• HaSch
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    2 years ago

    Even if this actually the thought process of these people, which I think are in an extremely marginal minority, such thinking can only be the product of their material conditions, namely the necessity to adjust to exploitative and wasteful nature of capitalism. Since the eight-hour day was established in Germany in 1918, there have been groundbreaking advances in technology and specifically automation, filtering through every field of business, which mean that there simply is not enough demand for work within the private sector for everyone to take up full-time jobs. But instead of splitting the work up so that everybody would work for, say, 5 hours a week, or take up investments so that some of their workers can pursue nobler callings, it is much more profitable for the capitalists to simply lay off large parts of the workforce instead, which then have to join the “army of unemployed”, to use a well-known metaphor. Because destitution begets rebellion, however, the welfare state then has to provide them with amenities such as government money to keep the system in place. Like libertarian societies, social democracies are also ultimately fashioned for the benefit of the capitalists, with the difference that cash must accomplish in the latter what ideological delusion does in the former.