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You should tell this to subsistence farmers living in Sub-saharan Africa that farm nearly every calorie they consume. It's a negotiation between them, the earth, and the uncaring sky. Same as its been for millennia. No rich people necessarily involved.
Are they free because no rich people are involved?
We live in an economically connected world. An argument can be made that they're forced to subsistence farm in a backbreaking and cruel way due to the natural resources of their country extracted by oligarchs that don't even live in Africa.
Wherever poverty exists, rich people are involved by their sheer unwillness to share enough to meet everyone's basic needs.
I thought bill gates cured poverty in Africa because he’s such a nice guy.
Pretty sure you're thinking of AIDS, not poverty.
Rich people are very likely at fault, too, given that shitty countries are handy for cheap labour and materials, like coltan...
Is every person in those communities required to work to eat and have shelter, or does the community take care of those that are unable to contribute labor due to health conditions/old age?
I can imagine by some stretch you can still blame the rich, maybe without the rich people they'd have more access to better farmland, cheap water, etc.
If you want to simplify the thought experiment, imagine being the only person in existence. You would still need to struggle just to meet the basic needs of survival, but you would definitely not be oppressed.
Nature is oppressive, so are billionaires. Working together helps overcome that, both when combatting nature and the asset class
I think that those are different meanings of the word "oppressive", which has a moral component when referring to human actions but not when referring to natural phenomena. You can only be wronged by another person, not by nature.
Imagine the following scenarios:
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You're alone on the planet. You struggle to survive.
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Now there's a wealthy person on the other side of the planet, where his lifestyle has no effect on you. He could rescue you but he chooses not to.
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The wealthy person offers to rescue you on the condition that you must work for him. He would get most of the products of your labor but survival would still be easier than it was when you were alone.
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Now you have no choice except to accept the wealthy person's offer. Survival is still easier than it would be if you were alone, but there isn't anywhere left where you could survive alone.
Your life is oppressive in each of these scenarios in the sense that simply surviving is difficult and there's no possibility of improvement. However, there's clearly no moral component to that in (1) because you are alone, and (4) seems like it almost certainly has a moral component. However, in every steps from (1) to (4) you're either better off or not worse off than you were before. Where does the moral component come from?
At step 3. Where the rich person forces conditions onto you and takes most of your production. That is immoral. Especially if he has the resources for both to survive with less effort just by not being selfish
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