this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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I think a lot of it is the disconnect that happens when you've been well taken care of all your life. If you had to work in school, and then apply for jobs, and then had to show up and do the work, but it was all pretty much straightforward and fair, then it's easy to think that if someone doesn't have enough money to live they probably just aren't doing those easy life things and it's their fault and nothing needs to change.
If you've had experience on the unfair side, it looks totally different.
Yeah this is true, but also money is made up? Like all animals just go in and eat food, and they will regularly do so on farms, but only humans get punished for it. Humans get kept away from food which they need to survive for purely social reasons.
Like imagine an alien looking down on us and for them money is totally arbitrary and they're all "wait what are those humans even doing? Like there's food right there and they are stopping the hungry humans from eating it, but they don't seem to mind as much when it's other animals...
So for me, the really screwed up thing about statements about money is that a bunch of people have just... forgotten? that money is made up? Like the old statement "people can sooner imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism".
Well, but, there's a reason societies that made up money did better than societies that didn't. I do actually think there's a perfectly valid point on the "other side," that it's not a good thing for society if people can just sit around and expect others to take care of everything for them food and shelter wise. There's an inherent justice in the concept that if the economic conditions are such that you can get decently-rewarding useful work and make a living at it if you decide to, you can kind of assume that if someone's struggling financially it's their own fault. Because that does happen sometimes.
But that's not at all the current economic climate. A lot of the rich people don't really do that much useful, if anything. A lot of the poor people work their asses off and they're still struggling for basic necessities. As technology's gotten more capable, what we should have done is make sure that the opportunities that are available are aligned with work that still really needs to happen: Science, art, working on important problems. The stuff that can't be automated -- construction, transport, a lot of physical jobs -- should pay well and wind up being a realistic way to ensure a good life and good retirement once you can't do it any more. Basically, the world should have justice; to me I don't think that should mean necessarily an escape from the "you gotta have a job" system, because (a) I don't think that's good for you, if the job that you're replacing "nothing" with is a good one (b) automation or no we're sure as shit not yet at a point where all the important things that need to get solved or worked on are solved.
Instead of doing all that, we just built a more efficient system for exploiting and grinding people down, committed ourselves to making the biosphere unlivable in 50 or 100 years, and worked hard on putting up systems to make it difficult for any of that system to change.
Hooray
But also
Amazing. It's almost as though capital itself should not be the driving force of society...
If you are a mother taking care of a child, is that a job?
I think looking around at what's worked well in the past is a good way to decide what "should" happen. Not that we have to be limited to that, but it's a good reality-touchstone for the conversation.
To me, the New Deal-era economy, if it had had racial justice and women's rights, is the best example I can see for what I would think is a good economy. The government is going to keep a close eye on creating jobs, creating a strong safety net, and reigning in the oligarchs who are trying to unbalance the system. It ushered in decades of prosperity. It was good (again, for white men at least).
It's a little hard to compare against socialist societies, because the West does its best to wreck any socialist country that might start working for its people, so that it can "prove" that socialism doesn't work. So there's a strong argument that socialism actually works better than historical examples would suggest. Cuba is actually a really instructive example in terms of what it does well (medicine in particular) even facing economic warfare from almost the entire rest of the world. But, even with that caveat, I still think that structuring an economy similar to 1930s through 1960s America (again, just with racial and gender justice added to it) seems like what works the best.
Yes. The ability of one parent to draw enough of an income that the other parent can focus largely on child care and "living" as distinct from working, is one of the key features that makes me like the New Deal-era US economy. That's as much an important part of my happy utopia as would be a happy life for the "working" partner in one-job families, with rewarding, balanced, satisfying work.
Actually, I think I remember seeing some kind of studies that argued that women in some Scandinavian countries seem to be happiest among modern societies, based on working like 10-15 hours per week. They have time for the family but they're not stuck at home going out of their minds like a 1950s housewife. (And obviously everyone should be able to do whatever they want to do, just that as the tradition seemed like it worked well in practice.) I tried to find them to send to you but I ran out of motivation before I did.
But yes, short answer, whichever partner is taking care of the family shouldn't be working full time. That is clearly insanity in the modern system and fueled just by greed of extracting value from people with no regard for what it's going to do to us long term.