It's easy to sympathize with the obvious direct victims suffering in the literal meat factories or whatever of capitalism's industrial horrors has been conjured in your mind today. And that's not wrong.
But there are a couple things to keep in mind:
When you hold a chain wound so tightly, you too are restricted, you too are held by the chain, on pain of death. Yeah, it's worse to be a slave, but even in slave states, the tension of oppression creates a kind of cage for the masters. It's nicer, sure, but it's still a fucking cage. An argument could be made that it's a more complete kind of cage-the slave loses nothing of themself when their physical chains are broken, when they can laugh and cry and run without the masters whip biting into their flesh. But the master, and the overseer, have built themselves and their consciences to be blind to the humanity in their fellow homos (convince me it's sapiens, convince me that name fits), to be disconnected and terrified of freedom, to be uncomprehending of their own humanity compassion and love, incapable of any relation not touched with dominance and brutality.
If libs are people, then the masters are just as worthy and needy of liberation as their slaves. Not as urgently in need, perhaps. Certainly not as accepting. But worthy.
And the surplus class, those kept away from the means of production and brutalized, a constant threat simultaneously of surplus labor and what will happen to you if you don't work, and a 'lower' thing to disdain, a shoe to step in so you don't feel the rock bottom we all know you're on quite so viscerally, so you sympathize with those above you and see the means of your (assuming you're a worker) oppression as being your protection-from them.
I'm of the opinion that they should be helped first if possible. Even if it's harder. The 'workers' are people and deserve more than they get, certainly, but they are in less urgent need.
Myopic focus on "workers" strikes me as cruel myopic and selfish. You can do better. Or you can't, and I'm disappointed in you I guess.
Thanks, I'm familiar with Hegel's master/slave hypothesis. The point of communism is to make it so there are no masters, but there are workers. the workers decide how their labor is applied and receive their benefit from it. We will either kill the owners, or make them workers. They are helped by becoming workers, and workers gain the rights kept to the owner class before.
I have at no point said people who aren't workers aren't persons or lose their humanity. The owner class really isn't made up of those incapable of working. However. lots of people in the working class are. Most people are able to, and in fact want to be productive in some capacity. Making art, cooking, cleaning, sex work, and emotional labor are all legitimate fields of work that contribute to society. lot of people are doing these things now and not being recognized for their efforts, who would be under communism. And it would be a lot easier to say to everyone at your factory who know exactly what your doing "I'm taking a month or two off, I'm feeling burnt out" than it is to say that to a boss who will replace you in a second. And for the small handful of people who genuinely are just completely unable to produce anything do to physical or mental blocks, their community would take care of them. Humans have done that for each other since before we could farm the land.
Totally! But the value of a person is not in their labor, and especially not in their work. That's the main point I'm driving home here.
Ugh, value, capitalism gets in everything. Virtue? That's a better wird. The virtue of a person does not exist entirely,bor even primarily, in their labor. Only their utility to a system lies primarily in that, which should only ever be a thing we make to enable human flourishing.
Where, please actually quote, exactly did I say anything about the measure of someone's virtue/value? I said we need a worker's world. I say we need it because owners hold back the worker's lives in bitter drudgery, and everyone would do better when they received recognition and compensation for their labors, rather than owners siphoning it. Here's a question for you: why are you so obsessed with the measure of a man? who is human and who is not, how we measure the value of a human being, how the humanity is observed. What is your ideology? Are you anarchist, ML, MLM, Juche, some mix? Even if you don't fully identify with one or another, give me an idea of what theories you subscribe to.
Again,all for the workers. I'm suggesting more inclusive language and ideas. It should not be a 'workers' world, but world without exploitation or (excessive? The current paradigm of personal?) ownership.
Most of the work I've done that mattered for more than five minutes was with people that had been thrown away by society and excluded from literally emergency rooms, you could set one of them outside a reported shooting and if the paramedics showed up before the cops, they would see them and probably just leave. A scared mostly useless kid who had read a lot of moral but not much explicitly political philosophy tossed out into the world. I ended up reading some theory later, but mostly I critically analyzed shit-mostly systems. I have fav philosophers, but not many favs who pitch particular politics. broadly speaking, partially from my time working with tech shit, I'm a principled illegalist. I tend to prefer looking at shit myself to trusting some dusty fuck who's been dead for centuries, and use them mostly as jumping off points instead of foundations. Neitzsche might be the exception, that one's in there pretty deep, fav philosopher, would absolutely go back in time to punch him in the face, might stop baby Hitler with adoption paperwork or something while I'm there IDK.
More recently I've been painfully confronted with the fact that nobody changes unless they want to, and they never seem to want to, contemporaneous with some major losses and trauma, so for the past couple years I dunno exactly what I believe, except that some people will get very angry if you tell them the truth or treat them with respect, and also literally everything is sometimes literally on fire.
Who are you and what do you believe? Because it sounds like you only asked this so you could know how to appeal to me.
It's easy to sympathize with the obvious direct victims suffering in the literal meat factories or whatever of capitalism's industrial horrors has been conjured in your mind today. And that's not wrong.
But there are a couple things to keep in mind:
When you hold a chain wound so tightly, you too are restricted, you too are held by the chain, on pain of death. Yeah, it's worse to be a slave, but even in slave states, the tension of oppression creates a kind of cage for the masters. It's nicer, sure, but it's still a fucking cage. An argument could be made that it's a more complete kind of cage-the slave loses nothing of themself when their physical chains are broken, when they can laugh and cry and run without the masters whip biting into their flesh. But the master, and the overseer, have built themselves and their consciences to be blind to the humanity in their fellow homos (convince me it's sapiens, convince me that name fits), to be disconnected and terrified of freedom, to be uncomprehending of their own humanity compassion and love, incapable of any relation not touched with dominance and brutality.
If libs are people, then the masters are just as worthy and needy of liberation as their slaves. Not as urgently in need, perhaps. Certainly not as accepting. But worthy.
And the surplus class, those kept away from the means of production and brutalized, a constant threat simultaneously of surplus labor and what will happen to you if you don't work, and a 'lower' thing to disdain, a shoe to step in so you don't feel the rock bottom we all know you're on quite so viscerally, so you sympathize with those above you and see the means of your (assuming you're a worker) oppression as being your protection-from them.
I'm of the opinion that they should be helped first if possible. Even if it's harder. The 'workers' are people and deserve more than they get, certainly, but they are in less urgent need.
Myopic focus on "workers" strikes me as cruel myopic and selfish. You can do better. Or you can't, and I'm disappointed in you I guess.
Thanks, I'm familiar with Hegel's master/slave hypothesis. The point of communism is to make it so there are no masters, but there are workers. the workers decide how their labor is applied and receive their benefit from it. We will either kill the owners, or make them workers. They are helped by becoming workers, and workers gain the rights kept to the owner class before.
What if you can't work? Or are sick of it? Are you still a person? Why shouldn't this be allowed?
Again, this "worker" fetishization excludes a lot of people, reeks of Calvinist bullshit.
I have at no point said people who aren't workers aren't persons or lose their humanity. The owner class really isn't made up of those incapable of working. However. lots of people in the working class are. Most people are able to, and in fact want to be productive in some capacity. Making art, cooking, cleaning, sex work, and emotional labor are all legitimate fields of work that contribute to society. lot of people are doing these things now and not being recognized for their efforts, who would be under communism. And it would be a lot easier to say to everyone at your factory who know exactly what your doing "I'm taking a month or two off, I'm feeling burnt out" than it is to say that to a boss who will replace you in a second. And for the small handful of people who genuinely are just completely unable to produce anything do to physical or mental blocks, their community would take care of them. Humans have done that for each other since before we could farm the land.
Totally! But the value of a person is not in their labor, and especially not in their work. That's the main point I'm driving home here.
Ugh, value, capitalism gets in everything. Virtue? That's a better wird. The virtue of a person does not exist entirely,bor even primarily, in their labor. Only their utility to a system lies primarily in that, which should only ever be a thing we make to enable human flourishing.
Where, please actually quote, exactly did I say anything about the measure of someone's virtue/value? I said we need a worker's world. I say we need it because owners hold back the worker's lives in bitter drudgery, and everyone would do better when they received recognition and compensation for their labors, rather than owners siphoning it. Here's a question for you: why are you so obsessed with the measure of a man? who is human and who is not, how we measure the value of a human being, how the humanity is observed. What is your ideology? Are you anarchist, ML, MLM, Juche, some mix? Even if you don't fully identify with one or another, give me an idea of what theories you subscribe to.
Again,all for the workers. I'm suggesting more inclusive language and ideas. It should not be a 'workers' world, but world without exploitation or (excessive? The current paradigm of personal?) ownership.
Most of the work I've done that mattered for more than five minutes was with people that had been thrown away by society and excluded from literally emergency rooms, you could set one of them outside a reported shooting and if the paramedics showed up before the cops, they would see them and probably just leave. A scared mostly useless kid who had read a lot of moral but not much explicitly political philosophy tossed out into the world. I ended up reading some theory later, but mostly I critically analyzed shit-mostly systems. I have fav philosophers, but not many favs who pitch particular politics. broadly speaking, partially from my time working with tech shit, I'm a principled illegalist. I tend to prefer looking at shit myself to trusting some dusty fuck who's been dead for centuries, and use them mostly as jumping off points instead of foundations. Neitzsche might be the exception, that one's in there pretty deep, fav philosopher, would absolutely go back in time to punch him in the face, might stop baby Hitler with adoption paperwork or something while I'm there IDK.
More recently I've been painfully confronted with the fact that nobody changes unless they want to, and they never seem to want to, contemporaneous with some major losses and trauma, so for the past couple years I dunno exactly what I believe, except that some people will get very angry if you tell them the truth or treat them with respect, and also literally everything is sometimes literally on fire.
Who are you and what do you believe? Because it sounds like you only asked this so you could know how to appeal to me.