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comment by smoorman1024
smoorman1024  ·  4089 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hipsters, Food Stamps, and the Politics of Resentment

    If it is increasingly impossible to disentangle the productive and unproductive parts of human activity, then we can reconstruct the old producerist dogma in a new way: everyone deserves to be provided with the means to live a decent life, because we are all already contributing to the production and reproduction of society itself.

I was on board and thought the author was making a different point until this section. I thought the author was arguing for a greater tie of wages to value. Instead he said, everyone deserves a basic living wage just because.





user-inactivated  ·  4089 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    I thought the author was arguing for a greater tie of wages to value.

The author certainly does support that, it's not mutually exclusive to the next point.

    Instead he said, everyone deserves a basic living wage just because.

Is access to food, water, shelter, &c not a human right? In our current situation where literally every bit of land is someone's property, the class of people who have no property are absolutely dependent on a receiving a wage to survive. Employment will never reach 100%, so if you reject the policy of a universal wage, you are condemning the unemployed segment of the population to homelessness, starvation, and death.

Also, many people do significant work, but are unpaid for it due to the way our society treats the social mode of production. A universal wage would partially resolve this.