What would you do if Capitalism didn't curb your potential and force you to sell most of your time?
I often daydream about how society would be if we were not forced by society to pigeon hole ourselves into a specialized career for maximizing the profits of capitalists, and sell most of our time for it.
The idea of creating an entire identity for you around your "career" and only specializing in one thing would be ridiculous in another universe. Humans have so much natural potential for breadth, but that is just not compatible with capitalism.
This is evident with how most people develop "hobbies" outside of work, like wood working, gardening, electronics, music, etc. This idea of separating "hobbies" and the thing we do most of our lives (work) is ridiculous.
Here's how my world could be different if I owned my time and dedicated it to the benefit of my own and my community instead of capitalists:
- more reading, learning and excusing knowledge with others.
- learn more handy work, like plumbing and wood working. I love customizing my own home!
- more gardening
- participate in the transportation system (picking up shifts to drive a bus for example)
- become a tour guide for my city
- cook and bake for my neighbors
- academic research
- open source software (and non-software) contributions
- pick up shifts at a café and make coffee, tea and smoothies for people
- pick up shifts to clean up public spaces, such as parks or my own neighborhood
- participate in more than one "professions". I studied one type of engineering but work in a completely different engineering. This already proves I can do both, so why not do both and others?
Humans do not like the same thing over and over every day. It's unnatural. But somehow we revolve our whole livelihood around if.
I don’t understand why these people think they’d have All this free time.
If there wasn’t an industry to sell us all the things we buy, people wouldn’t just volunteer to do it.
You’d be spending all your time learning how to hunt, fighting with your neighbours over territory, waging war over it likely, and dressing your kills to help feed your family.
Your wives would probably be busy trying to avoid being raped by your enemies while you’re out trying to bring home dinner and making clothes out of threads.
People think there would be starbuck’s to just walk into and start making coffees for people? Just some random dude who thinks ‘Hm, today I’m going to go and make coffees for people for a couple hours’ is this guy seriously okay?
Lemmy users do not understand why things are the way they are. They’re …. Childish. Child-like.
It’s almost like they imagine the government will be just like their parents and fund their lifestyle like they did when they were actually children.
Take them to swimming lessons, sign them up for art classes, dinner just magically appears on the dinner table everyday, they can spend all day just hanging out with friends and playing video games or whatever they want to do.
I think lemmy users, for the most part, are stuck having a crisis of changing from childhood to adult hood.
They’ll likely grow out of it, but boy is reading shit like this fucking embarrassing to adults
Here’s a hint, lemmy communists:
Without capitalism, you’ll do what the government decides you will do, for however long they decide you should do it for. If you’ve been farming wheat for 3 years and the government decides there’s too much wheat and not enough apples, you’ll be picking fucking apples for 16 hours a day, without sunscreen or water or breaks.
Or you’ll be shot and your family will be put in prison.
While the government leaders will live in big mansions free to do whatever they want.
This is exactly my thoughts on this. OP feels he's going to just 'pick up shifts' as he feels like it. Nope, it doesn't work like that. It's total fantasy, and you're description is on the money of how it really would be.
"Wow I just really feel like being a garbage man today!" ... said no one ever.
exactly
Without capitalism, we would be serving our own interests, not the interests of a minority ruling class, be it a capitalist class or one disguised by a state.
Capitalism gives you the BEST chance to make a living doing what interests you. If you don't like working for others, open a business and own capital. It's literally the rules of the game.
It does not. I spoke a bit in my post about why it doesn't. Owning a business is a bit better, but you're still operating at the whims of capital, having to do what the market deems a good investment rather than what's good for society. You also have to make sure not to ever compete with or upset a mega conglomerate with infinite money. You also still have to live with the fact that most of the rest of society is forced to live under this for profit system, which locks their potential.
So many words to say that you have a first-grade understanding of what an alternative to capitalism might look like
We have seen many alternatives to capitalism. They are all much much worse than capitalism.
You act as if humanity just popped into existence and started capitalism 200,000 years ago lmfo