Ok, so chapter 13, I don't have that much to say. Mostly went over like medieval governments and feudalism and how monarchs generally owned all the land and gave it to lords who were loyal to them, or as rewards for military conquest. Peasants could use the land as they wished to some extent under a "usufruct" system.
Chapter 14 made me very rationally angry. I was gonna say irrationally, but it's not really irrationally, but rationally, so yeah. This chapter went into the enclosure and colonial movements, and how the peasants were forced off of the land in Europe through mass privatization, and native americans and other natives elsewhere in the world through colonization. The government granted land rights to the wealthy, and the commoners lost all access to the land for their own subsistence. Basically, the movement turned people into wage slaves, and this is how we got the system we got today. And if anyone wants to know about America, yeah, it happened here too. Mostly because railroads didn't want people just having their livestock graze near train tracks, and because they wanted to continue to systemically deny freed black people rights to use the land. So we literally designed these systems that keep us propertyless, and force us into the wage labor market to survive. And as we know, the wage labor market doesn't have any real obligations to ensure that they meet their basic needs. To be fair, Im not really saying that the system would be perfect if they did. Again, for me, the core issue with capitalism is forced labor, the fact that people are expected to work long hours for a system that doesn't even give them a living wage in return is just...sick.
Yeah.
But that's where we are today, and that's the system we're born into. We justify this private property system and the idea that property is sacrosanct and you need to work in order to meet your needs and blah blah blah, and this whole system was designed by a bunch of discount philosophers and used by governments to justify erecting these unjust systems over us. it literally is like the matrix, it's a system that exists to turn us into batteries in a sense.
I'm not saying the leftists are right. Even if they are in large part right in terms of the history, their solutions are trash, and we saw what they look like when given control. Communist systems seem to be closer to going back to the monarchical system that private property evolved out of, rather than something resembling the next stage of human evolution. I mean, leftists didnt even try to abolish work. Like wtf. You're given free reign but because you dogmatically take some old bearded dude's labor theory of value a little too literally you force work on people via some system of obligation, and yeah. And we could say "well why not tax the land and give people a UBI that way"? Because I did the numbers on that. And it doesn't free people from dependence on wage labor. All that would do is force people off of their land and hand it over to the corporations to develop apartment buildings that are more dense and they can use the land more efficiently. Geoliberatarianism isn't really a force for freedom. it's more propertarianism, it just has these weird views on land that make sense on paper but the actual policies don't work out the way they're supposed to.
So what is the answer? Well, I'll stick to the same platform I've been for all of this time. UBI, medicare for all, free college, student debt forgiveness, a housing program, and a mini green new deal. I mean, I went into this already knowing the solutions, all this really does is make my case for those solutions stronger. Before, my idea of why we should prefer not to work over a system of work was mostly because it was how i characterized the good life. For me, work is an evil, a blight on society and humanity, and we should strive to work the fewest hours possible and to spend time on other things. If we need to force people to work to maintain a society capable of meeting our needs, fine, but we should be trying our best to wean people off of it.
Of course, the biggest roadblock I came across with that was people claiming the inherent injustice of taxing property others worked for and redistributing it. I believe the infringement on freedom and "rights" would be worth it under utilitarian principles, as the obsession with property rights is what keeps us all working, but reading this makes me realize it's so much worse than that. This system was literally designed by forced to rob us of our agency and force us to work. Like, we have the receipts now. It literally was designed this way. We literally replaced previously existing systems and forced people off of land where they farmed and foraged for centuries, in order to force them to make widgets in factories. And this is what we have today.
Yet here we are beating our chests and calling for more jobs and priding ourselves on what good little workers we are. It's sickening. We are literally brainwashed by centuries of propaganda here. "Arbeit Macht Frei" is the rallying cry of modern civilization, and rather than calling for meeting peoples' needs directly, we insist they must continuously jump through hoops here. We created this prison ourselves. Well, technically the elites created it and forced us all into it, but we collectively reinforce it even now.
As I see it, we can live however we want. There is no rulebook. Christianity is false, the bible isnt a rule book. Be fruitful and multiply and seize the land and work are not legitimate commands. Much like the story of private property and appropriation and the hobbesian hypothesis, they are myths made up to justify our suffering. I wont say that all of these myths were made with malice. SOme were made by people who legit had no idea how the world worked so they made up myths justifying how things were. But that doesn't mean we have to live by those words. We can make our own narrative. And I say we try to liberate people from the religion of work. We created this prison, now let's unmake it and turn it into a paradise. We have the resources, we just need a few tweaks to society and boom, it's a much better place to live.
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