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Some work is neccessary, labour not so. (absolutely speaking) In our current society basically everyone has to work to earn money, to then buy such products on
by captainmuon 13y ago
Some work is neccessary, labour not so. (absolutely speaking)
In our current society basically everyone has to work to earn money, to then buy such products on a more-or-less free market. We are able to produce more and more goods with ever less work. That's great on the surface, but wrecks the system, because:
- Experience shows we can't really split the remaining work evenly, so some people work a lot, and some are unemployed. But people can only really participate in the economy if they do labour (and get money). It sucks for them to be unemployed, but they also fall away as consumers, which hurts the whole economy.
- Stuff only ever get's done when labour is applied. (If I could produce and sell something with no human work, everybody else would do the same, and it would have no value. So, in the equilibrium that's not going to happen.) In a sense, labour is the secret engine of the economy. At the same time, you're trying to reduce the amount of labour needed, because it's expensive and cuts into your profits. All kinds of instabilities arise from this contradiction.
In the end, we'll probably have to transition away from capitalism to something better suited to our modern realities of production, whatever that will be. An unconditional basic income would be a first step in this direction - acknowledging the fact that we need less and less work, but we still need to feed the same number of people.