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coinphrase wrote

After reading the article, I'm wondering what human rights have to do with Social Justice. The writer holds up several straw man arguments to make a point, but there is no talk about day to day life. There seems to be an obsession with grand talk about kings and serfs, but what about the average day under model communism? How are average people's problems dealt with, once the perfect communist system is in place.

Let's say James is a big strong worker, smart and good looking. Carlos is small, weak and not so easy on the eyes. James and Carlos work the same plot of land as farmers and live in the same communal housing project. James works half as hard as Carlos and still outputs twice as much product. James has his pick of the women, while Carlos has to take whatever is left-over. Both James and Carlos live in a communal housing project, where nobody is allowed to make their homes better, by using their labor to improve their own situation over any other person. Carlos and others like him have shoddy looking abodes, they can't figure out how to fix stuff and don't have the physical strength to keep their place as nice as James and his peers. Carlos claims that James is oppressing him and demands that James come clean his place too and fix stuff. Is Carlos told to fuck off by perfect communism, to reap what he sows, or is James forced to labor for free so that Carlos can pretend to be like James?

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ziq wrote (edited )

No one is expected to labor more than anyone else. Everyone gets rewarded the same by society per hour, whatever their craft. If Carlos can't fix stuff, someone else will do it while Carlos does what Carlos is good at. Neither of them will have to work more hours than the other, unless they want to.

Repairpeople will be in high demand.

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coinphrase wrote

What if Carlos doesn't do anything as good as his competitors and even seems to be slacking off constantly? Is he allowed to fail?

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ziq wrote

There are no competitors in an equal society, that's the whole point. If you don't want to work, you get just what you need to survive. Work and you get more.

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coinphrase wrote

What if the majority decides that getting just enough to survive is good enough and that results in there not being enough for everyone to survive?

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ziq wrote (edited )

Then the society fails.

But your scenario goes against logic and history. People want to contribute to their community, to make it better. You're looking at it from the perspective of a capitalist dystopia where no one gives a fuck because only the rich can suceed.

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BabyCroc wrote

That's a silly question. If everyone runs out of food, they'll have no choice but to get off their butts and go back to work. Same as it is now.

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coinphrase wrote

Is it silly though? Let's say that half the people don't want to work, they just want to live off the system. The other half are hard working and so they get more stuff. Do the hard workers get food while the non-workers don't get food? In other words, if a large population was refusing to work, would they be allowed to starve while the hard workers got food? Is that equality or is equality achieved by making some people work hard, in order to allow those that refuse to work to survive? It can't be both ways and it surely has a precedence, since we see this sort of thing playing out all over the world.

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josefStallman wrote

You're heavily underestimating the productivity of humanity.

We currently produce enough food to feed the world a time and a half over (see this study). We can build a skyscraper in a month. We can already produce more of most things than we could ever possibly use, which is why we produce so much waste.

And that's with about 60% of the world working (see this article).

Think about how many of those jobs don't actually produce anything: bankers, managers, business owners, advertisers, PR managers.

The truth is that even if half a society is somehow too lazy to work, we can support all of them with proper planning, organization, resource management, and production infrastructure.

People are worth saving. People can talk about "deserving it" or whatever, but if you're not actively hurting other people, I think you deserve to live and have the ability to pursue whatever it is you like doing. If that isn't working, then that's okay. The people like me that like working will keep doing it.

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Commander_Flynt wrote

Im not sure how that study shows an overabundance of food. All it states is that if you force several variables, and that to organic farming has "34% lower yields (when the conventional and organic systems are most comparable)". I'm not really sure how this study helps, so please correct me if I'm wrong Also a majority of the world doesn't work because they are too old or too young.

The second you bring in resource management either someone is going to get and others will not, or everybody will have less. Unless you force people to work or pay them based on their performance, there is no incentive to work. Getting food to these people takes a workforce of truck drivers, which if you give someone the choice to work whatever they want, but they will get the same pay, why would anyone want to leave their family for long hours(10+, while traveling) and drive cross country to deliver items.

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josefStallman wrote

I may have linked the wrong study, my bad. Here's one from Oxfam.

The idea that "Someone is going to get and others will not" is a massive over generalization that only makes sense within a capitalist context of artificial scarcity. Take a processor, for instance. It doesn't take much more resources to produce an i5 quad-core than an i7 quad-core. The big difference is just how well they preform, and Intel knows they can charge a higher price. This is the case for most products in most industries. It's not much more difficult to produce rare products, they become rare because companies know that consumers will pay more for things they perceive as rare or valuable. By shifting production away from product lines, where you can get a "budget" or a "high-end" and moving them towards other specialities, like "efficient" or "powerful", you can create enough of most things to satisfy the needs of anyone who needs it.

And that's the real point here: need. One of the fundamental ideas of Marxism is "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need". We can provide enough of people's needs for the entire population to survive, to never have to worry about going hungry or medical care or where they're going to sleep. But we don't, because we have this bizarre idea that somehow, for any number of reasons, the people who don't have enough don't deserve it.

If you want an incentive to work, humanity is programmed with plenty. You don't get paid for cleaning the house, or cooking food, or doing your hobbies. You do them because you don't like being in a messy house, and don't like being hungry, and most importantly, you don't like being bored.

As for transportation of goods, we have a massive rail infrastructure already which would require much fewer workers than trucks, or we could develop better mass transit infrastructure as new things are invented, like hyperloops or self-driving cars. Almost any logistical problem can be solved given time and people who want to solve it.

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