Comment on Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking
willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days agoThe priviledged class will trade among themselves.
You can have a society with 7.5 billion people that are fed, clothed, sheltered enough to stave off early death, and 500 mil people with property rights trading among themselves.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
I could see a black mirror 15 million merits type of society. Pointless work for pointless pay. But gotta keep the poors in a position that they get something they want from their meaningless work even if it’s got no real value but they want the shiny.
willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
You can’t get cash rewards for consuming less. Spending is the least important variable in the accumulation game. All else being equal, spending less means you can spend more at other times. So if I penny pinch all year, I can splurge on New Year’s eve, that sort of thing. That doesn’t make you rich. That doesn’t elevate your status in societies where all the needed and useful resources are paywalled.
Income and time is what matters. And if you can get income while keeping all your time to yourself, that’s what elevates status. In other words you don’t trade your own time for income. That means there must be some slaves or extremely poor people that are constantly exploited to enable the elite living conditions.
A society doesn’t need parasitic elites. But if you want a better society you will have to pry it from the elites’ cold hands, because they won’t go along with a scheme that makes the world a happy and healthy place at their expense.
If I have 400 billion, but in a happy and healthy world I can only have 100mil max, which is 3 orders of magnitude less, I would rather burn down the whole planet than lose 1 cent. My interests are everything to me. My personal conditionsis what I experience first hand, while the rest of the world is just a theory, a story on a newspaper page, an image on TV, etc. I won’t accept tangible personally felt losses for gains which to me are theoretical.
Of course I am inhabit a worker instead of a billionaire, things are different, the calculus is different, but crumbs are crumbs. Whether I am a worker or billionaire, man or woman, I refuse to crumb myself. I want a 10 course dinner, with hookers and blow to boot, with every trimming.
If what you want is in a tree, you have to shake that fucking tree. If you want fish you have to catch it.
Some assholes wanted to exploit people, so they killed, threatened, organized and propagandized and accomplished it. We need to understand this and take notes.
If we want something else, there will always be people that are super happy with how thing are now. These folks will block our way. They are the tree, the fish, they are the soil that we have to plow and sometimes pave, to get to where we need to go. It will be ugly. It will not be without struggle.
If we just remain passive, and modestly undemanding, we know exactly what happens next.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
I wasn’t talking about getting rich, my point was working less. If work doesn’t pay, there is no reason to work.
willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
Slaves got no pay. They still worked.