’d want to endure. But I know people that really enjoy it. So it’s probably true of any job you might think is only done by those that are forced to.
I think, if AI and robotics replace most jobs. After some years of pain when capitalists enjoy the infinite money glitch they’ve discovered, there will either be a revolution or a natural coming to understand that things need to work differently.
Now, understand this would only work if the vast majority of work could be done via automation. In this case the vast majority of people would be able to pursue what they enjoy, a bit like the star trek anti-economy. If all remaining required jobs were no longer filled by those that volunteered to do them, there would be some kind of draft (think like jury duty), where people able to do a job have a chance to be called in to do it for a few months then released back to pursue their own interests.
I’ve always seen capitalism as the carrot on a stick we need, when we need human productivity from the vast majority of people. If that’s no longer the case, it’s not a suitable solution and all the ideas like universal basic income are just stopgap measures to try to eke a bit more time out of the capitalist system that has already run past the point where we can keep enough people usefully employed to make it work. That’s almost certainly the reason we’re seeing the huge wealth disparity that increases. As the productivity per person goes up, all the increased value only ever rises to the top.
Bit of a mini rant there, sorry about that.
deleted by creator
I’m not saying you’re wrong. But you realise how that reads right? It sounds like you’re saying we should keep a boot on the neck of “the little people” so the rest of us can have a good life.
Fair point, though i did try to use positive encouragement model to incentice people to work in not so enjoyable jobs. Even if not permanently, maybe in rotation.
Living in a nice society is all the motivation people need. I hate doing dishes, but I do them because I hate living without clean dishes even more. Everyone understands sometimes we gotta do stuff we don’t like doing for a greater good. Acting like we need a wageslave class to do menial tasks otherwise we’d just let our world collapse is insulting our collective intelligence. We can share the burden.
That seems kinda too idealistic view of the world.
I know much more people who, if not directly forced, would let the dishes or basically any environment around them completely mould and break down before even considering cleaning up even just the mess they have left behind, than people who altruistically do clean up after themselves and others.I do agree that living in a cleaner and nicer society should be enough of a motivation and for some it is, but there’s not enough of us.
We can already observe it in many public spaces where trash gets left laying around even if trash cans are available or public bathrooms or showers or my favorite example in the gym where plates get constantly left on the machines and cable attachments just piled up wherever those fell.
I’m not suggesting that we just leave everything to chance and just hope society maintains itself, I’m saying that we can structure society in a way that everything that needs to get done still gets done without the profit motive, because everyone inherently understands that if we evenly and fairly divide up the work that needs to get done, that they’re doing their part to live in a better world - does that make sense?
Yeah it makes sense and I’m not actually that much against the idea. I’m not that fond of the current wage slavery system either.
I just don’t trust general populations altruism that much to believe it would work on a large scale without any sort of a positive Incentivization in addition to just keeping the society running.
Sure is a good thing doing this dishes is the most complicated and least-pleasant thing people can do…
Who’s gonna volunteer to go through years of training specializing in commercial diving in wastewater to treatment plants for free?
“Who’s gonna do mindbraking soulcrushing jobs for days without a break?” Nobody, that’s not a job that has to be done this way. “But if we stop orphan crushing machine, what will crush all the orphans?”
When you’re imagining the worst parts of the worst jobs, remember that the reason those jobs have worst parts is because the main incentive of every job is to have the profit of a job as high as possible, and to exploit the workers. Yeah, some jobs are hard, some are complicated, some are dirty, some are all three. But all that is something people can and regularly enjoy. People don’t enjoy when it’s degrading, when it’s soulcrushing for no reason, when there is obvious injustice. And it has nothing to do with jobsSome things require years of specialization and simply can’t be done by novices. You don’t want volunteer engineers, pharmacists, etc. Some of those specializations are also unpleasant. We need to support people and not require that all humanity be profitable, but we also need to incentivize people to do shitty and/or difficult jobs. That balance is extremely difficult to find, and the most effective solution we’ve found is paying people for that work. There’s an incredible imbalance in our system right now that values non-productive ownership over all else, but the solution to that isn’t saying “Fuck it - nobody gets paid and it’ll all work itself out.”
The easiest solution is to tax the shit out of the uber-wealthy. Right now we have lower classes defined by income and an upper class defined by wealth. If we remove the wealth and make work and productivity more valuable than ownership, it moves us much closer to equity.
Someone who wants to live a life of luxury and comfort in a world with wastewater treatment plants, knowing that everyone else is also pitching in and doing their part.
Someone who wants to live in a world without billionaire pedophiles in power doing nothing but hoarding all of the wealth and abusing women and children.
Someone who cares about the wellbeing of their community and is motivated by that, rather than by selfish greed.
In other words, anyone. Everyone.
Everyone can’t do everything, and some specialized jobs with specialized skills are extremely unpleasant. Are you suggesting that we just hope things get done, or that we force people to do it while giving nothing in return.
One is delusional - the other is just slavery.
I’m suggesting that we can come up with a better system than the current one we have. I have ideas for how we could do that, and if you’re interested you can check out an anarchist FAQ for a wide variety of ideas, but I don’t have all the answers, no one does. We can only reach a system which works for everyone by first acknowledging our current system is deeply flawed, then coming together to work to build a better alternative.
This is idealistic to the point of parody.
These are all real things. A better world is possible. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but remember that incredible changes that would have seemed impossible have happened before and will happen again.
If you told a pioneer in the Virginia company back in 1607 that black women would be given rights and the abililty to vote to elect their leaders, they’d probably burn you as a witch.
Living in a nice society is all the motivation people need.
You might want to read up on the bystander effect. You do the dishes because no-one else is going to do it. But as soon as there are others who can do the job people will just stand around and let other die before they put in the effort.
That’s absolutely not what bystander effect is, not even close. It has also nothing to do with the issue at hand. Bystander effect caused not by not willing to put an effort, it’s incredibly complicated, layered, and not exactly explained, but probably the only thing we know about it for sure is that it’s not because people are lazy
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.
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.
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.
It sounds like you have never come across the concept of the tragedy of the commons?
The particular topic of waste disposal is a good one because we have good historical accounts of the transition from a free-for-all to regulated, paid profession. Take the example of Paris, which in the 17th century was infamous for its dirt and stink. Repeated efforts to force people to keep their own streets clean failed, and ultimately residents complained that if the King wanted the streets to be clean, he had better pay for someone to come and clean them. Eventually city officials managed to force (through threat of punishment) residents to sweep waste and mud into the middle of the streets, and pay people to come through and collect and remove it.
In 15th century Britain, nightmen removed waste from cess-pits and charged two shillings a ton. If there were enough people who just loved shoveling shit so much to do this without money changing hands, why weren’t they out doing that?
I’m actually very familiar with the idea of the tragedy of the commons.
Rather than re-cover well tread ground, I hope that you don’t mind if I quote from a relevant section of an Anarchist FAQ, and I encourage you to check the link I shared, as it goes into far more detail:
In reality, the “tragedy of the commons” comes about only after wealth and private property, backed by the state, starts to eat into and destroy communal life. This is well indicated by the fact that commons existed for thousands of years and only disappeared after the rise of capitalism – and the powerful central state it requires – had eroded communal values and traditions. Without the influence of wealth concentrations and the state, people get together and come to agreements over how to use communal resources and have been doing so for millennia. That was how the commons were successfully managed before the wealthy sought to increase their holdings and deny the poor access to land in order to make them fully dependent on the power and whims of the owning class.
[…]
In fact, communal ownership produces a strong incentive to protect such resources for people are aware that their offspring will need them and so be inclined to look after them. By having more resources available, they would be able to resist the pressures of short-termism and so resist maximising current production without regard for the future. Capitalist owners have the opposite incentive… unless they maximise short-term profits then they will not be around in the long-term (so if wood means more profits than centuries-old forests then the trees will be chopped down). By combining common ownership with decentralised and federated communal self-management, anarchism will be more than able to manage resources effectively, avoiding the pitfalls of both privatisation and nationalisation.
If you want a modern, real-world example of this which you may have actually experienced yourself, look no further than this medium we are using to communicate. The Internet is a great example. The Internet was a fantastic common space lovingly maintained and curated by individuals, with services and content provided freely. Corporations encircled it, and turned it into the torment nexus we have today. It wasn’t because of us, collectively, that spoiled the commons of the Internet - it was capitalism itself.
There are many things that people are willing to do for their own satisfaction, I don’t disagree with that. I don’t think waste disposal is one of them.
The “communal life” you’re talking about cannot exist in an urbanised society, because most people you affect in a city are not personally known to you, and there will be no opportunity for the social mechanisms we evolved to pressure us into doing the right thing. In a village of 200 people, if you throw your shit in the street, your neighbour, whom you know personally and whose opinion you likely care about, will complain. In a city of 2 million, if someone throws shit in the street you have no idea who it was, they’ve never met you, and what are you gonna do about it anyway?
Anyway, I should bow out now. I have no interest in discussing politics or economics with an anarchist.
Do you really believe everyone would act like a psychopath if they aren’t always directly accountable for their actions? And how does that differ from our current system?
I have no interest in discussing politics or economics with an anarchist.
That’s really too bad, because I’m sure you’d learn a lot! Anarchism is not what you think it is. Either way, have a great day, I wish you all the best. Solidarity forever!
Do you really believe everyone would act like a psychopath if they aren’t accountable for their actions?
No.
because most people you affect in a city are not personally known to you, and there will be no opportunity for the social mechanisms we evolved to pressure us into doing the right thing
That’s a demonstrable bullshit. Believing that the only motivation people can have is the fear of repercussions is the same level of that christian psychotic “if it wasn’t for the fear of god everyone would be raping and killing all the time” that says more about you than about supposed issue you’re afraid of.
It’s not fear of repercussions; it’s social glue. Crime is much more common in cities, out of proportion with how many people there are, because people who are willing to commit crime are not willing to commit it against people they know personally. Urbanisation allows depersonalisation allows bad behaviour.
It also allows effects to be transmitted that are simply way less direct than you have any hope of instinct being able to reckon with. Like, you can work out that tossing shit out of your window will piss off your neighbour, but the knock-on-effects of what you do can be harder to figure out than that. Did you buy a little bit more of anything at the start of COVID, “just in case”?
I feel like that entire passage completely ignores the fact that last time the bulk of humanity lived a communal lifestyle, the number of humans on the planet was a few orders of magnitude smaller. It’s a fairly easy setup to maintain when settlements are small and the bulk of people’s time is spent as hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers. As soon as you put a very large number of people into a city, the communal arrangement falls apart. And many people like living in cities. That genie is out of the bottle, and people are not going to be willing to go back to being a subsistence farmer in a commune.
I don’t see why we would need to give up modern agriculture, fertilizer, heavy machinery, or automation in order to abolish capitalism, can you explain why you feel that way?
Volunteer firefighters are paid pretty damn well while 20 of them stand around a car wreck at 2am.
Imagine an Internet where services are provided to make our lives better, not just to turn a profit.
Imagine a world where automation didn’t take away our livelihood, but helped us to spend more time doing what we wanted to do.
Imagine a world where food, water, shelter, education and healthcare was available to everyone, not paywalled.
This world is possible. We can get there. If heaven exists, we must create it here on earth.
Organize, protest and elect. Emphasis on organize and protest.
- Get as involved as you can with activist efforts locally.
- Organize, network, focus on building solidarity. Join or form a union. Join the IWW.
- Vote at primaries and elections for the best candidate, even if you doubt they can win.
- Don’t punch down.
- Don’t punch left.
- Educate yourself, politically.
- Push for voting reform and for anything that breaks the two-party system
How does capitalism inevitably lead to fascism?
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
