Is every person in those communities required to work, or does the community take care of those that are unable to contribute due to health conditions/old age?
Comment on Feelin free
hansolo@lemm.ee 6 days ago
You should tell this to subsistence farmers living in Sub-saharan Africa that farm nearly every calorie they consume. It’s a negotiation between them, the earth, and the uncaring sky. Same as its been for millennia. No rich people necessarily involved.
Are they free because no rich people are involved?
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 6 days ago
hansolo@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Everyone works, it’s just a matter of on what.
In the community where I lived, usually the guys did the farming, which was back-breaking work, leaning over hoeing land manually. Men would also raise livestock, be tailors, teachers, traders, barbers, and a few other jobs. Don’t get too wound up over “traders” - a guy would borrow money to walk to a large town and buy things he would sell to neighbors out of his home. He would do this until so many people said they would pay him back for the things from the “store” that he didn’t have any money to buy things in town anymore, so the town would be without things like salt or kerosene for lanterns for a couple weeks, and then people would get fed up, and one new guy would start the cycle over again.
Women pounded the millet and sorghum into flour to make food, did gardening, made every meal, raised the kids, pulled water from the well, and some other micro-level cottage industry-ish type things.
But people worked every day. Old people worked every day. Unless you got malaria or had a severe injury, every day was work until you died, and even then you tried to do something because there was always so much work to do.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Some people took care of meals and the household. That isn’t the kind of work to live that we are talking about because it isn’t directly paid.
Not to mention people with severe injuries or illnesses that can’t do hard labor. Someone with crippling arthritis will still be provided for by the community.
voxthefox@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I can imagine by some stretch you can still blame the rich, maybe without the rich people they’d have more access to better farmland, cheap water, etc.
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
If you want to simplify the thought experiment, imagine being the only person in existence. You would still need to struggle just to meet the basic needs of survival, but you would definitely not be oppressed.
HauntedCupcake@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Nature is as oppressive as billionaires. Working together helps overcome that, both when combatting nature and the asset class
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
I think that those are different meanings of the word “oppressive”, which has a moral component when referring to human actions but not when referring to natural phenomena.
Imagine the following scenarios:
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You’re alone on the planet. You struggle to survive.
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Now there’s a wealthy person on the other side of the planet, where his lifestyle has no effect on you. He could rescue you but he chooses not to.
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The wealthy person offers to rescue you on the condition that you must work for him. He would get most of the products of your labor but survival would still be easier than it was when you were alone.
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Now you have no choice except to accept the wealthy person’s offer. Survival is still easier than it would be if you were alone, but there isn’t anywhere left where you could survive alone.
Your life is oppressive in each of these scenarios in the sense that simply surviving is difficult and there’s no possibility of improvement. However, there’s clearly no moral component to that in (1) because you are alone, and (4) seems like it almost certainly has a moral component. However, in every steps from (1) to (4) you’re either better off or not worse off than you were before. Where does the moral component come from?
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hansolo@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Lol, so desperate to be the victim of an imaginary rich person that you don’t even understand that it universally takes work to do things like eat food.
How do you think people got food 10,000 years ago? Or 30,000?
Do you think being a hunter-gatherer society is a vacation? Who were the rich people before money was invented that apparently caused things like drought?
Shardikprime@lemmy.world 5 days ago
The kind of comments I’m reading here explain a lot of why Dems lost the election
They are willfully disconnected from the reality of their fellow Americans
They don’t see it
hansolo@lemm.ee 5 days ago
I know, right?
Elrecoal19_0@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Rich people are very likely at fault, too, given that shitty countries are handy for cheap labour and materials, like coltan…
hansolo@lemm.ee 5 days ago
Explain how that works with a village of 350 people 4k from a paved road, where no one can or does work outside of the village doing farming work.
1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 6 days ago
The lack of rich people doesn’t imply freedom - people who are forced to hunt, gather, fish or farm for subsistence only with no reward beyond that are enslaved to the need to produce food and find shelter, but that differs from a society where there’s sufficient food and shelter, it’s just hoarded by those who have too much
Additionally the presence of rich people doesn’t imply a lack of freedom - you could have a “safety net” system where everyone is guaranteed housing and enough grains and beans/similar to survive, and if they want more they can work for it (some of the taxes from this go towards compensating farmers and builders), giving people the freedom to not have to worry about survival, while also allowing for people to earn lots of money and buy nice things if they want and/or can
Rooskie91@discuss.online 6 days ago
We live in an economically connected world. An argument can be made that they’re forced to subsistence farm in a backbreaking and cruel way due to the natural resources of their country extracted by oligarchs that don’t even live in Africa.
Wherever poverty exists, rich people are involved by their sheer unwillness to share enough to meet everyone’s basic needs.
hansolo@lemm.ee 6 days ago
That really isn’t the case for large parts of rural Sub-Sahan Africa. For literally millions of people, they are growing crops basically about the same as their ancestors, in the same area. Maybe now they have mobile phones. It was ALWAYS hard labor.
Is everyone in this thread rich American college kids or something? Why do you all think the natural state of the world is Utopian paradise where leopards and impallas are best friends?
skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Because we had the technology and the money to create that world back in the 90’s. Now we’ve got twice as much money and twice as good tech in the world and yet 95% of people still have to fight for their survival. This could be a reality if it weren’t for hoarders.
jaybone@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I thought bill gates cured poverty in Africa because he’s such a nice guy.
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 6 days ago
Pretty sure you’re thinking of AIDS, not poverty.