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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Literally in that above example, I’m pretty sure they’re just going to redistribute their efforts. There will still be people growing crops and they’ll share with the people working on the irrigation canal, knowing it’s for their own benefit.
It’s not the only way things can ever get done under any circumstances. But for the guy to say you can remove it and get the same result is BS. And if we’re being real, capital drives some things that collective village action never could, like advances in medicine. And capital drives things on a scale that collective village action never does. Everyone thinks there isn’t enough housing but most of what we have was built with capital, not village collectivism. And we need more, the village needs something done, so where’s that village collectivism? Fact is a village can erect shantytowns in rural India but it can’t out in sewage lines and pour foundations for a new housing project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you include ‘food’, ‘shelter’, ‘transportation’ in ‘commodity production’, then yes, people want things like food, shelter, and transportation. People like being paid for their work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Literally in that above example, I’m pretty sure they’re just going to redistribute their efforts. There will still be people growing crops and they’ll share with the people working on the irrigation canal, knowing it’s for their own benefit.
It’s not the only way things can ever get done under any circumstances. But for the guy to say you can remove it and get the same result is BS. And if we’re being real, capital drives some things that collective village action never could, like advances in medicine. And capital drives things on a scale that collective village action never does. Everyone thinks there isn’t enough housing but most of what we have was built with capital, not village collectivism. And we need more, the village needs something done, so where’s that village collectivism? Fact is a village can erect shantytowns in rural India but it can’t out in sewage lines and pour foundations for a new housing project.
deleted by creator
Don’t correct my vocabulary. Saying the rich are a different species is irony, not hyperbole. Anyway, you haven’t made any points that stand here.
5 minutes earlier:
So you never said it doesn’t do anything. Just that it can be removed from the picture with no result. (?!)
Goodnight to this conversation.
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.)
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?
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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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.
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.
Describe this “decommodified economy” if you could. What does that mean to you?
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
If you include ‘food’, ‘shelter’, ‘transportation’ in ‘commodity production’, then yes, people want things like food, shelter, and transportation. People like being paid for their work.
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.
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.