Youāre nit picking. Whether the risk goes to zero or just very low, that doesnāt change the point that there is generally significant risk to start up, which does not exist with labor. Labor is almost always a zero startup risk, a business is almost always the opposite.
You keep saying the word risk, and liberal capitalists do this all the time. Companies limit personal liability, so risk goes to zero there for a bunch of legal issues.
What most people are talking about is money, but not everyone has access to money. If you take two people, one born into a rich family, and another born into a homeless family, the rich kid gets a massive inheritance and ārisksā 30% of it starting a business. Letās say he hires the person born into a homeless family.
The liberal conception here is that the rich person, handed a massive amount of cash for absolutely nothing, deserves the surplus value of labor from the poor person because he āriskedā a small part of his inheritance that the poor person never had access to. Itās a wild assertion.
This might seem fabricated, but in the real world this is how it goes, people with capital accumulate more capital. Jeff Bezos ābuilt Amazonā with a $245,000 loan from his parents, and worked out of their garage. He then used that loan and later capital investments to hire people to actually build Amazon.
His parents couldāve just as easily gone the standard capitalist route, and instead of loaning the money instead valuated the company at $300,000 and assumed ~80% ownership for the company. The only reason this isnāt how it played out is because parents donāt like exploiting their kids, there was a biological component at play that disallowed the standard capitalist exploitation from taking place. So they offered him a deal that no capitalist in their āright mindā would offer, because it left Jeff with far too much and the capitalist with far less.
Sure, they can limit it, and you can shield yourself personally from losses taken by the company, but there is a still (generally speaking, again) a significant financial risk to starting a company at all. You canāt āshieldā yourself from start up costs.
If the argument is that ārich people are financially more secure so itās easier for them to take riskā I 100% agree. Thereās no question that rich people start off with a massive head start. I fully recognize āthe uterine lottery.ā
But the meme is about this risk being equal to the āriskā taken by people just being paid to do labor. Donāt get my position wrong, I believe labor deserves way more of a share right now. But there is no risk in it. Sure, you can lose your job which sucks, but (again generally speaking, there are exceptions e.g. people might move across the country to take a job) you didnāt invest any money into starting the job. So now you are out a job and need to find a new one. You are not in the negative.
And we need this. We need to incentivize risking capitol to make capitol, as that helps labor too. Itās just that this isnāt infinite and doesnāt mean people should be able to amass any and all wealth they can. There is a middle ground and that is where the discussion needs to be. Not in this silly āwell, labor is really involved in the risk of losses too!!ā
Itās not, and this is specifically why Iāve avoided multiple opportunities to risk shit to start a new company: I would rather be a skilled laborer as I can just jump from job to job when I want, than to risk what seems to me to be a lot of money on trying to start a company. Too much pressure. Itās easy for me to not give a shit.
You misunderstood my argument slightly, itās not that itās āeasierā for rich people, itās that itās literally impossible to risk money you donāt have, and as a result of that you have exploitation of labor; stealing the surplus value of labor from a class that has no option other than to participate in wage labor.
Also the idea that thereās no risk in labor but there is risk in being a capitalist is a liberal lens that fails to actually account for material reality. Whatās the absolute worst case for both the capitalist and laborer? That they lose all access to their money, and have to rent themselves out to a capitalist.
Put another way, the risk capitalists engage in is being demoted from the owner class to the working class. That risk doesnāt justify them taking the surplus value of labor to accumulate vast hoards of wealth.
Left liberals view this as a quantitative issue, but itās a qualitative one. Profit is definitionally surplus value of labor, so no matter how small you make the capitalistās profit, itās always theft.
We need to incentivize risking capital
Absolutely, without capital injection the economy couldnāt function. Capitalism by definition requires exploitation of labor, and theft of the surplus value of labor is what incentivizes capitalists to not hoard all their wealth.
Itās a fundamentally broken system. Private entities shouldnāt be the ones handling investment, nor handling direction of development. Those should be handled democratically by worker syndicates, the capital should be injected from the state/communities.
Essentially anytime private corporations are involved in an industry (housing, healthcare, capital injection, governance, etc.) it breaks the system. Liberals are slowly seeing these material realities unfold, and so the propaganda being fed to them is harder to buy. You donāt find many people in support of private healthcare or governance anymore, and some are starting to learn about the others too.
itās that itās literally impossible to risk money you donāt have, and as a result of that you have exploitation of labor;
Except this isnāt true. You can go and find investors, or get a loan if you are willing/capable of putting up something as collateral. Is it easier for rich people? Yes, we both agree it is.
But the risk does not get ādemotedā to the working class. The working class did not take a risk (again, all generally speaking, I hope I donāt have to keep repeating that). They applied for a job, someone offered them money for their labor, and they accepted. If the job disappears, theyāve lost nothing. They can go apply for another job and have another person pay them for their labor. At the end of the day, the worst they can be is back to zero.
While someone who puts millions of dollars into starting a business or expanding one can lose all of that money, and be net negative one million dollars. Might this not hurt them much because they have a lot? Sure. But they were the ones who took the risk.
That risk doesnāt justify them taking the surplus value of labor to accumulate vast hoards of wealth.
What is justified is kind of besides the point, because that is a subjective question. If one does not benefit from risking their capital, then you are simply going to see fewer, if anyone, actually risking their capitol. Iām trying to argue within what I believe to be the frame of reality: someone has to take the risk and I think the only way to incentivize that is to reward them disproportionately for doing so. Is the current balance off? Absolutely, we both agree on that.
Capitalism by definition requires exploitation of labor, and theft of the surplus value of labor is what incentivizes capitalists to not hoard all their wealth.
Youāre using too strong of words that is just going to turn off many rational people. Itās not theft if you and I agree that youāll do something and Iāll pay you for it. Itās not exploitation, in and of itself, if you and I both agree upon the terms of our relationship, but I benefit more from it financially.
Itās a fundamentally broken system.
In theory every pure system works, in practice none of them does. Certainly, capitalism is no exception. But from just looking around, it seems to me that as a starting point, capitalism is unquestionably the best. Iām not some anachro-capitalists, itās clear that we need to socialize things, and I think healthcare is one of the most obvious that falls into that system, and it is also obvious that labor should have a larger share of the pie. But this idea that everything breaks because of capitalism, seems to be the opposite of what is most often the reality.
But I feel like we are getting off the point. What the meme is about is how labor is āriskingā something because they can lose their job and end up back at zero. Itās simply not comparable to a capitalist with their potential of actually losing money.
You can go and find investors, or get a loan if you are willing/capable of putting up something as collateral.
This isnāt universally true. You have to be exact in this conversation, especially when you disagree with someone, or else all your points come across as not fully thought out, and I canāt really trust anything youāre saying, which makes this a lot harder.
Some people can go and find investors. Some people (not everyone) can try, but investors arenāt charities, theyāre looking for a return on their profits, not something that is good for humanity. If youāre trying to run a cooperative food bank, you wonāt get investors, even though this has a vast amount more humanitarian value than tobacco investment.
But the risk does not get ādemotedā to the working class.
Again, you misread what I said (realized what I said was almost ambiguous, the way you interpreted it is a valid way to parse the syntax of my statement if I slightly misused the word ādemotedā, but thereās another way to parse it and thatās the way I intended it). Itās not the risk getting demoted, itās the people. The risk for the bourgeois is becoming part of the proletariat. The risk itself isnāt changing class, the person is.
I think you read the word ādemotedā as ādelegatedā, which is not the same word (or assumed I misused the word demoted slightly).
What is justified is kind of besides the point, because that is a subjective question.
Hand waving is uninteresting. Even if youāre a moral subjectivist (you shouldnāt be, but thatās orthogonal to this), you still operate with some level of moral understanding (see next response for an example). Even though this is antithetical to the nature of moral subjectivism, and moral subjectivists will pretend like they donāt operate with a moral understanding, in the real world they do. The hand waving away any moral question is an incredibly powerful technique, modernized by Nietzsche and utilized by some incredibly terrible actors, like slave owners and nazis. Itās not a practice you want to get into the habit of, even if you donāt understand the philosophical ground for truth-apt morality.
The rest of your paragraph ignores what I already responded with. Your general point being ācapitalism doesnāt work without private capital investment which only works with the existence of profitā, and my counter is āexactly, thatās one of the many failings of capitalism, it requires this exploitative relationship between capital and laborā.
While someone who puts millions of dollars into starting a business or expanding one can lose all of that money, and be net negative one million dollars. Might this not hurt them much because they have a lot? Sure. But they were the ones who took the risk.
Thereās an implication here that hides the moral statement youāre making, but itās still being made. Iāll make it explicit: āMight this not hurt them much because they have a lot? Sure. But they were the ones who took the risk [therefore itās justified for them to take the surplus value of labor created by the workers]ā
Not saying the quiet part out loud, and then hand waving away any explicit claims I make about what is justified is just a rhetorical tactic, one that would be best left unused if youāre actually interested in truth-seeking.
Youāre using too strong of words that is just going to turn off many rational people
Iām using words by their definitions, maybe theyāre definitions youāre unaware of, but Iāll share some wikipedia links because itās a good aggregator of resources, and you can easily get a broadstrokes idea of what Iām saying. I can suggest essays and books if you prefer too, but I figured this is easier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_is_theft! & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour
If saying the word ātheftā and āexploitationā gives you an icky feeling, then just replace it with āyunkteeā and āufurghleā or words of your choosing, I donāt really care. We just need words to describe the concepts elucidated by Proudhon and Marx, and those are the words they chose, not me.
But from just looking around, it seems to me that as a starting point, capitalism is unquestionably the best.
Christian theocracy/monarchies were āunquestionablyā the best prior to any democratic experiment. If you can point to actual socialist failed experiments that you dislike, go for it. However, Revolutionary Catolonia, the early days of the Bolshevik revolution before Leninās dismantling of worker syndicates, and a half a dozen other large real world examples of socialism exist where the oppressive capitalists were taken out of power. In most of these examples, either conservative Marxists or fascists dismantled socialism either by invasion/war or policy backed by state violence. They didnāt just suddenly collapse without external force and revert into an earlier stage of production (e.g capitalism).
This isnāt universally true. You have to be exact in this conversation, especially when you disagree with someone, or else all your points come across as not fully thought out, and I canāt really trust anything youāre saying, which makes this a lot harder.
This is hypocritical. You claimed that you canāt risk money you donāt have, and I gave multiple examples that contradict this. At no point did I say any investor is just going to give you money out of charity.
ealized what I said was almost ambiguous, the way you interpreted it is a valid way to parse the syntax of my statement if I slightly misused the word ādemotedā, but thereās another way to parse it and thatās the way I intended it
Itās all good. On re-read I feel like I probably should have interpreted it properly. However, I think the reason I misinterpreted it is because itās agreeing with my point. They run the risk of being ādemoted.ā They are the ones taking a risk. The labor is still going to be exactly where they started if they take a job and they get laid off.
Hand waving is uninteresting.
I didnāt handwave it away, I pointed out how you used a subjective term - where we could argue forever and never come to an agreement on what is justified - and how itās besides the point. The point had literally nothing to do with morals, but understanding subjectivity.
As to the rest of my point, you keep losing what we are talking about. At this point, I almost feel like youāre trying to avoid the point. I disagree with you that this is a āfailureā as I think it leverages what is typically human - in times of peace we tend to compete within a society - while many other systems ignore this part of human nature.
But, again, Iām coming from the angle that the meme doesnāt make sense because the labor doesnāt risk like the capitalist does. Youāre basically agreeing with me again.
āMight this not hurt them much because they have a lot? Sure. But they were the ones who took the risk [therefore itās justified for them to take the surplus value of labor created by the workers]ā
Please donāt put words in my mouth. Again, this all comes in reference to the meme. You are projecting your āmoralsā and attempts to label things as ājustifiedā onto me. If we want to talk about it, Iām a āproof is in the puddingā type of guy, and it has nothing to do with the subjective ājustifiedā but what works.
And youāre sitting here, typing to me on a computer that was the result of capitalism, presumably with a western education that was funded by a capitalist system, and probably benefiting a lot from that capitalist system. It works. Itās not without flaws. Itās not perfect. But this attempt to paint it as some failed system requires me to reject what I can see with my own two eyes. It requires me to reject what I can clearly see is in the pudding.
We just need words to describe the concepts elucidated by Proudhon and Marx, and those are the words they chose, not me.
And Iām just telling you you attract more flies with honey than vinegar.
If you can point to actual socialist failed experiments that you dislike, go for it.
Again, putting words in my mouth. You seemingly canāt help yourself. As I said earlier, Iām a proof is in the pudding type of guy. Youāve pointed out multiple cases where socialist experiments have failed, and none that have succeeded. Of course, this isnāt the fault of the system. No. Itās external forces.
The central theme of my point is that those āexternal forcesā are simply the result of human nature, which is why capitalism as come out on top time and time again. Itās leverages human nature, it doesnāt try to oppress it.
my point is that those āexternal forcesā are simply the result of human nature, which is why capitalism as come out on top time and time again
Those āexternal forcesā are literally violent fascists murdering workers and seizing the means of production on behalf of private enterprise. Even in the case of the U.S, Britian, France, etc. Enclosure was a violent process by capitalists to seize the commons. They often used liberal framings like āthe tragedy of the commonsā to justify seizing common land and handing it off the private enterprise. In Europe this was done with some physical violence, but not nearly as much as the U.S. The U.S literally genocided the native americans over hundreds of years to seize the commons here and sell it off to private enterprise.
Either your point I quoted is:
Capitalism is ahead because of its effective use of violence (enclosure of the commons, suppression of socialism, etc.)
Capitalism should be ahead because of its effective use of violence (enclosure of the commons, suppression of socialism, etc.)
If itās 1, thatās obviously correct, thatās just a recount of history. If itās 2, thatās ridiculous, and we can go into it, but I honestly have no idea which one of these is your position. At first you made it seem like you were defending capitalism, but youāve repeatedly rejected any framing of your positions as one towards ājustificationā, so I honestly have no idea if youāre even defending capitalism, or if you just think I donāt understand that the world is capitalist, and youāre trying to teach me that the world is capitalist.
I can assure you, I understand violent capitalism dominates the international stage. I donāt know what would give you the impression that I donāt see this
And youāre sitting here, typing to me on a computer that was the result of capitalism, presumably with a western education that was funded by a capitalist system, and probably benefiting a lot from that capitalist system
Western (U.S) education is failing on essentially every metric imaginable. Itās either insanely expensive, or astronomically worse than any other country (vast majority of EU countries, China, Cuba, etc.). That said, this is even orthogonal to your point, as none of my education was funded by capitalism, it was publicly funded. Publicly funded education has nothing to do with private enterprise or private ownership of the means of production. Publicly funded education existed long before capitalism.
My computer wasnāt developed by capitalism. Most individual parts, and even the network weāre using to communicate (both the internet broadly and lemmy more specifically) exist despite natural capitalist tendencies. The internet for example is built on ARPANET, which was funded by the DoD. Itās not something a capitalist envisioned and came up with. Another example is the microprocessor, again backed heavily by government funding, because private enterprise/companies/capitalists would not fund research with payout decades later.
Private capital could not have, and more importantly didnāt, develop the vast majority of technology we use today. Private enterprise tends to take already researched and developed technologies and combine them for products that can yield short term profits. Itās extraordinarily rare in the real world for private capital to research and develop technology that will yield profits in 20+ years.
Essentially the only times you see private enterprise take on long term research is when the capital is public, e.g the DoD funding some private contractor to do some research. Private investors/capital have very little interest in profits that long term, compared to the normal months or years theyāre looking at. It would be just as easy for the government to fund a worker cooperative instead of a private firm, itās just our government prefers private capitalist ventures over cooperative worker ones, so thatās what they choose to fund. Once you have public money funding worker cooperatives, the means of production are owned by the workers and the capital is provided by the state, and thereās no definition of capitalism that that falls under.
You are projecting your āmoralsā and attempts to label things as ājustifiedā onto me
Again, like I said earlier, if youāre not actually defending capitalism because you think itās fair, I have no idea why weāre having this conversation.
They are the ones taking a risk. The labor is still going to be exactly where they started if they take a job and they get laid off.
Yup, the risk is becoming part of the class thatās being exploited (or ufurghled; you never gave your own word that you wanted to use). You have to remember, youāre the one defending capitalism, Iām the one arguing against it. So my position is that itās unfair for the capitalist to exploit workers for the surplus value of their labor on the premise that they risk being brought down to the level of a worker, your premise is that this is fair. Itās important to note, if thatās not your premise, then youāre not defending capitalism, and I have no idea why weāre having this conversation.
Nope, what I said was correct. Itās literally impossible to risk money you donāt have. Itās possible to get money sometimes, for some people. You can have a job, get investment, get government welfare or subsidies, get money from a charity, etc. These arenāt all universally available options to everyone, and if theyāre unavailable to you, you donāt have access to money, and itās literally impossible to spend it if you donāt have it. What I said was tautologically true, and supposed to be a simple premise to the actual point I made. It wasnāt something you were supposed to disagree with, because itās literally true just by the construction of the statement.
I disagree with you that this is a āfailureā as I think it leverages what is typically human
Requiring exploitation is a failure. Even capitalists tend to admit this, so I wouldnāt try to hang onto this point. The real position capitalists tend to take here is that āthe ends justify the meansā, not that the means themselves are inherently justified, because theyāre obviously not. If exploitation of workers and alienation of labor were done in isolation, without any other considerations, theyād be obviously wrong to anyone.
The argument is what you laid out in your other responses, so Iād stick to that. Not that exploitation is inherently justified because itās human nature. First of all, human nature is complex, trying to tie it down to something as simple as āexploitation through competitionā is just simply reductive, but furthermore even if you could reduce human nature to that statement, itās still committing a naturalistic fallacy (itās not right just because itās natural).
And Iām just telling you you attract more flies with honey than vinegar.
This is a deflection. You donāt actually care about my tactics for getting people onboard with socialism. Proudhon and Marx described real social phenomena, and used the words theft and exploitation to describe them. Iām not attached to the words, if you want to use different words go for it, but we need words to describe it.
Annihilating the language that socialists use to critique capitalism is a common tactic, but itās also uninteresting because the sound or shape of the word is actually irrelevant to any point being made. Choose your own words, or adopt the words that are already used to describe the concepts. I chose the latter because itās easier, but if you have a major qualm with the words Iām unbothered if we choose different ones.
But this attempt to paint it as some failed system requires me to reject what I can see with my own two eyes.
Slavery was a system that worked, and yet I would call it a failed system. Not because it failed to produce products, but because it failed to be morally justified. It was immoral.
It might sound like an absolutely insane comparison to a 21st century westerner, but you want to know who didnāt think the comparison was insane? Literal slaves. Frederick Douglass for example wrote about how we should abolish wage labor along with chattel slavery, and how wage labor was only āa little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the otherā
I said āif you canā, thatās not putting words in your mouth. The other example of me āputting words in your mouthā I already addressed in two other comments.
If we want to talk about it, Iām a āproof is in the puddingā type of guy, and it has nothing to do with the subjective ājustifiedā but what works.
Capitalists have been violently surpressing socialism for over 100 years at this point. The CIA has literally admitted to forcing regime changes when they adopt socialist policies via democratic elections, theyāll actually overthrow democratically elected socialists and install pro-U.S fascist dictators. Companies like Coca Cola hire death squads in south america to kill union organizers.
Capitalism works because of systemic violence. The examples I gave were of working socialist examples, they worked for years or even decades before violent interference from capitalists. Capitalists need the violence of the state to maintain order, so if youāre defending capitalism because it āworksā, what youāre really doing is defending capitalism because it exists as a result of violent suppression of socialism.
Might doesnāt imply right, you shouldnāt defend a system just because one side is better at using violence than the other.
Youāve pointed out multiple cases where socialist experiments have failed, and none that have succeeded.
Each example I illustrated was a success. They were just conquered. Having a worse military is not a failure of a system, itās a result of capitalist interests having the backing of the state, and said states having trained military forces, while workers are untrained in how to use violence to achieve the means they want, so theyāre generally less effective at it. Being effective at using violence is not the mark of a good system, usually the opposite actually.
Youāre nit picking. Whether the risk goes to zero or just very low, that doesnāt change the point that there is generally significant risk to start up, which does not exist with labor. Labor is almost always a zero startup risk, a business is almost always the opposite.
And youāre completely missing the point that this argument doesnāt scale.
I donāt even know what that means. Zero risk is zero risk.
You keep saying the word risk, and liberal capitalists do this all the time. Companies limit personal liability, so risk goes to zero there for a bunch of legal issues.
What most people are talking about is money, but not everyone has access to money. If you take two people, one born into a rich family, and another born into a homeless family, the rich kid gets a massive inheritance and ārisksā 30% of it starting a business. Letās say he hires the person born into a homeless family.
The liberal conception here is that the rich person, handed a massive amount of cash for absolutely nothing, deserves the surplus value of labor from the poor person because he āriskedā a small part of his inheritance that the poor person never had access to. Itās a wild assertion.
This might seem fabricated, but in the real world this is how it goes, people with capital accumulate more capital. Jeff Bezos ābuilt Amazonā with a $245,000 loan from his parents, and worked out of their garage. He then used that loan and later capital investments to hire people to actually build Amazon.
His parents couldāve just as easily gone the standard capitalist route, and instead of loaning the money instead valuated the company at $300,000 and assumed ~80% ownership for the company. The only reason this isnāt how it played out is because parents donāt like exploiting their kids, there was a biological component at play that disallowed the standard capitalist exploitation from taking place. So they offered him a deal that no capitalist in their āright mindā would offer, because it left Jeff with far too much and the capitalist with far less.
Sure, they can limit it, and you can shield yourself personally from losses taken by the company, but there is a still (generally speaking, again) a significant financial risk to starting a company at all. You canāt āshieldā yourself from start up costs.
If the argument is that ārich people are financially more secure so itās easier for them to take riskā I 100% agree. Thereās no question that rich people start off with a massive head start. I fully recognize āthe uterine lottery.ā
But the meme is about this risk being equal to the āriskā taken by people just being paid to do labor. Donāt get my position wrong, I believe labor deserves way more of a share right now. But there is no risk in it. Sure, you can lose your job which sucks, but (again generally speaking, there are exceptions e.g. people might move across the country to take a job) you didnāt invest any money into starting the job. So now you are out a job and need to find a new one. You are not in the negative.
And we need this. We need to incentivize risking capitol to make capitol, as that helps labor too. Itās just that this isnāt infinite and doesnāt mean people should be able to amass any and all wealth they can. There is a middle ground and that is where the discussion needs to be. Not in this silly āwell, labor is really involved in the risk of losses too!!ā
Itās not, and this is specifically why Iāve avoided multiple opportunities to risk shit to start a new company: I would rather be a skilled laborer as I can just jump from job to job when I want, than to risk what seems to me to be a lot of money on trying to start a company. Too much pressure. Itās easy for me to not give a shit.
You misunderstood my argument slightly, itās not that itās āeasierā for rich people, itās that itās literally impossible to risk money you donāt have, and as a result of that you have exploitation of labor; stealing the surplus value of labor from a class that has no option other than to participate in wage labor.
Also the idea that thereās no risk in labor but there is risk in being a capitalist is a liberal lens that fails to actually account for material reality. Whatās the absolute worst case for both the capitalist and laborer? That they lose all access to their money, and have to rent themselves out to a capitalist.
Put another way, the risk capitalists engage in is being demoted from the owner class to the working class. That risk doesnāt justify them taking the surplus value of labor to accumulate vast hoards of wealth.
Left liberals view this as a quantitative issue, but itās a qualitative one. Profit is definitionally surplus value of labor, so no matter how small you make the capitalistās profit, itās always theft.
Absolutely, without capital injection the economy couldnāt function. Capitalism by definition requires exploitation of labor, and theft of the surplus value of labor is what incentivizes capitalists to not hoard all their wealth.
Itās a fundamentally broken system. Private entities shouldnāt be the ones handling investment, nor handling direction of development. Those should be handled democratically by worker syndicates, the capital should be injected from the state/communities.
Essentially anytime private corporations are involved in an industry (housing, healthcare, capital injection, governance, etc.) it breaks the system. Liberals are slowly seeing these material realities unfold, and so the propaganda being fed to them is harder to buy. You donāt find many people in support of private healthcare or governance anymore, and some are starting to learn about the others too.
Except this isnāt true. You can go and find investors, or get a loan if you are willing/capable of putting up something as collateral. Is it easier for rich people? Yes, we both agree it is.
But the risk does not get ādemotedā to the working class. The working class did not take a risk (again, all generally speaking, I hope I donāt have to keep repeating that). They applied for a job, someone offered them money for their labor, and they accepted. If the job disappears, theyāve lost nothing. They can go apply for another job and have another person pay them for their labor. At the end of the day, the worst they can be is back to zero.
While someone who puts millions of dollars into starting a business or expanding one can lose all of that money, and be net negative one million dollars. Might this not hurt them much because they have a lot? Sure. But they were the ones who took the risk.
What is justified is kind of besides the point, because that is a subjective question. If one does not benefit from risking their capital, then you are simply going to see fewer, if anyone, actually risking their capitol. Iām trying to argue within what I believe to be the frame of reality: someone has to take the risk and I think the only way to incentivize that is to reward them disproportionately for doing so. Is the current balance off? Absolutely, we both agree on that.
Youāre using too strong of words that is just going to turn off many rational people. Itās not theft if you and I agree that youāll do something and Iāll pay you for it. Itās not exploitation, in and of itself, if you and I both agree upon the terms of our relationship, but I benefit more from it financially.
In theory every pure system works, in practice none of them does. Certainly, capitalism is no exception. But from just looking around, it seems to me that as a starting point, capitalism is unquestionably the best. Iām not some anachro-capitalists, itās clear that we need to socialize things, and I think healthcare is one of the most obvious that falls into that system, and it is also obvious that labor should have a larger share of the pie. But this idea that everything breaks because of capitalism, seems to be the opposite of what is most often the reality.
But I feel like we are getting off the point. What the meme is about is how labor is āriskingā something because they can lose their job and end up back at zero. Itās simply not comparable to a capitalist with their potential of actually losing money.
This isnāt universally true. You have to be exact in this conversation, especially when you disagree with someone, or else all your points come across as not fully thought out, and I canāt really trust anything youāre saying, which makes this a lot harder.
Some people can go and find investors. Some people (not everyone) can try, but investors arenāt charities, theyāre looking for a return on their profits, not something that is good for humanity. If youāre trying to run a cooperative food bank, you wonāt get investors, even though this has a vast amount more humanitarian value than tobacco investment.
Again, you misread what I said(realized what I said was almost ambiguous, the way you interpreted it is a valid way to parse the syntax of my statement if I slightly misused the word ādemotedā, but thereās another way to parse it and thatās the way I intended it). Itās not the risk getting demoted, itās the people. The risk for the bourgeois is becoming part of the proletariat. The risk itself isnāt changing class, the person is.I think you read the word ādemotedā as ādelegatedā, which is not the same word (or assumed I misused the word demoted slightly).
Hand waving is uninteresting. Even if youāre a moral subjectivist (you shouldnāt be, but thatās orthogonal to this), you still operate with some level of moral understanding (see next response for an example). Even though this is antithetical to the nature of moral subjectivism, and moral subjectivists will pretend like they donāt operate with a moral understanding, in the real world they do. The hand waving away any moral question is an incredibly powerful technique, modernized by Nietzsche and utilized by some incredibly terrible actors, like slave owners and nazis. Itās not a practice you want to get into the habit of, even if you donāt understand the philosophical ground for truth-apt morality.
The rest of your paragraph ignores what I already responded with. Your general point being ācapitalism doesnāt work without private capital investment which only works with the existence of profitā, and my counter is āexactly, thatās one of the many failings of capitalism, it requires this exploitative relationship between capital and laborā.
Thereās an implication here that hides the moral statement youāre making, but itās still being made. Iāll make it explicit: āMight this not hurt them much because they have a lot? Sure. But they were the ones who took the risk [therefore itās justified for them to take the surplus value of labor created by the workers]ā
Not saying the quiet part out loud, and then hand waving away any explicit claims I make about what is justified is just a rhetorical tactic, one that would be best left unused if youāre actually interested in truth-seeking.
Iām using words by their definitions, maybe theyāre definitions youāre unaware of, but Iāll share some wikipedia links because itās a good aggregator of resources, and you can easily get a broadstrokes idea of what Iām saying. I can suggest essays and books if you prefer too, but I figured this is easier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_is_theft! & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour
If saying the word ātheftā and āexploitationā gives you an icky feeling, then just replace it with āyunkteeā and āufurghleā or words of your choosing, I donāt really care. We just need words to describe the concepts elucidated by Proudhon and Marx, and those are the words they chose, not me.
Christian theocracy/monarchies were āunquestionablyā the best prior to any democratic experiment. If you can point to actual socialist failed experiments that you dislike, go for it. However, Revolutionary Catolonia, the early days of the Bolshevik revolution before Leninās dismantling of worker syndicates, and a half a dozen other large real world examples of socialism exist where the oppressive capitalists were taken out of power. In most of these examples, either conservative Marxists or fascists dismantled socialism either by invasion/war or policy backed by state violence. They didnāt just suddenly collapse without external force and revert into an earlier stage of production (e.g capitalism).
This is hypocritical. You claimed that you canāt risk money you donāt have, and I gave multiple examples that contradict this. At no point did I say any investor is just going to give you money out of charity.
Itās all good. On re-read I feel like I probably should have interpreted it properly. However, I think the reason I misinterpreted it is because itās agreeing with my point. They run the risk of being ādemoted.ā They are the ones taking a risk. The labor is still going to be exactly where they started if they take a job and they get laid off.
I didnāt handwave it away, I pointed out how you used a subjective term - where we could argue forever and never come to an agreement on what is justified - and how itās besides the point. The point had literally nothing to do with morals, but understanding subjectivity.
As to the rest of my point, you keep losing what we are talking about. At this point, I almost feel like youāre trying to avoid the point. I disagree with you that this is a āfailureā as I think it leverages what is typically human - in times of peace we tend to compete within a society - while many other systems ignore this part of human nature.
But, again, Iām coming from the angle that the meme doesnāt make sense because the labor doesnāt risk like the capitalist does. Youāre basically agreeing with me again.
Please donāt put words in my mouth. Again, this all comes in reference to the meme. You are projecting your āmoralsā and attempts to label things as ājustifiedā onto me. If we want to talk about it, Iām a āproof is in the puddingā type of guy, and it has nothing to do with the subjective ājustifiedā but what works.
And youāre sitting here, typing to me on a computer that was the result of capitalism, presumably with a western education that was funded by a capitalist system, and probably benefiting a lot from that capitalist system. It works. Itās not without flaws. Itās not perfect. But this attempt to paint it as some failed system requires me to reject what I can see with my own two eyes. It requires me to reject what I can clearly see is in the pudding.
And Iām just telling you you attract more flies with honey than vinegar.
Again, putting words in my mouth. You seemingly canāt help yourself. As I said earlier, Iām a proof is in the pudding type of guy. Youāve pointed out multiple cases where socialist experiments have failed, and none that have succeeded. Of course, this isnāt the fault of the system. No. Itās external forces.
The central theme of my point is that those āexternal forcesā are simply the result of human nature, which is why capitalism as come out on top time and time again. Itās leverages human nature, it doesnāt try to oppress it.
But, again, we are way off the point.
Those āexternal forcesā are literally violent fascists murdering workers and seizing the means of production on behalf of private enterprise. Even in the case of the U.S, Britian, France, etc. Enclosure was a violent process by capitalists to seize the commons. They often used liberal framings like āthe tragedy of the commonsā to justify seizing common land and handing it off the private enterprise. In Europe this was done with some physical violence, but not nearly as much as the U.S. The U.S literally genocided the native americans over hundreds of years to seize the commons here and sell it off to private enterprise.
Either your point I quoted is:
If itās 1, thatās obviously correct, thatās just a recount of history. If itās 2, thatās ridiculous, and we can go into it, but I honestly have no idea which one of these is your position. At first you made it seem like you were defending capitalism, but youāve repeatedly rejected any framing of your positions as one towards ājustificationā, so I honestly have no idea if youāre even defending capitalism, or if you just think I donāt understand that the world is capitalist, and youāre trying to teach me that the world is capitalist.
I can assure you, I understand violent capitalism dominates the international stage. I donāt know what would give you the impression that I donāt see this
Western (U.S) education is failing on essentially every metric imaginable. Itās either insanely expensive, or astronomically worse than any other country (vast majority of EU countries, China, Cuba, etc.). That said, this is even orthogonal to your point, as none of my education was funded by capitalism, it was publicly funded. Publicly funded education has nothing to do with private enterprise or private ownership of the means of production. Publicly funded education existed long before capitalism.
My computer wasnāt developed by capitalism. Most individual parts, and even the network weāre using to communicate (both the internet broadly and lemmy more specifically) exist despite natural capitalist tendencies. The internet for example is built on ARPANET, which was funded by the DoD. Itās not something a capitalist envisioned and came up with. Another example is the microprocessor, again backed heavily by government funding, because private enterprise/companies/capitalists would not fund research with payout decades later.
Private capital could not have, and more importantly didnāt, develop the vast majority of technology we use today. Private enterprise tends to take already researched and developed technologies and combine them for products that can yield short term profits. Itās extraordinarily rare in the real world for private capital to research and develop technology that will yield profits in 20+ years.
Essentially the only times you see private enterprise take on long term research is when the capital is public, e.g the DoD funding some private contractor to do some research. Private investors/capital have very little interest in profits that long term, compared to the normal months or years theyāre looking at. It would be just as easy for the government to fund a worker cooperative instead of a private firm, itās just our government prefers private capitalist ventures over cooperative worker ones, so thatās what they choose to fund. Once you have public money funding worker cooperatives, the means of production are owned by the workers and the capital is provided by the state, and thereās no definition of capitalism that that falls under.
Again, like I said earlier, if youāre not actually defending capitalism because you think itās fair, I have no idea why weāre having this conversation.
Yup, the risk is becoming part of the class thatās being exploited (or ufurghled; you never gave your own word that you wanted to use). You have to remember, youāre the one defending capitalism, Iām the one arguing against it. So my position is that itās unfair for the capitalist to exploit workers for the surplus value of their labor on the premise that they risk being brought down to the level of a worker, your premise is that this is fair. Itās important to note, if thatās not your premise, then youāre not defending capitalism, and I have no idea why weāre having this conversation.
Nope, what I said was correct. Itās literally impossible to risk money you donāt have. Itās possible to get money sometimes, for some people. You can have a job, get investment, get government welfare or subsidies, get money from a charity, etc. These arenāt all universally available options to everyone, and if theyāre unavailable to you, you donāt have access to money, and itās literally impossible to spend it if you donāt have it. What I said was tautologically true, and supposed to be a simple premise to the actual point I made. It wasnāt something you were supposed to disagree with, because itās literally true just by the construction of the statement.
Requiring exploitation is a failure. Even capitalists tend to admit this, so I wouldnāt try to hang onto this point. The real position capitalists tend to take here is that āthe ends justify the meansā, not that the means themselves are inherently justified, because theyāre obviously not. If exploitation of workers and alienation of labor were done in isolation, without any other considerations, theyād be obviously wrong to anyone.
The argument is what you laid out in your other responses, so Iād stick to that. Not that exploitation is inherently justified because itās human nature. First of all, human nature is complex, trying to tie it down to something as simple as āexploitation through competitionā is just simply reductive, but furthermore even if you could reduce human nature to that statement, itās still committing a naturalistic fallacy (itās not right just because itās natural).
This is a deflection. You donāt actually care about my tactics for getting people onboard with socialism. Proudhon and Marx described real social phenomena, and used the words theft and exploitation to describe them. Iām not attached to the words, if you want to use different words go for it, but we need words to describe it.
Annihilating the language that socialists use to critique capitalism is a common tactic, but itās also uninteresting because the sound or shape of the word is actually irrelevant to any point being made. Choose your own words, or adopt the words that are already used to describe the concepts. I chose the latter because itās easier, but if you have a major qualm with the words Iām unbothered if we choose different ones.
Slavery was a system that worked, and yet I would call it a failed system. Not because it failed to produce products, but because it failed to be morally justified. It was immoral.
It might sound like an absolutely insane comparison to a 21st century westerner, but you want to know who didnāt think the comparison was insane? Literal slaves. Frederick Douglass for example wrote about how we should abolish wage labor along with chattel slavery, and how wage labor was only āa little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the otherā
I said āif you canā, thatās not putting words in your mouth. The other example of me āputting words in your mouthā I already addressed in two other comments.
Capitalists have been violently surpressing socialism for over 100 years at this point. The CIA has literally admitted to forcing regime changes when they adopt socialist policies via democratic elections, theyāll actually overthrow democratically elected socialists and install pro-U.S fascist dictators. Companies like Coca Cola hire death squads in south america to kill union organizers.
Capitalism works because of systemic violence. The examples I gave were of working socialist examples, they worked for years or even decades before violent interference from capitalists. Capitalists need the violence of the state to maintain order, so if youāre defending capitalism because it āworksā, what youāre really doing is defending capitalism because it exists as a result of violent suppression of socialism.
Might doesnāt imply right, you shouldnāt defend a system just because one side is better at using violence than the other.
Each example I illustrated was a success. They were just conquered. Having a worse military is not a failure of a system, itās a result of capitalist interests having the backing of the state, and said states having trained military forces, while workers are untrained in how to use violence to achieve the means they want, so theyāre generally less effective at it. Being effective at using violence is not the mark of a good system, usually the opposite actually.
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