And, though non-essential (down there on a hierarchy of needs), beauty is important to human lives.
Though again, they remove mountains for this, the shop produces a bunch of toxic, fish killing dust and sediment every day that's slowly killing me and my coworkers and destroying the planet.
But my main point was, the things I create every day are not essential. They are luxury items. Many of the other jobs i've had were also along the same line.
Not that they don't make people happy or improve their lives I suppose,(though the people that got soapstone in their kitchen recently are in for a some trouble the first time they drop something on it or spill something acidic on it.) But, in the end, it's definitely not essential and detrimental to the world as a whole in many ways.
A country that only produces essential items (food, shelter) for its population is a very poor country.
Almost by definition, a wealthy country predominantly produces and consumes non-essential goods and services.
It gets really difficult to argue which non-essential goods are worthwhile. Is the art on the wall worth more than the stone lintel? Is it good art? Is it a second hand lintel?
It's always been like this though. In the end, there's no reason for humans to have ever made most of the things we have over the millenia other than because we can and did. Once we had food and shelter and all these things pretty much taken care of, everythong else after was pretty much just for the fuck of it and we've always been at odds with the world and destroyed and altered our environments. The scale has just kept increasing to the point where there are massive global industries devoted to this.
At the same time, humanity still follows our basic survival insticts. We still have that inner subconcious mentality of scarcity when it comes to essentials. So it ends up being treated the same way in our economy as luxury goods and you end up in this situation where people are trading non-essential things for essential things.
But what's wrong with being equal ?
And now we set these people free to live as they will. How long will the complete equality last? It'd more likely be a matter of months than years. Some would work harder and produce more enabling them to grow in resources which could then be traded for other things - giving them more than others. Others would go in the opposite direction and behave irresponsibly, such as by indulgence in drink or drug, and find themselves falling further behind. Others would make decisions such as having more children than they could afford to provide for and find themselves in severe issues. Others would simply make better or more astute decisions in general leading them to pull ahead.
It wouldn't take long before our entirely equal society was riddled with inequity. The point of this is that it's impossible for humans to be equal unless somebody enforces that equality. And this brings up two issues. The first is that the enforcer of equality is generally a group or organization that is going to be inherently unequal. Even a completely social system would require 'enforcers' of some sort lest the over achievers dare keep the fruits of their labor for themselves. The second is that you end up with radically warped reward scenarios. If you do better than average, you get stuff taken from you. If you do worse than average, you get stuff given to you. Failure is rewarded, success is punished.
These distorted systems of motivation and the inherent control required to maintain equality are the very fundamental reason that the numerous systems of equality we've tried have all invariably ended up the same. Human society only functions by people spending a pretty good deal of their time doing x when they'd rather be doing y. It's not hard to see what happens when you remove any motivation whatsoever to actually do x. It even explains the ever recurring trend towards authoritarianism and cruel behavior - it's simply an effort to try to force people to do x after you remove all their motivation to do so, and it just doesn't work.
In countries with socialized medicine, access to healthcare services is usually more equal than countries without socialized medicine.
So if some equality can be created in such an important choice, maybe it could be achieved in the less important choice of counter tops, if someone we're to bother.
Genuine question, which bits of the Soviet projects were targetting making everyone equal -- all I've seen are the bits where a dictator rides the coattails of communist ideology to subdue the people. I'm still learning about this part of history, so am keen to understand which bits were started "properly" from a communist perspective. It strikes me that in all cases a portion of society wanted to impose communism, those who didn't want to give up their supremacy (of power or wealth) perverted that system.
As (IIRC) Galbraith says (paraphrase?) "in Capitalism man exploits man, in Communism it's the other way around". The thing is that communism at least seeks to gain equality, capitalism seeks to exploit others up to the legal limits imposed.
Private property of means of production and accumulation of capital were outlawed. It was the best attempt to follow Marx tenets.
> It strikes me that in all cases a portion of society wanted to impose communism, those who didn't want to give up their supremacy (of power or wealth) perverted that system.
No. The latter were massacred in 1918. Then the remaining ones executed and sent each other to GuLAGs in several waves. Separation of wealth (even if minuscule on the scale of developed capitalism) appears to be an emergent property.
In order to get this stone, they literally dismantle mountains one block at a time, slice them into slabs and ship them all over the world. Again, all so rich people can have nice shiny stone in their kitchens.