A very compelling narrative, thank you for sharing! Based on my limited understanding of history and economics and sociology, it feels true. But I’m no expert :)

The one point that I don’t really understand is:

It is not possible to work, or be compelled to work outside of society. Until we have socialism nothing compels us to work outside of social classes. I wouldn’t be working if my bourgeois didn’t compel me to.

This doesn’t make sense to me. My functional definition is that work is just expending energy to transition something from one state into another. Moving a boulder up a hill is still work, regardless of motivations of the actor. How are you defining “work”?

The problem I have with “voluntary” is that someone can still fall into the category of being exploited, either willingly or without their knowledge, and still happily and voluntarily participate in an unjust relationship

Not all of us ahem bourgeoisie ahem

I meant moreso that it compels us outside of the structure of a society, which also precludes any social classes. One cannot be bourgeois if one does not live amongst others whom they can subjugate.

of course, however what makes a societies differ is exactly what gets filled in to the “…”

Ha! I was trying to refer to the idiom without being verbose, not leaving those blanks as variables.

I guess my take is that what determines a society is more how “ability” and “need” are defines, that way the social structure is not oversimplified to a single one-sided relationship. E.g. a feudalist would claim the serfs need protection from thieves and bandits, and a lord has the ability to provide such protection; the lord, conversely, needs grain and the serfs have the ability to farm it

Consent is a bad metric because it ignores externalities—stuff like economic incentives, implicit threats of loss of basic needs, propaganda, trauma. Someone can be said to consent to exploitation, even if they only did so to continue surviving under oppressive economies/states. I “consent” to have the value of my labor extracted, pooled, and distributed to business owners in the same way I “consent” to the privacy policies (and the sale of my Personally Identifying Information) of the software the company I work for requires us to use (to remain employed)

That’s why I prefer focusing on exploitation. Someone doesn’t have to know they’re being exploited, agree that they’re being exploited, nor even want to not be exploited for it to still be unjust to exploit them and identify when it is happening. Veganism is a stance against animal exploitation.

Nature compells us to work for food anyway, that’s not exploitation and coercion, that’s just survival.

The construct of society is predicated on the idea of “from each… to each…” That saying often gets conflated with left-wing politics, but that’s just the point of animals (humans included) grouping together; after all, what’s the point of living in society if it doesn’t convey any benefits to the individual that they could not provide for themselves? That would be exploitative of the individual. But if they are benefitting, then it is only fair and just to also give back to the society one extracts benefits from, otherwise it is exploitative of the others.

Put another way: no one should be obligated to participate in society, but then society should likewise have no obligations to the non-participants.

Services as subscriptions: fine. They are ongoing agreements that require an unspecifiable amount of labor, it makes sense to pay as you go.

Subscription goods? Fuck that. If I am in posession of it and responsible for maintaining it in a specific state of operation and quality, I basically own it anyway.

Charging me monthly for a pocket-sized computer with the added stipulations that the seller gets to dictate what I’m allowed to do with it, probably installs spyware on it (on top of the OEM and OS spyware), and if I break it (or otherwise violate the terms of use) I have to buy it anyway and they still get to keep it? They’ve basically reinvented a mix of payphones and library PCs, but more invasive and more expensive

Nobody wants to point out that Alexey Grigorev changes to being named Gregory after 2 paragraphs?

Slop journalism at its sloppiest. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that this story was entorely fabricated.

Time and again, across years and product categories, Amazon has reached out to its vendors and instructed them to increase retail prices on competitors’ websites, threatening dire consequences if vendors do not comply.

Yes, buying from alternative websites is the bare minimum and the bar is so low it’s underground. But that’s beside the point: Amazon is price fixing across the internet.