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It’s Labor Day here in America, a day where we honor the American labor movement.
While the history of labor here in the US is important, today I really want you, no matter where you live, to consider just one thing.
If you’re employed by someone else, you contribute a majority of your waking hours each week to building wealth and equity for someone else.
You get little to show for it. A small fraction of the value you create, and the ability to be fired at any time, for any reason (or no reason at all).
You need money to have a home and food, which means employers have immense power of you. No job means no money means you very well might die. This coercive looming threat is the linchpin of work under capitalism.
In America, we have enough for everyone, but a few have too much and most have not enough.
We generate enough food to feed everyone. We have enough homes and apartments to house everyone. We have enough clothes to clothe everyone.
But instead of giving people what they need, we destroy surplus crops and let homes sit empty and destroy unsold clothes.
I believe that if you need something to live, it should be free.
A modest home should be free. Nutritious food should be free. Clothing should be free. Education should be free. Medical care should be free.
I don’t want state-controlled capitalism (what Americans often incorrectly call or think of as communism). I believe people should be free to do the kind of work they want to and work harder to get have more if they want them.
But it is unfathomably immoral that we allow a few to collect more wealth than they could spend in multiple lifetimes while many spend their whole lives toiling and never having enough.
If you had $1 billion, you could spend $25k a day, every single day, for 100 years, and still have money left over!
But minimum wage doesn’t even cover an apartment in most cities, let alone everything else you need to live.
If you’re a consultant, working your own terms, you at least have some ownership in your business. But most freelancers I know are working really hard to make other people rich while living rather modest lives themselves.
Work-for-hire means the company owns your labor, not you.
One of capitalism’s greatest successes is that it’s robbed us of imagination.
We struggle to imagine what life could look like under a different system. How it would be better. How it would be worse. How it would be different.
Utopias don’t exist. They never will. But I refuse to accept this system we toil under—while better than monarchies and fiefdoms—is as good as it gets.
Want to learn more? I highly recommend…
- Andrew Sage’s YouTube channel for some amazing decolonial/indigenous perspectives on socialism and anarchy
- Our Changing Climate for a deconstruction of capitalist toxic traits we accept as normal
- Thought Slime’s early work
- Solarpunk as a genre
- Pop Culture Detective’s videos on solarpunk and Disney’s Strange World
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