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a more rational system would provide extensive retraining programs and a systematic way for people to access alternate work possibilities. a more rational system might consider full employment to be a desirable system goal.
what folk do not seem to understand above is that these" lazy" people often--but not always--simply reproduce the characteristics of the system as a whole. libertarians have no way to think about this, so they attribute system characteristics to moral dispositions and in the process create this distinction between the virtuous petit bourgeois who lives shoulder to the grindstone and the Others who are parasites--and in this division lay the latent fascism of this viewpoint. nothing more. nothing less.
if you don't believe me, you should read some fascist discourse about the Problem of the Parasite--or, for a more surreal experience involving a floating version of the same type of category to designate the other, the Short Course of the History of the Soviet Communist Party, one of the great bits of collective auto-fiction written by the central committee of the CPU at the very height of stalinism--look at the lovely figure of the "hitlero-trotskyite wrecker"---it comes to the same thing---the imaginary system is understood as adequate-to-perfect in itself, left to itself---and problems are blamed on Outsiders as a function of some unchanging Personal Defect. put that into motion in the context of some Mission to Purge Society and make everything hunky dory--which is a logic that is not alien to libertarians when you get them talking about this "parasites" or "lazy people"--and the outcomes can be ugly indeed. a kind of Epic Ugliness lay there.
wake up. read some histories of capitalism in its actually existing forms--you know stuff that doesn't rely upon ridiculous separations which would lead you to think that capitalism died one fine day in 1856 in some obscure gunfight in kansas---but the actual sequence of systems, what they've been like, the centrality of crisis, the range of responses. the only way libertarian ideology makes any sense at all is in a historical vacuum.
this thread is frustrating because one side operates from inside this vacuum, substituting arbitrary anecdotes for anything remotely like system understanding. there is no way to reach an understanding if you are not willing to put the assumptions that allow you to avoid history into play. there is no way to even have a conversation that goes anywhere. what you get are long train-wrecks like this, which insofar as anyone learning anything is concerned might as well not happen. and this applies as much to myself as anyone else---there is no motivation to interact if you say the same things over and over and nothing happens. change for a moment how you think about the socio-economic environment you operate within---anyone who works from a social-system viewpoint can move to the anecdotal and understand how a worldview operates based on it--but there is no reciprocity.
so be it.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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