this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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Memes of Production
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For that matter, what form of society has ever not been like that for most people?
Native tribes of the Americas circa 1400 AD at least
This may be a shock but both hunter-gatherer and subsistence farming lifestyles are work.
Which is still far superior than current capitalism.
In this work, you are your own boss, you work when you want, from to until you want to.
You decide the work for today.
No stress, you want to go sleep or jackofr you can.
You get all the profits
You own it
Etc.
Sure. If you want to die.
Hunter-gatherers work long hours not because they think it's thrilling, but because if they don't, they literally fucking die. Like, that's the point of hunter-gatherer work. Not dying. That is what it is oriented towards. There is no local vegetable market they can go and buy food from.
No, the season decides the work for today. And the weather, and the growing cycle of the plants, and the animal migrations. If you want to go against those rhythms, that's just an elaborate way to perform suicide by starvation.
"No stress, just life or death."
Uh.
What profits? What ownership? You're a hunter-gatherer. You can't meaningfully own anything more than you can carry on you from place-to-place. That includes food stores. And every pound carried is an additional cost incurred in calories that you will have to work to make up for. And who are you going to trade with? Your fellow tribesmen, who are in the same position as you? They're not going to have much to trade, and in any case, a 'gift economy' is more likely wherein it would be more accurate to say that you don't really own anything so much as constantly owe the community.
For how many hours/day?
More than 8, I promise you.
Subsistence farmers work sunup to sundown. Hunter-gatherers have it somewhat easier, but there is a very distinct reason why complex societies don't generally arise from most hunter-gatherer systems, and it's not because hunting and gathering makes you dumb. It's because it's not really a system that affords a lot of flexibility in terms of what you do each day, regardless of how many or how few people there are in a region. Your rhythm is decided by the rhythm of the whims and wishes of the environment, where the animals have gone, how the wind has scattered the seeds last season. And your best knowledge is a very broad statistical guess as to what will be where, and in what quantities before competing species beat you to it.
The good thing is that you can be done very quickly some lucky days, whereas subsistence farming demands the full-time labor all the time. The bad thing is that you can burn an entire day for next-to-nothing, whereas subsistence farming is at least reliable. The worse thing is that your cushion against literal starvation is much, much smaller than even a subsistence farmer's - and subsistence farmers live much closer to starvation than any of us.