Maybe if one generalizes a bit more…take this as a supposition:
In societies, hierarchy coupled with inheritable wealth, without fail eventually creates hierarchical classes which are seen as races.
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I’m not sure what you think my position is, but I’m on your side regarding burn this piece of shit country and economic model to the ground.
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Because the cost of living is low, which means they have to charge less, which means even a similar profit margin to, say, NY would be a similar percent of revenue but lower actual dollars, meaning raising labor costs by 40% would necessarily make their business model unprofitable.
You can buy a large home on a half acre in Pickens county for $125k. Rent on buildings is lower. Fewer people to come in
I live in a state with an extremely low cost of living. $7 / hr is not a living wage. You’re arguing for Republican talking points and I can’t quite figure out why.
Show me some numbers about cost of living increases and wage stagnation in your state over the last two decades. I’ll give you a hint. Late state capitalism leads to more efficient production. The resulting gains have been going to the ruling class for decades, and not the workers. That’s why the 1% is increasing their wealth by trillions why the bottom 50% is losing wealth.
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The other thing about Pickens is that the schools absolutely suck so you don’t have a lot of educated people lining up to move their and raise a family. You have poor uneducated people that don’t have a lot of skills so the only work they can do is unskilled, which means the places moving there are places that want cheap work. Raising the minimum wage would likely force a lot of those jobs to disappear because it would either a) hasten automation or b) cause those companies to pack up and move overseas to open a sweatshop. This would cause unemployment to skyrocket in Pickens, which would mean that stuff like food which is now more expensive is even less affordable, a pretty deadly cycle.
I’m not some right wing nut that thinks the minimum wage is a bad thing, but I just looked it up and a living wage in Pickens is $11/hr and a bare minimum survival wage is $7/hour. I’d be fine with a nationwide $10/hr minimum wage with caveats that incentivize cities to go further; and Id be fine with incrementally increasing that to 15/hour over the next, day, 6 years, I just don’t think y’all comprehend the devastating shock that would cause to rural areas with a low cost of living.
I get it, I’m aware of the statistics you cite and think it’s getting worse faster than we even realize due to this recession. But that 1% you cite doesn’t really exist in the town of Pickens.
Look, I would be all for increasing the minimum-wage across-the-board if you could tie it to an independent analysis of cost of living county by county, municipality by municipality. I don’t really know how that would work but I would support such a thing. But $15 an hour won’t get your halfway what you need in San Francisco and it would be devastating to small towns across America
Castes.
Sure. Castes is an excellent, perhaps even perfect, way to frame things.
So, and to be clear, this is directed at everyone ITT, and not at just `@jalfrezi, can we all agree on this…
- Capitalism cannot exist with only two groupings of people (absentee owners, everyone else).
- Instead, for capitalism to exist, the ‘everyone else’ grouping must needs be divided in a particular manner.
- That particular manner is relative privilege. Such that those with higher levels of privilege will struggle to preserve that status-quo -vs- struggling against the absentee owners grouping.
- We can call the absentee owners grouping a ‘caste’, and we can also call the different groupings of relative privilege ‘castes’ also.
I’m throwing this out there to foster ‘vigorous debate’ regarding the topic expressed by the thread title.
So… anyone who wants to pursue this ‘vigorous debate’ as outlined in this post needs to (a) stipulate the above, (b) disagree with something in particular regarding the the above, or ( c) explain how the above framework doesn’t even make any sense.
Vigorous, not rigorous.
LOL @ having either here.
After the landlord thread, I said to myself that I’m done with intrewebs ‘debate’, so it’s probably all for the best anyways.
Caste implies birthright and heritage, which doesn’t apply to some groups here. Class is still good.
In theory I agree with 1-3, but it’s a little like some game theory situations where everyone acts intelligently. In the actual world there are still enough people in the worker class to forcibly overthrow regimes, but this rarely happens because for various reasons people often don’t see themselves as members of an exploited class, either because they don’t want to face the facts or because they are too distracted by other things to think about it.
I once shared a flat with a campaigner for the SWP (Socialist Worker’s party) and while we agreed on what the problems are I could never agree with him about his rigid class analysis that made a lot of sense in Marx’s Victorian Britain but much less sense in 1980s Britain where people had bought the idea that they could move between classes and actually join a higher class mobile through entrepreneurship or even just share buying.
Class mobility is good and all, but it shouldn’t be enough to think everything is ok. If 2 million people need to sleep in the gutter for the system to work, but we get to do some rotation of who is in the gutter, that’s not necessarily ok.
Aside from trying to figure out what system is optimal, I think it’s interesting, not obvious, and certainly not agreed upon – what sort of underclass or people not getting their needs met or people with no security is either required or absolutely inevitable with Capitalism.
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I’m not sure capitalism requires that. I think capitalism would survive if everyone had all their basic needs met - housing, utilities, food, education, health) and a much smaller number benefited greatly by having more land and wealth, moderated by government. Isn’t that the Scandinavian model (sometimes erroneously called socialist)?
There are many instances of capitalism around the world, with wide variations between them.
Ok, derail, I’ve seen some stuff on this, but 1 acre for 50 families? Bringing in a ton of resources from outside (compost etc)? You generally hear more like 1 acre per person.
I would say that capitalism requires an underclass to control and race is a clear and convenient way to separate people into classes. You can’t see nationality, ancestry or sexual orientation. However, you can easily identify people by skin color.
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I need you to define basic needs.
If basic needs are sufficient food, clothes, utilities, decent housing, education and health services then many western countries provided these before Friedman economics took over.
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Someone not educationally subnormal being unable to read or write is unacceptable in the modern world imo. Ditto for basic maths.
A minimum of 10? years free full time education for all kids to give them enough skills and knowledge of the world and enable them to gain a reliable sense of which subjects interest them the most for further study.