re: #346 darthstar

The jobs people want are the ones where you get to drive a Maserati, always go out for lunch, spend two hours a day at the gym, are surrounded by beautiful people, and don’t have to do anything. And make a lot of fucking money.

Tell someone they can get 150 dollars a day and they’ll do the math and realize that’s 3k a month and be excited. Point them to a field of dirt hiding delicious little tubers and suddenly it’s not that exciting.

Right. And back in the 18th century, when people were coming up with the philosophical/moral framework that underpins the “private property” clusterfuck we have today, there was at least a fallback option: you could head out west and stake a claim to some land.

Now that wasn’t a picnic, of course, it was a very hard option to take. But it was there, and it allowed people to have agency and to some extent to determine their own life outcome.

Now, there’s nothing. It’s work for peanuts in the blazing sun, or get puny social support that’s being slashed every day. Either way you’re fucked in the long term. If you’re twenty-one today and in the bottom third of what people laughably call the “classless” US resource scale, your prospects are extremely limited. That’s why the OWS demands are “that of a peasantry, rather than a working class”.

The media have done an excellent job in distracting people from this reality, but then the Catholic church managed that in the 17th century for a while and the guillotine still came out eventually.