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Wage labor is an imposition on people by people with power, wage labor is not a natural law or state of being. It is not unlike feudalism in that respect.
by heavyset_go 4y ago
Wage labor is an imposition on people by people with power, wage labor is not a natural law or state of being. It is not unlike feudalism in that respect.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoWage labor was a deal that many, many people freely accepted, because on net it was better than subsistence farming. Serious question: If you aren't doing wage labor, how are you going to live? Subsistence farming? Welfare? How?
- heavyset_go 4y agoWorker ownership is not the same thing as wage labor. Wage labor bifurcates people into an asset owning class and laborers who don't own the assets they're forced to depend on to eat. Wage labor divorces workers from owning the fruit of their labor in place of wages, whereas worker ownership doesn't. Wage labor was imposed upon people hundreds of years ago with the enclosure and privatization of common lands that people had relied on for centuries to provide for themselves. It was imposed because people voluntarily chose not to become wage laborers, as they preferred their lifestyles as is. To rectify this, a landless class of people was created, that could only rely on selling their labor to survive, through the enclosure of the land they had relied on in the past. People did not freely accept becoming factory workers, for example, they were forced into situations where it was the only option, and in many places, those that chose not to work were arrested and forced to work anyway.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoI gather that you're not in the US, then. Worker ownership is at least a respectable alternative. But it has a problem with capital-intensive industries. The workers typically don't have the resources to pool their funds and build a semiconductor fab.
- ok_dad 4y agoThere lies the problem: in todays society, I’m not free to choose how I live outside of a pre-approved selection of careers due to a small portion of people deciding they wanted this specific setup.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago> ... due to a small portion of people deciding they wanted this specific setup. This sounds like you're saying: It's all the fault of them. Not our own choices, not even structural forces pushing us this direction. It's them. That is, without further credible details, this sounds like paranoid conspiracy-theory stuff.
- BitwiseFool 4y agoThere are an incredible variety of careers to choose from and there are countless unconventional jobs out there that people have never heard of. There is no small portion of people creating a pre-approved selection of roles that we have no choice but to follow. Even if there were, it definitely begs the question of 'who are these people' and 'how do they have this power'?
- FooBarBizBazz 4y agoThey're called "investors", and they choose what kind of pursuits receive monetary compensation.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoNope. Customers choose what kinds of pursuits receive monetary compensation. You have something you want to do (and get paid for) that investors won't pay you to do? Can you get customers to pay for it? Then just go do it. Nobody's stopping you.
- funnymony 4y agoCounterpoint: Youtube influencers, standup comics, foo critics. (No investor chose to pay them)
- TheCoelacanth 4y agoThey "freely accepted" it as an alternative to starvation when they were forced off of the land they were previously farming so that it could become a large private farm.
- heavyset_go 4y agoA lot of the land that was enclosed wasn't even productive after privatization. Some of it just stood (and still stands) idle, despite previously providing sustenance prior to enclosure. Big estates with an abundance of non-productive land was a popular thing at one point.
- kazinator 4y agoPeople engage in wage labor because they find it preferable to alternatives like hunting and gathering berries. However meager is their lifestyle, it's better than what it would be under the alternatives. That's what people are slaves of: consumption. People engage in wage labor because it sustains a certain level of consumption that alternative activities wouldn't.
- heavyset_go 4y agoIt isn't a dichotomy between wage labor and living in the woods picking berries. You can have extremely similar production and economies that we have now, but without wage labor. One other option is worker ownership, as owning the fruits of one's own labor is not the same thing as wage labor. There are plenty of examples of historical and contemporary worker ownership, and none of them involve living in the woods.
- kazinator 4y agoIn order to own the fruits of your labor, you have to pay for all the tools and materials you need, and the space where you apply the tools to the materials. The material suppliers and toolsmiths also own the fruits of their labor, and don't owe them to you. Capitalism exists because individual worker ownership doesn't scale beyond simple trades. If a worker gets enough wherewithal to scale his or her operation to just a small shop, there are going to be workers there, who are either wage labor, or else customers who pay to use the shop.