Socdem moment 
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
153 points (100.0% liked)
news
23960 readers
785 users here now
Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.
Rules:
-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --
-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --
-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today/ . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--
-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--
-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --
-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Upvote, cause in principle you make the right argument and I think Jasmine is tone deaf to use cotton picking as an example.
But let's be honest. Americans don't want to perform low paid heavy manual labour.
They aren't going to be manufacturing garments in factories or picking peaches from the fields any time soon.
So I have to credit her for making a good argument, even if she chose the wrong example.
I mean ostensibly you're right, Americans absolutely cannot and will not do low paid heavy manual labour. I think the point is that it's not ridiculous to expect somebody supposedly on "the Left" to make the leap that maybe nobody should be doing low paid heavy manual labour. This is just classic socdem labour aristocracy spoils of empire type shit, that it's fine slave labour happens, just not here.
Well yes, I 100% agree.
It is in fact possible to have well paid agricultural labour. My own family has done it. It's still hard labour, but it doesn't have to be low paid.
But at the risk of sounding like a neoliberal, I don't think it is wrong that middle class Americans, who are rich by Latin-American standards, have the opportunity to get their kids an education so that they can become UX designers, lawyers and doctors.
The same happened in my family, and we don't have anyone doing farm labour in my generation.
And I therefore also don't think it is morally wrong that poor Latin-Americans try and earn better wages so that they, too, can provide their kids the same opportunities.
Just stop the exploitation. Give them an honest wage and let them enjoy the fruits of their labour.
We're arguing the same thing I think. Hard work should be compensated with appropriate wages and living conditions, manual labourer or office worker or whoever. Ideally nobody should work, but until we build that work this is the one we've got. Labour is always morally "wrong" under capitalism because it is definitionally exploitative.
This may not be glamorous work, but this is all essential labor. We need food to survive. We need clothes to survive (in most climates 🤔), and even in some solarpunk utopia, we would need factories to build things like looms, tractors, harvesters, and whatever other machinery is necessary to automate this labor. With the pressing climate crisis, we also have a genuine cause to transition to more local and direct supply chains for a lot of purposes. We have the choice either to find a way to make this labor rewarding, or to consign it to some underclass.
Under capitalism, we choose the latter, and then we have liberal politicians like this justifying immigration not as a right to seek greener pastures, but in terms of a cost/benefit analysis for the economy. While the economic bean-counting does make more sense in practical and economic terms than an arbitrary reign of terror against the workers who keep the food flowing to our grocery stores, there is nothing liberatory about it. It is still a regime which cultivates a "reserve army of labor" which it uses the threat of deportation against to suppress the wages and rights of all workers, with the fig leaf that coffee or bananas might cost a little bit less. They are not upset by the violence of border militarism or the trade war. They are only upset that it is being used in an arbitrary, capricious, and self-defeating manner, which is why they are out here scoring cheap rhetorical points while advocating nothing more than a return to the status quo ante. They have no interest in pulling on the thread of why these jobs, which are essential for us to survive, are so alienating in the fist place.