You must log in or register to comment.
I think there’s a simpler, more personal way to make this point. Here’s a few thought experiments:
Imagine you work for a company that lays you off, even while doing enough stock buybacks and executive bonuses such that they could’ve paid your salary for 1000 years. After you get laid off, imagine what would happen if you just ignored them and continued doing your work.
Or, your landlord doesn’t renew your lease because they think you’re ugly and they don’t want ugly people living in their building. Imagine what happens if you just stay, even if you keep sending the landlord their monthly rent on time.
Both of these situations end with armed, taxpayer-funded agents physically removing you from the premises by any means necessary; it is only the omnipresent threat of state violence that keeps capitalist control over their private property. We don’t see the violence because we’ve been trained from an early age not just to accept it, but to not even see it.
Not playing devils advocate by choice: there are systems in place (at least in more democratic countries) that force the employer and the landlord to keep you if you havent done anything wrong.
At will employment is an american joke.
Still, paying more for the shareholders and CEOs than the actual work your water, food and transportation needs is insane.
The idea that I can buy my way around laws and others rights is disgusting to the core.
The argument presented here is based on complete ignorance of the history of the human race.
Reason #1
The concept of property ownership is not a product of capitalism. This idea is literally as old as the oldest known civilization to keep written records, Mesopotamia.
Concern with property, its preservation, and its use shaped not only the Mesopotamian legal tradition but also economic and social practice, notably the ability to sell and to buy land and to transfer property through marriage and inheritance.
In Mesopotamian culture, property was owned by the state, by the temple, and by private families. Records show a distinction between movable property (material goods) and immovable property (land), and the selling, trading, repossessing, inheriting and transfer of all types of property.
Here is an example of a cuneiform tablet recording an agreement about the division of property.
There is even an equivalent of eminent domain:
When Hammurabi asked, “When is a permanent property ever taken away?” he was referring to the established customary legal principle that land was the permanent property of a family.
Hammurabi was not a capitalist. Babylon was not a capitalist nation.
Capitalism did not “invent legal privileges around property”.
Reason #2
Conquest of territory happened long before capitalism ever existed. Colonialism was hardly a new concept.
Genghis Khan was not a capitalist. Alexander the Great was not a capitalist. Julius Caesar was not a capitalist. Napoleon Bonaparte was not a capitalist.
If you require citations for this part of my argument, I suggest you find a basic text on world history at your local library.
Conclusion
I’m not going to address the other “reasons” as they are faulty conclusions drawn from the previously addressed faulty premises.
I am not arguing that these things are right and good. I am arguing that linking them specifically to capitalism represents a desperately uneducated understanding of human society and history. This is such a bad take, it reeks of teenage anarchist and “money is the root of all evil” oversimplification.
It’s a bit disingenuous arguing that capitalism is somehow a new concept, and colonialism isn’t.
I mean the terms capitalism and colonialism are both coined way after the practice of those systems. I think you could argue that capitalism even entered the human world before even currency was a thing.
Colonialism is the same, as you seem to intuit, considering other people and subduing them didn’t need a philosophical framework in order for it to be enacted.
In most civilizations wealth tends to accumulate at the top of the societal pyramid, which is capitalism. The pharaohs and sumerian kings alike are capitalists. They profit of the labour of others.
There’s a reason you’re unwilling to entertain other arguments, because you’re moving the goalposts and are afraid they will fall off the field.
This is such a weird take… how far removed from reality are you to actually believe that authoritarian feudalism is a form of capitalism?
Wealth accumulation is not capitalism. Capitalism enables wealth accumulation, but the opposite isn’t true in the slightest.
All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.
Ok I’ll bite. God help me.
My employer bills me out for $400/hr and I make about $100/hr. I wouldn’t be able to make that much on my own because I don’t have the resources and infrastructure my employer has: admin, IT, expertise, manpower, marketing, legal, and so on. I have zero interest in being self employed. So this is a good arrangement for me.
My clients are happy paying those prices because we provide good service at competitive rates.
My employer is happy because they usually net about 30% profit margin so the partners walk away with $120/hr after paying me and other overhead.
It’s the very definition of capitalism doing exactly what it is supposed to do: providing valuable goods and services to people who want to buy it from people who want to sell it, and everyone walks away happy from the transaction.
I fail to see how this is a violent and exploitative war on civilization itself. Fuck everything about this comic. Why is it even on my feed? Gah.
Back when I did service work I made about $30/hr and was billed out at $60/hr. Seems outrageous right? Until you factor in worker’s comp, other insurance, admin, etc. They needed to bill at $45/hr to just break even, and you need to charge more than that to cover other unexpected costs, downtime, buy new equipment, building maintenance, etc.
The idea that capitalism “steals” the surplus value of labour can be true sure, but it’s often simplified and exaggerated so much like in this meme that it’s hard to take seriously. It’s probably hard to quantify depending on the industry too as there are different expenses and added value by the employer (I bet Wal-Mart is an order of magnitude worse than your local plumbing company for e.g.) If I were to just hire myself out at the exact same rate my employer did but covered all the additional costs and value they added I wouldn’t actually be ahead anything at all, and I’d have to work even more just to end up in the same place in the end, so at least in that case the system benefited us both.
Yes, precisely this.
Workers are absolutely exploited by plenty of shitty companies. But that’s not caused by capitalism, nor is it solved by any other -ism. The causes are complex and the solutions are even moreso, if there even are solutions at all. To sit here bitching about it in the form of a stupid anti capitalism comic is just childishly naive.
Now do someone making $7.25 an hour.
Ok, I make 7.25 an hour and my employer bill me out at $25/hr. My employer walks away with 30% or about $7.50, etc etc. The sample numbers are meaningless.
So are your bullshit numbers
I’m done with you. Come back if you have something constructive to add to the conversation.
The material realities of someone making 7.25 (which I will concede is a little bit of a strawman, most people make more but not much) is very different than someone making 100/hr. The petit bourgeois exist for a reason. They’re still exploited but only to a point. They’re “commoners” that benefit from the status quo and wish to uphold it. They have it good enough and can relate to the disadvantaged people’s plight insofar as it allows them to dismiss their criticisms as being lazy, not working hard enough, bootstraps, yada yada. They’re a foil and a buffer between the proletariat and the bourgeoise. You can point to them to say the exact things you’re saying right now
So raise minimum wage to $20-30/hr. You don’t need to toss capitalism out the window to do that. It’s overly simplistic to blame these problems on one ism and naive at best to think these problems will go away for swapping it with another ism.
I’m happy for you, I really am! It sounds like you have a very good situation, but it’s important to remember that if the company is making profit, they are still taking value of your labor without doing the bulk of the work. Capitalism is designed to do exactly one thing, and that is to maintain the power of the wealthy elite. Any benefits are coincidental.
My example shows all three parties benefitting from the arrangement. Everyone would lose if I, the worker, quit. It’s not exploitation at all. I willingly enter into this agreement because I literally can’t do this on my own. So I benefit from company resources. My clients can’t be serviced by a small one man show so they choose a bigger company too. The firm owners make the most because it’s their company and none of this would be happening without them. It’s not exploitation and it’s not parasitic, it’s symbiotic. We’ve got loads of issues with legislation and enforcement, minimum wage should be like $20-30, corporate governance needs to address all stakeholders and not just shareholders, and so on. But that won’t be resolved by swapping capitalism for any other -ism. It’s overly simplistic to think one ism is the only problem and another ism is the only solution.
Upvoting for good faith engagement, even if a little frustrated. I encourage other leftists here to do the same.
The situation you describe is capitalism working smoothly. Marx himself spoke highly of aspects of capitalism many times. The problem comes when your company’s owner, who has the power to abuse that ownership, does.
By analogy, monarchies are bad, even if your king is good. You can have a fair, just, wise philosopher king. It sounds like you’re lucky in having a good job with a reasonable owner, but your owner could sell to a private equity company tomorrow, who will lay you off, outsource your job to lower costs, bill out the same rate even when lowering the quality, and pocket the difference. They’ll do this for a few years until the brand’s value has been mined, then they’ll scrap your company and sell it for parts.
Socialists like myself argue that because the system can be abused, it inevitably wil be abused. It’s a structural argument, not an argument about each specific case. We argue that democratic control of our jobs is a good thing, in the same way that we got rid of kings to replace them with democratic control is a good thing, because we think that system is more just and fair.
This might be the first discussion I’ve had on Lenny in good faith as you say, so thank you for that.
My position summarized is that we definitely have massive issues with inequality, injustice, lack of rights, etc. But these are issues of legislation, corrupt government and leadership, enforcement, corporate governance, media disinformation, and so on. As you said any system can and will be abused. Swapping capitalism for any other -ism won’t change anything. (What would that even look like?)
Some of my meandering thoughts for potential solutions include controlling media disinformation, campaign finance reform, term/age limits, and ranked voting. It would be great to somehow change corporate governance to require leadership to prioritize stakeholders and not just shareholders, but I don’t really know how to do this. Maybe a requirement that all public companies be owned at least maybe 10% by non-officer employees, enough to get a seat on the board of directors.
It’s extremely complicated and there’s no clear solution. I’m not saying capitalism is perfect, I’m saying it’s overall ok and it’s very childishly naive to make a shitty comic about swapping it for another -ism to solve all of our problems. I really don’t want to argue about it though or get into a flame war, I just can’t handle the vitriol on this forum.
The state is violent and community is violent and privacy is violent
Can anyone come up with an ideology that is not violent and can actually be implemented in the real world with real actors that aren’t smelling roses and giving out hugs?
Personally, I think the only reason evil exists is because the world is unfair, some are advantageous and some are not. This causes people to refuse to “play” fairly which causes bad behaviors such as deception, exploitation, murder, etc. The only way to eliminate or reduce evil is to make the world fairer. One of the ways I can think of is for the fortunate to help the unfortunate.
I don’t believe this to be true. Fairness only matters to people who value fairness. Many people value fairness, but it is irrational to believe that everyone values fairness. Some, not most or even many, don’t care about fairness fundamentally. For these people, interesting fairness does nothing for them. These are the people we need to protect others from while also providing an environment that didn’t necessarily mean removing or killing them.
But what causes people to value fairness so little or so much? When I support equality, I don’t just mean wealth or resources, but everything, and in this case it’s intellect or knowledge. When people have different intellect or knowledge, there is bound to be misunderstanding or miscommunication or other issues. People who have low empathy or are ignorant or dumb to realize how fairness affects people can make things worse. I guess in this case we can make everyone equally smart so no one can deceive and no more misunderstanding. Can’t make smart people dumber so I suggest making dumb people smarter which is to give education to those who need it.
You answered it yourself, but I will elaborate.
Humans are different between individuals. Some people are dumb. Some people are mean. Some people are evil. Fundamentally the paradox of tolerance applies to fairness as well.
Well you wouldn’t like this answer probably. I suggest to eliminate the differences but i think it’s impossible. As long as there is positive, there is negative. To eliminate the negative is to eliminate the positive too, which is neutral and can make life very dull. So my other suggestion is quite radical which is to eliminate life itself. Or just make life or the world as fair as possible even if it’s impossible.
Ah, good old fashioned Nihilism. Another thing that I think is silly.
It is irrelevant what you think personally. Other people don’t necessarily think those things and assuming that they will or do abide by your positions without an incentive is folly.
I’m simply just providing my solutions or opinions. Better than nothing i guess, unless you have a better plan.
Of course, it’s impossible to please everyone. Can’t take some without losing some. So maybe just brute force it? Idk.
