do service workers deserve living wages, benefits, time off, holiday pay and all of the other things you get through unionized labour? of course they do.

and, do they owe us a living? of course they fucking do.

but, does it make sense to seize the mcdonalds and redistribute the hamburgers? it very clearly does not. you want to shut these kinds of things down altogether, actually, tell the customers to make their own fucking sandwich and tell the workers to find something better to do.

so, if you think you can just redefine socialism for a service economy, you've lost the plot. we should be focusing on something else, and that something else is an emancipation of our time.

the old paradox was that you need somebody to run the machines that make our lives easier, but this has largely eroded and flipped over: the existing economy enslaves us rather than emancipates us, and we consequently don't just not need anybody to run it, but would be better off shutting it down altogether. when conservatives yell about dismantling the economy, my reaction is something like "yes, please!".

i've made this point before. if you live in an agrarian society, where almost everybody owns property and produces their own products, then a free market system is the best way to maximize freedom. but, if you live in an industrial economy where class is a much more defined concept, then the socialization of production is a pre-requisite for any meaningful discussion of freedom. the problem with really existing capitalism is that it is applying free markets to an industrial economy, which by definition doesn't make any sense. so, now that we are moving into a post-industrial economy, we need to ask the question: what is the best way to maximize freedom? and, it seems to me that the answer must lie in a system, perhaps as yet unnamed and undefined, that focuses on alleviating the necessity of work. that is what is in front of us, and should be the economy we want to try and build: one where people are truly free to spend their time how they actually want to.

i haven't written this. i doubt i'll be the one that does. but, to do this, you need to start talking about redistributing resources in a way that collectivizes ownership, but not through the worker co-operative. if we end up with restaurant co-ops while the banks keep demanding their rent, we're just spinning in circles.