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Originally Posted by jwb
my point was simply that labor isn't some unnatural invention of capitalism. It's been baked into our existence from the start. It's just in our society it's more indirect in terms of how it relates to the resources we procur. But the bottom line is you don't get something for nothing. Your existence has a material cost. You're responsible for paying it.
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And my point is that how modern society relates to the basic concept of not getting something for nothing has changed over the millenia and become far more complex and nuanced, so bringing up older times has the effect of oversimplifying modern realities.
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don't quite understand this statement
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It was meant to lead into my next statement to your next statement. Hence the ellipsis. Expounding would have meant repeating myself.
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You weren't born trained to work at Burger King.
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I was born trained to live in a society where Burger King and all the rest of American capitalism is the monolithic norm.
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And working on an agrarian farm in a commune would certainly involve a learning curve. But you could manage it, if you were so
inclined.
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Being inclined isn't the point. Find me an agrarian commune and I'll go there and see what happens. You can't simply shake a stick and find one, let alone a functioning one. Modern capitalistic society makes agrarian communes not simply rare but different from how they would be in a socialist society because the people who would go out of their way to create such a commune are going to be a very specific type of person and there's no guarantee that that person will be the person needed to create such a commune, and even if they were I've been raised to treat such a concept in a certain dubious way that makes me distrustful of any commune I might find. And that says nothing of how modern laws might affect how a commune should have to operate that would undermine its sustainability since those laws do not exist to sustain communes but to sustain capitalist ventures.