Capitalism cant provide

Okay but you won't do stupid bullshit in inefficient ways that keep me in 5000$ wine and a gilded skull throne of all the kids who hit puberty and became too old for me to fuck. So nothing of actual value to society.
so is it even really 'work'?
this tweet is philosophical junk
- Are you saying that it's bad philosophy or that philosophy is bad?

Capitalism, the system where we allow poverty to exist

I think we do more than allow it.
- Indeed we do
That makes it sound like it's just a passive side-effective and not a critical tool in the elite's arsenal in keeping the working class subjugated by holding the promise of suffering over our heads if we choose not to spend a third of our lives generating wealth for them.
- It wasn’t my intentions to make it sound like that and hoped that it would come across as you stated it
So do you want to take away freedom to starve and die of hunger

I don't get why it's so controversial that people should be able to survive without a job. It doesn't need to be glamourous, but nobody should be unhoused or unfed. We are blessed with plenty and we should share. And before it sounds like I'm religious, no, I'm not saying churches should be responsible for that, government should. (Though obviously I have no problems with any religious groups feeding and housing people as well.)

The argument is mostly that if nobody has to work, too few people will choose to work, and then the quality of life for all will deteriorate. It is still true that our modern society requires an enormous amount of upkeep just to keep the quality of life where it is now. That's work and if nobody does it then services will stop functioning.
Technically speaking, one could theoretically survive solely on homeless shelters and soup kitchens right now in the modern day, without the need to work. This would keep you biologically alive, but for most people, this is a degrading, unfulfilling existence. Which motivates people to work (or steal).
- Technically speaking, one could theoretically survive solely on a single job right now in the modern day. This would keep you biologically alive, but for most people, this is a degrading, unfulfilling existence. Which
- Removing consumers from a consumer economy does what exactly to that economy?
- What do you mean with quality of life? Remember people will only get their basic needs met. If they want more quality they have to pay for it and thus have to work. So the rest should be figured out by the free market (even better than now because labor market isn't free if people have to work to survive). Of course there will be a certain percentage that is okay with just surviving but I am sure their needs can be met by the taxes of the overwhelming amount of people who want more than that.
You don’t sound religious at all, so I’m not sure why you mentioned that, but im completely against churches feeding and housing people because they impose rules upon the recipients. I don’t believe in charity, so that’s part of it.
- The moderate(ish) Evangelical right will often agree no one should go hungry but believe it is the church's responsibility, not the government.

I disagree that "labor" can never be voluntary. But I also fully agree that labor in a Capitalist system is fundamentally based on coercion.

The thing to me is that "labor" and "doing work" are two fundamentally different things. You can accept a role that someone else needs done in exchange for something, or you can work on things you find important or interesting, or that just needs doing, to maintain yourself and your environment in a broad sense.

You should look up the feminist definition of labor. It includes everything you're talking about and draws a line between public and private labor. Labor =/= work.
- why does feminism have its own definition of labor?
  i get that women have unique challenges in the workforce but this seems like it should be a universal

If you meet people's basic needs, they do not cease to care or aspire.

A lot of the issue is "bullshit jobs" and being forced to do one. Work needs to be done, but we could be just as productive and maintain higher quality of life if we all worked less or for a shorter part of our lifespan.

Folks are happy to do a job that helps others, but they're less inclined to do a job to make a few bastards rich.

Bullshit jobs (=> jobs that are doing unnecessary work) are certainly part of that, but shit jobs (=> jobs that you would really not want to work) are another part of the equation.
Shit jobs make up a huge amount of the jobs that actually do stuff we depend on (e.g. food industry, retail, agricultural, garbage, ...). So the question is how do you get people to do these jobs? Without some form of coercion, that might be difficult.
- by making them not shit, maybe?
  like we have absurdly advanced robots, people don't really need to crawl through blocked sewers anymore.
- By paying accordingly to how shitty they are. It's that simple and actually what a free market is about. Because people need to work to survive the labor market isn't free and it doesn't work as it should/could.
  I remember as a kid I always thought garbage collectors must be paid pretty well to do a job like that. It's actually pretty sad that we accepted the slavery like conditions today as normal and unchangeable.

That also assumes that once people have what they need to survive they would give up on the things that they want. I'd love to have things like the necessities taken care of but I wouldn't expect them to pay for my video games and movie tickets, so I'd need a job to pay for that. Not only that, but I'd be able to work towards a career that I actually want instead of being forced to work a dead end job because I have to be constantly employed or else be homeless. The way the system works now makes it difficult to change careers or go to school later in life because any risk of being unemployed or lapse of time in our income could literally ruin our lives in a matter of weeks.

Claim is ok, the unspoken "so everything will collapse" is bullshit. In the end, Hampton is right: "work (do what someone else wants) or starve" is not how anyone should live

There's a fact that a lot of people commenting here are overlooking. Marx himself admitted that in the lower stage of communism, wages will have to exist until people's mindset on labor changes. It's simply not true that communism will not work because 'people don't like working'.

edit: grammar

Not really? Organization around mutual aid exemplifies time and time again people's willingness to do all kinds of labor without pay as well as capital's antagonistic response to the act.
Wages only have to exist until people are provided an alternative means of well being and self empowerment. That they can observe the value of labor is intrinsically tied to survival and well being, rather than extrinsically and arbitrarily.
Yep, every existing socialist society past and present requires labor, and paid for it. We can't jump from A to Z, we have to build socialism and build communism, and we have to continue developing. Wage labor as the sole motivator for labor in society is something that gets phased out as work becomes more for satisfying needs than profits for the few.
Also, in the higher stage of communism, labor that is necessary but not preferred — cleaning the sewers, for example — could be done in turn.
- This far in the future, you can find someone like me who would willingly design sewer-cleaning robots. My labor is being wasted on pointless billionaire projects.
- Fuck I’d be happy to clean sewers if I had a stable high quality of life and I knew that my work was directly contributing to the community and its health. (In fact, most sanitation workers currently have that perspective - sanitation work is care work, and something to be very proud of).
What prevents me from working a few months, getting enough money for a computer and internet, and then have food and housing for free and don't work for the rest of my life?

People are going to work for pleasure. That's how we're wired. What I find interesting is that people don't get this. They also never see any motive to work beyond the profit motive. I guess that what a system designed to squeeze all the blood out of you does.. you have none left to wander your mind.

Betterment of yourself and your part of society, human connection, just fucking around with curiosity and silliness. That's what I know deep down I want to guide me, but I'm also fighting against an internal system that had me hearing "you have to work if you want to eat" since I was a child.
You have to eat food to eat. That's it. It's literally the basis of life. I don't see birds commuting and paying taxes on their food
- Birds commute all the time. If they aren't where the food/nesting material/mating partner is, they commute there.
- You have to eat food to eat. That’s it.
  ...and that food has to come from somewhere. Someone has to work so you can eat.

Serious question, how can we provide everyone's basic needs without some work? Food doesn't harvest itself. Tools don't maintain themselves.

Labor will always be required on some level though it does not need to be exploited.

The premise is that without coercion people won't work. Which is just not true, people will do the work they want to do. It's just that the work people want to do isn't necessarily the work capitalists want them to do. Which means less exploitation and profit for the capitalists.
- Yeah the work people "want to do" and the work that needs to get done do not align IRL. Not enough people want to deal with waste systems or sanitation yet those are critical to any society.
  This isn't Star Trek. We don't live in a magical future where all the dangerous yet necessary work is automated.
The point being raised is that the current wage system is oriented around profit alone. Systems designed to meet the needs of the people as the prime order for society would still pay for labor, at least initially, but wouldn't threaten people into doing so via starvation.
- And if we maintained a wage based system with some degree of inequality that comes with it I would expect people to do these jobs. The moment there is no personal benefit I doubt you will ever find people doing the dangerous critical work.
I had breakfast this morning, and my fridge is full for the week. That doesn't mean I will refuse all wage offers for my time. If there is no slavery, then workers will get 5 recruiter calls per day begging them to take their clients' money.
- This right here! When people's basic needs are met, they'll work for luxury needs. The DS9 baseball card episode comes to mind.
- Ok now how do critical systems work that are not pleasant or dangerous to maintain and require skilled workers? Do we hope every community has people capable of being linemen or engaging in underwater welding?
  How much IRL practical thought have you really put into this notion because it seems unlikely to work out at all.

Adam Smith "sold" capitalism on the virtue of "free and fair markets". Capitalism, as a practical understanding today, is the supremacy of capital, oligarchist protectionism, and corporatism. Only fair markets (those without coercion and lies, including structural coercion) are free. Adam Smith did not define/sell capitalism as structural coercion of society to maximize ROI for those with capital. Actually the opposite, where "perfect competition" was supposed to result from free and fair markets. Monopoly/cartels generate higher ROI than competition.

UBI/freedom dividends is the path for free and fair markets for labour. It also naturally increases ROI, where investment includes work/time, where the freedom to refuse unfair work means higher pay for work, including higher returns on capital/management, if competition needs higher returns for their work too. But, most important to ROI, redistribution and high pay, means significant increase in demand/GDP, and more work available to satisfy that demand.

The reason UBI is resisted, is not that the rich cannot get much richer from UBI. It is that UBI redistributes power instead of wealth. Those in power, have more power under slavery than by giving away their power (freedom) to the people. Oligarchy needs control over power to protect their oligarchy. After your first $B, what is the point of more money if not to enforce harsher slavery to limit competition to your next $Bs.

Unless you assume people will work out of goodness of their hearts, every system has to somehow coerce people to work. You can't fulfill everyone's basic needs without workers.

And yes, maybe people would do some types of work anyway, but good luck finding people who find working in sanitation as an interesting hobby.

Someone would probably engineer a new sanitation machine or system that doesn't need as much human labor or exposure with unsanitary stuff as an interesting hobby. But yeah, people would have to build communities and the sense of community, and come to a consensus on how that community would want to divide labor; i.e. the community could vote to take turns doing undesirable jobs, or allow people to in undesirable jobs to work less hours or something.
Now that I think of it, things could be radically different if everyone is exposed to the undesirable work. Communities would probably opt for composting and less or compostable packaging in lieu of having to do a lot of trash work. They'd probably opt to eat less meat rather than working at a slaughterhouse.
- Preach. We are so deep into capitalism that we forget how we could do things "the human way"
- It's interesting but you did not answer the issue. What do you do when someone refuses to do the work assigned to them. Do you coerce them (so same as capitalism) or do you just let them off and encourage more people to refuse as well, because why should they do it if others don't.
Making sure everyone has basic needs doesn't mean you don't pay people to work. People would work because they want the other things you get from money aside from survival.
I think that people need a purpose and I think in a society not based on maximization of profit, people would have the ability to choose what that is and not have to do "whatever pays the bills"
Imagine a society where your doctors want to be doctors and your musicians want to be musicians.
In my experience watching my father retire and just living as an adult, people get squirrely when they dont have something to work on.
Work doesn't have to be what capitalism values to be work, it can ve creation, it can be gardening, it can be helping others.
Id argue people do fundamentally have drive to work as they have drive to have purpose. Work just isn't necessarily the suffering capitalism has led us to believe it is.
- Yes and no. There fundamentally are jobs that are both necessary and unpleasant. It is easy to talk about things like gardening and art, but we need sanitation. Even some level of bureaucracy. There are many kinds of work people may be willing to do for free or cheaply, but also many types of work almost no one would.
  PS: You can actually see this in volunteer driven open-source software projects. There are many volunteers to develop features or even fix bugs, but they sorely lack management roles and work on important but niche features (unused by most volunteers) like accessibility for blind people.
So you are in favor of keeping an underclass of people that you can threaten with death to force them to work?
- Having an underclass and (monetarily) coercing everyone to do their fair share of work to meet everyone's needs are two very different things. If I need to spell that out for you, you may want to think about these things and how they would look in practice a bit more for yourself before discussing them.

All animals need to work for food

I have a cat who lays down and uses her paw to pull dry food out of her bowl one at a time and eats them off the floor. Is that work?
- Your description alone is exhausting

I wonder what life was really like back in hunter gather times...must have been nice sometimes. Maybe even most of the time.

And if it wasn't, at least it was brief.
- Well, no. Infant mortality was crazy high, health problems were different, but life expectancies were 60-70 years if you survived puberty. We only recently hit that in agricultural hierarchalist society, and are slipping back below it.
- The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

The specific issue in the US is the exploitation of labor to serve the need for infinite profits. In an ideal state, the government (for the people, by the people) would stand between the needs of labor and the needs of profit by providing labor with legal protections from exploitation. When those in government become one with the needs of profits, the people lose.

What we are seeing now after Citizens United is that it becomes more profitable to lobby/capture the government to increase profits than it is to buy more productive labor. By extension, they use a portion of their profits to convince labor to vote against the interests of the many by identifying and focusing on divisive culture issues.

Now who is poised to protect labor? Used to be the news media holding the government accountable to the people, but now most influential news media organizations are held to the need for infinite profits. They have something to lose now if they report on an issue that interferes with their ad revenue.

The solution? Talk to your neighbors and engage in your local community. Invite others to the community. Support each other by sharing skills, knowledge, and resources locally. Serve your community rather than insatiable unidentifiable shareholders. Also be wary of organized religions that can be used to incite conflicts or division. Not saying religion is bad, just that large organizations dilute the accountability needed to prevent the reliance on infinite profits.

how would that be different without capitalism?

A lot less crime for one. We funnel people into prison because of how currency functions. If Basic Needs were met like not charging for food or other necesseities people wouldn't be nearly as miserable. Shouldn't take a rocket scientist to understand this. Complain about where the money comes from all you want but keeping things status quoe means we are okay with all the cruelty in our world.
- Is misery really the only factor? I know a lot of people who are doing well or really well that are complete assholes and steal shit
  Stealing for necessities is really rare. People are just selfish assholes
  Non-capitalism doesn't magically make people rich. Don't know what you're thinking. If anything, you consume less
Most people work a job they are unhappy with because they need the money for basic needs. If your basic needs are being met like food, housing , etc you are able to pursue something you enjoy doing to make additional money. You are no longer forced to labor for someone else, to sell your labor so someone else can profit off it.
- Who will do hard jobs then? Who will work for nothing? Food doesn't make itself

I knew as a child, i hated working and didn't want to do it.

Come to find out as an adult, everyone is a slave to corporations who overcharge us and underpay us. It's all rigged against the working class. So glad i didn't waste more money on college for a job i couldn't get.

Maybe I'm ignorant but this feels like a stretch. You have to work to survive, that's just how it is

You don't have to work if you're wealthy. Give me $5 million and I'll never work again, and live a happy life. Even as little as $2mil is doable

Even if you wanted to opt out of capitalism, I can't even think of how a poor person would manage to live legally in the US. You basically have to be a hobo constantly in fear of being arrested (and then in prison you're definitely a slave). You can't just go out into nature and build your own homestead like people used to do.

You're describing slavery.
- I can see why you think it's similar, but it's assuredly not the same as slavery. As a hobo, you still have rights and cannot be purchased or treated a literal property.

I get this sentiment, but why would anyone want to farm then? Who does the work? Hell, in the US we need immigrants to do it because nobody else will. I guess my response to this will always be ok if nobody has to work, then who will, and why? And if nobody decides to work, then there won't be the resources to make it so that nobody has to work. Nobody has ever replied with a solution to that aside from "well if we're in a post-scarcity world then we don't need people to work..." but we're not. Not even close.

It's kind of like libertarianism in my mind. If there are no rules and everyone is self sufficient, then who's to stop the people who don't want to earn their keep from just using force against those who do?

Infinite profit is a capitalist feature not a "USA problem" the media never fought for the working class because it seeks profit as well, the capitalist can buy it the working class cannot

Coercion isn't necessarily the problem - in a society that produces for needs, what if there's not enough people who want to produce furniture for instance? What about agriculture? If you don't meet the quotas, people's needs won't be fulfilled, so some degree of coersion would be necessary.

Maybe, maybe not? I find that your point is probably more valid on big scales encompassing tens or hundreds of millions of people. But I believe that in a "real society" - one where you mostly know and care for other members - people would be much better inclined to spend part of their time fulfilling others' needs. Ultimately I believe that most humans are ok with taking "someone has to do it" jobs and will do them well and with pride, as long as they can see the impact of their work. And trade will always be a thing for "fulfilling needs" across different societies
- Yeah, and for things to be traded, they need to be first produced somewhere. If it's a necessary item like insulin or electronics or whatever and lots of ethnostates that you describe need them, then the producers would need to meet a quota or else there'd be shortages.
  That's where coercion might come into play that I was previously talking about - what if there are jobs that are required to fulfill people's needs, but there's not enough people who want to do them? You have to somehow force or persuade enough people for everyone's needs to be met and for society to function, and my coercion I don't just mean "threaten with violence" or "make them starve", it could also be more peaceful methods like having some cultural status for being so noble or something.

They are also admitting they would happily live off the work of others and feel no need to contribute to society or make the world better in anyway if their needs were met.

I agree with this philosophy, but it does require you to admit that before civilization we were all slaves to nature. I think this is true, but some people might object that this meaning of "slave" is different from the conventional meaning.