I love when these assholes try to convince you that the capitalists created the company and therefore deserve all the capital.
Like, ok, give all your money to your parents and grandparents.
Always fun to see a nuanced Marxist concept escape lemmy.ml and be argued against by people who have zero idea what they’re talking about.
What the capitalists did was pay all the workers right after they did the work, even though the phones wouldn’t actually be sold for some time after that. Capitalists bring capital. Money. It takes money to get things started.
I completely agree that the rewards are all disproportionate. The people who put up the capital shouldn’t get all the rewards. But it’s just dumb to claim that they play no role at all. If that’s true, walk out of your house and make a phone you designed yourself out of sticks you find on the ground.
It only “takes money to get things started” because our economy is organized that way.
How else are you going to get 200 people together to assemble phones for a week?
A much higher financial incentive because they’d actually be the ones profiting from the sale of the phones. There are organizational structures other than corporations.
I was once asked to join a startup, and after a few chats I was ready to talk turkey. Then they sprung it on me that since there was no revenue yet, no one was making a wage. But my equity in the company would be correspondingly high.
I couldn’t do it. I had bills to pay. I was stunned that they thought I could do this, and I slowly realized that everyone else there was an ex-Googler and basically rich already.
So you see, I’ve been in the exact position you suggest your workers will jump at, and it does. not. work. People need to pay rent this month and can’t wait through a months long production chain and months long sales cycle all of which is full of risk. They need to get paid, for sure, not maybe, and now.
I’m not in here touting the glory of capitalism as if it’s a wonderful system. But I’m also not spouting pure fantasy bullshit about alternatives we can just switch to easy-peasy, because that’s a bunch of half-baked idealistic crap.
Yeah I mean I know it doesn’t work under this economic system, but that’s kind of the point I was making
I have heard this several times throughout this thread that sure, capital is necessary in this system, but that’s just an artifact imposed by this system. Under another system you wouldn’t need it.
I’m still waiting to hear any system where startup costs are not a factor and people can work on a thing that does nothing to meet their short term needs.
Are we talking about a utopia where all human needs have already been eliminated by magical technology so we can simply wander where we will and work on enriching projects that strike our fancy?
To keep it focused: show me a system where you can get 200 people together to assemble phones with no capital at the outset.
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You can’t get the same product tho. And it’s not the only thing.
The actual man power is only a fraction of what went into it.
Connections, property, minerals, education and many many other aspects went into it.
To design it with out capital you would need to find people who with out capital educated themselves
With out capital find individuals who have the minerals and resources
Lastly you need a way to connect all these people after you have found them
None of this requires actual money to do in theory, but now you need to find a way to justify to these people to provide their fancy rocks and knowledge into a project that doesn’t actually benefit them unless a pre existing system that relied on capital existed to push development to the current state.
The fundamental flaw that gets over looked is different economic systems push towards different advancements in technology.
So to argue that a different system would be better suited is just a fallacy. You don’t get capitalist products and goods in a communist system.
A system that optimizes for the worker would produce goods and services that improve the workers existence for example.
You might get some over lap but the implementation would also be so wildly different. Hell for example in a theoretical non corrupt communist system LLMs and AI systems would be lauded as amazing by everyone.
They are the ideal improvement of a system that shares resources to stream line and reduce the burden and quality of life of the working class. Since everyone would equally benifit from them and it would drive the hobbies artist out of a job but instead freeing them to make more personal art instead of art for the community.
No, you can get a better product. Capitalism is designed to focus wealth and that means that all companies that get big enough will, eventually, turn towards the “increase shareholder value at all costs” path. Apple was actually doing really well with how they did things until Tim Cook was in charge and then, when capital became more important than the actual product things started to go south. I have Apple products and they’re still very good, but they aren’t the same company that they used to be at all.
Capitalism is all about the distribution of wealth and putting it at the center of every decision. There are plenty of other ways to have a world very similar to what we have now without that poisonous way of think permeating everything we do and buy. There are more options than unfettered capitalism and Soviet-style communism.
there are more options
Okay. What are they? And what are these “better products” these other systems have produced?
I often hear people say there are better alternatives to capitalism but when pressed to show evidence of them, they are obscure, extremely limited examples, or they resort to “we’ve never REALLY tried TRUE communism.”
I’d like to have alternatives. But I don’t see them, or if I see them, I don’t see them doing anything much.
Democratic socialism? Literally just use your own imagination for three seconds or google it. You haven’t even begun to try, why should I engage with you in any detail if you’re just going to plug your ears and then claim nonsense?
Capitalism is not just “money exists”, it’s the extensive privatization of all goods and services and pinky-promising that the market will protect people. It’s a naive ideology that insists on a nonsense idea that corporations will have everyone’s best interests at heart and that everyone will always be able to work. It is so full of holes, holes represented by real human beings suffering even through no fault of their own.
You can keep money, private business, and variation in salaries and still have a system with public utilities and regulations to keep businesses in check. If you need examples there are places all over the world that show that there’s not just extreme capitalism or extreme communism. No one is hiding this information from you and you clearly know how to use the internet so do that first before saying nothing is real simply because random people on a forum won’t peel your eyelids back for you while you kick and scream against them.
The only thing you can remove from the process and still get the same result is capital…
People want to be paid for their labor, and with no capital you aren’t paying them. You just fell flat on your first purchase order for the first component.
Money is made up. The only reason people have to be paid for their work is because the capitalist system requires it for those workers to survive. All the capitalist system does is put the allocation of resources in the hands of a minority of powerful people. It happened under kings before that. There’s nothing special about capitalism. It only changes the concentration of power from lineage to who exploits the capitalist system best. It could just as easily happen under a socialized system that actually benefited workers in far more equitable ways. It sadly gets quashed by the greedy monsters of this world with manipulation and violence.
The only reason people have to be paid for their work is because the capitalist system requires it
Naw, people like being paid for their work.
Having food is nice, having a home is nice, having a car is nice, having a vacation is nice.
People like being paid for their work.
Capitalists giving you those privileges only exists in a capitalist system. Do you think people in communist systems or centralized state systems didn’t get to eat, or have homes, or travel? Just because capitalism is the way we are allocating resources and privileges in a lot of countries today, doesn’t mean it’s the only way these things can be distributed to people. People act like capitalism isn’t only a 300 year old economic system.
People don’t like getting paid, they like to get things with the money.
In a decommodified economy you would not need this.
We shouldn’t confuse the use of currency with the capitalist system.
In a decommodified economy, any sort of “currency” would not even be money in the modern sense of the word.
If you go straight to giving people the end things, the payment is the food, home, car, vacation, etc. People like being paid for their work.
You are still thinking of it in terms of commodity production
The only reason people have to be paid for their work is because the capitalist system requires it for those workers to survive.
Can you perhaps go back over this and explain what these words actually mean? I actually want to understand what you mean better. Because money is not identical to capitalism. And workers need to be paid for their work because they need to eat to survive. What is it that capitalism specifically is requiring here? I’ve seen one or two replies that are like “sure yeah people want to be paid but that’s capitalism’s fault too” and I genuinely don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Compensating someone for their work is a very basic concept not necessarily tied to capitalism. Even in the natural world there is very little labor that is not focused on some reward outcome. There is even compensation between species in symbiotic relationships. Compensation doesn’t seem like some weird forced artificial thing to me at all. It’s primal.
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Before capitalism they still used capital. Barter systems are still capital based.
Equal exchange and cohabitation hunter gather groups are still capital based.
Capital is just time. That’s all it is. What ways you quantify that is meaningless and pointless and every system is just a different way to quantify time. Capitalism uses currency debt as a trade standard for time. But it’s still just time.
We compound it and trade cast quantities of other people’s time around this devaluing the individuals. Communism instead removes the ability to do so and tries to make it so each person’s time can only be traded by them. So the only way to get cast quantities of time is by working together.
Even in a post commodity environment capital will still be the way trade with others. It would just be in time.
So sure, people want to be paid. But let’s be clear: they don’t inherently want money
Except the rich, right? But they are a different species, of course. Not at all the same human beings you see when you look at the noble proletarian!
All people want nice things while not having to work or think hard. All people are pretty okay having others do the work for them. This is not a unique feature of the rich which will vanish from humanity if we wave a magic wand and vaporize the upper class.
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I was being ironic. The rich definitely aren’t a different species. They are just another window on human nature.
We can abstract money until it’s meaningless and then say “see, it doesn’t do anything.”
But even if you regress everything to a basic barter economy, capital still matters. You want to gather 40 workers for a year to create an irrigation canal? Well someone has to be prepared to feed them for a year, THIS year, before the canal can benefit any crops. Otherwise they’re going to fuck off back to their own arid fields and scratch out another year.
So you see, the village can’t get a new canal without the labor of the workers, but you can’t get the labor of the workers without some ready capital. Theres absolutely nothing abstract about it. Capital matters.
What we all get mad about is that the guy with the capital then OWNs the canal and charges high prices for the water. And the way to solve that is by collectively bargaining for some worker ownership at the start. People like yourself get lost hating the guy with the capital and convincing yourself he doesn’t matter. He does. You just need to negotiate for a better shake.
That has been hard to do historically because there’s always some jackass who comes along and says “I’m starving, and I can dig ditches, just feed me while I do it.”
If a village needed something done, then they could figure it out collectively, you don’t need business to get things accomplished.
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So sure, people want to be paid. But let’s be clear: they don’t inherently want money, they want to survive, create, and ideally thrive in the society they inhabit. Capital is just the tool we happen to use right now, it’s not essential to the concept of creation.
Money existed long before modern systems, too. Bartering an exchange of goods for other goods sucks ass. It was almost immediately swapped out for some form of money in basically every society in history. (And to be clear, ‘money’ doesn’t just mean a coin or bill, it was often a standard, easy to exchange good the society agreed upon, such as a grain or a precious metal.)
they don’t inherently want money
Let me ask you, if you work for a company that makes washers (the things one pairs with bolts), and your employer offered to pay you every paycheck completely in washers, would you find that acceptable? Or would you demand something easier to work with, would you demand your services be rewarded with money instead?
they don’t inherently want money
I bet you don’t get paid in fucking washers, you demand payment in money.
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If that ‘proxy system’ was a measure of value you could easily exchange for goods and services, it would also be money. People invent money in every society because it just makes sense. Even in societies where they try to abolish money, money is instantly re-invented using some other measure because it is so damn useful for trade.
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I have made things with my hands for which I was not paid. I even gathered the materials. I am bad at capitalism.
You were rewarded in some way. You got the thing you made, or if it was a gift to someone, you enhanced your relationship with that person.
If a person gets no reward of any kind for their work, they stop doing that work. As they should.
Money and capitalism come into the picture when you want to motivate people to make something they won’t necessarily get to keep or use themselves, which they cannot then give as a gift, which does not give them the pleasure of artistic expression.
So yeah people can make things without money in the limited cases where there’s another form of reward. But modern societies are scaled way past people just making the things that they themselves receive immediate benefit from. You get economies from scale by mass production, and no one needs 10,000 k kitchen knives.
So the workers will work unpaid?
Some of y’all have never run a small business, and it shows.
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Iv yet to see a single volunteer system that doesn’t require capital. Even unpaid volunteer labor requires capital to sustain the ability for people to volunteer.
Go work with any non profit ever. Hell go just start trying to do anything at all. Capital is required even if free labor is used. :/
Just because the retiree does something for free doesn’t make it free. Every system requires input for output.
Where did that capital come from?
The same place the fed and skilled laborers came from: the proceeds of previous enterprises.
Capitalist funded the creation of the iPhone and withdrawal rent on their funding.
There are many ways to fund the process.
Capitalists like capitalism because they get to extract more than they funded with no upper bound.
They leech off of the value of the workers who created the product because they think funding the arrangment entitles them to infinite returns on their investment.
It’s rent seeking with more steps and no overhead. There is zero upkeep because the input is the output, capital.
If capital was additive then adding twice as much capital would result in twice as much output and that is clearly not the case.
It’s a valve and it is like a damn operator taking credit for the river.
Its just such a stupid argument on its face. We wouldn’t argue that tribalism gave us agriculture, or that somehow feudalism is good because of windmills. As a society we have ideas, we direct resources to those ideas, and then we reap the benefits of those ideas. Capitalism is simply a more effective driver of resources than the systems before. But mathematically driven aristocracy is still aristocracy.
Capitalism is destroying the Earth… and causing climate change at an unprecedented pace. Its all in what you view as valuable. If you dont value a habitable planet, sure capitalism is an effective system at exploiting workers for a few people’s benefit.
TBF if everyone ate locally raised grass fed beef that would kill the planet at an even faster rate. In the frontier days people sustained on Pigs which they would let roam wild and devour everything they came across, and then stored their meat in barrels of salt.
If every community supplied their own power and lighting such as oil lamps and furnaces, it would be worse.
If every community made their own plastics and devices instead of sophisticated centralized productions with higher efficiency and minimal material cost, that would be worse for the planet.
Capitalism is not inherently worse for the planet, nor better really. Extreme and polar distribution methods don’t change demand only processes and supply.
Yes it is.
Wouldn’t capitalism be the whole system and capitalists menaing here the top owning class?
It’s really not that complicated. Someone or something. Had to finance the research that lead to the technology. So, yes. Capitalism did indeed make your iPhone. It’s the driving factor of financing technological advancements outside of perhaps the military
That doesn’t mean those working the lines, writing the software, cleaning the office, maintaining the buildings, etc, deserve a fiftyeleven:th rate payoff.
It’s the same with all of your paraphrasing posts. It’s just unnecessary. You could just let the content speak for itself without looking like a clown.
It can be true that capitalism did indeed make your iPhone, and that it’s growing out of control in terms of exploitation and evolving into an oligarchy.(US)
Capitalists told workers to make the iphone.
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creation of a surplus of devices, through exploitation, for the purposes of profit is capitalism.
just buying stuff is just markets. barters and lemonade stands are not capitalist.
Where can I find this arbitrary definition of capitalism? Because barters and lemonade in a free market stands still sounds like capitalism to me, just on a smaller scale. Just because it seems more sympathetic doesn’t mean it’s not the same thing.
Im not saying that what you describe in your first paragraph isn’t bad, but words have meaning. If you intend to spread your thoughts on them, you’d do well to go beyond “capitalism bad mkay” because it makes people take your thoughts less seriously. So you end up preaching to the choir who’s already on your side and we’ve learned from reddit, Twitter and Fox that echo chambers are bad.
from wikipedia, for instance, with my highlights:
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit. This socioeconomic system has developed historically through several stages and is defined by a number of basic constituent elements: private property, profit motive, capital accumulation, competitive markets, commodification, wage labor, and an emphasis on innovation and economic growth.
All of which can still be present for your hypothetical lemonade stand.
yeah. cause a 8yo hires people and exploits them for profit while also buying up neighbors stands and closing them so they remain a monopoly. lol.
Careful with that rhetorical question or they’ll bring out a bunch of nutjobs books and ask you to read through untested and unrealistic theory from the past hundred years and then call you unintellectual for choosing the dictionary and textbook definitions over their pseudoscience.
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Humans did invent lemons to enjoy them, though. It was a very large and organized undertaking which led to commercial success for Egypt.
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and during a time … before capitalism. ;)
But not before capital. It was state controlled common economy. Common economy are basically proto communism.
And capitalism and communism both rely on capital. Just the controlling sector changes for the purposes of differentiating a common economy vs a modern capitalistic or communistic economy.
TBH Egypt was everything Communists claim about Capitalism. Idk why you would think otherwise.
Purchase of the device is Capitalism, because your money IS your vote, and YOU are the Capital of Capitalism!
Capitalism describes the division of labour and profits, not the purchasing of goods. YOU are not theCapital in capitalism unless you are working for the profits of the owner. The root word of Capitalism is Caput, meaning head or cattle. Capitalism’s root definition is basically the ownership of cattle or chattel.
In a planned economy, there are beepers and payphones. No one builds the most expensive commercial endeavor in all of human history – advanced silicon fab nodes
According to? The Soviets made it to space before we did, and China currently fabricates the vast majority of that technology. Technology isn’t native to any economic structure.
But capital is. Both Russia and China are fighting for capital.
With the space race the capital was military research, propaganda and money.
In China it’s just money military research and propaganda
No different than the United States where the capital is money, military research and propaganda
End of the day it’s all just capital. How it’s controlled and what the capital is changes.
But it all still the same thing being fought over.
I would argue that is a better semantic dispute, but still forced. You can interpret things as political capital, technological capital, or even militaristic capital… But it becomes a little over done pretty quickly. There are better and more accurate ways to describe these claims than to claim everything is capital.
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Semantics do not create meaning, they describe it, poorly in most cases as vernacular evolves.
Claiming something is a semantic dispute by rote when being corrected is different than engaging in a reasonable semantic dispute.
Words do have meaning, and vernacular hasn’t changed enough to completely alter the meaning of an entire economic system…
Most of the people that worked for William Shockley have been interviewed and recorded, along with their protégés. Bo Lojek of Motorola also wrote History of Semiconductor Engineering (Springer).
Are you claiming that certain technologies can only be developed under capitalism? Or that semiconductor engineering would have never surpassed a certain stage without a particular economic system? What does any of that have to do with the division of labour and profits?
Over a long enough time scale, a different economic system would have pressures towards different goods and services.
Why there would be definitely some similarities. A modern economic system such as capitalism and communism would result in two very invastly different things.
While baseline technology would probably look, if not be the same, what is then used for and developed for would be different.
For example, it’s more likely in a communist system that AI would be developed far more rapidly than we saw under capitalism.
While capitalism pushes towards something like ads and monetizing information. Communism would push towards the acceleration and simplification of outmoding the worker entirely.
For capitalism outmoding the worker is just a side effect of saving money. It’s not the goal. Under communism, it would be the goal since it would create the best possible circumstances for people to be able to live a equal life given the highest benefit of the communal progression.
Different systems have different goals to argue that the same things would be created in the same order is just bad faith. Even arguing that things would be created exactly. The same is bad faith.
A quick jump through the history books and even a service level understanding of History can prove that. The concept of simultaneous invention shows as much. The printing press is a fantastic example.
Invented hundred years apart in two entirely different parts of the world. One barely used and quickly forgotten because their system of governance, economy and society did not see much of a point to it. While the other is what revolutionized the world.
Different systems invent different things because they have different goals. Even when they do invent, the same thing doesn’t mean it’ll be used or even valued and thus never improved on.
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do not care to argue with you like this. I come here to hang out with digital neighbors, not to have some angry debate.
I don’t think we’re engaging in an angry argument? At least, I’m not upset. I think I’m just rebutting some of your claims and asking for clarification?
I get nothing out of this, and for a disabled guy in social isolation, these have a disproportionate negative impact. On my original LW account I just blocked everyone that argues or down votes as such toxic negativity is unwelcome, unnecessary, and mildly harmful to everyone.
So anyone who disagrees with you is being negative or harmful? I don’t really see how being disabled gives you the right to make inarguable inflammatory claims in a public forum.
The trials of physical disability may include a much reduced margin for adversarial encounters and contention. It is a subtle prejudice that is impossible to avoid.
You may want to talk to someone about that, but In my experience any prejudice you are self aware of are prejudices that can be avoided.
Have a great day.
You too.
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Absolutely nothing requires the only two options to be capitalisim and planned economy. Market socialism is a thing.
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Idk kind of sounds like capitalism with extra steps. Seems like the major difference between people who oppose capitalism and everyone else is just how they define the word.
What exactly does the meme imply the solution is? State operated companies? Only allowing cooperative companies? Lynching CEOs and hoping the next batch will be better, AKA “doing a luigi”?
The reason it isn’t capitalism with extra steps is that the defining trait of capitalism vs socialism isn’t the presence of markets (which long predate capitalism as a distinct concept), but rather who owns what and how that ownership is justified and structured. Now, arguably market socialism is more similar to capitalism than a planned economy is, but capitalism doesn’t just mean an unplanned economy either (as those, again, are much more ancient than the term implies).
I don’t think the meme implies any particular solution. To be honest, it doesn’t really even imply a problem to be solved. To my eyes it just looks like it’s just mocking a particular argument used to defend capitalism, without really communicating much beyond a distaste for that argument and presumably with capitalism in general.
Why would anyone build beepers if there are no mobile phones? That’s an entire wireless infrastructure that doesn’t need to be created or maintained. Beepers were the impetus for early wireless repeaters and signal towers. Phones created the data and load bearing standards but the hardware was built for the devices before phones.
In a planned economy the onus is on the person to be where they need to make or receive a call. Like the 70s and rotary phones. “Plan your day around what the day has planned for you” is what one of the most annoying teachers I’ve ever had said and it’s the perfect model for blaming the individual for problems outside their control. And that’s why central planners will use it to deflect from criticism.
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There are people in these comments more or less wanting money to be abolished.
Monopolies and billionaires aside… that’s a level of impractical where you need to step back and take a deep breath, cause we’re not about to go back to exchanging three loaves of bread for two steaks again anytime soon. Come on, now…
That’s where people start to make fun of you, you know? And if you’re not anti-democratic or something (in which case, serves you right) and you really are well-meaning, that’s just sad.
In the simplest of terms: someone somehow has to keep track of all the things, and you’d basically end up right back at some kind of ‘unit’ and the cycle restarts.
I always blame Edward Bernays for a lot of things we have today.
Because he was responsible for taking his uncle’s insights and weaponizing them for profit and power?
I think you could make the argument that Communist Nations maintain the sweathshops responsible for creating the components of iPhones. Also for the profits.
Under communism there would be no state. So a “communist nation” cannot exist by definition.
I don’t see how collective ownership completely invalidates a state. Technically a direct democracy without private ownership is a communism, for example.
But yes they don’t currently exist.
I don’t see how collective ownership completely invalidates a state
States exist to protect class interests through exploitation, war, police, and armies. They protect the interests of the owners, the bourgeoisie. Without classes separating people, the state loses its purpose and withers away.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withering_away_of_the_state
Under communism there are no classes, everyone is equal. Therefore there is no purpose for a state, therefore it dies.
Democratically controlling production != state
If there is no enforcement of democratically decided policy then the democracy is ineffective and it’s just plain anarchy where anybody can get away with doing anything.
When there is a line at a restaurant do you cut the line?
Is there laws in place to deal with people who cut the line?
If the answer to both of those is no, then you’ve already participated in a system in which group decisions are adhered to, without any enforcement mechanisms. And arguably, the group decision to wait in line instead of cutting is a democratically decided one. Nobody likes having somebody cut in front of them, so most people prefer that waiting in line is adhered to.
That’s just a small thought experiment, applying the same rational to larger society is straightforward. And these kinds of things already exist in the form of community gardens, mutual aid orgs, really really free markets, community cleanups, community workshops, and other similar things. Some of these are set up as nonprofits out of a necessity of working under capitalism, but not all of them. And they work together despite nobody enforcing usage or contributions.
They are also democratic, if the group working the local community garden decides as a collective that the existing garden is too small, they may find that they agree to expand it by adding an extra row of beds along some section of the plot. This is also, all without enforcement.
People do cut in line because it is not illegal, just like how people did murder other people and their families and in some cases entire tribes in the Wild West Frontier because it was not illegal.
But how does the concept of collective ownership invalidate a state?
People do cut in line because it is not illegal
You’ve missed the point, which is to show that you already participate and adhere to a democratic decision despite there being no enforcement.
just like how people did murder other people and their families and in some cases entire tribes in the Wild West Frontier because it was not illegal.
And that happened under a system in which labor was not collectively owned, where automation was not anywhere where it is now, and the resources were not spread fairly. Scarcity causes exactly that kind of strife.
But how does the concept of collective ownership invalidate a state?
It doesn’t, the dissolution of classes is what does that under Marxist theory.
there is no such thing, nor can there be, as a communist nation.
Then there are no communist nations, nor in contrast does the phrase “capitalist nation” have any meaning.
why does there not being any actual communist nations (by the very definition) mean to you there is no capitalist nation? we are in one right now.
If it’s the only kind of nation then it’s a distinction without purpose.
Capitalism is a historical development from feudalism, so you don’t need communism as a point of comparison/contrast for capitalist nation to exist.
Also, the “communist” countries are, strictly speaking, capitalist if you look at their mode of production and mode of distribution. Stuff is made largely for profit, there’s private ownership, markets, things are distributed via money. As a wise man once said, name doesn’t make a thing.
