So, kyle kulinski just put out a video on how a CEO is "excited" about firing workers because of AI, with the CEO saying they dont go on strike or ask for a pay raise. And....he's acting like this is comic book villain level stuff. I mean, it can be interpreted that way, but it doesn't have to be. This is just the reality of jobs and labor.
I mean, this is a big premise of my ideology, so I'm going to bold it and make it clear. BUSINESSES DON'T WANT TO HIRE PEOPLE. THEY WANT THE MOST WORK DONE FOR THE LEAST AMOUNT OF MONEY. IF THEY COULD GET RID OF ALL HUMAN LABOR AND REPLACE IT WITH MACHINES, THEY WOULD.
That's the thing I really wish people would understand. Work under capitalism is servitude. It's wage slavery. The left has this weird view that work is dignified and they want fair wages and fair working conditions. But...at the end of the day, they want to preserve the social contract as it exists, ie, the idea that workers HAVE to work, and businesses HAVE to pay them. It's not an arrangement either side actually likes IMO. But we all pretend to like it, because we see labor as necessary for survival, and we structured society and conditioned people to accept the idea that work has to be done, they should want to do it, and they should be paid for it.
But...if you ask me, almost all evils under capitalism come from this wage labor system. This is literally the point of my own ideology. Unlike marx, capitalism doesnt just alienate people from their labor, as if work is good and it's just the capitalist mode of production that's bad. No, work itself is bad. And to bold the other side of the above claim: We shouldn't want to work. We shouldnt want to spend all day on a factory line making widgets. We shouldnt want to spend all day asking customers if they want fries with that. Eliminating wage labor would FREE humanity.
The whole thing is, we need to then come up with another system that distributes resources to people. Currently, people are expected to work, and they're expected to be paid by employers. And employers never ever did wanna pay. Hell, the entire history of capitalism outside of the new deal era was oppression and wage slavery and the new deal era only managed the symptoms of that rotten system, and didnt address the root causes. We need another system of economics to some extent if we're going to move past wage labor.
And for the record, it doesnt have to be full on socialist. One of the only reasons we've been on this treadmill of work for so long is because business leaders have feared that if we kept automating away work we'd automate ourselves out of capitalism. Businesses wouldnt be able to make money because they'd value their freedom from work over buying more crap. So FDR set the system up around the 40 hour work week and here we are almost 100 years later still using his system, except with most of the worker protections stripped out of it, leading to a return to gilded age like conditions and attitudes.
But yeah. That's what my ideology is about solving, and that's why I believe we need a second new deal or economic bill of rights that guarantees an income, healthcare, eduation, housing, and reduces the work week gradually over time. We should WANT to see the end of the wage labor system. We should cheer it on. As I said, businesses don't wanna pay us. And quite frankly, I dont wanna spend my life working. So why don't we just...do away with this crappy system and come up with something else?
Btw, I dont think businesses realize what they're doing. It's possible the dark enlightenment types see the next stage of human development as returning to feudalism as, after all, they see the state as their army to protect their property rights. But, as a believer in democracy, and as someone with left wing ideas, I believe that the answer is that, yes, the voters have to vote to redistribute property away from the rich toward everyone else. And again, that's what my own ideology is about. I'm not a dark enlightement MFer who wants to give corporations all the wealth while we have nothing. They'd LOVE for society to go in that direction as we transition away from the 20th century wage labor system. BUT, if we want society to work for ALL of us, yeah, we need redistribution. And that involves a lot of taxes, and that involves people getting paychecks for doing nothing, and healthcare, and housing, and education, etc. And the wealthy arent going to like it. The economy exists for us, we dont exist for it, and what's the point of all of this wealth in the first place if it doesnt go to us anyway? This is where i start sounding a bit leftist, but the system is inherently unjust, if we exist just as cheap labor for rich people who sit around hoarding wealth all day. But to be honest, that's what the wage labor system is, and always had been. So yeah, I cheer on its end, and hope society can reorganize itself around a more humanist ethos where we quite frankly DON'T have to work any more.
Quite frankly, I think Kyle, and a lot of the left, misses the point. Like, they are just stuck in this weird 20th century idea of a fair day's work for a fair day's pay, when that was just the compromise all along. And it was a crappy one that at best was done out of the necessity of getting the work that had to be done, done. In reality, we shouldnt want to work, just as businesses don't want to pay us. But they should pay us anyway, because it leads to a better reality for us all. Just do it through taxation and expansive social services. It really is that simple.
EDIT: Okay i watched the rest of the video, I reacted hastily in response to the first minute, but he kinda is at the point of "what do we do if we get rid of all the jobs?" Well, to answer that, I'll paraphrase scott santens. If we give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If we teach a man to fish, he eats for the rest of his life. If we create a robot to fish for us, do all men starve or do all men eat? And that's the question and it really depends on what we do to address this. If we have a society as it exists now where everyone has to work to eat and that's the ironclad law of society, yeah, you're gonna have a bad time when you transition away from that. But if we have a society where we recognize that property is just a social construct in the first place enforced by men with guns, we realize we can change it. It really just depends on what the men with guns do. Do the men with guns defend the privileges of the wealthy? Or do they tell them "no, you have to share."
That, for me, is the core difference between the right and the left. Between the christian worldview that underlies capitalism with its protestant work ethic, and a more humanist worldview. Does society exist for the sake of the wealthy? or does it exist for all of us? because historically, property rights primarily exist for the sake of the wealthy. Heck, the whole idea that we are entitled to nothing and have to work for everything was a construct created to make us have to serve the rich. Because they create the jobs, and we're expected to work them. ANd then they get all of the rewards and we get what's left over. Again, all new deal liberalism was, was a compromise that they had to pay us decently. It was basically the idea that the rich had to share a bit. But only if we worked for it. They never addressed the work thing. I do address the work thing. Just provide us all money and basic services, and let the economy work as it always has. If people want to work for more money, fine, as i dont think we'll ever do away with ALL human labor. But they shouldnt have to. And income and wealth should be distributed in a way to lead to a utilitarian outcome for all in society, ideally according to some rawlsian "veil of ignorance" style fairness. And that's where we get UBI, and that's where we get universal healthcare, and all of the other stuff I'm for. That's the path forward. And that's what the left SHOULD be emphasizing, rather than being luddites and preserving an old compromise neither side was truly happy with.
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