this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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I'm going to be honest here, I am extremely confident that even if free housing in something like a homeless shelter and free cheap basic food was provided on a universal basis free of charge by the state, thus eliminating the "work or starve" situation by ensuring everyone's basic biological needs can be met without labour, the people who make posts like this one would then claim that "work or eat boring food" counts as coercion.
The state has the capability to keep people alive. That's not the issue. People are generally not content will merely being kept alive and not sick. They want to live enriched lives with access to air conditioning, video games, cell phones, hamburgers, and national parks. All of that takes an enormous amount of labour to produce.
The food doesn't need to be boring. But even under that assumption, it would still be less coercive, and therefore better.
It sure does, but we live in a time of historically unheard of automation and excess. Over a century ago Kropotkin calculated a 5 hour work day/300hr work year to be the minimum needed per worker. And we've had a shit load of technicological advances since then. Even with the increases in amenities I'd be shocked if the true current number isn't drastically lower.
And your examples are all examples of things that people would genuinely like to work on. For example Mr. Technology connections is obsessed with heat pumps. I'm working on open source games, even while currently living under the coercion of capitalism. And I wouldn't mind putting significant time into working to maintain a nation park, so long as it didn't mean that it fucked with my food, shelter, and healthcare.
Of course, I don't think that food served to the needy (or to the vagrant, in this scenario), should be boring on purpose, and of course those in charge ought to endeavour to provide whatever variety is possible, but it just so happens that the types of food that can be most easily produced, and thus the most efficient in terms of converting hours of labour into calories, tend to universally be judged as boring. I'm guessing it will be a lot of grain, maize, potatoes, and soybeans.
I absolutely am not going to take someone's word on the notion that 300 hours of labour per annum (which is a one hour work day) is sufficient to maintain the current standard of living.