I have been talking to a friend about my socialist ideals, and there are a couple of things he said in response that I'd like to address publicly, not just to him. My friend said: "As I understand it you are suggesting that everyone should be able to live without 'working'."
If this is the case, he misunderstands it, but only slightly. I am suggesting that each individual should be able to live without having to work. Without being compelled to work. The pivotal point is the idea that we do not have enough, or advanced enough, technology that things can function without anyone doing anything... but that we do have enough technology that we could, conceivably, fill all the roles truly necessary for everyone to have a decent minimum of safety, comfort, and happiness, on a volunteer basis.
And that even more easily, we could produce significantly more wealth (measured in things like food, living spaces, technology, medical care, and other goods and services both basic and luxurious) than would be required for everyone to live at this comfortable minimum standard... and portion some of the extra stuff, particularly the luxurious and higher quality or less fundamentally necessary stuff, as rewards to those who do wish to work.
The system would not be that different, fundamentally, from the way it is now, save that instead of having to earn enough money to cover our rent, groceries, medical bills, transportation, education, legal assistance and all other services we require... we would automatically be entitled to a certain adequate standard of every one of these free of charge, regardless of status or wealth.
If we wanted a higher standard of essentials, or wished to indulge in extra things like a night at the movies or theatre, some fun new technology, travel to a far away land for a vacation, or things like that...
Those. Those are the rewards that we might be compelled to work for, were the satisfaction of a job well done and desire to actually do something useful with our own special talents not reason enough. Not to mention social status and respect for being a benefit to society in general.
Really doesn't sound too far from current reality, does it? It isn't too hard to imagine a world in which there are some grocery stores where you don't even NEED money, you can come and get a certain amount of food to take home for free. We technically already have those in Canada, if you think about it. Food banks, we call them. Odd, that it should be called a bank when it's one of the few places in the modern world that does not deal with currency in any way. There would be some apartments that you could live in free of charge, albeit likely comparatively small ones without the best features or design. There would be places where you can get second hand or lower quality furniture that nevertheless is sturdy enough to trust, and fulfills its function as well as you need it to.
And I would hope, as I expect anyone else would, that these minimum standards, the way people can survive even without giving anything back, will continue to improve... I hope that they'll even gain a little bit of ground on the continually advancing cutting edge of technology, as time goes by. Maybe in 2024, the poorest people in Canada will still have easy access to technology that's only two years old, things we haven't even begun to dream up yet, and the richest will have what was invented in their own yesterday.
Now for the other point I'd like to address. "The key question that comes to mind is this: from the fruits of whose productive work do you take the resources to support those who choose not to work in the capitalist sense?" And that is a good question that a lot of people feel compelled to ask people who believe in the ideal of socialism.
It is phrased in such a way as to not be the right question, from my point of view, since from my point of view no-one should be 'entitled' to keep for themselves the entire fruits of their labour to begin with. Human culture simply does not work like that, it involves trade and sharing. Not everyone can cook, not everyone can build, and not everyone can hunt... or wants to, for that matter, for any given of the three. But a skilled cook can cook for a hall full of people, a builder can build many houses, and a skilled and lucky hunter can bring home enough meat for his entire tribe. It is not presumed that we would be better off in a society where the hunter keeps all the meat, the cook prepares meals only for himself and his immediate family, and you don't live in a house unless you can build one worth living in. I realize that the concern is how we can justify asking anyone to provide services even to those who are giving nothing back - why the cook should have to feed not only the person who built his house and the person who brought him the meat for his cooking pot, but also members of the community to whom he owes nothing, who have not exchanged services with him. I'll get to that point a little later.
For the sake of fairness, I can answer the question as asked. Whose productive work? Anyone who is willing to do the work just for the sake of doing it, or with an understanding that it is by virtue of others' similar willingness that they have the things they cannot produce independently and would not always be able or willing to trade for. Love for the work itself, a genuine desire to help people, or a desire to contribute for social validation and bragging rights are all good reasons to work and it is possible to find people who are willing to help other people just because they are people and they have needs and desires to be met, which "I" have the power to fulfill. If this were not true, there would be no volunteers in the world. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
The historical solution that most "civilized" societies seem to have adopted to solve the matter of human beings developing specialized skills and needing to be able to share them without general societal disarray and confusion over who was trading what for what has been to try to measure the values of each of these contributions against each other, and use physical tokens to represent value contributed to society and thus earned, versus value taken back from society and thus spent. Thus, currency is born, and we just try to get all the prices for things figured out in such a way that everyone contributes to the group in order to benefit from it, and everyone makes enough to afford the things they need, when they need them.
Oh, what a great circus act THAT turns out to be.
Enter endless arguments about whose services and goods are more valuable, more necessary, higher quality, and otherwise worth more money, endless jockeying for social position and wealth, and a million and one little traps into which we fall by trying to make sufficient quantities of necessary goods readily available to everyone, even the poorer classes. How badly has this completely fucked over the industry of simply growing plants, the first stage food industry and probably the single most essential job in the history of the human race? Not to mention that tokens can be easily misplaced or even stolen, so even if the balances are set to an impossibly ideal and perfect balance, some people who feel that they are not well enough compensated for the work they do may go about trying to correct this by imposing a small re-compensation tax from anyone they find they can get away with taking it from.
But back to the plight of underpaid farmers for now. One might well ask, if one wishes to pose a question, why the businessman and the doctor and the lawyer should, and indeed whether they should, "give up" part of their justly earned wages and the fruits of their labour, for the benefit of the lowly farmer, whose goods are appraised at a much lower price?
But of course, the answer is obvious. Because while some of us may greatly value the convenience of the businessman's newest appliance, be desperate for the defense of a good lawyer, and sing thanks to the doctor for his help fixing your broken leg and your sister's ulcers...
We all, even more importantly, need to eat.
The fact is that the art of civilization is effectively the co-operation of all or at least most people within it, with diverse skills, talents and strengths. We work together, and together produce a world of convenience, plenty, power and security that would not be possible otherwise.
Then the question comes down, as indeed it must, what of the invalid? What of the children? They don't have anything for us to buy from them, they don't have any services to charge us for...
... Does this, then, make them useless? Not in the case of the child, surely, for children grow up and learn skills to share, they contribute when they are older. The invalid? Some of them can be healed (ah, the power of the good doctors at work), and can contribute with concrete skills, but some, alas, will never be able to do so competitively if at all. So what of them? Do we allow them to live half-lives, buy whatever lowly scraps of food, and live in whatever slums, their lesser efforts can afford, until they waste away?
No. We don't condone this cruelty. We believe, as well we should, that simply being human is virtue enough that one should be able to survive with some comfort and dignity by that virtue alone, and it is with this reasoning that we will sacrifice some of the wealth we do not technically need for the good of those who can give nothing back. It is commendable and human of us to be so generous.
There is, however, another problem yet unsolved, one that is much less obvious. It has begun to creep up on us, but we still seem very reluctant to acknowledge it.
Actually, there are two, and they go together.
Firstly, again, there is the matter of how to balance the importance and values of completely different services and products, in order that they be appropriately priced and fair. Here, there is a fundamental problem. The more valuable a thing is, the more dramatically it makes life better, we assume, the more it benefits society when it is contributed, so it should be worth more money. That stands to reason. On the other hand, the more important a thing is, the more important it is that everyone be able to afford it, because it may be necessary for their wellbeing, and the wellbeing of a person is inherently important. Everyone, including people who don't have much money. Therefore, the more important something is, the more affordable it should be, the less money it should cost. It stands to reason.
However, the result of these two perfectly logical conclusions interacting is that the most important, basic and vital parts of society, the things we literally cannot, or would not want to live without... are the things that we reward people the least for providing us with. We will make our inventors and psychologists and lawyers and businessmen rich and privileged... And leave farmers, teachers, doctors, and the producers of things that everyone needs, like simple clothing... poor. So poor, sometimes, as the results of flaws in the system continue to build up, that they may not be able to afford any more than a life of basic essentials. It should be no wonder, then, if we find ourselves short of people willing to do the hardest work, that is the most important... and because of our twisted hierarchy of what deserves how much money... the least rewarded.
The second problem is that as technology progresses, it becomes much more efficient and autonomous. A garden that takes a whole family to maintain can soon be run by one, or else multiply in size and still require the same amount of labour to farm due to advances in weed and pest control, new fertilizers and better tools, like tractors and machines for threshing wheat.
A database of information that once took a dozen people and an entire room to write down, keep track of and maintain can now not only be expanded a hundred fold, but even with all the extra information, be kept running and maintained by just one person using a sophisticated computer, while simultaneously being accessible to literally thousands of people at once without using additional work hours, thanks to the wonders of the internet.
Routine medical tissue tests that once had to be done by eye and took hours can now be automatically checked by machine in minutes, with an astonishing leap in reliability.
Et cetera.
In each one of the cases above, it has become possible to provide the service involved to many, many more people at once... with an actual reduction in the number of people who need to spend their time arranging for it to happen. This has occurred in every single industry, which is very much to our credit, and the number of new industries we've invented now that we have the spare people to power them, while impressive, does not actually fill up the difference.
In the middle ages, it may have been necessary for the survival of a village, that everyone spend long days labouring at their assigned tasks, because otherwise there would not be enough food, or adequate defense, or enough houses, for them all.
We no longer live in that world. The percentage of people who need to be farmers to feed us all has fallen dramatically, and we even have the luxury of more choices in our foodstuffs, with a trading culture so strong that we can get fresh or close-to-fresh produce of almost any kind from anywhere in the world, all year round.
With more efficient practices and better tools as well as many more drugs and medicines and a completely evolved sense of how the human body works, we need a smaller percentage of the population to be doctors to keep us in good health.
Even with inventors, scientists, politicians and government officials at all levels, teachers, plumbers, engineers and the creators and producers and maintainers and servicers of every new invention we've come up with, and the veritable army of customer service personnel, accountants, waitresses, cleaning staff, and salesmen (a job which I am convinced provides no benefit to society at large whatsoever by its existence), there is still a huge block of the population who are not employed in any of these fields... that we can afford to, and do, provide basic services for anyway.
There is, quite simply, nothing that they are actually needed for. There are, of course, always things that could help, new ideas to come up with, smaller, unnecessary but pleasant roles they could fill...
But there arises a new problem. Firstly, that many of these people may simply have no idea what additional benefit there could be for them to provide, worth the time of doing it... And secondly, and most damnably, the rather massive problem that even if someone does come up with a wonderful thing they could do and be good at, and make humanity richer by the doing... there is a very good chance that they will not be able to find anyone willing to pay them to do it.
With the same hierarchy of value and importance that devalues food production and teaching the next generations simply because they are so important that we need them... this same system by which professions jockey and push for dominance, where a million different voices of producers and servicemen proclaim "I am the one worth the most! I deserve the best reward!"... some of the most humane, generous, beautiful activities that human beings can come up with...
...Are ranked so low, that they are awarded no compensation at all.
Consider relief and community project workers in foreign countries, many of whom work without pay, or even pay for their "hero vacations" themselves to help cover the cost of supplies. Consider the fact that the Global Fund to fight AIDS has been suffering considerably for lack of donations from world governments, and a couple of times, has come close to having to suspend vital operations... like giving free AIDS medicine to impoverished Africans. Thankfully, campaigning and philanthropy have kept it above water... so far.
On a less serious note, why is it that skilled, old fashioned craftsmen, makers and repairers of fine wares, need to be shutting down their shops and ceasing business when they are still providing excellent service and goods that should be considered valuable, and the space they are taking up is not needed for anything bigger or more important - no, it's likely there are already empty and unused shopfronts in the same neighborhood?
The answer is that while we value these things, or at least claim to, when it comes to paying the bills, we have to prioritize and assign, decide where our money is going to go. For some reason, our currency, the manner by which we measure and trade and use wealth to ensure that everyone gets a fair share, not only creates inequity but actually causes us to discard some of the wealth we already have, by placing a limit on what we can "afford" which is completely independent of both the wealth we actually have, and the number of people we have available to do work for us creating wealth.
It creates complicated scenarios in which it makes more sense for a company to treat its workers more poorly in order to increase overall efficiency, despite the truth of the fact that workers perform better when treated well and kept healthy, and also despite the moral problems with such a business model.
It creates a world in which we have more than enough food, technology, manpower and skill, all just sitting there, to feed everyone the most delicious feasts we can imagine... and instead of doing that, we obsessively keep track to make sure that no-one gets away with taking more than they can pay for, even if it means we have to throw food away and make it useless rather than give it to someone who is hungry but has no money.
And due to the extensive legal issues surrounding money and its transactions, we actually have a significant chunk of the economy which is effectively entirely dedicated to cleaning up the messes left by its own flaws!
The money system and the requirement that people earn money from employers willing to pay them started out as a good idea to keep things organized, but like the original printing press and European feudalism, it has had its day. We can do better now. We have the technology. The times have evolved past it, and frankly we do not need it anymore. It places pointless artificial limits on the amount we are able to do, encourages greed and hoarding and theft by putting far too much value in tiny, useless coins and papers, and makes just as many problems with value assignment and prioritization than it solves by making sure everyone has to contribute... even though we do not actually need them to.
If we stripped away the redundancies and accounting and sales that money makes necessary all by itself, I am confident that we could care for 100% of the people using the man hours and skill of 10% of the people. We could do it better, more efficiently, and with less grief all around, than we do it now. It would be just another mighty leap forward in social efficiency.
Even if we just restricted the use of money to certain luxury industries like travel and entertainment, and the finest of material things, we could make our society much more streamlined, efficient, and inherently more caring and generous. We could stop making 10% of the population work 40 hours a week and get 50% or more of the population to work 10 or so hours a week, too, if we wanted to. I bet people would be happy to volunteer for shifts like that. I did it myself, for a while.
And that, actually, is my final, and most personal complaint.
Me. Myself.
I am a goodhearted, intelligent, insightful person. I have the skills and the power to cheer and console, to help people through their problems and keep things in perspective. I have lots of good ideas.
And the way things work now, I am not authorized to act on any of them without paying thousands of dollars I do not have to be lectured at for a few years first. Because society "can't afford" the risk that I might do it wrong and hurt someone.
Fuck this world. I want to go home. I want to make home. Here. So damn well fucking let me.
