The Path of the Unarmed

Chapter 13: Your worth is much more than your job, work, or contribution

"So, let's take up that question of the definition of the working class," Disarmed said. "What's wrong with the statement that 'if we don't work, we starve.'?"

"I don't think it's true," Unarmed said. "I've been reading a little bit about hunger, starvation, and famines and it seems to me that throughout history, people only starve in war or siege situations. Nobody starves out of laziness, or out of an unwillingness to work. They starve because other people prevent them from getting food, usually after their own crops have failed because of war, or bad weather or some plant disease or some other disaster."

"Good work, and with some grim reading too," Disarmed said. "I also haven't found a case of people starving out of laziness. So the whole idea that 'if we don't work, we starve' is a kind of myth. In our capitalist system, there are many ways to starve, but none of them have to do with laziness. It's more that you would starve if you can't work, or if your parents can't work, but even then it's more likely that even after being denied work you'd also have to be denied emergency help and even charity - which usually happens in, like you said, wars or sieges."

Unarmed said: "So, why do the leftists who wrote that, think that?"

"You remember that capitalists produce propaganda, and a lot of what we do as leftists is try to free ourselves and others from that propaganda. One of the greatest tricks the capitalists have pulled is making everyone feel like they have to work, that if they don't work - and specifically, work in a job helping make profits for a capitalist - then they will starve. That it's capitalists who are stopping you from starving by employing you. When in fact, it's capitalists who are perpetually threatening you with starvation by taking the land, which belongs to everyone, and what the earth produces, which belongs to everyone, and preventing people from accessing it unless they pay rent, work for wages, and buy things for money which they probably have to borrow."

"But then they're not wrong - it's true that if we can't work, we starve, because capitalists make it so."

"Yes. If you read about Indigenous nations in North America that were destroyed by the Spanish and British empires, or African countries or Asian that were colonized, the empires made war, committed genocide, took land, forced them to pay taxes, worked them to death in mines and plantations - made sure that if they didn't work, they starved, and sometimes made sure they starved even if they did work. Starvation is mostly unknown outside of war, except for very rare and extreme natural disasters (during which working harder couldn't have helped)."

"Well that definitely helps me understand why I thought the statement 'if we don't work, we starve' was inaccurate. But are there other problems with it?"

"Definitely. Capitalists want us not only to fear starvation if we don't work for them. They also want us to measure our very worth in terms of how hard we work for them: in other words, in terms of how much we contribute to their wealth. 'Hard-working' is a term of praise. And so is the flip side of it, consumption, being rich so that you can buy and consume a lot of things, held in esteem. If you're not working, you're 'idle'. If you're unemployed, you're a 'loser'. If you're living on some form of social assistance, you're reminded that 'no one owes you a living' and you're taking without contributing."

"But if you're wealthy, it's considered fine to be idle. Working or not, you're not a loser if you're rich. If you inherited wealth from your parents, you act like you're owed a living. And business models are all based on taking without contributing - mining corporations take from the ground, the big tech corporations take your data without asking --"

"-- and the biggest example of all," Disarmed said. "Banks money out of nothing, and get governments to treat it like it's real. I've been reading this anthropologist, who argues that most of the time the way people are motivated to work in capitalism is through debt. People owe debts for studying, for buying homes, for weddings and funerals, for cars you need to get to work - elements of necessity in daily life that can't be accessed without debt, even though people are then judged for having debts."