cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1261690/a-majority-of-americans-now-support-seizing-wealth-from-ai-industry
While 89% back mandatory safety disclosures, nearly 70% support requiring AI firms to transfer 50% of their stock to a public fund
One aspect of capitalism that many people don’t get is that capital is only capital and not just money, because you can force people to work for you, that’s why UBI or paying people based on stock values will never be enough to get your average person out of wage slavery.
Care to elaborate on that one?
It’s fundamental to capitalism
Capital is “Wealth, money, or assets used to start a business, produce goods, or invest for future growth”
Even if you don’t fully agree with the labor theory of value if you accept that it’s partially accurate, then it’s fundamental to capitalism to have a captive workforce that have to work to survive, because that’s how you turn your money into more money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
That’s why the development of modern capitalism was contingent on enclosing the commons and taking away people’s ability to survive without working in factories for capitalists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure#Parliamentary_inclosure_acts
And also why the myth of the tragedy of the commons was invented by a literal lord: https://inthesetimes.com/article/commons-practices-capitalism-enclosure-peasants-indigenous-collective-ownership
If you really want to get into the details Marx lays it out pretty well in Capital vol.1 (even if it’s not written in a particularly concise way and quite Eurocentric, I think this aspect is pretty well sourced and does explain how capitalism came to be in Europe pretty well).
So under a capitalist system, where capitalists & the state need your labor in order to enrich themselves, no alternative to labor is ever going to remove the requirement for people to work in order to access what they need to survive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_mode_of_production#Distinguishing_characteristics
So, you’re saying that the fundamental reason why people will always work is because a few rich bastards want it that way?
Sounds like a problem that has been solved many times in the past, never permanently so far but it never hurts to try again.
I was only saying that under capitalism, the system requires people be separated from the resources we need to survive and forced to work, so we should at a minimum replace that with something better.
But i do agree that as long as some people control access to what we need to survive, those people they will use that control to extract value from the rest of us
I think it’s only been solved a few times in the past, and usually that happens capitalists & authoritarian “communists” did a lot of work to prevent it spreading.