By "slave" I mean somebody who is not free in the sense of:
>> A free man sells the results of his work. A free man cleans someone's house and bills him when the work is done. A free man drives passengers from the airport to their home and bills them when they get there. A free man creates a software module and bills the client when it's ready. A free man translates a document and bills per page. A free man cooks a cake and bills for it.
A free man sells results, not time.
Also, a free man takes care of the food and security on his or her own.
Is it more risky? Yes. Is it more stressful? Yes. But that's what freedom is about.
Employment contracts aside... Let's just ask ourselves, is having a job optional?
Of course it is optional, because no one is holding a gun to your head, right?
But "everybody knows" that 1. if you don't work, you'll sooner or later (perhaps sooner!) be homeless and 2. homelessness can lead to sudden, violent death.
Just because the trigger and the barrel are far apart doesn't mean it isn't a gun.
I, too, hate the endless mouse wheel of employment.
However, having a job is a COMPLETELY OPTIONAL choice that one makes; nothing is stopping any of us from living on a deserted island without a job.
Having a job is the cost of living in society. It sucks and needs improvement, but it is not as bad as slavery where you have no choice and not much gain.
In other words, we are born into debt and must work all our lives to pay off that debt. This is true in so many ways, and makes what we're talking about amount to at best a kind of bonded child labor.
You don't have to think of it as slavery, but it's very very far from COMPLETELY OPTIONAL. There is no deserted island to live on!! There are no guarantees of universal housing, or healthcare, or much else that is needed to survive. Until there are, working vs. not working can never be a real choice. The working class by definition must work in order to live.
One could potentially find an uninhabited island with soil and water among the islands in the world, like 1 out of the 5000 uninhabited ones in the Philippine archipelago. One could even hide out in a remote location on land in a random large country, like Russia.
It might take some work, but it seems possible to me.
Such a trip costs money. To secure the legal right to inhabit the island, to make the trip, and to bring enough supplies to survive.
A person either needs to use his parent's cash or to work for a number of years and save before leaving. The "choice" isn't available to him until that happens, so either his parents must work to purchase their child's freedom, or he must work to purchase it himself. In either case this is one of the very definitions of slavery.
Yeah, I stopped calling it "slavery" because it tends to derail the discussion. However, if you say that slavery gives you "no choice and not much gain" then the jobs are mostly improvement in the second aspect - you still don't have a choice, but you get a bit more in return.
I could write a long post about this but my thought process currently is that being born in society automatically includes the cost of the knowledge that gets transferred to you even without doing anything. Geting automatically registered in the system and being born in a hospital or a house with heating has an inherent cost like "society debt". I think its part of evolution and not linked to monetary systems, money is only a representation.
Don't you think the owner of this deserted island with enough resources to live on might at some point object to you being there and force you off his land?
There is no living outside of society, outside of private property and the rule of law. There is no real choice here.
> Employment contracts aside... Let's just ask ourselves, is having a job optional?
The majority of people need to work if they want to survive, that's true. So "jobs" aren't voluntary. But "a job" is. You don't have to pick plants out in a field if you don't want to. If you don't like your position, or boss, or pay, you can quit and look for work elsewhere. Or even have multiple jobs!
A slave doesn't get to say "This other company is nicer and pays better, so I'm leaving here and going there instead." But you can.
Slaves don't get to pick where they sleep, either.
Thing is, neither do most people.
SELECT TOP 1 job,residence
FROM jobs JOIN residences
WHERE jobs.pay > residences.rent
ORDER BY jobs.pay DESC, residences.rent ASC
it's common to add some qualifications like...
AND jobs.category NOT IN ('murder','prostitution')
AND residences.crime_factor < 0.4
...etc.
But that doesn't change the fact that LOTS of people believe in their hearts that they have absolutely no choice but to continue doing exactly what they are doing.
I'd hazard the guess that almost all of us have actually removed WHERE predicates because during the initial searches (back in late childhood), zero rows were returned. Predicates like
jobs.category = 'helping_people'
or
residences.climate = 'tropical'
If you are thinking that it's just not possible for everyone to have their ideal job, fine. It's not. But stop for just a second and review that survival part...
Why exactly is it so hard to survive without a job, in 2016? I mean, physically. You need air and water and food and shelter. Those are listed in decreasing order of necessary frequency.
Seems to me that the problem is rent and the social framework that enforces eviction via violence--even if the space isn't otherwise being used.
I, for one, would not die without a job--not from starvation. But I would eventually be arrested, beat up, stripped of my possessions, etc, and that would eventually lead to death. The jobless don't die--they are killed.
In those terms, we are enslaved by the existence of personal property. Or maybe by the existence of society, in general. Society's requirements force you into a certain set of paths.
> Why exactly is it so hard to survive without a job, in 2016?
Why should it not be, for a sufficiently broad definition of "job"?
Because it seems that the "survival" part could - and should - be automated away in this day and age. Just like we try and do with all the other boring stuff we don't want to do over and over and over again.
Automation is an effort multiplier, but it's not a cure-all, and it's not free. Building and maintaining the system will ultimately take some sort of time, work, or money input from people. So, if someone isn't going to somehow contribute to the input, why should they benefit from the output? And if they are contributing somehow, then isn't that a job?
Having the choice to choose which ruler you serve it's not what it seems to be. As Machiavelli wrote:
>> for men change their rulers willingly, hoping to better themselves [...] they are deceived, because they afterwards find by experience they have gone from bad to worse
