‘I got a powerful need to eat’
why use carrot when stick work
Not at all. This person is only describing life/work in some of the post-WII developed world. Historically, this is the anomaly, not the norm.
For a large part of recorded history, the formula was that land/resource holders offered anyone the cheapest, lousiest, and worst acceptable conditions in exchange for work. The conditions of the resource holders also actually sucked, and when leveraging economies of scale, offers of relative physical and economic security (sure, you’ll be kinda poor, but you don’t have to travel to another town to sell grain to survive because the Lord will always buy it from you at a “fair” rate.) were typically the value add that made it worth it to consider share-cropping under nobility as opposed to simply going it alone.
I’m not sure why Reddit and Lemmy seem so hell-bent on this fantasy version of history where farming is a joy denied us by the wealthy, but its hilariously misguided. Considering where things are headed, it sounds like for many it will end up being a dangerously wrong fantasy that others can take advantage of easily, and people that post things like this will learn the lesson first hand.
How is that not true anymore? Here in the UK home ownership is increasingly a dream for the younger people so guess what - you’re 100% reliant on work/pay to make rent on a home and to have stability for your family
What the image mentions was true for a few decades and for a minority of humans only. Home ownership is still at a very high level compared to what it was even 100 years ago. Hell, you should know that if you’re from the UK, people used to live in towns that were developed and owned by the factory owners, that’s how they managed to move people from rural regions to the city so quickly, outside of that, housing in the city was no better than the slums we see all over the world these days.
If you go back far enough, weren’t 100% of homes privately owned?
No. That was never a thing.
How do you mean?
?
The way they made people work for wages started at the barrel of a gun. “We take your (public) land, now you work in a factory or starve”. All the rest you think are due to Capitalism, is in fact the victories of the working class struggles, which they’ve been trying to dismantle for the past century. If anything the system resets itself to its original form.
“We take your (public) land, now you work in a factory or starve”.
Where can I read more about this?
The GP is talking about the dismantling of the Commons in England during the Industrial Revolution.
Anyway, it’s not that simple. English even got the term “tragedy of the Commons” to refer to what was happening before the dismantling. Those people still were plainly stolen, yes, but the value what was taken wasn’t that clear. Also, people were escaping the Commons into factory jobs way before they were taken.
