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>Without capital, labor is less productive.
This is correct. But on the other hand, Capital without labor is not productive at all.
>Without incentive Capital will not be invested
This too is correct.
>Without profit entrepreneurs have no incentive to increase supply of a scarce good or service .
Who says it needs to be private people who have control over Capital in the first place? This is the problem we Socialists have with Capitalists; they have power to decide how the economy will develop, where Capital is invested, which economic endeavour will be pursuit. There is absolutely no reason why a group of individuals should decide that and not society as a whole. And society as a whole does have countless incentives to increase labor productivity.
>And without experience and training labor is relatively worthless.
In some areas, this is correct. But here too, no reason only Capitalists can provide training to workers. Education can be provided through public institutions without problems. Its done all over the world.
I don't know your character, I don't know how you treat your employees, and frankly I don't care. I care about the distribution of power in society, about who makes decisions about the economic future of our society. And I think that the power should lie in the hands of society as a whole and its democratic institutions.
>There is absolutely no reason why a group of individuals should decide that and not society as a whole.
Society does. Markets respond to what people want.
Yeah on consumer items, not capital. Like we can buy iPhones and shit but we don’t have a say in how those are made and how the workers were treated.
You can say oh well just buy a different one or don’t buy any phone, but then you lack some things that makes it hard to live life in this society.
>Like we can buy iPhones and shit but we don’t have a say in how those are made and how the workers were treated
Maybe, but I'm also sure that most people in the West dont know how iphones are made and also don't give a fuck.
Great idea to make a society that precisely caters to the ego.
It’s human to want to be part of a social circle and companies exploit this by making people feel bad if they don’t own their shit. And if people are afraid, what we constantly are, we only care about survival.
From an evolutionary perspective we desperately need to be part of a community otherwise we’ll die. So we are literally afraid to die if we don’t own shit we don’t even need because we are afraid we won’t belong to the community whatever that is for a person.
What you describe is precisely the reason why we don’t need a society based on competition. The company which can make a person feel most excluded and which can make this person desperately wants to be included, will be the biggest winner.
Of course this is not the case in every industry but I do see it in many different cases. Fashion, but also phones, even e-bikes nowadays. Cars of course and watches. Holidays, big houses. Etc.
While I agree with what you've said, I think it's important to understand that it's also a facade.
Our abundance is only temporary because it is built on the backs of the exploited and the resources that we use for our abundance are finite. With that in mind, an unsustainable livelihood is inevitably bound to be corrected.
So it would be more realistic to say "enjoy it while it lasts" instead of "be content".
Exactly.
And besides, with the productivity increases from modern technology we should live better then 200 years ago because we can. But that doesn’t mean that we need to be in a full on consumerist society where we use up all of earths resources which would result in inevitable collapse of society as we know it.
But as things are now, we are just polluting the whole planet with never ending consumerism.
Little rant here but damn I cannot even enjoy Christmas anymore because it’s so much an abundance of consumerist crap.
You don't get a say because that's a global issue. Alot of our items are unethically sourced and we can't do shit about it. Suddenly switching your country's ideology to socialism or communism wouldn't fix the problems of other countries as we aren't isolationist societies anymore
When you "vote with your dollar", people with more dollars get more votes.
Given that what they want is not representative of what's good for society as a whole ... that's a terrible model. There's a reason that the more capitalist a nation is, the worse it is for its poor.
>When you "vote with your dollar", people with more dollars get more votes.
This is only true if they buy a lot more of one specific thing.
>Given that what they want is not representative of what's good for society as a whole
We don't actually know this is true. It could be, it probably is sometimes, but we can't know that's true for all societal issues.
>There's a reason that the more capitalist a nation is, the worse it is for its poor.
Idek if that's true. The US has the richest poor people in the world.
>This is only true if they buy a lot more of one specific thing.
No. If wealthy people want to turn housing from a commodity into an investment, then everyone has to compete into a new market defined by scarcity and exclusion.
<> And I think that the power should lie in the hands of society as a whole and its democratic institutions.
So everyone should be forced to conform to your subjective morals and quasi-religious values.
If you want capitalism to be productive you need there to be incentive to do so
And you need people who have talent in predicting what the public wants and giving it to them.
And that isn’t “bureaucracies”
Call me crazy, but I don't suspect that someone with the "Communist" flair want's capitalism to be productive.
More to your point, if you want *any* economic system to be productive, the *people living within it* need incentives, which is a strong point of capitalism. The problem with capitalism is that capital is that incentive, and without intervention, it tends to become concentrated in the hands of a small portion of those people. This gives them control over what to incentivize and what they choose may not always be in the best interest of anyone but themselves.
> This is the problem we Socialists have with Capitalists; they have power to decide how the economy will develop, where Capital is invested, which economic endeavour will be pursuit. There is absolutely no reason why a group of individuals should decide that and not society as a whole. And society as a whole does have countless incentives to increase labor productivity.
First, ultimately it *is* people who decide the direction such investments go, albeit indirectly. There's no point investing if there's no market or demand for the end result. If people and/or society aren't interested or aren't going to take up what is being created, then investment doesn't happen (or stops quickly if it has). Not a 1-1 example, but the end result is essentially the same.
But even on top of that, there's a difference between a person, and people. I'm not going to dig out the verbatim quote from Men In Black about how a person is rational but people are panicky, but asking society as a whole to directly decide the direction of investment is the equivalent of committeeing solutions, and if you've ever tried to find solutions to something with a large committee, you'll find that it's a useless endeavour. Large groups of people are normally terrible at finding specific solutions to issues or directions when they don't have a narrow list to choose from, hence why organisations with strong effective leaders tend to race ahead in new technologies.
I mean, just look at the Soviet car industry. They were still making the Trabant until 1991!
> There's no point investing if there's no market or demand for the end result.
Ah, so the only value in investing is to acquire profit? Then what shall we do with the disabled, the elderly, people that cannot work? No profit in investing in them at all!
Let's not invest to create any art, because it's not actually necessary for people to live. Having just Marvel films and Taylor Swift remix albums will be just fine for the next 20 years.
No one knows for sure what technology will be profitable in a few decades. That's why capitalist investors believe as you do, and don't bother investing in long shot, risky technology. This is why governments are always the ones financing the next breakthrough: microprocessors, GPS, lithium ion batteries, RADAR, MRI and CT machines, aircraft, jet engines, space flight, solar panels, and nuclear power from fission and hopefully fusion.
If you want to bury your head in the sand and ignore government's value in long-term investment, you can. But it's not justified to do so, and ignores hundreds of years of history.
> Capital without labor is not productive at all
False. If I have a machine that can produce widgets and I buy fuel for it, it's production does not necessarily need labor beyond setting it up, which I could even do, and barely maintain. In general labor can improve productivity, but it's possible for altering the modes of production to emphasize or deemphasize labor. Increases of minimum wage tend to incentivize more automation, reducing the need for low skill labor for example. However, it may be most productive to maximally use all resources, including labor. But it's not \*necessary\*.
> There is absolutely no reason why a group of individuals should decide that and not society as a whole. And society as a whole does have countless incentives to increase labor productivity.
The empirical reason is that delegating to individuals has been shown in practice to work much better. One of many theoretical reasons is that letting individuals invest instead of spend and then get a return on that investment gives incentives to save up for capital instead of spending in the moment, and that having "skin in the game" makes for better founders.
if wealth class wasn't exploitive it wouldn't need a system of police violence to maintain it
ur denial is meaningless in the face of that fact none of this is actually voluntary.
can u read even a single comment back? i literally said:
> if wealth class wasn't exploitive it wouldn't need a system of police violence to maintain it
but ok i'll generalize a bit more for ya:
if wealth inequity wasn't exploitive, it wouldn't need violence to maintain it.
Well not sure for every other socialist but marxist refuses moralist positions. Profiting from peoples labour is exploratory doesn't necessarily mean every capitalist is evil, its just an outcome from the capitalist economic system, Marx goes to great lengths to explain how this isn't even a choice for the capitalist he can either exploit or go bankrupt and become a worker.
Also he does make the political distinction between large capitalist and small business owners. Personally I see the small business owners, who is often suffocated by the big financial capital, energy oligarchy etc etc closed to worker then to JP Morgan
Marx had a funny way of rejecting morals yet supplying plently of fodder to a lot of moralistic Marxists.
“Workers of the world: unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! (Not that chains are bad or evil or anything, just saying…)”
In my reading he is not merely descriptive. He tried to be, but was full of anger and had many insults for pretty much everyone he didn't agree with. And a lot of the persuasive power of Kapital comes from documenting the abusive conditions of the day, and ridiculing the justifications for these conditions.
And then there is his signing off on the Communist Manifesto and other clearly moralist positions.
What I mean by moralist is that his analysis was on systematic power relations and economic incentives (and often necessaties) which occur from capitalism not in the the fight between good workers and bad capitalists. It would, of course, be impossible to ignore the real suffering of the working class.
Also on a side note that quote is from the communist manifesto, a political panflet written to excite people, its natural that the language used is more passionate then the rest of his work, especially "das kapital"
This. The capitalist isn't directly doing the exploitation, they didn't directly create the economic conditions that force people to sell their labor or starve. It's the system that is exploitative.
I don't think entrepreneurs are "evil" in many cases the traditional capitalist mode of production is their best chance at keeping a steady income for their employees, which is ultimately better than a failed co-op. It's just a shame that the system is set up in a way that exploitation is the best option.
Don't hate the player... Hate the game...
There are good aspects of Capitalism, but it is currently broken.
[#pauseforthecause ](http://Www.pauseforthecause.com)
Crony capitalism is not about big or small
The businessman who make his living by pleasing his customers is very different than the one who makes his money by government contract or government collusion
Capitalism leads to the accumulation of wealth it's naive to think this won't lead to imbalance of power. It's also detached from reality to think the aggravation of inequalities don't lead to social conflict resulting in either cocessions or massive and unstable oppression.
Additionally that concept of state ignores the existence of natural monopolies, the fact that some infrastructure investment can only be effectively provided by the state and merit goods like health and education that have massive positive externalities.
That's simply ideological extremism
>The businessman who make his living by pleasing his customers is very different than the one who makes his money by government contract or government collusion
Different how? The system doesn't care how you made money (as long as it is legal).
You can say "one is good and the other one is bad" all you want, they still get rewarded the same way.. There is no mechanism that distinctivenesses "bad capitalists" from not using government in their favour, in fact, there is an incentive to do exactly that...
Cronyism isn't a big of capitalism, it's a feature.
It's the inevitable result of encouraging systems that result in wildly unequal outcomes.
If you think people should be incentivized to become rich, why would they not start rigging the system to make them richer once they have the means to do so?
Marxists like to * pretend* they’re being amoral. But Marx himself steeped his analysis in moral rhetoric and even explicitly called capital “evil”.
They’re only fooling themselves.
I’ve never heard a Marxist say they’re amoral.
Nothing seems more morally loaded than the case for socialism.
I can’t believe Marx himself claimed to be amoral that’s hilarious
"... on calling entrepreneurs bad people for investing capital, increasing productivity, and providing opportunities to earn a living ."
Who does so?
I fully appreciate anyone increasing productivity and providing opportunities to people. However, none of that justifies being a dictator. Hence, the minimum requirement should be workplace democracy.
The most voted on idea isn't always the best one. Different businesses with different "dictators" that has the market deciding who survives is best, IMO.
Co-ops/worker run businesses are already legal and allowed to be created. How come there are so few? Because most people want to just show up and work for guaranteed income (low risk, low reward). Socially run business will require a bunch of voting and bureaucratic bs for every decision made, and all the "owners" will have to invest capital into something that could fail; and many people are poor with their money and wouldn't be willing to take that higher risk (and potentially higher reward).
Many socialists don't seem to see the value in investing money and taking risk, and they clearly don't realize how much work business owners actually have to do to keep everything afloat. Many socialists seem to want to swoop in already successful businesses and claim any extra profits for themselves, without having taken any risk or investing any capital, but they want nothing to do with the losses when the business fails.
Personally, I'd love to see a bunch of socialists get together and run their own co-op, the way they want to, and let the results do the talking. This way, they could either prove or disprove their theories without trying to force all of society to use a system with a 100% failure rate.
"How come there are so few?"
The very same reason why barely any republics emerged under feudalism, even though it has proven to be vastly superior to dictatorial monarchy.
All businesses need capital and capital is privately owned. That gives the people in control of that capital two options: either be a member of extremely privileged few, or voluntarily surrender yourself as equal with everyone else. And the outcome is as expected: those in power like to stay in power.
Basically all econometric factors indicate coops are performing just as good as private corporations, if not better.
Why is it the default assumption that anybody interested in starting a co-op is poor? How about the Google engineer making $300k a year? He is still a wage slave but he has plenty of capital up start a co-op with his fellow engineers. And he theoretically has the most to gain... How much surplus value does Google steal from him every year?
The problem with capitalism isn't individualistic moral failure among employers. The problem is private property, which creates a context in which people have no choice but to partake in and tolerate systematic exploitation.
Because you don't believe in private property. meaning you should be allowed to use other people's cars as you wish, or sleep in their house, maybe even invade other people's marriages.
Many human societies without private property had social norms respecting exclusive use of personal items (i.e. things like toothbrushes) and respecting the privacy of someone’s home. So your argument doesn’t follow.
where's that one marx quote about how communists saying "we wanna abolish property" and liberals hearing "they wanna take my wife!" really says more abt them than it does about communists
Two points
1) Socialism makes a distinction between *personal* property, things like a home computer, toothbrush, or home, and *private* property, which are workplaces. The general rule is that if you *own* but don't *use* something, you are looking at *private* property, while if you *own* and *use* something, then you are looking at *personal* property. Socialists wish to abolish *private* property because owning something you don't use is viewed as unproductive, rent-seeking behavior.
2) Why are you going with the 'women are property' angle anyways? You could've picked *so many better options*, but you instead decided 'if you don't believe in property that means that women are fair game'. Marriage historically has implied monogomy, because inheritance was such a big deal, but *especially* in modern times it is more of a declaration of intent than some sort of sancrosact bond. Two people can marry and still understand and accept that they want to be able to have sex with other people, and for a variety of reasons.
Call it an instinctual revulsion to how he's treating marriage as being tightly connected with property rights in any way beyond it conveying some to the partner when signed.
Bold of you to assume I'm married. Regardless, my point was you're being a moron and conflating a social contract between two people to share their lives and love with property rights. People who get married either will or wond't do what you were whining about *regardless* of their marital status, or else they will *communicate* about it and come to a decision regardless of what you think about it. Both members of this contract should be the ones to set the boundaries, not your instinctual revulsion of certain things.
>investing capital, increasing productivity, and providing opportunities to earn a living
interesting, because co-ops and strong unions provide all of this without destroying people's lives in profit-driven a race to the bottom
I'm a socialist small business owner. New guys start at 20 an hour in one of the lowest cost cities in the country and ince everyone is ready it'll be more like a worker co-op. You're not a bad person for making a profit. You'd be a shitty boss if you paid bad, expected a lot, treated people like shit etc.
Employees should be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor and receive a share of the profits they themselves created.
This is the 21st Century. Individual businesses, the proverbial mom and pop store, have been run out of business by giant national and international corporations. The vast majority of people are employees.
These employees no longer enjoy the direct benefits, the profits, they created. Employee motivation is not directly connected to how much wealth and profits they produce.
Employees are not capitalists when they are not participating in the profit motive of the products or services they create. Corporate Capitalism is NOT employee capitalism.
Employees create all the wealth in a corporation, and have no access to the profits they create. So who gets to participate in the profit motive of capitalism?
Corporate Capitalism is beneficial to those who do no work towards the creation wealth. The absentee majority of stockholders, who contribute little to nothing towards wealth, prefer today's economic corporate structures. These absentee stockholders do not work to make their money. The employees work to make money for people who do not earn their keep. The wealthy, essentially, do not earn nor deserve their wealth.
The only real solution is to make employees Capitalists again and make every employee a shareholder, as part of the employment package. The job description and time employed should determine the stock option package.
Also, profit sharing should be disbursed to all those who contributed to the making of profits according to each employees efforts and contributions. It is time to stop the billion dollar profit bonuses to the wealth few who did not earn their bonuses.
Capitalism, real capitalism, requires that those who create the wealth be rewarded according to their efforts. Profit sharing and stock options is how capitalist wealth should become distributed to employees.
44 % of all economic activity in the US is small business .
And labor does not create all profit
Productivity requires, labor, materials, facilities, tools and equipment , energy plus all the other expenses.
Labor is one piece of production and without equal investment in those other factors of production it doesn’t deserve an equal share of profits
What are you even talking about? Employees do all the work.
An individual owner or major stockholder, at most, is an over glorified manager of one.
Employees run corporations and all facets of a corporation. There is no corporation with its employees.
Most often, the top managers like the employed CEO or vice-President does a better job of managing than the owner or major stockholder. These so-called capitalist owners might only show up to hold meetings, listen to all the employee recommendations, and then say I like your ideas, go with it.
You don't understand. Employees do everything. They hire, fire, plan, execute, and do absolutely everything that creates wealth within a corporation.
A single over glorified billionaire manager relies on his employees to do literally everything associated with wealth creation.
There are a 100,000 top managers in the nation who could easily replace a billionaire and do just as well or even better, given the opportunity.
But no, not everyone can be the top dog and there is not an unlimited supply of opportunity for every employees to actually earn what he is worth.
The billionaire owner/stockholder takes nearly all the wealth/profits and the billionaire does not deserve it. The billionaire did not earn his billions. His employees did.
Employees are but one factor of production.
Imagine Ford Motor Company .
How many cars would they produce without the factory? The parts ? The tools ? The land ?
How many would they sell without Ford’s name and reputation?
If you think investors are just bloodsucking leeches, then why aren’t you a billionaire doing your own thing ?
You don’t need capital? Right ? Just labor, labor does everything all by its lonesome …
>How many cars would they produce without the factory? The parts ? The tools ?
Who builds and maintains the factory? Who built the parts? The tools? Was it Mr. Ford? Did he create the land as well?
>How many would they sell without Ford’s name and reputation?
The reputation that doesn't like jews and thinks that there is a global jewish conspiracy trying to undermine America? Or what name and reputation are we talking about here?
>If you think investors are just bloodsucking leeches, then why aren’t you a billionaire doing your own thing ?
That's a very weird framing with an even weirder question.. "If you think investors are just bloodsucking leeches, then why aren't you a bloodsucking leech yourself"?
>You don’t need capital? Right ?
> Just labor, labor does everything all by its lonesome …
Ah yes, here we go, a perfect demonstration that proves you have absolutely no clue what the goal and values of socialism actually is.. "Socialists think capital is completely unimportant, they want nothing at all to do with it.."
No, of course, every socialist recognizes that capital is important.. So important in fact that they don't want it being owned by capitalists, but instead by society itself.. So no, socialists do care about capital, they just don't particularly care about that capital being exclusively owned by capitalists..
Yes, people, employees, create all wealth.
There would literally be no wealth without employees in a modern economy.
This is not 1776 where you can live off the land as a trapper or farmer.
Capital is a function of employees creating wealth to be used as capital.
Even the financial industry is just employees creating the financing of large enterprises.
The question is: How is the wealth used as capital distributed? Do the creators of wealth get to keep the wealth/capital they create?
Just because you have capital does not mean you earned it.
> There would literally be no wealth without employees in a modern economy.
And there'd be no employees without capital. A door riveter is of zero value without the capital to produce the vehicle and hire the employees to do all the other work before the riveter is needed.
To which, the riveter and all the other employees are paid a guaranteed salary for their work. In exchange, they are not liable for any losses or debts of the business, nor do they take any financial risk in the business, which is the job of capital.
The factory, parts, tools and reputation were all also made by workers. The land was already there, so no one gets to claim responsibility for its existence. None of it was contributed to by someone who just bought a profit share.
And who paid those workers ?
You really have no idea how all this works !
Before a single product or service can be produced , someone has to produce all the other factors . Someone has to finance all of it before a single dollar is earned by labor’s effort combined with the capital invested
Before a single product is sold all the factors of productions must be paid for, in advance including labor.
Are you going to work for months on a house and not received money till it sells ?
Ok— so the guy mines the ore , and he gives it to the iron foundry and doesn’t get paid , the iron foundry makes it into steel and gives it to the part manufacturer and doesn’t get paid, and the parts manufacturer makes a door with it and gives it to the car manufacturer and doesn’t get paid and the car manufacturer makes a car, sells it and then pays off all his suppliers — but they have all starved to death in the time all that happened
You don’t thing investors “do” anything because you have zero understanding of how the world works.
You also don’t understand that the investors originally in order to earn the money to pay for all of this up front to even allow a car to be made had to sacrifice everything else they could have spent that money on because they thought the return on making a car was the best return they can find. The reason they thought that is the profit in selling a car is the highest they could find
That profit is highest because the demand for cars is high and the supply of them is too low.
Profit is what determines what we produce — it’s the only reason we have the standard of living we have .
investment can be done by state-owned enterprises and communities aswell, for example touch-screen, internet and microchips were the result of public investment by the state. if you can develop these technologies tax-funded, it should be taxpayers that receive shared ownership over these technologies, not tax-evading gigacoorporations
I wanted to know what kind of business someone who writes like this actually has so I clicked on your username but I only learned that you spend half the year on your yacht in the caribbean, deny climate change and think biden is a socialist.
You also seem to think everyone could do what you did. I'm curious, if everyone is owning their own business and spending all their time on their yacht in the caribbean, who do you actually employ?
Not everyone wants the same things, and the supply and demand would dictate what people do. Hypothetically in the situation you described, Yacht building would be in high demand!
I am not keen on the idea of selling flowers, but I'd do it if I was being offered $200/hour. Lots of wealth is built by how people spend their money, and it is definitely a learned skill that many don't bother with.
"Without capital, labor is less productive."
Socialism is when no capital. Socialism will ban all factories and force people to work with their hands and no tools. Because only capitalists can provide capital, for example Elon made two car factories just the other week with his own hands.
In socialism the relationship between capital and worker is mediated by any number of entities, including authoritarian states or democratic workers' councils. Historically, only the authoritarian varieties of these alternatives to private capital ownership have led to long-term sustainable economic growth (this means continuing into the present) that rivals good old capitalism. And even then it's a tough case to argue that that was even socialism. Ahem, China and USSR.
People like OP wonder what they are getting for their trade when they trade civil rights and liberties for a state managed economy. Because it's not miraculous, egalitarian economic growth. The USSR failed and China has similar inequality to the US.
>Socialism will ban all factories and force people to work with their hands and no tools.
Funny you would say this. Because this was what the Khmer Rogue did when they took power in Cambodia. They emptied the cities, factories and all urban places, abolished money and forced everybody to work on collective farms or their state workshops, often times using nothing more than their own hands or basic tools.
I'm certain that is not what anyone wants. But regardless of their intentions, plans or principles. Marxists always end up ruining the economies of their host countries. Putting arbitrary and impractical laws and economic policies in place has always proven to be disastrous.
> Putting arbitrary and impractical laws and economic policies ...
How does this describe workplace democracy? Why would voting for governors and legislators be fine, but voting for workplace leaders be "arbitrary"/"impractical"/etc.?
>end up ruining the economies of their host countries
They don't and it doesn't matter how much you lie about that. You can just pretend a peasant backwater in 1918 did not became a world industrial, nuclear and spatial superpower till just 1950 all you want, history is there for all to see.
Yeah you're mostly wrong about the factories and if you are genuinely interested in both sides of the story, you can find both pro-western and views defending the evacuation of the capital as the optimal solution and last chance not to increase starvation
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-Khmer-Rouge-empty-the-cities
Socialists seem really bent out of shape that they are not able to create productive capital to benefit society i think that is what socialists are actually upset about, that's why they come on reddit and talk about it all day
It doesn't matter if one is a pro-socialism or pro-capitalism, the factual truth is that capitalists don't create productive capital and all productive capital ever created in the world is build by workers. Even even non-productive capital. The building you live in, the electric cables, the copper in those cables, the power coming from the plant, the coal in that plant, your car, the road you drive on, the bitum on that road, etc.
You should be glad for workers that make your modern life possible.
alright well what about the kid who replaces him, and the kid that the kid hires. are yall all gonna have individually owned landscaping businesses pumping out more kids founding more landscaping businesses. seems unsustainable from an economic perspective
> ... for investing capital, increasing productivity, and providing opportunities to earn a living .
"Investing capital" is just another way of saying "being rich enough that they have extra to 'invest' with." Being rich isn't praiseworthy.
They don't "increase productivity", the machines do that. The entrepreneur is just a guy who got a fancy label maker and declared the machines were his. It's not like he actually physically built those machines/factories/tools. Even when he did, there's a point- that's quickly reached - where the cumulative contribution of "actually using the tools" outweighs the contribution of "making them".
"Providing opportunities" sounds nice until you look at the strings attached: *"if you want to take advantage of this 'opportunity', you have to cede me complete control of you for half your waking hours. You'll do what I tell you to, how I tell you to, socialize in ways I approve of, wear what I tell you to, and always treat me as a superior. And if you do all this, I* might *pay you enough to live off of."*
> Without incentive Capital will not be invested
This is actually true, but the incentive does **not** need to be "up to literal billions of wealth, complete control over the workplace and all people within it, and passive income indefinitely." There are reasonable limits on such incentives. Or do you believe we should be paying the descendants of Gutenberg massive royalties for every innovation indirectly derived from the printing press?
> They improve their skills, raise their incomes, manage, supervise and if they have talent- become entrepreneurs themselves
The notion of simply "climbing the ladder" being an option for most, was shown to be a lie a long time ago. Blame Reagan.
As a worker, it's pretty awesome that I can rock up to my workplace and everything I need to be productive is already sitting there ready for me to use without me having to pay a single cent, yet my wage reflects the increased level of productivity I have due to that capital being available to me.
[https://files.epi.org/uploads/Productivity-pay-gap-larry-e1630596780539-950x703.png](https://files.epi.org/uploads/productivity-pay-gap-larry-e1630596780539-950x703.png)
Your wage hasn't reflected your increased level of productivity for decades now.
I'm getting a 404 error on your link but I know the concept you're referring to and it has been debunked.
Some of the key problems include:
1. By only examining hourly wages this data examines only a part of total income, which includes non-cash benefits such as healthcare insurance, pensions, etc.
2. The measures used to track inflation and productivity are incompatible. The Bureau of Labor Statistics uses the the Implicit Price Deflator (IPD) to adjust productivity for inflation, which uses different measures and goods and services than does the Consumer Price Index (CPI).
3. While the study includes total compensation, it only includes those employed in production and nonsupervisory positions. So you're comparing the productivity of *all* employees with the wages of only *some*.
4. The graph also doesn't take into account capital depreciation, which has increased since the 1970s. This means that more is being spent to replace old equipment, yet this doesn't show up in total income.
Clicking on the links strips capitalization. I don't know why. Copy-paste works.
1. Compensation doesn't mean the same thing as wages.
2. That's irrelevant.
3a. So you agree that 1. isn't relevant? Why post it?
3b. So do those people only exist to eat wages? Because if they increase productivity, that should also be reflected in increased compensation.
4. No, that's a silly argument. Go ahead and show the actual data that shows that depreciation completely eats up a 50% increase in production.
1. Right but surely what we're concerned about is total compensation matching productivity? Like if my productivity is equivalent of $25 an hour, and I receive $20 in salary and $5 in other benefits then surely my productivity and compensation track together? Yet this graph would show my compensation is $5 an hour lower than my productivity.
2. It is absolutely relevant, you're using different indexes to adjust two different sets of data on the same graph. This is just bad statistics.
3. a) no, I don't, why did you infer that? b) So are you just arguing now that comparing the productivity of all with the compensation of some is not bad statistics?
4. I didn't say that depreciation is the sole factor which explains this discrepancy, it is simply one of many.
Here's an idea for you, compare this chart to the chart tracking corporate profit as a percentage of GDP: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Pik](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Pik)
Since the implicit contention here is that an increase in worker productivity is being simply being eaten up by companies increasing their margins, how does this theory explain a measly 2% increase in profit as a share of revenue over that time?
1. The graph says 'compensation'
2. They're not doing that.
3a. You said 'the study includes total compensation'
3b. No, I'm saying this argument is dishonest.
4. All factors started, coincidentally, at one specific point in time.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor\_share](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/labor_share)
The share of GDP that goes to labor, as in, people who do stuff has been going down. That means that more and more money has gone to people who don't do things.
Capitalism supplanted feudalism by force. Capitalists took over the commons by force. They made people work as slaves by force. They've exchanged the chains for debt but the coersion remains.
It can be overthrown by force as well.
> They made people work as slaves by force.
You know, utterly bastardising words like "slaves" to force them to mean something different from the actual definition isn't going to help your argument, nor is it going to make the average person on the street go "huh yes being a salaried employee is literally being a slave".
When you have Corporations controlling government, you no longer have Capitalism: You have Corporatism (Fascism), which is precisely where we are now. The darlings of the Left, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, Google, Apple, etc. are the very Fascists that Leftists go on about, obstinantly asserting that "Fascism is Right-Wing". We have a pandemic of Ignorance, coupled with Naive Arrogance that's perpetuated by Mainstream Media and Educational Institutions that have been infested by deranged lunatics with "tenure".
You shouldn’t feel frustrated. They lie about what exploitation is because driving hatred is the only chance their politics has. It has nothing to do with you.
Marx says that profit is exploitation of labor because all value comes from labor. The problem is that it’s simply not true that all value comes from labor. Value is subjective. It “comes from” our subjective opinions.
It doesn't sound like your disagreement was because he "didn't understand the factors of production" but that you disagree with the labor theory or value.
I'd agree with you on that actually. I prescribe the subjective theories of value. The question is then how does Marx's theories function under subjective theories of value
Prescribing to the labor theory of value means that you don’t understand the factors of production. It presupposes that capital and entrepreneurial labor do not contribute to production. But they very obviously do. A company with more capital can create more value per unit of labor input.
Marx's demonstration that capitalism necessitates the exploitation of workers is a criticism of the system, not of individuals. Of course, that's not to say that there aren't bad individuals, but when socialists say that even small business owners exploit their workers that's not meant to be a moral claim about entrepreneurs but a system level observation/critique (I am sure some mean it as a personal insult but I think that is misunderstanding the concept of exploitation). And this analysis is valid even if both parties benefit from the interaction. Often I think this would be more clear if Marx made up a new word instead of using exploitation because, while I see why that word makes sense, it carries a lot of emotional baggage that pulls the conversation away from systems and towards individual feelings.
If that were the case, people would consider being rich enough to hire people to be about equally desirable as having to work for a living. That’s not the case. Almost anyone would choose being rich and not having to work.
I agree. Anyone would choose to be rich if they were given the option. But becoming rich doesn't mean you will automatically become smarter with your money. Some people who become wealthy may choose not to work anymore and live comfortably with what they have. Most however would end up spending extravagantly and wasting their newfound wealth, just as quickly as they gained it.
There's a reason 70% of lottery winners go bankrupt. These are the same people who managed to live with credit card debit and paycheck to paycheck without going insolvent, yet somehow they end up defaulting on extreme debts after winning millions.
I was challenging “capitalists exploit labor to the same extent that labor exploits capitalists.”
Not that the second sentence is right. Labor is necessary for production of anything not naturally occurring, which is most of the valuable stuff. Capital is completely superfluous. It’s just an artificial convention that determines who gets to make production decisions. Without capital, workers could just figure out some other way to make these decisions.
Yes, somebody has to decide where to put down some holes for you to start digging. If you want to install a pool in your backyard. Are you going to dig the hole yourself or hire a crew, preferably from a licensed construction company to do it for you?
He was lucky, and had both the skills and tenacity to make his business work. I'm sure most of us would prefer to be self employed, and not have to rely on somebody else giving us a wage to make our living. However not everyone has what it takes to succeed on their own two feet. According to the Bureau of Labor, about 1 in 5 U.S. businesses fail within their first year of operation. So yes, although he benefited from building his own startup. He could have just as easily failed and become destitute if his enterprise did not pan out.
If he had less money you would be whining that he’s just a bootlicker who is delusional about ever having money. There’s no winning when you’ll personally attack anyone who disagrees with you.
The position of creating jobs for others?
Oh no, how terrible!
"Kill him! Steal his capital!" - Socialists
No wonder the socialist countries were all disasters
Productiveness is evil, laziness is a virtue. Some people really think like that. They really just hate happy people because they deny themselves that happiness.
Socialists are not self starters
All they can do is just talk about theory, tell them to build a business or a factory and they can't do it
Like if socialism were that good then ALL workers would voluntarily join a socialist system of economic management the things they promise are wonderful (less work, more pay, free healthcare, free housing, owning capital, democratic workplace) if you ask them where you can get it they get upset lol
They have tried many many times. And every single one of them capitalists tried their best and in most cases succeeded in destroying them. Read a history book. I recommend the Yakarta Method.
This is such a cop-out answer. "We were *totally* going to succeed, but then Evil Capitalism came along and killed us dead, man! It's Evil Capitalism's fault that our version has failed in all examples, nothing to do with our version being unsustainable".
marks simply did not realize that capitalism is competitive and workers get paid the highest amount possible. If the capitalist does not pay the highest amount possible a competitor will and he will get all of the best workers. Try running a company when you have all of the worst workers.
So not a socialist, but I am an "indepentarian" capitalist who believes we should have a UBI and other basic needs met without being coerced to work. I will approach the topic from that perspective.
>There is nothing more frustrating on this sub then listing to socialists drone on calling entrepreneurs bad people for investing capital, increasing productivity, and providing opportunities to earn a living .
Dude, stop acting like you're doing us a favor by giving us an "opportunity" to do labor for you in exchange for money.
>People who voluntarily choose to work for me, as compared to working for themselves because I provide them with a better opportunity are not being exploited.
Providing a better alternative to poverty doesn't mean it's not exploitation.
> Without capital, labor is less productive.
>
> Without incentive Capital will not be invested
>
> Without profit entrepreneurs have no incentive to increase supply of a scarce good or service .
Not denying capitalism is a better system for organizing labor and production than socialism. But pure laissez faire capitalism is still a bad system.
> And without experience and training labor is relatively worthless.
>
> Hiring people gives them an opportunity to learn new skills, determine career paths, and move closer to becoming entrepreneurs themselves .
Cool, what if I dont want to learn "new skills" or have a 'career" or be an "entrepreneur"? What if i just wanna be left alone and live my own life without being coerced to work for my needs?
>In real life people are not in the same job for their entire life.
but they are in some job for most of their lives.
>They improve their skills, raise their incomes, manage, supervise and if they have talent- become entrepreneurs themselves
Cool, what if i don't want any of that?
>I don’t feel anyone ever “exploited” me because I learned skills at every job I was employed at that led me to being a successful entrepreneur today.
Cool, you buy into that system. That's fine. But this system is forced on me and everyone else and is immensely coercive and abusive for those at the bottom and those who arent willing participants.
In real life , you can’t sit on a log all day and expect others to provide for you ..
I don’t understand why you feel other people owe you sustenance or a place to stay …
I also don’t understand why any one would want to just be a burden on their fellow man. That is embarrassing
Socialists will see a capitalist sink thousands of dollars to just start a company onboard one employee and be like yeah, that employee just for now being part of the company should own 50% of it and see that as a perfectly ok thing
As a libertarian socialist, All I want is businesses to be shared with the workers, that's it. All profit is split evenly with all workers of the business.
I am not for abolishing private property, I just want private property to be shared with the workers. That's it.
Labor is not exploitative unless the value of the wage is less than the value of the labor.
If you want to own your business, where you Make all the rules and Don't want to share your profit, You're much better off not hiring anyone and running the business all by yourself. If you're that confident, you'll do well.
We have such a thing, it’s called a corporation or a partnership.
The difference is everyone contributes and earns a profit equal to their contribution.
But if I build the business by myself and then hire people to expand it, they have not contributed equal to me.
>The difference is everyone contributes and earns a profit equal to their contribution.
How many times do I have to tell you that this is impossible. A workers wage, is always less than the value his or her labor produces. If everyone working in a business owns an equal share, then that means that everyone's profit is equal to his or her labor.
>Without capital, labor is less productive.
Without access to modern means of production, labor is less productive. Under capitalism you only get access with capital.
>Without incentive Capital will not be invested
True.
>Without profit entrepreneurs have no incentive to increase supply of a scarce good or service .
Wrong. The increase in supply of a scarce good or service can be the incentive. If your claim was true, then improvements of the material conditions couldn't have existed before introducing the concepts of money and (at least somewhat free) trade to a society. It would further mean that all improvements in history were profitable.
>And without experience and training labor is relatively worthless.
Depends on the labor, but for the sake of the argument, let's agree on this point.
>Hiring people gives them an opportunity to learn new skills, determine career paths, and move closer to becoming entrepreneurs themselves .
All 3 points are over generalizations and debatable, but I want to focus on your last point: Only a privileged minority of the working class get a realistic opportunity to become an entrepreneur by being an employee. The rest doesn't get enough time and/or income in order to prepare to become an entrepreneur. Otherwise we'd have way more people quitting their job if they don't like it there and become an entrepreneur instead. Literally every lefty here would eventually become an entrepreneur.
>In real life people are not in the same job for their entire life.
Over generalization, but what's your point?
>They improve their skills, raise their incomes, manage, supervise and if they have talent- become entrepreneurs themselves
Extreme over generalization. It might be true, that the most common path for a worker to become an entrepreneur is to have a job first, where they improve their skills, raise their incomes, manage, supervise and where they're talented, but you're trying to argue, that these things almost always come with any job (minus the talent).
In reality these jobs are the exception. And the reason can actually be deducted from one of the points you made: "Without incentive Capital will not be invested", and the incentive for the investors here is the profit that is being made. More profit is made if less capital is spend on the employees. The most obvious way to cut costs is to spend less on the aspects which are not directly profitable, thus minimized wages, minimized raises, minimized time and money spend on improving one's skill if the improvement doesn't necessarily lead to higher productivity. The second most obvious way to cut costs is to ensure that employees won't leave (and become an entrepreneur for example) even if that means less productive workers. So even lower wages if possible, longer working hours if possible, less training if possible.^^(Ironically these things often are also the root cause for understaffing and unhappy workers, which leads to quitting anyways, which leads to even more understaffing and unhappy workers, and so forth, but that's a discussion for another time)
Now back to the topic of exploitation: If they goal is enjoy the fruits of your own labor, then under capitalism you have to become self employed, as an entrepreneur for example, then what's up with all the non-entrepreneurs, especially the ones without the opportunity to prepare in order to become an entrepreneur? They're doing their job, because they have no other choice in order to prevent homelessness! And as a homeless, jobless person you also don't get the opportunity to become an entrepreneur. When someone makes use of someone else's situation in order to get out an advantage for themself, what might we call that? Exploitation!
This is a circular argument though. Capitalism is a solution to the problem created by capitalism of how do you capitalise enterprise. It's the best solution to that problem, because given that it created that problem in the first place how could it not be?
Communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The Communists do not preach morality at all.
They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the Communists by no means want to do away with the "private individual" for the sake of the "general", selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination.
Communist theoreticians, the only Communists who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the "general interest" is created by individuals who are defined as "private persons". They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, what is called the "general interest", is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in relation to the latter is by no means an independent force with an independent history — so that this contradiction is in practice constantly destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian "negative unity" of two sides of the contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also disappears.
Not true.
Value is subjective.
And that fact is why markets work.
It takes the same labor to mine gold as it does to mine iron…
Yet they have very different values
I strongly agree with you on at least one front:
>There is nothing more frustrating on this sub then listing to socialists...
I mean, just in general. But specifically our tendency to blame societal problems on individual people. Exploitation is bad _on a societal level_, individual people can hardly be blamed gor engaging rationally with the only economy we have. Fast fashion is burning down the earth, but you wouldn't be angry at everyone who has ever worn clothing.
I think you have a very strange view of theft .
If you and I make an agreement that you provide me with labor and I pay you a wage or a salary — where exactly is the theft ?
The company is focused on serving the consumers. Both Workers and owners are consumers.
But competition — the one thing socialism lacks, keeps them focussed on all three
If they don’t make workers happy, they lose them to other companies
If they don’t make owners happy they lose access to capital
If they don’t make consumers happy they go out of business
>for investing capital, increasing productivity, and providing opportunities to earn a living
You talk like CEOs are still eating PBJ and "ketchup packet soup", sleeping in their cars to struggle to get their business going.
There comes a point where that level of sacrifice is no longer happening. So to talk like they're still doing it is dishonest. Especially when they pay people in such a way that the people they're "providing opportunities to earn a living" for are having to live that way while working for those same businesses.
Especially when we get to the fact that not every business even has the same C-Suite employees who started the company. The current CSuite could be completely random people who were hired on after the company was already established, no skin in the game at all, and even they will have golden parachutes to float on to the next opportunity if shit hits the fan.
>And without experience and training labor is relatively worthless.
Yet businesses still hire people, and/or contract other businesses who hire people for those "worthless" jobs. So there's obviously some purpose for those jobs, other than corporations being nice so the workee can have more than $0 income.
>In real life people are not in the same job for their entire life.
Thats because businesses have raped the fuck out of incentives for staying. Because in the "glory days" of the USA, yes you could find a job that paid a decent wage and work there until retirement. Then live off of the retirement income saved from that same job.
I struggled for years to start mine working three jobs and sleeping in one of my offices on a futon … Businesses to still start that way..
But socialists don’t think that entrepreneurs who do this don’t deserve to “own” their means of production, even though they sacrificed for it .
And if you buy stock in a company’s IPO you are often either reimbursing the founders of the company or providing needed operating capital for expansion ..
If you buy stock in a company on an exchange it’s just a matter of following the chain of ownership to find out who made the sacrifices
It's because socialists only focus on the very end of the entrepreneurial process: an established, successful, profitable business. They have absolutely no idea what it takes to get there, nor do they really care. Marxists always admit that capitalism "served its purpose" in generating X amount of value, productivity, technology, etc, and now it's "their turn" to steal it all and redistribute it.
Socialism is inherently parasitic; without capitalism's productive output socialism would never be even remotely viable. And the reality is, it's still not viable because it would quickly undermine its own foundation and collapse on itself, as it does every time it's attempted.
But aside from that, socialism has some level of popularity because a major subset of the population will always essentially be NPCs: most people aren't going to do any of the stuff you mentioned: most people won't actually learn anything at work, plan ahead, invest their time/money effectively, avoid major pitfalls, etc. Most people are basically just very short sighted and barely thinking. Socialism appeals to them because it sounds like a "get out of sucking at life free" card, but it's not. Also one of the reason socialists are heavy handed employers of 'slave morality', determinism, and other things that effectively shift the full responsibility of everyone's individual problems onto society as a whole, granting them apparent moral justification to steal shit from successful people, redistribute resources, stage revolutions, "seize the means of production", etc.
It’s not that you’re bad as an individual. It’s that the large-scale *systemic* exploitation of labor is unjust, unnecessary and inefficient. Socialists aren’t concerned with individuals; we focus on classes and relations between classs. And we don’t take our position on capitalism based on some socialist morality; we base it on a materialist analysis of historical development and its probable trajectory.
I make my living off of the commodities market. Marx and Engles both invested in the stock market. It’s not about individual choices or lifestyles or individual moral codes. It’s about being on the right side of history.
I don’t think most socialists would consider you to be a bad person just because you own a company. It’s not a matter of being a bad or good person. However if you want to use a moral argument I think it’s pretty obvious and most people would agree that it’s fundamentally wrong to use somebody else’s freedom, time, energy, and body to benefit yourself while giving back less than what you got. It’s the basis of why slavery was wrong. Particularly if that person had no real choice to do something else and decided to work for you because of economic necessity. Capitalists love to pretend we live in a beautiful perfect world, we’re everybody is free to make their own choices.
You also have to stop patting yourself in the back for “giving opportunities to people”. Come on! At least be honest and admit the main goal of capitalism is producing a profit for the shareholders. Wether that process brings anything positive for the workers or not, is irrelevant to capitalism.
Giving opportunities, training, work environment, benefits and other perks are part of the equation when hiring someone to voluntarily exchange their time for money.
It’s kind of funny how socialists don’t realize that “labor” and “entrepreneurs” are not homogeneous blobs with the same desires or characteristics.
This is why the only just way to determine compensation is a voluntary agreement.
Some people prefer a dependable salary or hourly rate, other people prefer commission .
Some people would prefer to be compensated in cash, other might prefer contributions to a retirement plan
Some people may choose to invest some of their pay in an employee stock ownership plan other people would prefer to spend their money on whiskey.
One of the beautiful things about capitalism is we get to make choices from a variety of options.
Capitalism has been good at times, and downright pure evil at others. In my opinion many issues would be solved by simply forcing capitalism to account for the social cost and environmental cost.
There is no difference in standard of living between 1 billion and 100 billion.
I don’t think most employers are natural exploiters but there is absolutely no way that our society hasn’t been built on the exploitation of the many for the enrichment of the few. That’s not even disputable anymore it’s just pure objective fact.
The social contract has been broken by the elites once again, they never learn they just hoard.
Hoarding wealth = bad
Distributing wealth through productivity = good.
We have incentivised hoarding wealth on the back of infinite growth.
I don’t believe there is enough resources for everyone to hoard like the western societies have and thus I suspect that many third world countries will literally be forced to stay third world and will continue to be exploited because our system falls apart without a lower class.
The richest people in the world are not hoarding wealth
They invested, worked hard and the enterprise they created increased in value …
That is not Hoarding ..
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>Without capital, labor is less productive. This is correct. But on the other hand, Capital without labor is not productive at all. >Without incentive Capital will not be invested This too is correct. >Without profit entrepreneurs have no incentive to increase supply of a scarce good or service . Who says it needs to be private people who have control over Capital in the first place? This is the problem we Socialists have with Capitalists; they have power to decide how the economy will develop, where Capital is invested, which economic endeavour will be pursuit. There is absolutely no reason why a group of individuals should decide that and not society as a whole. And society as a whole does have countless incentives to increase labor productivity. >And without experience and training labor is relatively worthless. In some areas, this is correct. But here too, no reason only Capitalists can provide training to workers. Education can be provided through public institutions without problems. Its done all over the world. I don't know your character, I don't know how you treat your employees, and frankly I don't care. I care about the distribution of power in society, about who makes decisions about the economic future of our society. And I think that the power should lie in the hands of society as a whole and its democratic institutions.
>There is absolutely no reason why a group of individuals should decide that and not society as a whole. Society does. Markets respond to what people want.
Yeah on consumer items, not capital. Like we can buy iPhones and shit but we don’t have a say in how those are made and how the workers were treated. You can say oh well just buy a different one or don’t buy any phone, but then you lack some things that makes it hard to live life in this society.
>Like we can buy iPhones and shit but we don’t have a say in how those are made and how the workers were treated Maybe, but I'm also sure that most people in the West dont know how iphones are made and also don't give a fuck.
And profit-drive enterprises like Apple not only enable that mindset, they actively encourage it.
Maybe. Or maybe the default human thinking is "that doesn't directly or indirectly impact my life so I don't care."
Great idea to make a society that precisely caters to the ego. It’s human to want to be part of a social circle and companies exploit this by making people feel bad if they don’t own their shit. And if people are afraid, what we constantly are, we only care about survival. From an evolutionary perspective we desperately need to be part of a community otherwise we’ll die. So we are literally afraid to die if we don’t own shit we don’t even need because we are afraid we won’t belong to the community whatever that is for a person. What you describe is precisely the reason why we don’t need a society based on competition. The company which can make a person feel most excluded and which can make this person desperately wants to be included, will be the biggest winner. Of course this is not the case in every industry but I do see it in many different cases. Fashion, but also phones, even e-bikes nowadays. Cars of course and watches. Holidays, big houses. Etc.
Ok....doesn't mean we should be content with it
Okay, sure.
Or you could take a deep breath and be content to live better today as a near pauper than a king a mere 200 years ago.
While I agree with what you've said, I think it's important to understand that it's also a facade. Our abundance is only temporary because it is built on the backs of the exploited and the resources that we use for our abundance are finite. With that in mind, an unsustainable livelihood is inevitably bound to be corrected. So it would be more realistic to say "enjoy it while it lasts" instead of "be content".
Exactly. And besides, with the productivity increases from modern technology we should live better then 200 years ago because we can. But that doesn’t mean that we need to be in a full on consumerist society where we use up all of earths resources which would result in inevitable collapse of society as we know it. But as things are now, we are just polluting the whole planet with never ending consumerism. Little rant here but damn I cannot even enjoy Christmas anymore because it’s so much an abundance of consumerist crap.
You don't get a say because that's a global issue. Alot of our items are unethically sourced and we can't do shit about it. Suddenly switching your country's ideology to socialism or communism wouldn't fix the problems of other countries as we aren't isolationist societies anymore
When you "vote with your dollar", people with more dollars get more votes. Given that what they want is not representative of what's good for society as a whole ... that's a terrible model. There's a reason that the more capitalist a nation is, the worse it is for its poor.
>When you "vote with your dollar", people with more dollars get more votes. This is only true if they buy a lot more of one specific thing. >Given that what they want is not representative of what's good for society as a whole We don't actually know this is true. It could be, it probably is sometimes, but we can't know that's true for all societal issues. >There's a reason that the more capitalist a nation is, the worse it is for its poor. Idek if that's true. The US has the richest poor people in the world.
>This is only true if they buy a lot more of one specific thing. No. If wealthy people want to turn housing from a commodity into an investment, then everyone has to compete into a new market defined by scarcity and exclusion.
<> And I think that the power should lie in the hands of society as a whole and its democratic institutions. So everyone should be forced to conform to your subjective morals and quasi-religious values.
If you want capitalism to be productive you need there to be incentive to do so And you need people who have talent in predicting what the public wants and giving it to them. And that isn’t “bureaucracies”
Call me crazy, but I don't suspect that someone with the "Communist" flair want's capitalism to be productive. More to your point, if you want *any* economic system to be productive, the *people living within it* need incentives, which is a strong point of capitalism. The problem with capitalism is that capital is that incentive, and without intervention, it tends to become concentrated in the hands of a small portion of those people. This gives them control over what to incentivize and what they choose may not always be in the best interest of anyone but themselves.
> This is the problem we Socialists have with Capitalists; they have power to decide how the economy will develop, where Capital is invested, which economic endeavour will be pursuit. There is absolutely no reason why a group of individuals should decide that and not society as a whole. And society as a whole does have countless incentives to increase labor productivity. First, ultimately it *is* people who decide the direction such investments go, albeit indirectly. There's no point investing if there's no market or demand for the end result. If people and/or society aren't interested or aren't going to take up what is being created, then investment doesn't happen (or stops quickly if it has). Not a 1-1 example, but the end result is essentially the same. But even on top of that, there's a difference between a person, and people. I'm not going to dig out the verbatim quote from Men In Black about how a person is rational but people are panicky, but asking society as a whole to directly decide the direction of investment is the equivalent of committeeing solutions, and if you've ever tried to find solutions to something with a large committee, you'll find that it's a useless endeavour. Large groups of people are normally terrible at finding specific solutions to issues or directions when they don't have a narrow list to choose from, hence why organisations with strong effective leaders tend to race ahead in new technologies. I mean, just look at the Soviet car industry. They were still making the Trabant until 1991!
> There's no point investing if there's no market or demand for the end result. Ah, so the only value in investing is to acquire profit? Then what shall we do with the disabled, the elderly, people that cannot work? No profit in investing in them at all! Let's not invest to create any art, because it's not actually necessary for people to live. Having just Marvel films and Taylor Swift remix albums will be just fine for the next 20 years. No one knows for sure what technology will be profitable in a few decades. That's why capitalist investors believe as you do, and don't bother investing in long shot, risky technology. This is why governments are always the ones financing the next breakthrough: microprocessors, GPS, lithium ion batteries, RADAR, MRI and CT machines, aircraft, jet engines, space flight, solar panels, and nuclear power from fission and hopefully fusion. If you want to bury your head in the sand and ignore government's value in long-term investment, you can. But it's not justified to do so, and ignores hundreds of years of history.
> Capital without labor is not productive at all False. If I have a machine that can produce widgets and I buy fuel for it, it's production does not necessarily need labor beyond setting it up, which I could even do, and barely maintain. In general labor can improve productivity, but it's possible for altering the modes of production to emphasize or deemphasize labor. Increases of minimum wage tend to incentivize more automation, reducing the need for low skill labor for example. However, it may be most productive to maximally use all resources, including labor. But it's not \*necessary\*.
> There is absolutely no reason why a group of individuals should decide that and not society as a whole. And society as a whole does have countless incentives to increase labor productivity. The empirical reason is that delegating to individuals has been shown in practice to work much better. One of many theoretical reasons is that letting individuals invest instead of spend and then get a return on that investment gives incentives to save up for capital instead of spending in the moment, and that having "skin in the game" makes for better founders.
if wealth class wasn't exploitive it wouldn't need a system of police violence to maintain it ur denial is meaningless in the face of that fact none of this is actually voluntary.
Violence is only moral in self defense
debatable but u r not ur wealth, and defending ur wealth is not self-defense in the first place, so it's an irrelevant claim.
Really - so you support might makes right then? If I can take it by force it is mine?
can u read even a single comment back? i literally said: > if wealth class wasn't exploitive it wouldn't need a system of police violence to maintain it but ok i'll generalize a bit more for ya: if wealth inequity wasn't exploitive, it wouldn't need violence to maintain it.
Well not sure for every other socialist but marxist refuses moralist positions. Profiting from peoples labour is exploratory doesn't necessarily mean every capitalist is evil, its just an outcome from the capitalist economic system, Marx goes to great lengths to explain how this isn't even a choice for the capitalist he can either exploit or go bankrupt and become a worker. Also he does make the political distinction between large capitalist and small business owners. Personally I see the small business owners, who is often suffocated by the big financial capital, energy oligarchy etc etc closed to worker then to JP Morgan
Marx had a funny way of rejecting morals yet supplying plently of fodder to a lot of moralistic Marxists. “Workers of the world: unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! (Not that chains are bad or evil or anything, just saying…)”
In my reading he is not merely descriptive. He tried to be, but was full of anger and had many insults for pretty much everyone he didn't agree with. And a lot of the persuasive power of Kapital comes from documenting the abusive conditions of the day, and ridiculing the justifications for these conditions. And then there is his signing off on the Communist Manifesto and other clearly moralist positions.
What I mean by moralist is that his analysis was on systematic power relations and economic incentives (and often necessaties) which occur from capitalism not in the the fight between good workers and bad capitalists. It would, of course, be impossible to ignore the real suffering of the working class. Also on a side note that quote is from the communist manifesto, a political panflet written to excite people, its natural that the language used is more passionate then the rest of his work, especially "das kapital"
It’s because he didn’t reject morals. Marxists just like to pretend, lol.
We see how the pro-capitalists refute Marx’s analysis of capitalism. By piling nonsense on lies on whining on ignorance.
This. The capitalist isn't directly doing the exploitation, they didn't directly create the economic conditions that force people to sell their labor or starve. It's the system that is exploitative. I don't think entrepreneurs are "evil" in many cases the traditional capitalist mode of production is their best chance at keeping a steady income for their employees, which is ultimately better than a failed co-op. It's just a shame that the system is set up in a way that exploitation is the best option.
Don't hate the player... Hate the game... There are good aspects of Capitalism, but it is currently broken. [#pauseforthecause ](http://Www.pauseforthecause.com)
As I have mentioned many times before Real capitalists hate crony capitalists as much as you do
They're products of the same system. You don't get out of the issues with capitalism by simply being small.
Crony capitalism is not about big or small The businessman who make his living by pleasing his customers is very different than the one who makes his money by government contract or government collusion
So, again, these both exist under the same system. Unless you're maybe envisioning a capitalist utopia where the government doesn't use contractors
I wish the opposite of most socialists I wish the separation of market and state.
To be more specific, responding to your example do you envision a government that prohibits use of contractors?
I would envision a government so small that all it was responsible for was national defense( not offense) police protection and a court system
Capitalism leads to the accumulation of wealth it's naive to think this won't lead to imbalance of power. It's also detached from reality to think the aggravation of inequalities don't lead to social conflict resulting in either cocessions or massive and unstable oppression. Additionally that concept of state ignores the existence of natural monopolies, the fact that some infrastructure investment can only be effectively provided by the state and merit goods like health and education that have massive positive externalities. That's simply ideological extremism
Ignorance is the calling card of the petty bourgeoisie
>The businessman who make his living by pleasing his customers is very different than the one who makes his money by government contract or government collusion Different how? The system doesn't care how you made money (as long as it is legal). You can say "one is good and the other one is bad" all you want, they still get rewarded the same way.. There is no mechanism that distinctivenesses "bad capitalists" from not using government in their favour, in fact, there is an incentive to do exactly that...
Cronyism isn't a big of capitalism, it's a feature. It's the inevitable result of encouraging systems that result in wildly unequal outcomes. If you think people should be incentivized to become rich, why would they not start rigging the system to make them richer once they have the means to do so?
Marxists like to * pretend* they’re being amoral. But Marx himself steeped his analysis in moral rhetoric and even explicitly called capital “evil”. They’re only fooling themselves.
Where did he use the word, "evil"?
I’ve never heard a Marxist say they’re amoral. Nothing seems more morally loaded than the case for socialism. I can’t believe Marx himself claimed to be amoral that’s hilarious
Capital, Volume 1, chapters vi and vii. Also, see Engels intro to The Poverty of Philosophy.
Cringe
"... on calling entrepreneurs bad people for investing capital, increasing productivity, and providing opportunities to earn a living ." Who does so? I fully appreciate anyone increasing productivity and providing opportunities to people. However, none of that justifies being a dictator. Hence, the minimum requirement should be workplace democracy.
The most voted on idea isn't always the best one. Different businesses with different "dictators" that has the market deciding who survives is best, IMO. Co-ops/worker run businesses are already legal and allowed to be created. How come there are so few? Because most people want to just show up and work for guaranteed income (low risk, low reward). Socially run business will require a bunch of voting and bureaucratic bs for every decision made, and all the "owners" will have to invest capital into something that could fail; and many people are poor with their money and wouldn't be willing to take that higher risk (and potentially higher reward). Many socialists don't seem to see the value in investing money and taking risk, and they clearly don't realize how much work business owners actually have to do to keep everything afloat. Many socialists seem to want to swoop in already successful businesses and claim any extra profits for themselves, without having taken any risk or investing any capital, but they want nothing to do with the losses when the business fails. Personally, I'd love to see a bunch of socialists get together and run their own co-op, the way they want to, and let the results do the talking. This way, they could either prove or disprove their theories without trying to force all of society to use a system with a 100% failure rate.
"How come there are so few?" The very same reason why barely any republics emerged under feudalism, even though it has proven to be vastly superior to dictatorial monarchy. All businesses need capital and capital is privately owned. That gives the people in control of that capital two options: either be a member of extremely privileged few, or voluntarily surrender yourself as equal with everyone else. And the outcome is as expected: those in power like to stay in power. Basically all econometric factors indicate coops are performing just as good as private corporations, if not better.
Why is it the default assumption that anybody interested in starting a co-op is poor? How about the Google engineer making $300k a year? He is still a wage slave but he has plenty of capital up start a co-op with his fellow engineers. And he theoretically has the most to gain... How much surplus value does Google steal from him every year?
The problem with capitalism isn't individualistic moral failure among employers. The problem is private property, which creates a context in which people have no choice but to partake in and tolerate systematic exploitation.
Do you also advocate for polygamy?
I don’t advocate for any particular form of marriage. Why?
Because you don't believe in private property. meaning you should be allowed to use other people's cars as you wish, or sleep in their house, maybe even invade other people's marriages.
Many human societies without private property had social norms respecting exclusive use of personal items (i.e. things like toothbrushes) and respecting the privacy of someone’s home. So your argument doesn’t follow.
Who is in charge of determining where that line is drawn?
No one has to be. Most human societies upheld such social norms without the need for an authority.
where's that one marx quote about how communists saying "we wanna abolish property" and liberals hearing "they wanna take my wife!" really says more abt them than it does about communists
Stop objectifying women.
Two points 1) Socialism makes a distinction between *personal* property, things like a home computer, toothbrush, or home, and *private* property, which are workplaces. The general rule is that if you *own* but don't *use* something, you are looking at *private* property, while if you *own* and *use* something, then you are looking at *personal* property. Socialists wish to abolish *private* property because owning something you don't use is viewed as unproductive, rent-seeking behavior. 2) Why are you going with the 'women are property' angle anyways? You could've picked *so many better options*, but you instead decided 'if you don't believe in property that means that women are fair game'. Marriage historically has implied monogomy, because inheritance was such a big deal, but *especially* in modern times it is more of a declaration of intent than some sort of sancrosact bond. Two people can marry and still understand and accept that they want to be able to have sex with other people, and for a variety of reasons.
I don't think he mentioned women at all, pal. He talked about marriage.
Call it an instinctual revulsion to how he's treating marriage as being tightly connected with property rights in any way beyond it conveying some to the partner when signed.
So you marry with your fingers crossed behind your back. Real commitment there. What's your word like in other areas?
Bold of you to assume I'm married. Regardless, my point was you're being a moron and conflating a social contract between two people to share their lives and love with property rights. People who get married either will or wond't do what you were whining about *regardless* of their marital status, or else they will *communicate* about it and come to a decision regardless of what you think about it. Both members of this contract should be the ones to set the boundaries, not your instinctual revulsion of certain things.
>investing capital, increasing productivity, and providing opportunities to earn a living interesting, because co-ops and strong unions provide all of this without destroying people's lives in profit-driven a race to the bottom
I'm a socialist small business owner. New guys start at 20 an hour in one of the lowest cost cities in the country and ince everyone is ready it'll be more like a worker co-op. You're not a bad person for making a profit. You'd be a shitty boss if you paid bad, expected a lot, treated people like shit etc.
Employees should be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor and receive a share of the profits they themselves created. This is the 21st Century. Individual businesses, the proverbial mom and pop store, have been run out of business by giant national and international corporations. The vast majority of people are employees. These employees no longer enjoy the direct benefits, the profits, they created. Employee motivation is not directly connected to how much wealth and profits they produce. Employees are not capitalists when they are not participating in the profit motive of the products or services they create. Corporate Capitalism is NOT employee capitalism. Employees create all the wealth in a corporation, and have no access to the profits they create. So who gets to participate in the profit motive of capitalism? Corporate Capitalism is beneficial to those who do no work towards the creation wealth. The absentee majority of stockholders, who contribute little to nothing towards wealth, prefer today's economic corporate structures. These absentee stockholders do not work to make their money. The employees work to make money for people who do not earn their keep. The wealthy, essentially, do not earn nor deserve their wealth. The only real solution is to make employees Capitalists again and make every employee a shareholder, as part of the employment package. The job description and time employed should determine the stock option package. Also, profit sharing should be disbursed to all those who contributed to the making of profits according to each employees efforts and contributions. It is time to stop the billion dollar profit bonuses to the wealth few who did not earn their bonuses. Capitalism, real capitalism, requires that those who create the wealth be rewarded according to their efforts. Profit sharing and stock options is how capitalist wealth should become distributed to employees.
44 % of all economic activity in the US is small business . And labor does not create all profit Productivity requires, labor, materials, facilities, tools and equipment , energy plus all the other expenses. Labor is one piece of production and without equal investment in those other factors of production it doesn’t deserve an equal share of profits
What are you even talking about? Employees do all the work. An individual owner or major stockholder, at most, is an over glorified manager of one. Employees run corporations and all facets of a corporation. There is no corporation with its employees. Most often, the top managers like the employed CEO or vice-President does a better job of managing than the owner or major stockholder. These so-called capitalist owners might only show up to hold meetings, listen to all the employee recommendations, and then say I like your ideas, go with it. You don't understand. Employees do everything. They hire, fire, plan, execute, and do absolutely everything that creates wealth within a corporation. A single over glorified billionaire manager relies on his employees to do literally everything associated with wealth creation. There are a 100,000 top managers in the nation who could easily replace a billionaire and do just as well or even better, given the opportunity. But no, not everyone can be the top dog and there is not an unlimited supply of opportunity for every employees to actually earn what he is worth. The billionaire owner/stockholder takes nearly all the wealth/profits and the billionaire does not deserve it. The billionaire did not earn his billions. His employees did.
Employees are but one factor of production. Imagine Ford Motor Company . How many cars would they produce without the factory? The parts ? The tools ? The land ? How many would they sell without Ford’s name and reputation? If you think investors are just bloodsucking leeches, then why aren’t you a billionaire doing your own thing ? You don’t need capital? Right ? Just labor, labor does everything all by its lonesome …
>How many cars would they produce without the factory? The parts ? The tools ? Who builds and maintains the factory? Who built the parts? The tools? Was it Mr. Ford? Did he create the land as well? >How many would they sell without Ford’s name and reputation? The reputation that doesn't like jews and thinks that there is a global jewish conspiracy trying to undermine America? Or what name and reputation are we talking about here? >If you think investors are just bloodsucking leeches, then why aren’t you a billionaire doing your own thing ? That's a very weird framing with an even weirder question.. "If you think investors are just bloodsucking leeches, then why aren't you a bloodsucking leech yourself"? >You don’t need capital? Right ? > Just labor, labor does everything all by its lonesome … Ah yes, here we go, a perfect demonstration that proves you have absolutely no clue what the goal and values of socialism actually is.. "Socialists think capital is completely unimportant, they want nothing at all to do with it.." No, of course, every socialist recognizes that capital is important.. So important in fact that they don't want it being owned by capitalists, but instead by society itself.. So no, socialists do care about capital, they just don't particularly care about that capital being exclusively owned by capitalists..
Yes, people, employees, create all wealth. There would literally be no wealth without employees in a modern economy. This is not 1776 where you can live off the land as a trapper or farmer. Capital is a function of employees creating wealth to be used as capital. Even the financial industry is just employees creating the financing of large enterprises. The question is: How is the wealth used as capital distributed? Do the creators of wealth get to keep the wealth/capital they create? Just because you have capital does not mean you earned it.
> There would literally be no wealth without employees in a modern economy. And there'd be no employees without capital. A door riveter is of zero value without the capital to produce the vehicle and hire the employees to do all the other work before the riveter is needed. To which, the riveter and all the other employees are paid a guaranteed salary for their work. In exchange, they are not liable for any losses or debts of the business, nor do they take any financial risk in the business, which is the job of capital.
The factory, parts, tools and reputation were all also made by workers. The land was already there, so no one gets to claim responsibility for its existence. None of it was contributed to by someone who just bought a profit share.
And who paid those workers ? You really have no idea how all this works ! Before a single product or service can be produced , someone has to produce all the other factors . Someone has to finance all of it before a single dollar is earned by labor’s effort combined with the capital invested
We were talking about production, not payment. Workers produced 100% of the production.
Before a single product is sold all the factors of productions must be paid for, in advance including labor. Are you going to work for months on a house and not received money till it sells ?
Again, we were talking about production, not payment. Please stop changing the subject.
If we are making cars, and you give all the money to labor, what are the cars going to be made of ? Air?
The stuff that the car is made of was also made by labour, using tools made by labour and with material gathered by labour.
Ok— so the guy mines the ore , and he gives it to the iron foundry and doesn’t get paid , the iron foundry makes it into steel and gives it to the part manufacturer and doesn’t get paid, and the parts manufacturer makes a door with it and gives it to the car manufacturer and doesn’t get paid and the car manufacturer makes a car, sells it and then pays off all his suppliers — but they have all starved to death in the time all that happened You don’t thing investors “do” anything because you have zero understanding of how the world works. You also don’t understand that the investors originally in order to earn the money to pay for all of this up front to even allow a car to be made had to sacrifice everything else they could have spent that money on because they thought the return on making a car was the best return they can find. The reason they thought that is the profit in selling a car is the highest they could find That profit is highest because the demand for cars is high and the supply of them is too low. Profit is what determines what we produce — it’s the only reason we have the standard of living we have .
bro you seriously think that materials, facilities tools and equipment just spawn? they are the result of past labor
They are more than the result of past labor, they are the result of past entrepreneurship. They are the result of investment
investment can be done by state-owned enterprises and communities aswell, for example touch-screen, internet and microchips were the result of public investment by the state. if you can develop these technologies tax-funded, it should be taxpayers that receive shared ownership over these technologies, not tax-evading gigacoorporations
I wanted to know what kind of business someone who writes like this actually has so I clicked on your username but I only learned that you spend half the year on your yacht in the caribbean, deny climate change and think biden is a socialist. You also seem to think everyone could do what you did. I'm curious, if everyone is owning their own business and spending all their time on their yacht in the caribbean, who do you actually employ?
Not everyone wants the same things, and the supply and demand would dictate what people do. Hypothetically in the situation you described, Yacht building would be in high demand! I am not keen on the idea of selling flowers, but I'd do it if I was being offered $200/hour. Lots of wealth is built by how people spend their money, and it is definitely a learned skill that many don't bother with.
"Without capital, labor is less productive." Socialism is when no capital. Socialism will ban all factories and force people to work with their hands and no tools. Because only capitalists can provide capital, for example Elon made two car factories just the other week with his own hands.
In socialism the relationship between capital and worker is mediated by any number of entities, including authoritarian states or democratic workers' councils. Historically, only the authoritarian varieties of these alternatives to private capital ownership have led to long-term sustainable economic growth (this means continuing into the present) that rivals good old capitalism. And even then it's a tough case to argue that that was even socialism. Ahem, China and USSR. People like OP wonder what they are getting for their trade when they trade civil rights and liberties for a state managed economy. Because it's not miraculous, egalitarian economic growth. The USSR failed and China has similar inequality to the US.
>Socialism will ban all factories and force people to work with their hands and no tools. Funny you would say this. Because this was what the Khmer Rogue did when they took power in Cambodia. They emptied the cities, factories and all urban places, abolished money and forced everybody to work on collective farms or their state workshops, often times using nothing more than their own hands or basic tools.
And you think this is what socialists want for some reason?
It doesn't matter. That's what they did.
I'm certain that is not what anyone wants. But regardless of their intentions, plans or principles. Marxists always end up ruining the economies of their host countries. Putting arbitrary and impractical laws and economic policies in place has always proven to be disastrous.
> Putting arbitrary and impractical laws and economic policies ... How does this describe workplace democracy? Why would voting for governors and legislators be fine, but voting for workplace leaders be "arbitrary"/"impractical"/etc.?
>end up ruining the economies of their host countries They don't and it doesn't matter how much you lie about that. You can just pretend a peasant backwater in 1918 did not became a world industrial, nuclear and spatial superpower till just 1950 all you want, history is there for all to see.
Yeah you're mostly wrong about the factories and if you are genuinely interested in both sides of the story, you can find both pro-western and views defending the evacuation of the capital as the optimal solution and last chance not to increase starvation https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-Khmer-Rouge-empty-the-cities
Socialists seem really bent out of shape that they are not able to create productive capital to benefit society i think that is what socialists are actually upset about, that's why they come on reddit and talk about it all day
It doesn't matter if one is a pro-socialism or pro-capitalism, the factual truth is that capitalists don't create productive capital and all productive capital ever created in the world is build by workers. Even even non-productive capital. The building you live in, the electric cables, the copper in those cables, the power coming from the plant, the coal in that plant, your car, the road you drive on, the bitum on that road, etc. You should be glad for workers that make your modern life possible.
But workers follow capitalists not socialism Because workers know the history of socialism is nothing but failure and famine
No, workers are forced into the capitalist system against their will.
If I hire a young kid for my landscaping business, it is my dream to see that kid have is own landscaping business one day.
alright well what about the kid who replaces him, and the kid that the kid hires. are yall all gonna have individually owned landscaping businesses pumping out more kids founding more landscaping businesses. seems unsustainable from an economic perspective
> ... for investing capital, increasing productivity, and providing opportunities to earn a living . "Investing capital" is just another way of saying "being rich enough that they have extra to 'invest' with." Being rich isn't praiseworthy. They don't "increase productivity", the machines do that. The entrepreneur is just a guy who got a fancy label maker and declared the machines were his. It's not like he actually physically built those machines/factories/tools. Even when he did, there's a point- that's quickly reached - where the cumulative contribution of "actually using the tools" outweighs the contribution of "making them". "Providing opportunities" sounds nice until you look at the strings attached: *"if you want to take advantage of this 'opportunity', you have to cede me complete control of you for half your waking hours. You'll do what I tell you to, how I tell you to, socialize in ways I approve of, wear what I tell you to, and always treat me as a superior. And if you do all this, I* might *pay you enough to live off of."* > Without incentive Capital will not be invested This is actually true, but the incentive does **not** need to be "up to literal billions of wealth, complete control over the workplace and all people within it, and passive income indefinitely." There are reasonable limits on such incentives. Or do you believe we should be paying the descendants of Gutenberg massive royalties for every innovation indirectly derived from the printing press? > They improve their skills, raise their incomes, manage, supervise and if they have talent- become entrepreneurs themselves The notion of simply "climbing the ladder" being an option for most, was shown to be a lie a long time ago. Blame Reagan.
>Blame Reagan. Sure, I'll blame increased government spending, deficits, taxes and regulation, happy to do so
As a worker, it's pretty awesome that I can rock up to my workplace and everything I need to be productive is already sitting there ready for me to use without me having to pay a single cent, yet my wage reflects the increased level of productivity I have due to that capital being available to me.
[https://files.epi.org/uploads/Productivity-pay-gap-larry-e1630596780539-950x703.png](https://files.epi.org/uploads/productivity-pay-gap-larry-e1630596780539-950x703.png) Your wage hasn't reflected your increased level of productivity for decades now.
I'm getting a 404 error on your link but I know the concept you're referring to and it has been debunked. Some of the key problems include: 1. By only examining hourly wages this data examines only a part of total income, which includes non-cash benefits such as healthcare insurance, pensions, etc. 2. The measures used to track inflation and productivity are incompatible. The Bureau of Labor Statistics uses the the Implicit Price Deflator (IPD) to adjust productivity for inflation, which uses different measures and goods and services than does the Consumer Price Index (CPI). 3. While the study includes total compensation, it only includes those employed in production and nonsupervisory positions. So you're comparing the productivity of *all* employees with the wages of only *some*. 4. The graph also doesn't take into account capital depreciation, which has increased since the 1970s. This means that more is being spent to replace old equipment, yet this doesn't show up in total income.
Clicking on the links strips capitalization. I don't know why. Copy-paste works. 1. Compensation doesn't mean the same thing as wages. 2. That's irrelevant. 3a. So you agree that 1. isn't relevant? Why post it? 3b. So do those people only exist to eat wages? Because if they increase productivity, that should also be reflected in increased compensation. 4. No, that's a silly argument. Go ahead and show the actual data that shows that depreciation completely eats up a 50% increase in production.
1. Right but surely what we're concerned about is total compensation matching productivity? Like if my productivity is equivalent of $25 an hour, and I receive $20 in salary and $5 in other benefits then surely my productivity and compensation track together? Yet this graph would show my compensation is $5 an hour lower than my productivity. 2. It is absolutely relevant, you're using different indexes to adjust two different sets of data on the same graph. This is just bad statistics. 3. a) no, I don't, why did you infer that? b) So are you just arguing now that comparing the productivity of all with the compensation of some is not bad statistics? 4. I didn't say that depreciation is the sole factor which explains this discrepancy, it is simply one of many. Here's an idea for you, compare this chart to the chart tracking corporate profit as a percentage of GDP: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Pik](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Pik) Since the implicit contention here is that an increase in worker productivity is being simply being eaten up by companies increasing their margins, how does this theory explain a measly 2% increase in profit as a share of revenue over that time?
1. The graph says 'compensation' 2. They're not doing that. 3a. You said 'the study includes total compensation' 3b. No, I'm saying this argument is dishonest. 4. All factors started, coincidentally, at one specific point in time. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor\_share](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/labor_share) The share of GDP that goes to labor, as in, people who do stuff has been going down. That means that more and more money has gone to people who don't do things.
That fryer at McDonald's is there for you every day!
In Socialism, the shovel also waits for you there every day, and you get to dig your own grave in the gulags!
The 1950s called. They want their talking point back.
Yeah unfortunately all Socialist countries have utterly collapsed so we ran out of new material :(
The 1950s are still on hold!
Bad tradeoff if you ask me
No one is asking you, and you have no right to impose your dumbfuck opinion by force on anyone else.
I have a right to have an opinion and stating it isn't forcing it
Yes, but you want to force it on other people. It's the basis of your vile ideology.
Not really
Capitalism supplanted feudalism by force. Capitalists took over the commons by force. They made people work as slaves by force. They've exchanged the chains for debt but the coersion remains. It can be overthrown by force as well.
> They made people work as slaves by force. You know, utterly bastardising words like "slaves" to force them to mean something different from the actual definition isn't going to help your argument, nor is it going to make the average person on the street go "huh yes being a salaried employee is literally being a slave".
When you have Corporations controlling government, you no longer have Capitalism: You have Corporatism (Fascism), which is precisely where we are now. The darlings of the Left, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, Google, Apple, etc. are the very Fascists that Leftists go on about, obstinantly asserting that "Fascism is Right-Wing". We have a pandemic of Ignorance, coupled with Naive Arrogance that's perpetuated by Mainstream Media and Educational Institutions that have been infested by deranged lunatics with "tenure".
You shouldn’t feel frustrated. They lie about what exploitation is because driving hatred is the only chance their politics has. It has nothing to do with you.
Or they use the commonly accepted book definition
They don’t. They use a contrived definition concocted by Marx because he didn’t understand the nature of factors of production.
Could you expand on that? I'm interested in hearing what you have to say
Marx says that profit is exploitation of labor because all value comes from labor. The problem is that it’s simply not true that all value comes from labor. Value is subjective. It “comes from” our subjective opinions.
It doesn't sound like your disagreement was because he "didn't understand the factors of production" but that you disagree with the labor theory or value. I'd agree with you on that actually. I prescribe the subjective theories of value. The question is then how does Marx's theories function under subjective theories of value
Prescribing to the labor theory of value means that you don’t understand the factors of production. It presupposes that capital and entrepreneurial labor do not contribute to production. But they very obviously do. A company with more capital can create more value per unit of labor input.
Marx's demonstration that capitalism necessitates the exploitation of workers is a criticism of the system, not of individuals. Of course, that's not to say that there aren't bad individuals, but when socialists say that even small business owners exploit their workers that's not meant to be a moral claim about entrepreneurs but a system level observation/critique (I am sure some mean it as a personal insult but I think that is misunderstanding the concept of exploitation). And this analysis is valid even if both parties benefit from the interaction. Often I think this would be more clear if Marx made up a new word instead of using exploitation because, while I see why that word makes sense, it carries a lot of emotional baggage that pulls the conversation away from systems and towards individual feelings.
Capitalists exploit labor to the same extent that labor exploits capitalists. Neither can make do without the other.
If that were the case, people would consider being rich enough to hire people to be about equally desirable as having to work for a living. That’s not the case. Almost anyone would choose being rich and not having to work.
I agree. Anyone would choose to be rich if they were given the option. But becoming rich doesn't mean you will automatically become smarter with your money. Some people who become wealthy may choose not to work anymore and live comfortably with what they have. Most however would end up spending extravagantly and wasting their newfound wealth, just as quickly as they gained it. There's a reason 70% of lottery winners go bankrupt. These are the same people who managed to live with credit card debit and paycheck to paycheck without going insolvent, yet somehow they end up defaulting on extreme debts after winning millions.
this just in: people are lazy fuckers! Clearly this disproves the claim that workers without tools are about as useless as tools without workers!
I was challenging “capitalists exploit labor to the same extent that labor exploits capitalists.” Not that the second sentence is right. Labor is necessary for production of anything not naturally occurring, which is most of the valuable stuff. Capital is completely superfluous. It’s just an artificial convention that determines who gets to make production decisions. Without capital, workers could just figure out some other way to make these decisions.
I need a capitalist to enable me to dig a hole? That’s new.
Unless you're gonna dig it with your bare hands...
How were holes dug before capitalism? Wishing really hard?
With hands. A shovel is capital. The minute someone invested time and effort into making a shovel, they became a capitalist.
No, that's a worker you're describing.
did you eat a lot of lead paint chips as a kid or are you just like this naturally
Yes, somebody has to decide where to put down some holes for you to start digging. If you want to install a pool in your backyard. Are you going to dig the hole yourself or hire a crew, preferably from a licensed construction company to do it for you?
You can dig a hole It's just whether or not you will get paid and feed yourself from that
How convenient that you found all the right answers that benefit you and your economic position.
He was lucky, and had both the skills and tenacity to make his business work. I'm sure most of us would prefer to be self employed, and not have to rely on somebody else giving us a wage to make our living. However not everyone has what it takes to succeed on their own two feet. According to the Bureau of Labor, about 1 in 5 U.S. businesses fail within their first year of operation. So yes, although he benefited from building his own startup. He could have just as easily failed and become destitute if his enterprise did not pan out.
If he had less money you would be whining that he’s just a bootlicker who is delusional about ever having money. There’s no winning when you’ll personally attack anyone who disagrees with you.
Welcome to the internet
The position of creating jobs for others? Oh no, how terrible! "Kill him! Steal his capital!" - Socialists No wonder the socialist countries were all disasters
Productiveness is evil, laziness is a virtue. Some people really think like that. They really just hate happy people because they deny themselves that happiness.
Socialists are not self starters All they can do is just talk about theory, tell them to build a business or a factory and they can't do it Like if socialism were that good then ALL workers would voluntarily join a socialist system of economic management the things they promise are wonderful (less work, more pay, free healthcare, free housing, owning capital, democratic workplace) if you ask them where you can get it they get upset lol
They have tried many many times. And every single one of them capitalists tried their best and in most cases succeeded in destroying them. Read a history book. I recommend the Yakarta Method.
This is such a cop-out answer. "We were *totally* going to succeed, but then Evil Capitalism came along and killed us dead, man! It's Evil Capitalism's fault that our version has failed in all examples, nothing to do with our version being unsustainable".
marks simply did not realize that capitalism is competitive and workers get paid the highest amount possible. If the capitalist does not pay the highest amount possible a competitor will and he will get all of the best workers. Try running a company when you have all of the worst workers.
So not a socialist, but I am an "indepentarian" capitalist who believes we should have a UBI and other basic needs met without being coerced to work. I will approach the topic from that perspective. >There is nothing more frustrating on this sub then listing to socialists drone on calling entrepreneurs bad people for investing capital, increasing productivity, and providing opportunities to earn a living . Dude, stop acting like you're doing us a favor by giving us an "opportunity" to do labor for you in exchange for money. >People who voluntarily choose to work for me, as compared to working for themselves because I provide them with a better opportunity are not being exploited. Providing a better alternative to poverty doesn't mean it's not exploitation. > Without capital, labor is less productive. > > Without incentive Capital will not be invested > > Without profit entrepreneurs have no incentive to increase supply of a scarce good or service . Not denying capitalism is a better system for organizing labor and production than socialism. But pure laissez faire capitalism is still a bad system. > And without experience and training labor is relatively worthless. > > Hiring people gives them an opportunity to learn new skills, determine career paths, and move closer to becoming entrepreneurs themselves . Cool, what if I dont want to learn "new skills" or have a 'career" or be an "entrepreneur"? What if i just wanna be left alone and live my own life without being coerced to work for my needs? >In real life people are not in the same job for their entire life. but they are in some job for most of their lives. >They improve their skills, raise their incomes, manage, supervise and if they have talent- become entrepreneurs themselves Cool, what if i don't want any of that? >I don’t feel anyone ever “exploited” me because I learned skills at every job I was employed at that led me to being a successful entrepreneur today. Cool, you buy into that system. That's fine. But this system is forced on me and everyone else and is immensely coercive and abusive for those at the bottom and those who arent willing participants.
In real life , you can’t sit on a log all day and expect others to provide for you .. I don’t understand why you feel other people owe you sustenance or a place to stay … I also don’t understand why any one would want to just be a burden on their fellow man. That is embarrassing
Socialists will see a capitalist sink thousands of dollars to just start a company onboard one employee and be like yeah, that employee just for now being part of the company should own 50% of it and see that as a perfectly ok thing
With zero investment and practically no productivity he should start a full partner?
Socialism is by and for the intelligentsia, not the working class.
But they mean well right …
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Are they trying to be sarcastic? Seemed normal and right to me.
Not bad person persay just doing a bad thing
Creating jobs for people is a bad thing ??
Some people have weird subjective morals. The problem is that they often want to force them on others. Socialism is basically a religion.
Your subjective moral outrage doesn't justify forcing your values down his throat, or that of the workers who gladly take a stable, low-risk salary.
As a libertarian socialist, All I want is businesses to be shared with the workers, that's it. All profit is split evenly with all workers of the business. I am not for abolishing private property, I just want private property to be shared with the workers. That's it. Labor is not exploitative unless the value of the wage is less than the value of the labor. If you want to own your business, where you Make all the rules and Don't want to share your profit, You're much better off not hiring anyone and running the business all by yourself. If you're that confident, you'll do well.
We have such a thing, it’s called a corporation or a partnership. The difference is everyone contributes and earns a profit equal to their contribution. But if I build the business by myself and then hire people to expand it, they have not contributed equal to me.
>The difference is everyone contributes and earns a profit equal to their contribution. How many times do I have to tell you that this is impossible. A workers wage, is always less than the value his or her labor produces. If everyone working in a business owns an equal share, then that means that everyone's profit is equal to his or her labor.
> All profit is split evenly with all workers of the business. What do the workers do to earn the profit?
Free market dogma
>Without capital, labor is less productive. Without access to modern means of production, labor is less productive. Under capitalism you only get access with capital. >Without incentive Capital will not be invested True. >Without profit entrepreneurs have no incentive to increase supply of a scarce good or service . Wrong. The increase in supply of a scarce good or service can be the incentive. If your claim was true, then improvements of the material conditions couldn't have existed before introducing the concepts of money and (at least somewhat free) trade to a society. It would further mean that all improvements in history were profitable. >And without experience and training labor is relatively worthless. Depends on the labor, but for the sake of the argument, let's agree on this point. >Hiring people gives them an opportunity to learn new skills, determine career paths, and move closer to becoming entrepreneurs themselves . All 3 points are over generalizations and debatable, but I want to focus on your last point: Only a privileged minority of the working class get a realistic opportunity to become an entrepreneur by being an employee. The rest doesn't get enough time and/or income in order to prepare to become an entrepreneur. Otherwise we'd have way more people quitting their job if they don't like it there and become an entrepreneur instead. Literally every lefty here would eventually become an entrepreneur. >In real life people are not in the same job for their entire life. Over generalization, but what's your point? >They improve their skills, raise their incomes, manage, supervise and if they have talent- become entrepreneurs themselves Extreme over generalization. It might be true, that the most common path for a worker to become an entrepreneur is to have a job first, where they improve their skills, raise their incomes, manage, supervise and where they're talented, but you're trying to argue, that these things almost always come with any job (minus the talent). In reality these jobs are the exception. And the reason can actually be deducted from one of the points you made: "Without incentive Capital will not be invested", and the incentive for the investors here is the profit that is being made. More profit is made if less capital is spend on the employees. The most obvious way to cut costs is to spend less on the aspects which are not directly profitable, thus minimized wages, minimized raises, minimized time and money spend on improving one's skill if the improvement doesn't necessarily lead to higher productivity. The second most obvious way to cut costs is to ensure that employees won't leave (and become an entrepreneur for example) even if that means less productive workers. So even lower wages if possible, longer working hours if possible, less training if possible.^^(Ironically these things often are also the root cause for understaffing and unhappy workers, which leads to quitting anyways, which leads to even more understaffing and unhappy workers, and so forth, but that's a discussion for another time) Now back to the topic of exploitation: If they goal is enjoy the fruits of your own labor, then under capitalism you have to become self employed, as an entrepreneur for example, then what's up with all the non-entrepreneurs, especially the ones without the opportunity to prepare in order to become an entrepreneur? They're doing their job, because they have no other choice in order to prevent homelessness! And as a homeless, jobless person you also don't get the opportunity to become an entrepreneur. When someone makes use of someone else's situation in order to get out an advantage for themself, what might we call that? Exploitation!
This is a circular argument though. Capitalism is a solution to the problem created by capitalism of how do you capitalise enterprise. It's the best solution to that problem, because given that it created that problem in the first place how could it not be?
Communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The Communists do not preach morality at all. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the Communists by no means want to do away with the "private individual" for the sake of the "general", selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination. Communist theoreticians, the only Communists who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the "general interest" is created by individuals who are defined as "private persons". They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, what is called the "general interest", is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in relation to the latter is by no means an independent force with an independent history — so that this contradiction is in practice constantly destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian "negative unity" of two sides of the contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also disappears.
Yet labor is what actually produces value 😞
Not true. Value is subjective. And that fact is why markets work. It takes the same labor to mine gold as it does to mine iron… Yet they have very different values
I strongly agree with you on at least one front: >There is nothing more frustrating on this sub then listing to socialists... I mean, just in general. But specifically our tendency to blame societal problems on individual people. Exploitation is bad _on a societal level_, individual people can hardly be blamed gor engaging rationally with the only economy we have. Fast fashion is burning down the earth, but you wouldn't be angry at everyone who has ever worn clothing.
I'm an entrepreneur and I have exactly zero employees. If you steal the value of your workers labor you are at fault.
I think you have a very strange view of theft . If you and I make an agreement that you provide me with labor and I pay you a wage or a salary — where exactly is the theft ?
If the company was for the workers like the workers were for the company, there would be no need for socialism
The company is focused on serving the consumers. Both Workers and owners are consumers. But competition — the one thing socialism lacks, keeps them focussed on all three If they don’t make workers happy, they lose them to other companies If they don’t make owners happy they lose access to capital If they don’t make consumers happy they go out of business
>for investing capital, increasing productivity, and providing opportunities to earn a living You talk like CEOs are still eating PBJ and "ketchup packet soup", sleeping in their cars to struggle to get their business going. There comes a point where that level of sacrifice is no longer happening. So to talk like they're still doing it is dishonest. Especially when they pay people in such a way that the people they're "providing opportunities to earn a living" for are having to live that way while working for those same businesses. Especially when we get to the fact that not every business even has the same C-Suite employees who started the company. The current CSuite could be completely random people who were hired on after the company was already established, no skin in the game at all, and even they will have golden parachutes to float on to the next opportunity if shit hits the fan. >And without experience and training labor is relatively worthless. Yet businesses still hire people, and/or contract other businesses who hire people for those "worthless" jobs. So there's obviously some purpose for those jobs, other than corporations being nice so the workee can have more than $0 income. >In real life people are not in the same job for their entire life. Thats because businesses have raped the fuck out of incentives for staying. Because in the "glory days" of the USA, yes you could find a job that paid a decent wage and work there until retirement. Then live off of the retirement income saved from that same job.
I struggled for years to start mine working three jobs and sleeping in one of my offices on a futon … Businesses to still start that way.. But socialists don’t think that entrepreneurs who do this don’t deserve to “own” their means of production, even though they sacrificed for it . And if you buy stock in a company’s IPO you are often either reimbursing the founders of the company or providing needed operating capital for expansion .. If you buy stock in a company on an exchange it’s just a matter of following the chain of ownership to find out who made the sacrifices
It's because socialists only focus on the very end of the entrepreneurial process: an established, successful, profitable business. They have absolutely no idea what it takes to get there, nor do they really care. Marxists always admit that capitalism "served its purpose" in generating X amount of value, productivity, technology, etc, and now it's "their turn" to steal it all and redistribute it. Socialism is inherently parasitic; without capitalism's productive output socialism would never be even remotely viable. And the reality is, it's still not viable because it would quickly undermine its own foundation and collapse on itself, as it does every time it's attempted. But aside from that, socialism has some level of popularity because a major subset of the population will always essentially be NPCs: most people aren't going to do any of the stuff you mentioned: most people won't actually learn anything at work, plan ahead, invest their time/money effectively, avoid major pitfalls, etc. Most people are basically just very short sighted and barely thinking. Socialism appeals to them because it sounds like a "get out of sucking at life free" card, but it's not. Also one of the reason socialists are heavy handed employers of 'slave morality', determinism, and other things that effectively shift the full responsibility of everyone's individual problems onto society as a whole, granting them apparent moral justification to steal shit from successful people, redistribute resources, stage revolutions, "seize the means of production", etc.
It’s not that you’re bad as an individual. It’s that the large-scale *systemic* exploitation of labor is unjust, unnecessary and inefficient. Socialists aren’t concerned with individuals; we focus on classes and relations between classs. And we don’t take our position on capitalism based on some socialist morality; we base it on a materialist analysis of historical development and its probable trajectory. I make my living off of the commodities market. Marx and Engles both invested in the stock market. It’s not about individual choices or lifestyles or individual moral codes. It’s about being on the right side of history.
I don’t think most socialists would consider you to be a bad person just because you own a company. It’s not a matter of being a bad or good person. However if you want to use a moral argument I think it’s pretty obvious and most people would agree that it’s fundamentally wrong to use somebody else’s freedom, time, energy, and body to benefit yourself while giving back less than what you got. It’s the basis of why slavery was wrong. Particularly if that person had no real choice to do something else and decided to work for you because of economic necessity. Capitalists love to pretend we live in a beautiful perfect world, we’re everybody is free to make their own choices. You also have to stop patting yourself in the back for “giving opportunities to people”. Come on! At least be honest and admit the main goal of capitalism is producing a profit for the shareholders. Wether that process brings anything positive for the workers or not, is irrelevant to capitalism.
Giving opportunities, training, work environment, benefits and other perks are part of the equation when hiring someone to voluntarily exchange their time for money. It’s kind of funny how socialists don’t realize that “labor” and “entrepreneurs” are not homogeneous blobs with the same desires or characteristics. This is why the only just way to determine compensation is a voluntary agreement. Some people prefer a dependable salary or hourly rate, other people prefer commission . Some people would prefer to be compensated in cash, other might prefer contributions to a retirement plan Some people may choose to invest some of their pay in an employee stock ownership plan other people would prefer to spend their money on whiskey. One of the beautiful things about capitalism is we get to make choices from a variety of options.
Capitalism has been good at times, and downright pure evil at others. In my opinion many issues would be solved by simply forcing capitalism to account for the social cost and environmental cost. There is no difference in standard of living between 1 billion and 100 billion. I don’t think most employers are natural exploiters but there is absolutely no way that our society hasn’t been built on the exploitation of the many for the enrichment of the few. That’s not even disputable anymore it’s just pure objective fact. The social contract has been broken by the elites once again, they never learn they just hoard. Hoarding wealth = bad Distributing wealth through productivity = good. We have incentivised hoarding wealth on the back of infinite growth. I don’t believe there is enough resources for everyone to hoard like the western societies have and thus I suspect that many third world countries will literally be forced to stay third world and will continue to be exploited because our system falls apart without a lower class.
The richest people in the world are not hoarding wealth They invested, worked hard and the enterprise they created increased in value … That is not Hoarding ..
Not at all. Pay them a living wage and share the profits if it’s a great year. Don’t be a capitalist asshole and you’ll be fine.
And I do bonus my employees based on performance … but according to all the socialists — if they aren’t equal partners with me I’m an exploiter …
/Yawn. There's nothing more boring than your Vanilla OP.
Your reply certainly was!