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Having to work to survive is the default state of nature, unless you are a baby or an elder. It doesn't mean you're oppressed.
What about our modern world makes you think humanity exsists in a default state of nature?
We don't live in a post-scarcity society, so the rules of nature still apply. People need food, water, shelter, energy and someone has to work to provide those things.
My fellow Lemmy user, we dont live in a post-scarity world because profits matter more than people in our Capitalist Society. We could live in a post-scarity world, but that would come at the cost of profits for the 1% who do effectively zero work.
We literally destroy food in this country instead of giving it to people who have nothing. The "scarcity" is entirely manufactured.
Get help
We could live in a post-scarity world, but that would come at the cost of profits for the 1%
No we couldn't. If those profits went away, it wouldn't lead to a post-scarcity society, those companies would simply cease to exist. Along with the goods they produce and the jobs they create.
Actually, they wouldn't cease to exist without profits. Profits are income in excess of expenses.
Without profits, investors don't get dividends. Businesses can be entirely successful without every turning a profit because they "only" produce goods and distribute the income entirely to cover costs including labor.
If we did something radical like taking ownership of companies away from investors and holding them in public trust, you wouldn't see the companies cease to exist, you'd see prices come down, wages go up, or heavy infrastructure investment.
Profit is an indicator of market inefficiency. The equilibrium state for a market is zero profit.
You also end up with management and incentive issues. You can correct those with violence or starvation in the short term and hope everything works out in the long term.
What, to you, is the difference between the owners being the government, and the owners being investors, all else being equal?
Do you think people don't get paid if there's no profit? Profit is just money left over after everyone gets paid and the bills are settled. It just goes to investors, and the employees don't see it.
Do you think that transition would happen without severe turmoil? That's the period I'm referring to. I think there's a huge difference in incentives to create new businesses as well as to keep running them efficiently between private investment and government...I'm not sure what method you propose to regulate industry.
It doesn't matter if people get paid if shelves are empty. The economy isn't a magical portal that delivers toilet paper to those in need: it's an insanely complicated set of (highly compromised at the moment, thanks to rich fucks and the officials/politicians they buy) human behaviors that act as market signals.
Why do you think there would be severe turmoil? In existing cases where the government has taken control of a business in the US, it's typically reduced turmoil, which is why they've done it.
The difference in incentive is that private investment is looking for profits, and public ownership is usually more concerned with stability or public welfare.
What do you picture a change in ownership looking like? Do you think that somehow means massive layoffs and changes in management? Why would shelves go empty? What calamity befell the economy when we nationalized passenger rail, airport security, or mortgage financing? Or when we temporarily nationalized GM?
If changing ownership decimates the economy, then why hasn't it been decimated already by routing changed in ownership that businesses have?
All this is aside from the original point, which is that profitability is not the same thing as solvency.
Siphoning some percentage of the companies revenue to investors isn't what makes the business work.
Profit is an indicator of market inefficiency. The equilibrium state for a market is zero profit.
What a dumb take. If I work all day to earn money, and I use some of it to pay my bills and save the rest, does that mean I'm being inefficient? Is my employer being inefficient by paying me more than I need?
That's literally a guiding tenet of capitalism. Profit is an indicator of market inefficiency because not enough of a good is being produced to satisfy demand. The existence of profit in a market segment signals to others that they should enter the market to try to capture some of the profit, which lowers the profit each party gets. As competition increases, profits lower until supply is in equilibrium with demand.
If it's a situation where competition isn't feasible, then profit is an indicator that the business is artificially charging more than they need to.Market efficiency is one type of efficiency. Is a widget maker suddenly becomes more efficient at producing widgets, they can sell more widgets at the same price, leading to increased profits.
Production became more efficient, but the market became less efficient, signalling that other firms should find a way to compete and get those profits, until competition drives prices down to the cost of production.https://youtu.be/b-4ry8ZLwoQ?si=1r0GU8HVCT7dC1OP
You are not a market segment, so your personal finances aren't comparable.
Your boss is being inefficient if they're paying more for labor than they have to. Labor is a market, and high wages signal to workers that they should enter a labor segment, which eventually drives wages in that segment down until an equilibrium is reached.
you wouldn't see the companies cease to exist, you'd see prices come down, wages go up, or heavy infrastructure investment.
Exactly, you'd also see the inovation to drop, effectiveness of people's work would decrease slowly and also quality of products would go down. It's actually not that radical, many, many countries have tried that, both small and large, gigantic even. But rarely (if ever) it worked in a long run
Why do you think work effectiveness or innovation would drop? The people doing the work already don't see the profits. Nothing would change for them.
There's no difference between the board of directors being appointed by investors and then being appointed by elected officials, as far as the employees are concerned.There's a difference between a state run and a state owned enterprise.
A publicly owned enterprise is perfectly common, and indistinguishable from any other business.They're quite common around the world, and some of the largest companies on the planet are state owned.
So you honestly believe that if executive compensation was more modest, they would simply shut down their companies?
And if that did happen, that nobody else would jump into the gap in the market?
The means of production would still exist.
Do you know what the means of production are? Labor. Not magic!
Factories, farming equipment ,machinery all would still exist.
Which means they either need to be worked, i.e. labor is needed; or there is scarcity of food and goods. Neither option results in a post-scarcity society.
You clearly have not realized the sheer amount of food that stores throw away because it wasn't purchased. Not because it wasn't edible, but because it didn't turn X profit in Y time. Dumpsters are secured and food often deliberately made inedible. Very little is ever simply donated because that would call capitalism into serious question.
That is entirely irrelevant to the discussion here. The person I am responding to is arguing that we somehow could transform into a society where nobody has to work. Not one where everybody who works today still works, but with fairer and better distribution of the produced output.
And yet, there's a class, that neither me or you belong to, who dosen't need to work a day of their life to survive.
Sounds like a parasite. We're supposed to kill those, right?
And yet many of them do anyway. And what percent of that class has never worked a day in their life? Most of them probably have years or decades of experience in their career and had to work hard to get to where they're at.
Lol, lmao even
You know, it's tempting to think people like this aren't real but i met a guy just like gigan IRL sitting in a bar one night.
Guy was a working stiff like me but he was just convinced that the super-rich deserved what they had, and that he was in the proper place, the bottom. He didn't put it exactly that way, but that was the gist.
Cant understand it, and certainly can't help folks like that understand.
Maybe you didn't read the entirely of OP picture. "If you HAVE to work to survive you are working class". Some of them still work, to keep their power and privileges, or to pursue their personal needs on the arts and other alike.
A gentleman should have something to do after all. Not employment of course, but some enterprise
Not /s but said in like a mocking tone. Anyway, I'm agreeing with you
The point is they don't need to work. Sure, if I didn't need to work for money then I would probably get bored and find something to do, but it's not same as selling your labour because you have to.
I don't see where she said this makes you oppressed.
I think we're lumping different kinds of "work" here. But even if we accept the premise, what would that say about people who who don't need to work? Are they unnatural?