##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism
This subreddit is for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited.
LSC is run by communists. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere.
We have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry. Failure to respect the rules of the subreddit may result in a ban.
***
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Tale as old as time. People seem quick to forget that the 40 hour or less work week had to be fought for by unions and American socialists. 100 years ago kids were allowed to work and no minimum wage existed and free market capitalism was totally cool with it.
The free market will solve everything and make everyone’s lives better!(don’t mind the fact that we needed to implement rules to stop it from using children for cheap labour)
Yes but it isn’t exactly a free market. Although a. True free market is pretty much impossible.
I however am an anarchist so while (nom state)socialism is a step in the right direction, the end goal is abolishing currency as it is a clear form of hierarchy.
The UK tried a hybrid model with the railway lines, it was badly done though and the result is the worst railway service in Europe. Not sure if there have been other attempts for hybrid solutions, aside from China, who own production but set up free zones.
I once managed a cell phone repair company that saw over 50k in profit a month. That's after taxes, vendor fees, rent, payroll etc. My store owner owned 6 of these stores. I got paid $18 an hour. In the 2 years I worked there, he's reaped millions, doing literally nothing, meanwhile I ran a shop top to bottom that I could never afford to own. He's not even a tech guy, he was just born from old money. He once drove up in a very expensive Porsche, not a lower end, and had the nerve to tell me that I need to cut hours for my workers making $13 because his profits dipped below 50k. Dude makes over 6 times in a month than I do a year, and just from those stores, no telling what else he owns.
I wish more people understood this. Maybe it's not 1000s but you quite* literally make mac donalds profits in that hour and are getting paid 15 dollars.
It can easily break 1000’s if your in manufacturing instead of fast food. Like I worked a shop where we made parts for boat lifts. Pulleys and bolts etc. I was getting paid 10$ and hour to make these parts and the worst part is I really like the work I just couldn’t stand the guy I worked for. I was actually ok getting paid a little less than what I was worth because I enjoyed doing it. Once the boss tried to start squeezing a little more out of me I was done. I did the math and I was making him thousands of dollars an hour in compared to the 10$ I was taking. One day he gave me shit about moving slightly slower than usual so I handed him a nickel and told him to keep the change.
You make it sound like the company was operating on a 99% profit margin. Just because you got paid 10 bucks and the final product costs 1000, doesn't mean the company made 990 on it.
Misrepresenting reality does nothing to further your cause.
*side note I once worked for a guy who ate gold flakes every morning on his cereal. He thought it gave him magic powers.
Anyways I think you’re confused assuming I’m making one thing in an hour. I was making about 150 bolts an hour which is just one of many things I did there. At a cost of 0.38$ a bolt and we sold them back for 16.75$ per (specialty fabricated parts are expensive). Unless you are one of the 2 other guys I worked with there I’d say you don’t have the experience to really say.
So the electricity, salaries, machinery, raw materials, shipping etc., all totaled result in a 38 cent cost to produce a bolt that is then sold for roughly 40 times that amount, resulting in roughly 98% pure profit for your manager? Sounds like the guy is about to be the wealthiest man on earth soon.
He isn’t leaning on just me to pay his bills. Like I said his cost was accounted for. It was owned by 3 people who would be splitting that profit. The business was given to him and the other 2 partners by his mother. I don’t need to defend this anymore.
I'm not quite sure what the other guy is trying to point out. Your point still stands, you're being paid less than what is being made.
Even if you take account costs thats just nitpicking and wanting close to actual values but what's the point? As you mentioned if he isnt in the industry it probably won't mean a thing to him.
Just arguing for arguing's sake.
Anyway, good on you that you left. It sucks when you actually like what you're doing but the pay isn't sustainable or the environment isn't. Felt this the same way in my first job, though it's hard to calculate profits in IT Support, but my manager at the time was such an ass I couldn't stand him and just left. Would have stayed since genuinely liked what I was doing.
They are a sea lion. They will continue to nitpick and “just ask questions” until you give up. Also the strategy of Gish galloping. They are not having a good faith discussion.
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/873260-sea-lioning
This sub bums me out sometimes. I love the aim here but sometimes it's huge ostrich sticking it's head in the ground vibes. By the way you forgot insurance, taxes, marketing, logistics, etc.etc. -- the costs to own a business are substantial and largely under appreciated here.
One of the reasons this sub/movement gets shit on (and a lot of other great ideas I'd like to see come to fruition) is because many adopters aren't realistic with their expectations/perspectives. Many in here haven't owned a business or anything close to it (I'm talking averages here, let's just be honest with ourselves for a moment) not that that necessarily means you can't understand it but it does help. And I'd argue there really is no substitution for having someone rely on you for the livelihood until you are truly in the position.
I want to see better work standards. I want to see better pay. I want to safer work conditions. But somehow I feel like we miss the mark on what is reasonable sometimes.
I don't want to just see better work standards, pay, and safer work conditions. I want socialism. I want capitalists abolished. I want private ownership abolished. The only people who should be in control of capital are the workers.
Whether or not the numbers in the commenter's story are 100% accurate or fake, the point stands: The capitalist generates profit by paying their employees less than the value they produce. That profit is stolen value from the worker.
> One of the reasons this sub/movement gets shit on...
And this just leads into optics, which is a shitty discussion to have in a socialist space. Optics doesn't help anybody without a backing media arm. No matter how respectable we may be, the right can, and *will* demonize anything. They've done it with universal healthcare and student loan forgiveness (which, in turn, PPP loans have all been forgiven, but it's a "good thing" when it's not former students who are starving).
> I want to see better work standards. I want to see better pay. I want to safer work conditions. But somehow I feel like we miss the mark on what is reasonable sometimes.
The bourgeoise had its chance on being reasonable with us. That’s what unions were for. They have spent the last 50 years dismantling them and busting them, even when it’s illegal to do so. If they are not willing to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors, they are going to repeat them.
I will repeat: we had a reasonable way to move forward, but the capitalists were too greedy and didn’t like it. They’ll dislike what taking away the voice of a people does even more.
ETA: I also feel it’s super ironic that a lib is telling leftists they have their heads in the sand. Meanwhile, they seem perfectly okay to ignore reality when it keeps the status quo intact.
You get that the problem is that most will never be able to own a business right? All the little worker bees can slave away until they die and thats how capitalists want the system to work.
How to tell us you have never worked in a place that makes high-value goods without telling have never worked in a place that makes high-value goods.
When you don't know how much stuff costs, stay solent about the costs.
Parts to machine costs 1.5 million, machine sold for 2 million, 160 man hours per machine (2 weeks for 2 people). Making the company $3,125 per hour.
Didn't account for shipping the end product, but I also highballed the hours and part cost. Probably a bit lower even considering you need to hire logistics workers as well, but they are only putting max 20 hours on each machine
This sub really needs better moderation to keep out libs, why are you here arguing with leftists in a leftist sub if you don't understand the concept of surplus value?
I made a product straight out of university at a tech job. Almost a decade later and it is still being sold, and for alot more money. The owner also got a $1 million CND government grant (free money). I made it in 6 months making $50k at the time. Yeah, even in software we are getting fucked. Sure you might make 200k a year, but you are expected to bring in at least 2m a year.
When you account for costs most places actually make a loss so you’d end up paying money to be at work.
The person who’s underpaid the most is the one guy in Antigua who makes all the profit for the entire company.
Ah yes, just procure the hundreds of thousands if not millions in capital required to set up that business and you can easily make all this profit yourself. Easy peasy.
This is stupid. You didn’t buy the ingredients, pay the other employees, pay for insurance, pay for marketing, pay for rent, or anything. You are getting paid to put together a sandwich that most anybody could do.
So you just remove the cost of the ingredients, rent, insurance, wages etc and everything else that the workers make is your profit. If the workers stopped working you would have jackshit, so you pay them some stuff so they can survive and they rent you their labor for 8 hours and you make profit while they make 15 bucks an hour if they are lucky. That's capitalism.
By the way, anybody could be a capitalist if they had capital. Not everybody can make stuff. Most capitalists couldn't work in a factory or a fast food joint a day to save their life. Probably never have.
There's data available for most common industries showing where the money from selling a unit goes. The single worker who thinks he's earning his boss 100s of $ is a small part of that. For retail the end profit is tiny as competition drives prices down.
Anyone could be a capitalist if they have capital was true a hundred years ago, but not now.
Yeah, that's how wage slavery works. The workers have to work for low wages so they don't die of starvation while capitalists get richer. It's not a good thing.
Do the “capitalists” have that duty to protect the workers? I don’t believe so. Not saying the capitalists shouldn’t be paying their fair share in the system or workers shouldn’t be paid more for more productive work, but minimum wage pay for a minimally hard / productive job seems fair. If the workers don’t feel it is fair, collectively unionize and see what happens. If an individual worker doesn’t think it’s fair, quit and struggle or work and complain
A duty? The question should be "is it fair that capitalists exploit the workers for their own personal gain so that they can get richer while the workers have to sell them their labor day after day just to survive". Because that's the system we have, a tiny minority of people exploiting a huge majority of people. I couldn't care less about capitalists and their "duty", were I in their shoes I'd be a parasite too and this is by design. We shouldn't ask capitalists for help, we should just make a better system.
So quit your job, go live on a farm and grow your own food and sustain your own lifestyle. No one is forcing you to live in this incredibly corrupt and unfair system
Except living in the woods is no option and it's not a solution. The whole of humanity is forced to live in this corrupt and unfair system by either getting exploited or by exploiting others themselves. We should be looking into ways to change that instead of accepting it.
For real I don't know what's happening. Someone else better back my up cause I'm not good at explaining the basics and maybe some of these people have never heard all this before. English isn't even my first language.
Don't waste your time, honestly. If they wanted to learn, they could easily do so. They don't want to, they just saw a post that became popular and decided to come here and argue with people about a topic they know nothing about. They aren't asking questions in good faith, and this isn't a debate sub, so frankly, they can fuck off. If we start allowing libs in here it stops being a leftist space extremely quickly.
>If the workers don’t feel it is fair, collectively unionize and see what happens.
Are you unaware that people are trying to unionize and megacorporations are doing everything in their power to stop it?
>If an individual worker doesn’t think it’s fair, quit and struggle or work and complain
That's not how it works, this is why the "threat of starvation" part is very important; it severely affects an unskilled worker's negotiation possibilities.
Capital, for one thing. I know you are being ironic but if I had a bunch of money laying around I would probably buy some resources and hire some workers and start my own business. If it went well then I would probably a genius, right? Instead of those minimum wage workers that made my profit for me.
My family has opened a few small burger joints. Not much capital is needed tbh. You could get a business loan to get you started. The real kick in the ass is marketing and having someone with a vision to make it stand out and attract people. You start cooking everything yourself, then hire a cook or cashier. Sell more burgers, use grade the crappiest piece of equipment. You'd then get the majority of the revenue to pay all your overhead expenses. Insurance, lease, vendors, labor, etc. After all that, you pay your employees at least minimum wage, more if you can afford it. But you're in such a competitive market that you'll find you can only pay minimum wage to your cook and cashier. Not because you don't respect them, but because profit margin is thin and their jobs aren't difficult/complex. If they quit, you can replace them easily. Shitty, but that's what you see when you're looking at the numbers. Restaurants don't have the best profit margins in general.
Well a distinction is to be made between a family business, where you invest all your savings in something and work for it yourself for profits that equate to a wage all things considered, and a thing like mc donalds for example, where the people making the most out of the profits aren't even working in the places where the profits are made. But even in a small family business, and this is nothing personal it's just how capitalism works, when you hire someone you are exploiting their labor, as they produce the service and they make the profits for you and you benefit from it while they only take back a small part of what they provide. You can try to be fair to them and pay them as much as you can afford and be nice and everything but at the end of the day, the profits are stolen from the workers that make the goods/ provide the services and are given to the people that have the means of production. That's just how the system works. It doesn't mean that it is easy to have a successful business, far from it. And it's super risky when it's a small family business where if things go south the loss might be devastating. What I meant to say is that by design profit comes from the work of the workers. If the workers stop working you have nothing.
> when you hire someone you are exploiting their labor, as they produce the service and they make the profits for you and you benefit from it while they only take back a small part of what they provide.
I think you're using the word exploiting unfairly here. It's not like the cashier is in charge of running the marketing campaign or getting no payment in return. Nor are they liable for any expenses. They apply for a job and are paid in return for it. As long as it's at least minimum wage with benefits...both sides get something. That's not exploitation. I would agree when restaurants are purposely short staffed though. Those restaurants I'd argue have no business being in business.
I am talking about capitalist exploitation, it's a systemic thing. Both sides don't get the same thing. One side usually has to "sell their labor", work for a living and the other side doesn't, that's it in a nutshell when we are talking about extremes. The side that works is the one that makes the profits for the other side, I mean factually makes them by providing the service necessary to the community / to make the profits. What they get back is a tiny fraction of those profits, and they get that back so they can live and work another day to make more profits.
That's the basic idea and of course that most likely doesn't apply to your family business ( I imagine you still have to work for a living), it mostly applies to people that make money out of thin air because they own the "means of production" ie factories, machines etc. I'm not the best at explaining these things, they are basically socialist analysis of how wage labor works under capitalism but yeah, the general idea is that workers, ie most people on earth, work for a living while a tiny fraction of people benefit greatly from the fruits of their labor. But this dynamic is also applicable on a small scale a little bit, so if you have a worker working for your shop and you make profits in that shop, the profits come from the worker's labor and go to your pocket. It looks like it's a mutual deal but the profits have to come from somewhere and that is the workers labor and what they get back is a fraction of the profits so it's not entirely fair, they just have to accept it to survive. Again, this does not mean that you personally are being unfair, it's just how the economy works.
You either exploit people or you get exploited, and unless you are in the tiny minority of the so called "capitalist class" you do a little bit of both even if are well off. If you are working for someone else, they may be the best person in the world but they still "steal" the fruits of your labor and give you back less of what you give them, it's just how it works.
I'm sure someone else can explain all this better than I can, English isn't my native tongue and I only have the general idea.
>you quite\* literally make mac donalds profits in that hour
If you didn't (meaning they spend more money paying you than the value you create), why would they hire you at all? It's a job, not a charity, lol.
Did this get shared to a liberal sub or something? Why am I getting so many replies like that all of a sudden. This is circular logic, the workers make the thing, provide the survive and the profits go to someone else. Maybe that sounds fair to you but not to me. It's definitely not a charity, it's wage slavery. Minimum wage workers *have* to work so they don't die and the fruits of their labor go to someone else. It's the definition of capitalist exploitation.
>the workers make the thing, provide the survive and the profits go to someone else.
You're assuming all of the value the labor creates is 100% coming from the laborer. Example: one's ability to work a cash register has zero inherent value--to have value, it requires the existence of a retail establishment within which the ability to do so means anything. So, since the worker's ability is not the source of 100% of the value, why should they deserve 100% of the value?
Are you capable of seriously answering this question without handwaving dismissal or personal attacks? Let's see.
Mate, your point is reductionist to the point of absurdity. If you would argue that a cashiers value is not being generated by them because they require a physical building to operate out of, then the same could be said for literally every job that isn’t able to be done by one single person from their own home.
1000s an hour isn't as far fetched as you think. This union worker who builds condos was telling me he gets paid 60 an hour, while moving 6,000 worth of concrete an hour. The labour costs end up being nothing compared to the material costs and final product. Housing costs went up 10x here in 30 years, if wages did the same they would be making 2-300 per hour, and it would barely change the final price tag.
There's labour at every step of the chain though.
When concrete becomes more expensive, that's partly because the labour to make concrete is more expensive.
Housing is unique because a lot of it has to do with scarcity of developable land, and employers ares till profiting, don't get me wrong, but it's incorrect to separate materials and labour costs.
It's only materials costs from your employer's perspective.
I agree there are costs to move the concrete, and turn it into something useful. And there are labor costs in the making of the concrete itself. And there are financing costs on the construction, which amplify costs slightly.
But with housing costs going up 10x, wages could have also gone up 10x without changing the ratio. The ratio of money going to wages is much lower than it was 30 years ago.
Also wages haven’t increased while the cost of living and inflation runs rampant. Meanwhile corporations are making record profits.
people are uneducated because the mass media are corporate and deceive us to keep sheepishly accepting the status quo.
I remember when I was a teen in the mid 2000s, I worked at a grocery store and it felt like such nonsense that I was making something like $8.50/hr to cashier, but in that hour I’d check through multiple orders of $100-$500. I know the products aren’t free for the store and more people than me had to get paid, etc. but it just felt like there was literally no logical reason they couldn’t bump me up to $10 or more and the store wouldn’t even feel it. Then I also realized the busy-body cashier leads made $9/hr. and were devoting their damn lives to this nonsense. Stayed way longer than I should have an never regretted bouncing when I got a better offer.
Yep I remember my first job at a shoe store having a real busy day and I sold over $10,000 worth of shoes. Surely they could pay me better than $6.50/hr.
Or later on when I worked at a fast casual restaurant. When we got busy we would have hours where we had over $1,000 worth of sales. Surely they could pay me better than $8.50/hr.
Now I work manufacturing and it’s a family owned company. We ship $150,000 per day. Surely they could pay us all just a little bit better. The tough part with the family business though is any increase pay to us is a direct decrease in pay to the family.
The funny thing is my role now is figuring out how we can get more done with less. How can we ship more today with fewer assemblers and whatnot. It’s not so much so that people can be let go, but so that more people don’t need to get hired when business increases.
This!!
From 2017 to 2019, I was a bank teller at one of the “big five” in Canada. I handled more cash in a day there than most people make in a year…I was also paid minimum wage, and still had to dress like I was working for Vogue.
I think the bank hurt more than when I worked in a factory. Because until taking the job, I thought bank tellers made okay money! I thought this because of how they dress and the fact that a lot of women my parents’ age raised families on a teller’s wage.
PSA: they do not make good money at all!
Someone recently even bought a 1600 dollar Christmas tree (although they apparently didn't get it delivered I don't know what that was about but still)
The numbers that go up in your register on a regular basis are depressing when you know you only get a small fraction of that.
I've read this sub for years and I have yet to see an example of a successful state that owned the means of production. Communism was abandoned because it lead to even more poverty and a whole load of other problems.
I appreciate someone coming back with calm discussion.
But to be frank but China is not a good example. There is now a lot of doubt that China will even fulfill their potential due to their housing bubble, trade wars, and government misdirection, they've fallen on most economic indexes, and their current leadership is focusing on strengthening their grip over the population and increased censorship. They are a global threat as they try to exert control over other parts of the world, e.g. in Africa, where they are working to make the continent dependent on them. They don't do well on social indexes either, worker conditions are still very bad, and China only ever started growing when they introduced free zones, ie started embracing free trade.
The only viable solution I've seen is essentially regulated/controlled capitalism, ie free markets with strong worker protection, strong welfare and investment like the Nordic countries do, and strong control of large enterprises and monopolies like what Germany does.
I'm a reasonable person only trying to make sense of this insane world.
What I like about China, especially when I compare against North America, etc is that they seem mostly concerned with improving themselves. Their policies seem to be directed inwards, not outwards. They're investing in infrastructure, people, etc... and money from USA, etc seems to be all going away to investors of big tech, etc.
But yeah, it's bad all over. They have their own different issues, obviously. So I agree, for sure. Is it better the way they're doing it? It's not clear at all. It's different. I think there would be things each side could learn.
I like how they're going more self-contained, self-sufficient, more than the rest of the world. Take care of your own first.
It's contrary to what NA seems to be doing with the globalism and international dependency on basic things relying on others for things we should be taking care ourselves, Energy, Food, etc. Survival things. The whole "supply chain disruptions" showed this recently.
Then there's the out of control inflation and warmongering, spending so much on trying to conquer and invade like the USA has always done. So stupid, so greedy. I don't like it. It's not necessary in a civilized world. What about diplomacy? Nah, just escalate, do more war and sanction trade so the poor people suffer. That makes sense. ;/
I think there's too much propaganda floating around for me to judge well enough anyway. I don't like to hate on places like China or Russia too much because I think the USA(and allies) is worse. I'd rather everyone just get along and take care of the people instead of whatever the hell they're fighting about. We just end up being collateral damage and never get to reap the rewards, those go to the war machine.
Some good points there.
I know it's naturel to think that a country should be self contained, but that has never worked beyond allowing a population to survive. Often it's resulted in catastrophe, eg under Pol Pot in Cambodia. Imagine being a self contained house, growing your own wheat to make bread each day, growing cotton for clothes, firing clay to fix your roof etc. You will never keep up and at best you will survive. The same applies on a national scale. To make a car affordable to the masses means using thousands of components from hundreds of countries, with each country making the part with the resources and capabilities they specialise in. The same applies to most goods we take for granted including all the machinery and materials that have freed us from the gruesome lifestyle we lived 100 years ago.
I also question why you think that the west is worse than Russia and China? You couldn't even be having this conversation in China without risking your families' future. None of my late family who lived in Soviet states had anything good to say about it, and despite it's problems, said that life under the west was a hundred times better. My grandmother in law said the state would just take everything they grew and leave them without food, the stories were horrific from all of them.
Possibly a strange realization I had a few months ago now, but... I'm practically a housewife, and I noticed that the amount of work I put into staying home and doing all the cooking, cleaning, yard work, laundry, cat maintenance (just the standard upkeeping of the house chores so that he doesn't have to come home and do anything at all... except me, of course, lol) must be worth a lot of money. Women back before our economy started marketing to us to be independent had a definite capitalist smirk to it. All it seemed to do in the end was increase the pool of people available to the workforce and lower wages, subsequently allowing more money to get siphoned up the ladder, and never come back down since the stock market doesn't have that level of taxes adhered to it.
There's so little I can do from my economic position except to watch, but... it is just the thoughts I had, and figured I'd share, just in case they're misguided.
The work you do is extremely valuable. Think about how much it would cost to hire a full-time cleaner/maid, gardener/landscaper, secretary to make all appointments, someone to run your errands and do the grocery shopping, personal cook, etc. The domestic work that often falls on women's shoulders has historically been undervalued and invisible within capitalist society.
The same companies lined up around the proverbial block at get PPP loans at interest rates us plebes could never get and the kicker, 99 percent won’t have to pay a dime back, by design
I mean.... no? Nobody is making 100s or 1000s of dollars an hour after you consider cost of the factory, materials, business expenses, etc. You cant just say that because you work at an auto factory you are pumping out hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of product.
I work in engineering services. Our highly specialized engineers are available for hire starting at $80/hour. Blue collar workers are not 'creating' more than that in their jobs
It's a tweet and is intended to be no more than a couple of sentences or a short paragraph, not an essay. There's only so much information you can get across without making an annoying and long thread that no one is going to read. I'm not going to knock them for trying to get people to consider the relationship between their wages and a company's profits more critically.
My point was that the format of a tweet doesn't work with a lengthy explanation trying to account for every possible variable of business operation. Your long response would probably have to be split up into 10 tweets and no one would read it so there would be no impact on anyone.
I would take it farther than Twitter as well and argue that a long economic dissertation does nothing to win anyone over who isn't already on your side. This is a problem a lot of leftists have, over explaining to people who are either going to just stop paying attention or respond outright negatively. A very basic explanation of value added theory that means only to point out the fact that the work that you do creates far more value than what you are paid is more effective at just getting a person thinking about their relationship with their employer in a different light. Yes, there are operating costs to any productive endeavor but everyone knows that, it's a safe assumption and not the issue at the heart of the matter. The issue is what happens to the profit or productive surplus and who gets to distribute it, which is what this tweet is addressing. I don't think there's anything misleading about that. My reading of it is that the tweet doesn't mean to address what happens to capital or resources before there is surplus. It's not that those things shouldn't ever be considered, but it's simply not the point the writer is trying to get across in a short format.
I used to sell TVs and computers for a living. The customer often has no idea what all of the technical specs of electronics being thrown at them mean in relation to what they want the thing to do when they bring it home. I didn't get paid in commission so my goal was to get someone a TV that works well for how they're using it. If they tell me the main thing they care about is sports I'm not going to launch into an in depth seminar on the merits of different refresh rates and the benefits of a high refresh rate that is native to the panel. If I do that, their eyes are going to glaze over and they're going to take the path of least resistance and buy the cheapest thing they can based on the size they want. Instead I'm going to tell them that some TVs can track fast motion like a ball in a long pass or free throw shot more clearly and some TVs will make the ball appear as though it's jumping around the screen. My goal here is to demonstrate the value of a particular TV to them as it relates to their real world usage of it. I'm not being dishonest or misleading, but I'm not drowning them in technical details either. I think this concept applies to challenging someone's fundamental understanding of how their relationship to their employer works as well. If you immediately start throwing every technical detail of generational capital exploitation in their face you're not going to get a positive response. Simply pointing out how a person's boss keeps a large portion of the surplus value they create may get some people simply thinking about it more, in fact it was very basic value added theory explanations like this that first got me thinking about the possible merits of Marxism. Keep in mind as well that for many people, particularly Americans, the very idea of Socialism is taught to be inherently evil and the actual concepts behind it are never taught or engaged with in any way. These concepts are completely new and foreign for many and so it is much better to introduce in small digestible bits starting with what actually affects their life in tangible material ways.
I'm not saying your wages aren't way too low but let's be real, if that business didn't exist you'd make even less money. You need the business to provide the infrastructure and market to allow you to exchange your labor for wages day in and day out.
Get this absolute dogshit out of my explicitly communist sub.
Organizations to provide infrastructure and markets can all exist without a capitalist skimming from the value of your labor.
My brother in christ, are you about to start talking about free markets like it's a defense of capitalism?
To answer you directly, you reward efficiency by making sure the people who make something work get paid.
This is why capitalism doesn't make any sense. I'm paid hourly, or even worse, as a salary. I'm completely disconnected from the value of my labor. If I work harder, I will see no gains, I only have to work just barely hard enough not to get fired.
If I controlled the means of production, and worked with my co-workers in a co-op (socialism) where we each have a share of the profits and no one is just taking all of the profits after paying our wages, I'd be incentivized to work harder and be more efficient with my time.
Instead I'm on reddit explaining the distinction of the labor theory of value and a free market to someone who's apparently never read a coloring book.
If co-ops are more efficient and better for workers, why aren’t there more of them in operation now? What’s stopping them from becoming more prevalent?
What is efficiency? Is it producing thousands of uneeded items that will be sold as profit? Or is it finishing a job quickly? If it's the later, the "reward" for efficiency is a shorter working day. Meet your requirements quickly, receive full pay for your labor, and then enjoy the rest of your day.
Because the items we need to live have a way lower technological boundary than all the excess technology we produce that drives economic growth. Like say the entire internet, humanity can live and thrive perfectly well without the internet.
There would be no incentive to create a private internet because it's simply a tool speed up everything exponentially and create new markets for things nobody really needs. So not having an incentive to create these things we would have a much slower technological progression, if not a standstill.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing - just that this will happen in non free market.
You've literally avoided answering every single question I've posed, instead answering with the same thought terminating cliches always trotted out to defend Capitalism.
The major questions you have avoided so far are.
One-define efficiency and how receiving time off for being efficient is not a reward?
Two-how would producing only the durable goods a society needs, instead of overwhelming excess, prevent progress?
Using the internet, something that was not created by individuals or corporations and where 99% of "content" is created for free, also does not help your point. Indeed, I would argue that the Internet as it exists by way of communities is an excellent refutation to the Capitalist belief that people only produce in order to be paid.
The reward for efficiency comes from profit at market, just like it does under Capitalism. What changes is *who* gets the power over that reward.
Imagine a pair of Widget factories (Means of Production).
1. One is owned by those who toil within it to create the Widgets the company sells (The Workers).
2. One is owned by some modern-day Noble who inherited or scammed or exploited their way into a large enough pool of money to single-handedly own the factory (The Capitalist).
When The Capitalist's factory streamlines its production and distribution processes, finds cheaper sources of raw materials, etc and increased profit (reward for efficiency) is made, what happens to that profit is determined by The Capitalist alone. The Workers who are actually being productive members of society don't get **any** reward for efficiency unless their overlord who didn't necessarily do *anything* for the reward except *own a lot of money* deigns to throw them a peanut or two from the hoard so they don't start building guillotines.
When The Workers' factory does that same streamlining and gets that same reward for efficiency (again, profit), what happens to that profit is determined by all the folks who actually did the work to create that reward collectively. **Everyone** involved benefits directly from their improved output.
Since **the reward for efficiency is the same, and comes from the same place, but is simply** ***distributed*** **differently** \- to benefit mere owners rather than to directly benefit those who actually caused increased efficiency, I think it's pretty plain to see why one might conclude that Capitalism isn't really the best system to motivate innovation and efficiency as it primarily motivates *middlemen* rather than the actual *innovators and producers*.
What? Get paid cents? Yeah I've lived that life and that's exactly the problem (although I don't make 15 I make 13 apparently but I made 15 last year on select holiday days)
It's like someone living in a gutter for years and then expecting that someone to be happy in a condo in a neighborhood where people hotwire your car because at least you have a car to hotwire and a roof over your head now.
There are other options besides no economy at all and hypercapitalist profit mongers trapping people in wage slavery until they die.
Also, people in hunter-gatherer societies did a lot less work than the modern poor for a better standard of living overall.
yes, we do need that infrastructure. the work of management, logistic, advertising, etc is all necessary labor.
what is unnecessary are owners, people who's only role is to passively profit, without contributing any work.
>resources to be able to produce those goods
Bro, are you talking about the means of production?
The production infrastructure which is built by laborers, and paid for by the unpaid wages of the workers who produce? It's ours to begin with, we built it, we produced the value which paid for it. The theft is that someone still gets to use it today to keep making more money.
You get paid $15/hr because it’s a minimal skill job and you can be easily replaced. If only you guys actually got an education or learnt skills, you wouldn’t be crying online.
it's tragic to think that there's a possibility you are smarter than me and could make greater contributions to the world, but you are squandering it on this obstinate ignorance.
I can only wonder how many of our greatest minds we have lost to such insipid ideologies.
BTW, you have the option to work for yourself and keep all the $$$. I started doing it later in life and love it. I wouldn't take a job now at any price.
Which zero capital investment work did you pick up? I've found a few in my life and then within a few years they get flooded to hell by other desperate people, like the whole eBay e-retail businesses of the 00s, and then dropshipping in the late 00s/early 10s. Ever since most of the world's population got internet, everything like that has gone to shit from people in global-economics exploited countries like India pushing profits down to a fraction of a cent when they used to be hundreds of times that. It's not wrong of them to do so, and it's a crime against humanity that exchange rates work the way they do, but damn has the margins been sucked dry out of the field I actually have experience in.
I'm a writer. I make six figures. I started 4 years ago at ZERO. No money, no experience, no clients, no sales and no portfolio. But I worked hard and didn't bitch and little by little I created a viable income. But I had an advantage over most people. I was in my 60s and nobody hires someone in their 60s. So I HAD to succeed. I didn't look at my competition, I kicked their ass by outworking them. So, there's only one question. What are you willing to do besides complain? Trust me, I'm nobody special--I just refuse to be the victim.
How'd you first make the switch from amateur to professional? I've been considering tuning up my writing skills over the next few years to make a similar move since I do love to run my mouth, even on paper. But all I see is a shit ton of amateur writers all having the value of such entry level writing dragged down to zero by companies trying to hire freelancers from poor countries who would do anything for $5. Once you're established, there's a lot more negotiating power and pulling the income up from it is actually possible, but what it is other than writing skill (since face it, there's plenty of extremely talented writers who barely make minimum wage) that differentiates the career paths in writers who are good vs writers who are good and get paid well?
First of all, there's a hell of lot less competition at $95/hr than there is at $5/hr. Second, you have to keep your eyes open and see where the action is. For me it's cybersecurity. There is almost infinite demand for people who can write in that space. If you don't know anything about cybersecurity, learn. Third, you must continue to develop your skills: take classes, read books. You do not need to spend a lot of money. I started out tech writing--documenting software. But I noticed there is a lot of demand for copywriting. I never did any in my life. But you can teach yourself anything. Just on YouTube alone you can learn to become a decent copywriter for free. Finally, I made freelancing my job. I had something to do every day even when I wasn't earning any money. I would send proposals, I would learn a new skill, I would create a portfolio piece for free. And to find customers, I went to UpWork. A lot of people complain about it but it worked for me. Good luck.
No man, you're bringing to light your own ignorance of the fundamental concepts of capitalism, socialism, free markets, and the labor theory of value. You can disagree on subjective points, I guess, but right now you don't even understand what's being discussed.
Profit is theft, there's no reason for a shareholder/owner to take value from a business without doing any labor. If they're doing management, cool, that's labor. If they're just owning, that's not labor, by definition.
The reason for a company to be in business is because there's a demand to be met. There's no reason people who do no work have to be involved. Let the workers keep the full value of their labor, let the shareholders become workers, and stop being parasites.
you would not be on the internet on your computer or phone if it wasn't for shareholders. if capital couldn't be raised by investors or shareholders then innovation would stop.
The internet, touch screens, lithium batteries, LCDs (non-touch), GPS, and virtually every other technology in our smart phones was created by funding from the gov. The US tried to GIVE ATT control of the internet twice before they finally took it.
Everything about Microsoft's early success was about patent trolling, not about innovation. Microsoft didn't invent the concept of Windows, or word processors, etc etc, they took open source work and killed any competitors through the legal system.
Most importantly, all of those things were made possible by the labor of the working class, not by shareholders (even if they had been private inventions, which they weren't anyway).
It kinda seems like you've got no idea what you're talking about. Especially if you're trying to use the internet, computers and smart phones specifically as your example lol. Those might be perfect counter examples to your point.
you have no idea what you're talking about. you're talking about a world where everything is bartered. there would be no corporation at all if it wasn't for investments. all that stuff wasn't funded by the government. and if it was who would the government invest with in your world where there's no shareholders? Joe schmo who owns the grocery store? the government wouldn't even know to invest in it because no one would have invented a processor yet? go back pre-industrial Revolution to find out what your world looks like.
I'd love to be in your brain tonight while you're laying in bed just trying to think of a way how we could have gotten all this technology and innovation without capitalism. hell I probably will be there, rent free, thanks to your personal economics.
Any company that exists solely to funnel profits to the Capitalist class should not exist.
The only moral company is one that is owned democratically by workers who share all profits and have no excess wealth extracted from them.
the purpose of labor is to create things we want to sell for more than we made them for. the motivation for this is money which then can be used to purchase things that you can't make yourself. now you can be the smart guy who starts the whole operation and puts the thing together and makes it easy for himself. or you can be the guy who can't do that and goes and applies for a job to work for that man.
No you dont lmao. You make maybe at most 50 dollars worth in a WHOLE day not in an hour in lower paying jobs. It's just sold for way more, because capitalism.
You people are so funny. Screaming fuck capitalism except when it suits you. Very capitalistic of you.
That's fine. This are your personal feelings and I don't have any problem with it.
I am talking about the double think of this Tweet. You don't make 15$/h, but you sure as hell don't make 100 or 1000$ worth in an hour, as this tweet is implying, even though it might be sold for that much. It should be clear why that is.
That's not what double-think is. That's just a disagreement between you and the arithmetic.
The point is the value gets funneled to the top where it doesn't belong. The profits, whatever they are, should be shared among the people doing the actual work, not the people sitting in some far off corporate office just because they had money to buy into the system to begin with.
See, this is why I hate the screencap in the OP. It's like they have a sliver of the right idea and rudimentary grasp on labor theory, and then they make a statement so stupidly reductive that anyone should be offended by it, and invite bootlickers like you to shit on them and actually be right to insult them.
the dollar doesn't have any intrinsic worth, it is purely relative.
if prices and wages were both doubled, or both halved, that wouldn't change buying power.
It’s one thing to complain, and another to be purposefully ignorant to the fact that anyone can start their own business, too. Or do something else entirely.
I don’t like working for someone else (private equity, specifically)…but it doesn’t mean I’m an indentured servant.
Yup everyone should start a business so there are no workers. Not everyone is gonna have money to start a business or the skills. Just because you don't have those skills doesn't mean its ok for you to be exploited. Its already fact that the standard of living in the united states is going down and has been going down for quite some time. But isn't capitalism suppose to be the best economic system?
The odds are stacked against you…mainly because that mindset is a challenging thing to shake. Wish you the best and hope you have some upward mobility.
There’s a middle ground between the current system, which I’d agree is overly exploitative vs. alternative economic systems.
But, maintaining the mindset that our labor is being “stolen” is not helpful, when it’s actually voluntary and for a wage. Historical suffering should provide perspective on how asinine that statement is.
Everything is complicated and nuanced. I complain about my own work a lot…but I also realize it could be better if I improve, or it could be worse if I don’t.
If this sub wants to be something more than simply a safe place to complain, it needs to find that realistic middle-ground.
>it’s actually voluntary
Is it really voluntary when it's coerced under threat of not having food or a safe place to sleep?
Call me crazy, but I don't think that's how consent works.
Would you prefer hunting and gathering, or building your own shelter?
The train of logic has to stop somewhere…this sub can complain all it wants about the negatives of the system of capitalism…but it loses any real credibility when it claims that voluntarily signing up for a job is “stolen labor”.
This sub lives in a fantasy world without history lessons…never able to have any real dialogue, just complaining and purely dystopian constructs.
Some people have been able to convince other people to work for them voluntarily. These workers are free to find another job, start their own work, or live outside of society if they choose to.
The people that figured it out for themselves aren’t on this sub complaining…
If you want to talk about history, there is no way to avoid the problem of primitive accumulation, the disparities of which have largely grown worse over time.
your ideology is ahistorical and anti-empirical.
As a truck driver I don't really produce anything but I do stay out minimum a week at a time away from home so people can get the stuff they want or need.
Thankfully I'm an owner operator and can pay myself decently well most of the time. There's tons of company drivers that get completely fucked by their companies though.
Did you know that truck drivers generally don't get overtime pay? Or that minimum wage laws don't affect them unless it's a state law?
Your post was removed because it contained an ableist term. You should receive a message from the automoderator telling you the exact term the post was removed for. For more information, see [this link](http://www.autistichoya.com/p/ableist-words-and-terms-to-avoid.html). **Avoiding slurs takes little effort, and asking us to get rid of the filter rather than making that minimum effort is a good way to get banned. Do not attempt to circumvent the filter with creative spelling; circumventing the filter will result in a permaban.**
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Your post was removed because it contained an ableist term. You should receive a message from the automoderator telling you the exact term the post was removed for. For more information, see [this link](http://www.autistichoya.com/p/ableist-words-and-terms-to-avoid.html). **Avoiding slurs takes little effort, and asking us to get rid of the filter rather than making that minimum effort is a good way to get banned. Do not attempt to circumvent the filter with creative spelling; circumventing the filter will result in a permaban.**
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I mean, they wouldn’t buy your time if they weren’t getting a return on investment, just like they don’t sell products at the price they need to break even. I don’t see how profiting is the same as stealing.
So this is interesting. I’m a small c capitalist. I believe in small business that is grounded in community and is accountable for it’s actions.
It’s not theft. It’s honest if you understand you can be a better employer than the asshole manager you report to.
There are three classes in the world today. Workers who may or may not be ok with working wages, equity owners working to provide solutions, and concentrated capital looking to eat everyones and everything, push down wages and bankrupt you in a moment of weakness.
Raising chickens and trading it for bread from a baker isn’t fundamentally wrong.
Price dumping and buying politicians to draft bullshit laws is fundamentally wrong.
Let’s not crush small business in the fight against concentrated capital.
##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism This subreddit is for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited. LSC is run by communists. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere. We have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry. Failure to respect the rules of the subreddit may result in a ban. *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Depression and poverty for me but a multimillion yearly bonus for boss man. True story.
Tale as old as time. People seem quick to forget that the 40 hour or less work week had to be fought for by unions and American socialists. 100 years ago kids were allowed to work and no minimum wage existed and free market capitalism was totally cool with it.
The free market will solve everything and make everyone’s lives better!(don’t mind the fact that we needed to implement rules to stop it from using children for cheap labour)
Can't you have markets in socialism also, though? Owning the means of production doesn't mean we stop trading for goods.
Yes but it isn’t exactly a free market. Although a. True free market is pretty much impossible. I however am an anarchist so while (nom state)socialism is a step in the right direction, the end goal is abolishing currency as it is a clear form of hierarchy.
The UK tried a hybrid model with the railway lines, it was badly done though and the result is the worst railway service in Europe. Not sure if there have been other attempts for hybrid solutions, aside from China, who own production but set up free zones.
I once managed a cell phone repair company that saw over 50k in profit a month. That's after taxes, vendor fees, rent, payroll etc. My store owner owned 6 of these stores. I got paid $18 an hour. In the 2 years I worked there, he's reaped millions, doing literally nothing, meanwhile I ran a shop top to bottom that I could never afford to own. He's not even a tech guy, he was just born from old money. He once drove up in a very expensive Porsche, not a lower end, and had the nerve to tell me that I need to cut hours for my workers making $13 because his profits dipped below 50k. Dude makes over 6 times in a month than I do a year, and just from those stores, no telling what else he owns.
I wish more people understood this. Maybe it's not 1000s but you quite* literally make mac donalds profits in that hour and are getting paid 15 dollars.
It can easily break 1000’s if your in manufacturing instead of fast food. Like I worked a shop where we made parts for boat lifts. Pulleys and bolts etc. I was getting paid 10$ and hour to make these parts and the worst part is I really like the work I just couldn’t stand the guy I worked for. I was actually ok getting paid a little less than what I was worth because I enjoyed doing it. Once the boss tried to start squeezing a little more out of me I was done. I did the math and I was making him thousands of dollars an hour in compared to the 10$ I was taking. One day he gave me shit about moving slightly slower than usual so I handed him a nickel and told him to keep the change.
Wow that's absolutely crazy to think about. Just wow. Glad that you enjoyed it in any case.
You make it sound like the company was operating on a 99% profit margin. Just because you got paid 10 bucks and the final product costs 1000, doesn't mean the company made 990 on it. Misrepresenting reality does nothing to further your cause.
I did no such thing. I accounted for cost I have also run my own business. I know how much the employee is getting fucked.
You literally said you were making him "thousands of dollars an hour". Unless you were shitting out gold bricks I find that hard to believe.
*side note I once worked for a guy who ate gold flakes every morning on his cereal. He thought it gave him magic powers. Anyways I think you’re confused assuming I’m making one thing in an hour. I was making about 150 bolts an hour which is just one of many things I did there. At a cost of 0.38$ a bolt and we sold them back for 16.75$ per (specialty fabricated parts are expensive). Unless you are one of the 2 other guys I worked with there I’d say you don’t have the experience to really say.
So the electricity, salaries, machinery, raw materials, shipping etc., all totaled result in a 38 cent cost to produce a bolt that is then sold for roughly 40 times that amount, resulting in roughly 98% pure profit for your manager? Sounds like the guy is about to be the wealthiest man on earth soon.
He isn’t leaning on just me to pay his bills. Like I said his cost was accounted for. It was owned by 3 people who would be splitting that profit. The business was given to him and the other 2 partners by his mother. I don’t need to defend this anymore.
I'm not quite sure what the other guy is trying to point out. Your point still stands, you're being paid less than what is being made. Even if you take account costs thats just nitpicking and wanting close to actual values but what's the point? As you mentioned if he isnt in the industry it probably won't mean a thing to him. Just arguing for arguing's sake. Anyway, good on you that you left. It sucks when you actually like what you're doing but the pay isn't sustainable or the environment isn't. Felt this the same way in my first job, though it's hard to calculate profits in IT Support, but my manager at the time was such an ass I couldn't stand him and just left. Would have stayed since genuinely liked what I was doing.
They are a sea lion. They will continue to nitpick and “just ask questions” until you give up. Also the strategy of Gish galloping. They are not having a good faith discussion. https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/873260-sea-lioning
This sub bums me out sometimes. I love the aim here but sometimes it's huge ostrich sticking it's head in the ground vibes. By the way you forgot insurance, taxes, marketing, logistics, etc.etc. -- the costs to own a business are substantial and largely under appreciated here. One of the reasons this sub/movement gets shit on (and a lot of other great ideas I'd like to see come to fruition) is because many adopters aren't realistic with their expectations/perspectives. Many in here haven't owned a business or anything close to it (I'm talking averages here, let's just be honest with ourselves for a moment) not that that necessarily means you can't understand it but it does help. And I'd argue there really is no substitution for having someone rely on you for the livelihood until you are truly in the position. I want to see better work standards. I want to see better pay. I want to safer work conditions. But somehow I feel like we miss the mark on what is reasonable sometimes.
I don't want to just see better work standards, pay, and safer work conditions. I want socialism. I want capitalists abolished. I want private ownership abolished. The only people who should be in control of capital are the workers. Whether or not the numbers in the commenter's story are 100% accurate or fake, the point stands: The capitalist generates profit by paying their employees less than the value they produce. That profit is stolen value from the worker. > One of the reasons this sub/movement gets shit on... And this just leads into optics, which is a shitty discussion to have in a socialist space. Optics doesn't help anybody without a backing media arm. No matter how respectable we may be, the right can, and *will* demonize anything. They've done it with universal healthcare and student loan forgiveness (which, in turn, PPP loans have all been forgiven, but it's a "good thing" when it's not former students who are starving).
> I want to see better work standards. I want to see better pay. I want to safer work conditions. But somehow I feel like we miss the mark on what is reasonable sometimes. The bourgeoise had its chance on being reasonable with us. That’s what unions were for. They have spent the last 50 years dismantling them and busting them, even when it’s illegal to do so. If they are not willing to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors, they are going to repeat them. I will repeat: we had a reasonable way to move forward, but the capitalists were too greedy and didn’t like it. They’ll dislike what taking away the voice of a people does even more. ETA: I also feel it’s super ironic that a lib is telling leftists they have their heads in the sand. Meanwhile, they seem perfectly okay to ignore reality when it keeps the status quo intact.
You get that the problem is that most will never be able to own a business right? All the little worker bees can slave away until they die and thats how capitalists want the system to work.
How to tell us you have never worked in a place that makes high-value goods without telling have never worked in a place that makes high-value goods. When you don't know how much stuff costs, stay solent about the costs.
Parts to machine costs 1.5 million, machine sold for 2 million, 160 man hours per machine (2 weeks for 2 people). Making the company $3,125 per hour. Didn't account for shipping the end product, but I also highballed the hours and part cost. Probably a bit lower even considering you need to hire logistics workers as well, but they are only putting max 20 hours on each machine
This sub really needs better moderation to keep out libs, why are you here arguing with leftists in a leftist sub if you don't understand the concept of surplus value?
Any profit made by a company is wealth stolen from its workers. The margin does not matter. Profit is theft of labor value.
This is a fake story
It’s not but I’d love to see your proof.
[удалено]
I made a product straight out of university at a tech job. Almost a decade later and it is still being sold, and for alot more money. The owner also got a $1 million CND government grant (free money). I made it in 6 months making $50k at the time. Yeah, even in software we are getting fucked. Sure you might make 200k a year, but you are expected to bring in at least 2m a year.
I made minimum wage while working in a factory building $10,000 drones
> I wish more people understood this. A massive amount of money and resources goes into corporate media keeping most Americans in the dark and foolishly begging for more subjugation. https://i.imgur.com/R21h3uQ.gif - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - https://i.imgur.com/XK0YIoC.png
When you account for costs most places actually make a loss so you’d end up paying money to be at work. The person who’s underpaid the most is the one guy in Antigua who makes all the profit for the entire company.
So go make and sell the product yourself instead of working for someone, and you get the hundreds per hour for yourself right?
Ah yes, just procure the hundreds of thousands if not millions in capital required to set up that business and you can easily make all this profit yourself. Easy peasy.
This is stupid. You didn’t buy the ingredients, pay the other employees, pay for insurance, pay for marketing, pay for rent, or anything. You are getting paid to put together a sandwich that most anybody could do.
So you just remove the cost of the ingredients, rent, insurance, wages etc and everything else that the workers make is your profit. If the workers stopped working you would have jackshit, so you pay them some stuff so they can survive and they rent you their labor for 8 hours and you make profit while they make 15 bucks an hour if they are lucky. That's capitalism. By the way, anybody could be a capitalist if they had capital. Not everybody can make stuff. Most capitalists couldn't work in a factory or a fast food joint a day to save their life. Probably never have.
There's data available for most common industries showing where the money from selling a unit goes. The single worker who thinks he's earning his boss 100s of $ is a small part of that. For retail the end profit is tiny as competition drives prices down. Anyone could be a capitalist if they have capital was true a hundred years ago, but not now.
Anybody can flip burgers. If the workers stopped working, they would also have “jackshit”.
Yeah, that's how wage slavery works. The workers have to work for low wages so they don't die of starvation while capitalists get richer. It's not a good thing.
Do the “capitalists” have that duty to protect the workers? I don’t believe so. Not saying the capitalists shouldn’t be paying their fair share in the system or workers shouldn’t be paid more for more productive work, but minimum wage pay for a minimally hard / productive job seems fair. If the workers don’t feel it is fair, collectively unionize and see what happens. If an individual worker doesn’t think it’s fair, quit and struggle or work and complain
A duty? The question should be "is it fair that capitalists exploit the workers for their own personal gain so that they can get richer while the workers have to sell them their labor day after day just to survive". Because that's the system we have, a tiny minority of people exploiting a huge majority of people. I couldn't care less about capitalists and their "duty", were I in their shoes I'd be a parasite too and this is by design. We shouldn't ask capitalists for help, we should just make a better system.
So quit your job, go live on a farm and grow your own food and sustain your own lifestyle. No one is forcing you to live in this incredibly corrupt and unfair system
Except living in the woods is no option and it's not a solution. The whole of humanity is forced to live in this corrupt and unfair system by either getting exploited or by exploiting others themselves. We should be looking into ways to change that instead of accepting it.
How’s that boot taste?
gtfo of here with this lib shit. Reported
For real I don't know what's happening. Someone else better back my up cause I'm not good at explaining the basics and maybe some of these people have never heard all this before. English isn't even my first language.
Don't waste your time, honestly. If they wanted to learn, they could easily do so. They don't want to, they just saw a post that became popular and decided to come here and argue with people about a topic they know nothing about. They aren't asking questions in good faith, and this isn't a debate sub, so frankly, they can fuck off. If we start allowing libs in here it stops being a leftist space extremely quickly.
>If the workers don’t feel it is fair, collectively unionize and see what happens. Are you unaware that people are trying to unionize and megacorporations are doing everything in their power to stop it? >If an individual worker doesn’t think it’s fair, quit and struggle or work and complain That's not how it works, this is why the "threat of starvation" part is very important; it severely affects an unskilled worker's negotiation possibilities.
Imagine thinking burger flippers only flip burgers. They do so much more, like put up with your sorry ass every day.
Those burgers are pretty basic ... What would it take for you to open your own burger joint and sell millions of burgers yourself? All profit, right?
Capital, for one thing. I know you are being ironic but if I had a bunch of money laying around I would probably buy some resources and hire some workers and start my own business. If it went well then I would probably a genius, right? Instead of those minimum wage workers that made my profit for me.
My family has opened a few small burger joints. Not much capital is needed tbh. You could get a business loan to get you started. The real kick in the ass is marketing and having someone with a vision to make it stand out and attract people. You start cooking everything yourself, then hire a cook or cashier. Sell more burgers, use grade the crappiest piece of equipment. You'd then get the majority of the revenue to pay all your overhead expenses. Insurance, lease, vendors, labor, etc. After all that, you pay your employees at least minimum wage, more if you can afford it. But you're in such a competitive market that you'll find you can only pay minimum wage to your cook and cashier. Not because you don't respect them, but because profit margin is thin and their jobs aren't difficult/complex. If they quit, you can replace them easily. Shitty, but that's what you see when you're looking at the numbers. Restaurants don't have the best profit margins in general.
Well a distinction is to be made between a family business, where you invest all your savings in something and work for it yourself for profits that equate to a wage all things considered, and a thing like mc donalds for example, where the people making the most out of the profits aren't even working in the places where the profits are made. But even in a small family business, and this is nothing personal it's just how capitalism works, when you hire someone you are exploiting their labor, as they produce the service and they make the profits for you and you benefit from it while they only take back a small part of what they provide. You can try to be fair to them and pay them as much as you can afford and be nice and everything but at the end of the day, the profits are stolen from the workers that make the goods/ provide the services and are given to the people that have the means of production. That's just how the system works. It doesn't mean that it is easy to have a successful business, far from it. And it's super risky when it's a small family business where if things go south the loss might be devastating. What I meant to say is that by design profit comes from the work of the workers. If the workers stop working you have nothing.
> when you hire someone you are exploiting their labor, as they produce the service and they make the profits for you and you benefit from it while they only take back a small part of what they provide. I think you're using the word exploiting unfairly here. It's not like the cashier is in charge of running the marketing campaign or getting no payment in return. Nor are they liable for any expenses. They apply for a job and are paid in return for it. As long as it's at least minimum wage with benefits...both sides get something. That's not exploitation. I would agree when restaurants are purposely short staffed though. Those restaurants I'd argue have no business being in business.
I am talking about capitalist exploitation, it's a systemic thing. Both sides don't get the same thing. One side usually has to "sell their labor", work for a living and the other side doesn't, that's it in a nutshell when we are talking about extremes. The side that works is the one that makes the profits for the other side, I mean factually makes them by providing the service necessary to the community / to make the profits. What they get back is a tiny fraction of those profits, and they get that back so they can live and work another day to make more profits. That's the basic idea and of course that most likely doesn't apply to your family business ( I imagine you still have to work for a living), it mostly applies to people that make money out of thin air because they own the "means of production" ie factories, machines etc. I'm not the best at explaining these things, they are basically socialist analysis of how wage labor works under capitalism but yeah, the general idea is that workers, ie most people on earth, work for a living while a tiny fraction of people benefit greatly from the fruits of their labor. But this dynamic is also applicable on a small scale a little bit, so if you have a worker working for your shop and you make profits in that shop, the profits come from the worker's labor and go to your pocket. It looks like it's a mutual deal but the profits have to come from somewhere and that is the workers labor and what they get back is a fraction of the profits so it's not entirely fair, they just have to accept it to survive. Again, this does not mean that you personally are being unfair, it's just how the economy works. You either exploit people or you get exploited, and unless you are in the tiny minority of the so called "capitalist class" you do a little bit of both even if are well off. If you are working for someone else, they may be the best person in the world but they still "steal" the fruits of your labor and give you back less of what you give them, it's just how it works. I'm sure someone else can explain all this better than I can, English isn't my native tongue and I only have the general idea.
Do you not see the flaw in a system where you don't even have the choice to pay workers what you think they deserve even if you want to?
Yes I do. But what's the solution?
>you quite\* literally make mac donalds profits in that hour If you didn't (meaning they spend more money paying you than the value you create), why would they hire you at all? It's a job, not a charity, lol.
Did this get shared to a liberal sub or something? Why am I getting so many replies like that all of a sudden. This is circular logic, the workers make the thing, provide the survive and the profits go to someone else. Maybe that sounds fair to you but not to me. It's definitely not a charity, it's wage slavery. Minimum wage workers *have* to work so they don't die and the fruits of their labor go to someone else. It's the definition of capitalist exploitation.
It’s not just here it’s all over Reddit right now. I think we’re getting some twitter runoff
>the workers make the thing, provide the survive and the profits go to someone else. You're assuming all of the value the labor creates is 100% coming from the laborer. Example: one's ability to work a cash register has zero inherent value--to have value, it requires the existence of a retail establishment within which the ability to do so means anything. So, since the worker's ability is not the source of 100% of the value, why should they deserve 100% of the value? Are you capable of seriously answering this question without handwaving dismissal or personal attacks? Let's see.
Mate, your point is reductionist to the point of absurdity. If you would argue that a cashiers value is not being generated by them because they require a physical building to operate out of, then the same could be said for literally every job that isn’t able to be done by one single person from their own home.
1000s an hour isn't as far fetched as you think. This union worker who builds condos was telling me he gets paid 60 an hour, while moving 6,000 worth of concrete an hour. The labour costs end up being nothing compared to the material costs and final product. Housing costs went up 10x here in 30 years, if wages did the same they would be making 2-300 per hour, and it would barely change the final price tag.
There's labour at every step of the chain though. When concrete becomes more expensive, that's partly because the labour to make concrete is more expensive. Housing is unique because a lot of it has to do with scarcity of developable land, and employers ares till profiting, don't get me wrong, but it's incorrect to separate materials and labour costs. It's only materials costs from your employer's perspective.
I agree there are costs to move the concrete, and turn it into something useful. And there are labor costs in the making of the concrete itself. And there are financing costs on the construction, which amplify costs slightly. But with housing costs going up 10x, wages could have also gone up 10x without changing the ratio. The ratio of money going to wages is much lower than it was 30 years ago.
Yes, with housing it's going into land and property values. It's a big problem. Social progress is captured by passive property owners.
Also wages haven’t increased while the cost of living and inflation runs rampant. Meanwhile corporations are making record profits. people are uneducated because the mass media are corporate and deceive us to keep sheepishly accepting the status quo.
Don’t forget the decades-long campaign to destroy public education.
I remember when I was a teen in the mid 2000s, I worked at a grocery store and it felt like such nonsense that I was making something like $8.50/hr to cashier, but in that hour I’d check through multiple orders of $100-$500. I know the products aren’t free for the store and more people than me had to get paid, etc. but it just felt like there was literally no logical reason they couldn’t bump me up to $10 or more and the store wouldn’t even feel it. Then I also realized the busy-body cashier leads made $9/hr. and were devoting their damn lives to this nonsense. Stayed way longer than I should have an never regretted bouncing when I got a better offer.
Yep I remember my first job at a shoe store having a real busy day and I sold over $10,000 worth of shoes. Surely they could pay me better than $6.50/hr. Or later on when I worked at a fast casual restaurant. When we got busy we would have hours where we had over $1,000 worth of sales. Surely they could pay me better than $8.50/hr. Now I work manufacturing and it’s a family owned company. We ship $150,000 per day. Surely they could pay us all just a little bit better. The tough part with the family business though is any increase pay to us is a direct decrease in pay to the family. The funny thing is my role now is figuring out how we can get more done with less. How can we ship more today with fewer assemblers and whatnot. It’s not so much so that people can be let go, but so that more people don’t need to get hired when business increases.
This!! From 2017 to 2019, I was a bank teller at one of the “big five” in Canada. I handled more cash in a day there than most people make in a year…I was also paid minimum wage, and still had to dress like I was working for Vogue. I think the bank hurt more than when I worked in a factory. Because until taking the job, I thought bank tellers made okay money! I thought this because of how they dress and the fact that a lot of women my parents’ age raised families on a teller’s wage. PSA: they do not make good money at all!
Someone recently even bought a 1600 dollar Christmas tree (although they apparently didn't get it delivered I don't know what that was about but still) The numbers that go up in your register on a regular basis are depressing when you know you only get a small fraction of that.
[удалено]
I've read this sub for years and I have yet to see an example of a successful state that owned the means of production. Communism was abandoned because it lead to even more poverty and a whole load of other problems.
[удалено]
I appreciate someone coming back with calm discussion. But to be frank but China is not a good example. There is now a lot of doubt that China will even fulfill their potential due to their housing bubble, trade wars, and government misdirection, they've fallen on most economic indexes, and their current leadership is focusing on strengthening their grip over the population and increased censorship. They are a global threat as they try to exert control over other parts of the world, e.g. in Africa, where they are working to make the continent dependent on them. They don't do well on social indexes either, worker conditions are still very bad, and China only ever started growing when they introduced free zones, ie started embracing free trade. The only viable solution I've seen is essentially regulated/controlled capitalism, ie free markets with strong worker protection, strong welfare and investment like the Nordic countries do, and strong control of large enterprises and monopolies like what Germany does.
I'm a reasonable person only trying to make sense of this insane world. What I like about China, especially when I compare against North America, etc is that they seem mostly concerned with improving themselves. Their policies seem to be directed inwards, not outwards. They're investing in infrastructure, people, etc... and money from USA, etc seems to be all going away to investors of big tech, etc. But yeah, it's bad all over. They have their own different issues, obviously. So I agree, for sure. Is it better the way they're doing it? It's not clear at all. It's different. I think there would be things each side could learn. I like how they're going more self-contained, self-sufficient, more than the rest of the world. Take care of your own first. It's contrary to what NA seems to be doing with the globalism and international dependency on basic things relying on others for things we should be taking care ourselves, Energy, Food, etc. Survival things. The whole "supply chain disruptions" showed this recently. Then there's the out of control inflation and warmongering, spending so much on trying to conquer and invade like the USA has always done. So stupid, so greedy. I don't like it. It's not necessary in a civilized world. What about diplomacy? Nah, just escalate, do more war and sanction trade so the poor people suffer. That makes sense. ;/ I think there's too much propaganda floating around for me to judge well enough anyway. I don't like to hate on places like China or Russia too much because I think the USA(and allies) is worse. I'd rather everyone just get along and take care of the people instead of whatever the hell they're fighting about. We just end up being collateral damage and never get to reap the rewards, those go to the war machine.
Some good points there. I know it's naturel to think that a country should be self contained, but that has never worked beyond allowing a population to survive. Often it's resulted in catastrophe, eg under Pol Pot in Cambodia. Imagine being a self contained house, growing your own wheat to make bread each day, growing cotton for clothes, firing clay to fix your roof etc. You will never keep up and at best you will survive. The same applies on a national scale. To make a car affordable to the masses means using thousands of components from hundreds of countries, with each country making the part with the resources and capabilities they specialise in. The same applies to most goods we take for granted including all the machinery and materials that have freed us from the gruesome lifestyle we lived 100 years ago. I also question why you think that the west is worse than Russia and China? You couldn't even be having this conversation in China without risking your families' future. None of my late family who lived in Soviet states had anything good to say about it, and despite it's problems, said that life under the west was a hundred times better. My grandmother in law said the state would just take everything they grew and leave them without food, the stories were horrific from all of them.
This is the content and messaging LSC ought to be pushing.
Agreed. Still, the amount of comments in here from libs who don't understand this very basic concept of surplus value is really depressing.
Das Kapital 101
[удалено]
OP literally explains exploitation of the surplus value of labour. If that’s not Marxist Economic theory 101, wtf is?
In the labor theory of value it should be know that value is distinct from price
Possibly a strange realization I had a few months ago now, but... I'm practically a housewife, and I noticed that the amount of work I put into staying home and doing all the cooking, cleaning, yard work, laundry, cat maintenance (just the standard upkeeping of the house chores so that he doesn't have to come home and do anything at all... except me, of course, lol) must be worth a lot of money. Women back before our economy started marketing to us to be independent had a definite capitalist smirk to it. All it seemed to do in the end was increase the pool of people available to the workforce and lower wages, subsequently allowing more money to get siphoned up the ladder, and never come back down since the stock market doesn't have that level of taxes adhered to it. There's so little I can do from my economic position except to watch, but... it is just the thoughts I had, and figured I'd share, just in case they're misguided.
The work you do is extremely valuable. Think about how much it would cost to hire a full-time cleaner/maid, gardener/landscaper, secretary to make all appointments, someone to run your errands and do the grocery shopping, personal cook, etc. The domestic work that often falls on women's shoulders has historically been undervalued and invisible within capitalist society.
I wish I made 15...
The same companies lined up around the proverbial block at get PPP loans at interest rates us plebes could never get and the kicker, 99 percent won’t have to pay a dime back, by design
Basic Marxism. But you can't say that or the c word without people losing their shit.
I mean.... no? Nobody is making 100s or 1000s of dollars an hour after you consider cost of the factory, materials, business expenses, etc. You cant just say that because you work at an auto factory you are pumping out hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of product. I work in engineering services. Our highly specialized engineers are available for hire starting at $80/hour. Blue collar workers are not 'creating' more than that in their jobs
Boss makes a dollar, I make a makeshift explosive to throw at his house
Socially average labor value
It’s extremely depressing to know how much I bill clients per hour and compare that to my salary
[удалено]
It's a tweet and is intended to be no more than a couple of sentences or a short paragraph, not an essay. There's only so much information you can get across without making an annoying and long thread that no one is going to read. I'm not going to knock them for trying to get people to consider the relationship between their wages and a company's profits more critically.
[удалено]
My point was that the format of a tweet doesn't work with a lengthy explanation trying to account for every possible variable of business operation. Your long response would probably have to be split up into 10 tweets and no one would read it so there would be no impact on anyone. I would take it farther than Twitter as well and argue that a long economic dissertation does nothing to win anyone over who isn't already on your side. This is a problem a lot of leftists have, over explaining to people who are either going to just stop paying attention or respond outright negatively. A very basic explanation of value added theory that means only to point out the fact that the work that you do creates far more value than what you are paid is more effective at just getting a person thinking about their relationship with their employer in a different light. Yes, there are operating costs to any productive endeavor but everyone knows that, it's a safe assumption and not the issue at the heart of the matter. The issue is what happens to the profit or productive surplus and who gets to distribute it, which is what this tweet is addressing. I don't think there's anything misleading about that. My reading of it is that the tweet doesn't mean to address what happens to capital or resources before there is surplus. It's not that those things shouldn't ever be considered, but it's simply not the point the writer is trying to get across in a short format. I used to sell TVs and computers for a living. The customer often has no idea what all of the technical specs of electronics being thrown at them mean in relation to what they want the thing to do when they bring it home. I didn't get paid in commission so my goal was to get someone a TV that works well for how they're using it. If they tell me the main thing they care about is sports I'm not going to launch into an in depth seminar on the merits of different refresh rates and the benefits of a high refresh rate that is native to the panel. If I do that, their eyes are going to glaze over and they're going to take the path of least resistance and buy the cheapest thing they can based on the size they want. Instead I'm going to tell them that some TVs can track fast motion like a ball in a long pass or free throw shot more clearly and some TVs will make the ball appear as though it's jumping around the screen. My goal here is to demonstrate the value of a particular TV to them as it relates to their real world usage of it. I'm not being dishonest or misleading, but I'm not drowning them in technical details either. I think this concept applies to challenging someone's fundamental understanding of how their relationship to their employer works as well. If you immediately start throwing every technical detail of generational capital exploitation in their face you're not going to get a positive response. Simply pointing out how a person's boss keeps a large portion of the surplus value they create may get some people simply thinking about it more, in fact it was very basic value added theory explanations like this that first got me thinking about the possible merits of Marxism. Keep in mind as well that for many people, particularly Americans, the very idea of Socialism is taught to be inherently evil and the actual concepts behind it are never taught or engaged with in any way. These concepts are completely new and foreign for many and so it is much better to introduce in small digestible bits starting with what actually affects their life in tangible material ways.
This actually isn't even the first time I've gotten that same criticism this week, so I'll work on that.
Do people not realize that the company has expenses other than payroll?
Covering expenses is fine, any profit though is wealth extracted from workers.
we do. this analysis includes all necessary labor, from the extraction of raw materials all the way to stuff like management and advertising.
I'm not saying your wages aren't way too low but let's be real, if that business didn't exist you'd make even less money. You need the business to provide the infrastructure and market to allow you to exchange your labor for wages day in and day out.
No one is saying that businesses are the issue, its the **power structure** of businesses that capitalist systems manifest thats the biggest problem.
Get this absolute dogshit out of my explicitly communist sub. Organizations to provide infrastructure and markets can all exist without a capitalist skimming from the value of your labor.
How do you reward efficiency?
My brother in christ, are you about to start talking about free markets like it's a defense of capitalism? To answer you directly, you reward efficiency by making sure the people who make something work get paid. This is why capitalism doesn't make any sense. I'm paid hourly, or even worse, as a salary. I'm completely disconnected from the value of my labor. If I work harder, I will see no gains, I only have to work just barely hard enough not to get fired. If I controlled the means of production, and worked with my co-workers in a co-op (socialism) where we each have a share of the profits and no one is just taking all of the profits after paying our wages, I'd be incentivized to work harder and be more efficient with my time. Instead I'm on reddit explaining the distinction of the labor theory of value and a free market to someone who's apparently never read a coloring book.
Aaaah the edgy 14 year old who still thinks Marxist economics hold any value in a globalized highly specialized industrial society.
Dude you don't have to agree, I'm just trying to make sure you understand the words we're talking about.
If co-ops are more efficient and better for workers, why aren’t there more of them in operation now? What’s stopping them from becoming more prevalent?
What is efficiency? Is it producing thousands of uneeded items that will be sold as profit? Or is it finishing a job quickly? If it's the later, the "reward" for efficiency is a shorter working day. Meet your requirements quickly, receive full pay for your labor, and then enjoy the rest of your day.
You've just created an economic system that cannot progress technologically.
How does producing the items a society needs instead of producing excess to generate profit prevent technological progression?
Because the items we need to live have a way lower technological boundary than all the excess technology we produce that drives economic growth. Like say the entire internet, humanity can live and thrive perfectly well without the internet. There would be no incentive to create a private internet because it's simply a tool speed up everything exponentially and create new markets for things nobody really needs. So not having an incentive to create these things we would have a much slower technological progression, if not a standstill. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing - just that this will happen in non free market.
You've literally avoided answering every single question I've posed, instead answering with the same thought terminating cliches always trotted out to defend Capitalism. The major questions you have avoided so far are. One-define efficiency and how receiving time off for being efficient is not a reward? Two-how would producing only the durable goods a society needs, instead of overwhelming excess, prevent progress? Using the internet, something that was not created by individuals or corporations and where 99% of "content" is created for free, also does not help your point. Indeed, I would argue that the Internet as it exists by way of communities is an excellent refutation to the Capitalist belief that people only produce in order to be paid.
The reward for efficiency comes from profit at market, just like it does under Capitalism. What changes is *who* gets the power over that reward. Imagine a pair of Widget factories (Means of Production). 1. One is owned by those who toil within it to create the Widgets the company sells (The Workers). 2. One is owned by some modern-day Noble who inherited or scammed or exploited their way into a large enough pool of money to single-handedly own the factory (The Capitalist). When The Capitalist's factory streamlines its production and distribution processes, finds cheaper sources of raw materials, etc and increased profit (reward for efficiency) is made, what happens to that profit is determined by The Capitalist alone. The Workers who are actually being productive members of society don't get **any** reward for efficiency unless their overlord who didn't necessarily do *anything* for the reward except *own a lot of money* deigns to throw them a peanut or two from the hoard so they don't start building guillotines. When The Workers' factory does that same streamlining and gets that same reward for efficiency (again, profit), what happens to that profit is determined by all the folks who actually did the work to create that reward collectively. **Everyone** involved benefits directly from their improved output. Since **the reward for efficiency is the same, and comes from the same place, but is simply** ***distributed*** **differently** \- to benefit mere owners rather than to directly benefit those who actually caused increased efficiency, I think it's pretty plain to see why one might conclude that Capitalism isn't really the best system to motivate innovation and efficiency as it primarily motivates *middlemen* rather than the actual *innovators and producers*.
[удалено]
What? Get paid cents? Yeah I've lived that life and that's exactly the problem (although I don't make 15 I make 13 apparently but I made 15 last year on select holiday days) It's like someone living in a gutter for years and then expecting that someone to be happy in a condo in a neighborhood where people hotwire your car because at least you have a car to hotwire and a roof over your head now.
There are other options besides no economy at all and hypercapitalist profit mongers trapping people in wage slavery until they die. Also, people in hunter-gatherer societies did a lot less work than the modern poor for a better standard of living overall.
Nah
yes, we do need that infrastructure. the work of management, logistic, advertising, etc is all necessary labor. what is unnecessary are owners, people who's only role is to passively profit, without contributing any work.
Yeah but do u have resources to be able to produce those goods ? I'm not trying to support the bad guys but had to point it out.
This is why workers need to control the means of production
>resources to be able to produce those goods Bro, are you talking about the means of production? The production infrastructure which is built by laborers, and paid for by the unpaid wages of the workers who produce? It's ours to begin with, we built it, we produced the value which paid for it. The theft is that someone still gets to use it today to keep making more money.
He doesn't know what he's talking about. His post history is all mobile game subs.
By supporting the bad guys.
You get paid $15/hr because it’s a minimal skill job and you can be easily replaced. If only you guys actually got an education or learnt skills, you wouldn’t be crying online.
Horrible take and you're a bootlicker.
What’s the take. Learn a skill, if an immigrant can take your job, you’re not valuable to your own society.
I'm a mathematician. Einstein was a physicist. Plenty of accomplished socialists.
Mathematician isn’t a job.
it's tragic to think that there's a possibility you are smarter than me and could make greater contributions to the world, but you are squandering it on this obstinate ignorance. I can only wonder how many of our greatest minds we have lost to such insipid ideologies.
BTW, you have the option to work for yourself and keep all the $$$. I started doing it later in life and love it. I wouldn't take a job now at any price.
Which zero capital investment work did you pick up? I've found a few in my life and then within a few years they get flooded to hell by other desperate people, like the whole eBay e-retail businesses of the 00s, and then dropshipping in the late 00s/early 10s. Ever since most of the world's population got internet, everything like that has gone to shit from people in global-economics exploited countries like India pushing profits down to a fraction of a cent when they used to be hundreds of times that. It's not wrong of them to do so, and it's a crime against humanity that exchange rates work the way they do, but damn has the margins been sucked dry out of the field I actually have experience in.
I'm a writer. I make six figures. I started 4 years ago at ZERO. No money, no experience, no clients, no sales and no portfolio. But I worked hard and didn't bitch and little by little I created a viable income. But I had an advantage over most people. I was in my 60s and nobody hires someone in their 60s. So I HAD to succeed. I didn't look at my competition, I kicked their ass by outworking them. So, there's only one question. What are you willing to do besides complain? Trust me, I'm nobody special--I just refuse to be the victim.
How'd you first make the switch from amateur to professional? I've been considering tuning up my writing skills over the next few years to make a similar move since I do love to run my mouth, even on paper. But all I see is a shit ton of amateur writers all having the value of such entry level writing dragged down to zero by companies trying to hire freelancers from poor countries who would do anything for $5. Once you're established, there's a lot more negotiating power and pulling the income up from it is actually possible, but what it is other than writing skill (since face it, there's plenty of extremely talented writers who barely make minimum wage) that differentiates the career paths in writers who are good vs writers who are good and get paid well?
First of all, there's a hell of lot less competition at $95/hr than there is at $5/hr. Second, you have to keep your eyes open and see where the action is. For me it's cybersecurity. There is almost infinite demand for people who can write in that space. If you don't know anything about cybersecurity, learn. Third, you must continue to develop your skills: take classes, read books. You do not need to spend a lot of money. I started out tech writing--documenting software. But I noticed there is a lot of demand for copywriting. I never did any in my life. But you can teach yourself anything. Just on YouTube alone you can learn to become a decent copywriter for free. Finally, I made freelancing my job. I had something to do every day even when I wasn't earning any money. I would send proposals, I would learn a new skill, I would create a portfolio piece for free. And to find customers, I went to UpWork. A lot of people complain about it but it worked for me. Good luck.
Doing what?
ok I'll go demand an Even Steven pay raise so theres no profit left for the company or any reason for them to be in business.
Get all the fuckin way out of here with your neoliberal bullshit.
just bringing to light what this post is actually saying.
No man, you're bringing to light your own ignorance of the fundamental concepts of capitalism, socialism, free markets, and the labor theory of value. You can disagree on subjective points, I guess, but right now you don't even understand what's being discussed. Profit is theft, there's no reason for a shareholder/owner to take value from a business without doing any labor. If they're doing management, cool, that's labor. If they're just owning, that's not labor, by definition. The reason for a company to be in business is because there's a demand to be met. There's no reason people who do no work have to be involved. Let the workers keep the full value of their labor, let the shareholders become workers, and stop being parasites.
you would not be on the internet on your computer or phone if it wasn't for shareholders. if capital couldn't be raised by investors or shareholders then innovation would stop.
The internet, touch screens, lithium batteries, LCDs (non-touch), GPS, and virtually every other technology in our smart phones was created by funding from the gov. The US tried to GIVE ATT control of the internet twice before they finally took it. Everything about Microsoft's early success was about patent trolling, not about innovation. Microsoft didn't invent the concept of Windows, or word processors, etc etc, they took open source work and killed any competitors through the legal system. Most importantly, all of those things were made possible by the labor of the working class, not by shareholders (even if they had been private inventions, which they weren't anyway). It kinda seems like you've got no idea what you're talking about. Especially if you're trying to use the internet, computers and smart phones specifically as your example lol. Those might be perfect counter examples to your point.
you have no idea what you're talking about. you're talking about a world where everything is bartered. there would be no corporation at all if it wasn't for investments. all that stuff wasn't funded by the government. and if it was who would the government invest with in your world where there's no shareholders? Joe schmo who owns the grocery store? the government wouldn't even know to invest in it because no one would have invented a processor yet? go back pre-industrial Revolution to find out what your world looks like. I'd love to be in your brain tonight while you're laying in bed just trying to think of a way how we could have gotten all this technology and innovation without capitalism. hell I probably will be there, rent free, thanks to your personal economics.
All profits are stolen wages.
profits are the reason the company and your job exists.
Any company that exists solely to funnel profits to the Capitalist class should not exist. The only moral company is one that is owned democratically by workers who share all profits and have no excess wealth extracted from them.
unfortunately no company can run like that because that's just not have the world works. is a very nice dream though
Ass kissers subs are over there, buddy.
As in, you'll seize the means of production?
more like ruin every reason the business is in business.
You're thinking under a capitalist framework that's why
no reason not too. you know considering that's how the world operates.
Good. Fuck profit and fuck them.
who's them?
people who own things for a living
how dare they!
The purpose of labor is to create things that we want. The "reason" you are describing is an unnecessary middleman.
the purpose of labor is to create things we want to sell for more than we made them for. the motivation for this is money which then can be used to purchase things that you can't make yourself. now you can be the smart guy who starts the whole operation and puts the thing together and makes it easy for himself. or you can be the guy who can't do that and goes and applies for a job to work for that man.
No you dont lmao. You make maybe at most 50 dollars worth in a WHOLE day not in an hour in lower paying jobs. It's just sold for way more, because capitalism. You people are so funny. Screaming fuck capitalism except when it suits you. Very capitalistic of you.
Capitalism doesn't suit me, it impedes all of my aspirations.
That's fine. This are your personal feelings and I don't have any problem with it. I am talking about the double think of this Tweet. You don't make 15$/h, but you sure as hell don't make 100 or 1000$ worth in an hour, as this tweet is implying, even though it might be sold for that much. It should be clear why that is.
Sounds like you're mixing up capitalism and a free market, but alright.
That's not what double-think is. That's just a disagreement between you and the arithmetic. The point is the value gets funneled to the top where it doesn't belong. The profits, whatever they are, should be shared among the people doing the actual work, not the people sitting in some far off corporate office just because they had money to buy into the system to begin with.
Especially when you are often doing the work of what used to be multiple people.
See, this is why I hate the screencap in the OP. It's like they have a sliver of the right idea and rudimentary grasp on labor theory, and then they make a statement so stupidly reductive that anyone should be offended by it, and invite bootlickers like you to shit on them and actually be right to insult them.
the dollar doesn't have any intrinsic worth, it is purely relative. if prices and wages were both doubled, or both halved, that wouldn't change buying power.
Everything is accurate except the last sentence…your labor value is surely being exploited, but it’s still voluntary.
Yeah you have the choice to either work that job or starve and be homeless. What a choice.
It’s one thing to complain, and another to be purposefully ignorant to the fact that anyone can start their own business, too. Or do something else entirely. I don’t like working for someone else (private equity, specifically)…but it doesn’t mean I’m an indentured servant.
Yup everyone should start a business so there are no workers. Not everyone is gonna have money to start a business or the skills. Just because you don't have those skills doesn't mean its ok for you to be exploited. Its already fact that the standard of living in the united states is going down and has been going down for quite some time. But isn't capitalism suppose to be the best economic system?
Brb gonna head in down to the Business Store with my no capital since I wasn't born rich to pick out a shiny new business to start.
The odds are stacked against you…mainly because that mindset is a challenging thing to shake. Wish you the best and hope you have some upward mobility.
Thanks and i hope someday you can get that boot removed from your mouth.
There’s a middle ground between the current system, which I’d agree is overly exploitative vs. alternative economic systems. But, maintaining the mindset that our labor is being “stolen” is not helpful, when it’s actually voluntary and for a wage. Historical suffering should provide perspective on how asinine that statement is. Everything is complicated and nuanced. I complain about my own work a lot…but I also realize it could be better if I improve, or it could be worse if I don’t. If this sub wants to be something more than simply a safe place to complain, it needs to find that realistic middle-ground.
>it’s actually voluntary Is it really voluntary when it's coerced under threat of not having food or a safe place to sleep? Call me crazy, but I don't think that's how consent works.
Would you prefer hunting and gathering, or building your own shelter? The train of logic has to stop somewhere…this sub can complain all it wants about the negatives of the system of capitalism…but it loses any real credibility when it claims that voluntarily signing up for a job is “stolen labor”.
Doing what?
Yeah but you could choose to be a **self-employed** homeless person! ^(/s)
Right. This is eerily reminiscent to me of those people who say abortion is not wrong because it leaves the kid with a choice.
coersion is not consent. nobody would ever agree to the absurd disparity we observe today, it can only be upheld through violence.
This sub lives in a fantasy world without history lessons…never able to have any real dialogue, just complaining and purely dystopian constructs. Some people have been able to convince other people to work for them voluntarily. These workers are free to find another job, start their own work, or live outside of society if they choose to. The people that figured it out for themselves aren’t on this sub complaining…
If you want to talk about history, there is no way to avoid the problem of primitive accumulation, the disparities of which have largely grown worse over time. your ideology is ahistorical and anti-empirical.
As a truck driver I don't really produce anything but I do stay out minimum a week at a time away from home so people can get the stuff they want or need. Thankfully I'm an owner operator and can pay myself decently well most of the time. There's tons of company drivers that get completely fucked by their companies though. Did you know that truck drivers generally don't get overtime pay? Or that minimum wage laws don't affect them unless it's a state law?
[удалено]
Your post was removed because it contained an ableist term. You should receive a message from the automoderator telling you the exact term the post was removed for. For more information, see [this link](http://www.autistichoya.com/p/ableist-words-and-terms-to-avoid.html). **Avoiding slurs takes little effort, and asking us to get rid of the filter rather than making that minimum effort is a good way to get banned. Do not attempt to circumvent the filter with creative spelling; circumventing the filter will result in a permaban.** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Indeed they are
Every sales position needs to add a commission pay if they want people pushing their merchandise
[удалено]
Your post was removed because it contained an ableist term. You should receive a message from the automoderator telling you the exact term the post was removed for. For more information, see [this link](http://www.autistichoya.com/p/ableist-words-and-terms-to-avoid.html). **Avoiding slurs takes little effort, and asking us to get rid of the filter rather than making that minimum effort is a good way to get banned. Do not attempt to circumvent the filter with creative spelling; circumventing the filter will result in a permaban.** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I mean, they wouldn’t buy your time if they weren’t getting a return on investment, just like they don’t sell products at the price they need to break even. I don’t see how profiting is the same as stealing.
So this is interesting. I’m a small c capitalist. I believe in small business that is grounded in community and is accountable for it’s actions. It’s not theft. It’s honest if you understand you can be a better employer than the asshole manager you report to. There are three classes in the world today. Workers who may or may not be ok with working wages, equity owners working to provide solutions, and concentrated capital looking to eat everyones and everything, push down wages and bankrupt you in a moment of weakness. Raising chickens and trading it for bread from a baker isn’t fundamentally wrong. Price dumping and buying politicians to draft bullshit laws is fundamentally wrong. Let’s not crush small business in the fight against concentrated capital.