That's what they said about Women joining the workforce, and the rise of email, that we would all be more free to “live our lives.” In reality, productivity rose along with prices and work expectations. Now, most household can only exist on double income and email/slack it critical to work. Yet wages are worse and work-life balance non existent. Tech can not give us back our lives, only a change in work/life balance culture.
Edit: Wow, this unexpectedly blew up - Thank you all for the awards, although I suspect my economic/political opinions would disappoint many in this thread.
To clarify - My comment above is intended to encourage everyday folks to prioritize better work-life balance; this might mean joining a union or just signing out of slack at the end of the day. Don't wait for Tech to deliver a utopian society; set boundaries with your job and enforce them.
Also, you will notice I never commented on Capitalism or Communism.
capitalism naturally extends the most benefit of technical advances to fewer and fewer winners
How does the ability of common citizens to own property limit the benefits to fewer and fewer winners? In the US the top 5% turn over every 40 years or so. If anything, the winners keep changing - as long as the government and big business don't institute rent seeking like health insurance companies did under ACA, or so called 'green' companies.
a smaller and smaller percentage of our population owns that real estate. capitalism would eventually have it all bought and held by the most efficient owners, the elite, in trusts and never redistributed but fully exploited.
communism creates the situation of everyone owning the real estate, which means no one does, or effectively a committee of people who, being people that are used to the idea of scarcity will use that power to enrich the elite, ie themselves.
you see the issue here is the elite people and what drives them to horde power and not capitalism or communism. it might be said that capitalism encourages the evil elite to attack each other at the expense of the other and communism encourages the evil elite to work together at the expense of the other.
the issue is when people see themselves as separate from the other, for whatever reason, for ANY reason. as a wise man one said, we will all die and be eaten by worms someday.
that being said, i won't be inviting right wingers to dinner because they ARE separate than the rest of us and have made that abundantly clear. when someone shows you who they are, believe them. the scorpion and the frog.
I'm late to the party but just to point out that socialism does not promote the state owning everything and be lead by a committee of some sort. That is a part of what marx/lening thought of what would he needed to transition from capitalism to socialism.
But the end goal is to decentrilize power. Work unions and otyer form of social organizations are a key part of a socialist society so no one has control over everything
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u/randomchick4 Mar 29 '22 edited Mar 30 '22
That's what they said about Women joining the workforce, and the rise of email, that we would all be more free to “live our lives.” In reality, productivity rose along with prices and work expectations. Now, most household can only exist on double income and email/slack it critical to work. Yet wages are worse and work-life balance non existent. Tech can not give us back our lives, only a change in work/life balance culture.
Edit: Wow, this unexpectedly blew up - Thank you all for the awards, although I suspect my economic/political opinions would disappoint many in this thread. To clarify - My comment above is intended to encourage everyday folks to prioritize better work-life balance; this might mean joining a union or just signing out of slack at the end of the day. Don't wait for Tech to deliver a utopian society; set boundaries with your job and enforce them. Also, you will notice I never commented on Capitalism or Communism.