Very amusing to see capitalism apologists on the Fediverse
I mean, it's more understandable on Xitter or Macebook
But here? The place that's sustained by the twine, chewing gum, patreon, and the hopes and dreams of two dozen catgirls? The place that's been going strong without a profit motive for half a decade now?
#Capitalism fucked your mind.
@SallyStrange i wonder if we're doing the same thing to 'capitalism' the right wing does to socialism.
Muddy the definition so nobody has the same definition and thus it's turned into a pejorative for everyone.
Trying to differentiate the nuance between a market system and 'capitalism' isn't great in this format 😬
No excuse. The info is right there, you need to sort it out better.
Most of the muddying actually comes from defenders of capitalism who have only superficial understanding, if even that much.
Understand first of all that the word capitalism itself was originally coined by critics of the system. It was always a bad thing, but the word has been rehabilitated by some.
You know there are people here who can help you see the true defining characteristics of capitalism if you are willing to examine things.
@RD4Anarchy @pixelpusher220 right, like, I was just talking about two specific defining characteristics of capitalism as we currently know it: the concept of LLCs and marginal utility theory
I'm always trying to be more precise and specific in my understanding and explanation, so no, I don't really worry that I'm muddying definitions as a habit. If things seem unclear, that's an opportunity to explore and hopefully learn.
@SallyStrange @RD4Anarchy @pixelpusher220
Hope you don't mind a dumb question... what do you mean by capitalism? All private business? Just companies of a certain size?
@mmclark @RD4Anarchy @pixelpusher220 Per Oxford dictionary: "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit."
@SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220
The private ownership thing gets emphasized a lot, especially in dictionary examples, but I've come to think it is not really essential at all; not a defining feature of capitalism.
Consider the following description of capitalism from the book "State Capitalism: The Wages System Under New Management" by Adam Buick and John Crump:
"We shall suggest that, apart from being a class society, capitalism has the following six essential characteristics:
1. Generalised commodity production, nearly all wealth being produced for sale on a market.
2. The investment of capital in production with a view to obtaining a monetary profit.
3. The exploitation of wage labour, the source of profit being the unpaid labour of the producers.
4. The regulation of production by the market via a competitive struggle for profits.
5. The accumulation of capital out of profits, leading to the expansion and development of the forces of production.
6. A single world economy."
The focus of this short book is to argue (very successfully IMO) that individual private ownership is not a defining feature of capitalism and that countries such as China, The Soviet Union (this was published in 1986), Cuba, Vietnam, etc, though they may identify as "socialist" and are called "communist" by many are in fact simply another form of capitalism called "state capitalism".
In the process of making this argument, this book also became an excellent general reference for understanding what capitalism really is, how capitalist economics work, what socialism really is and isn't, and plenty of fascinating and clarifying historic context.
free PDF:
https://files.libcom.org/files/State%20Capitalism.pdf
@RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220
> 3. The exploitation of wage labour, the source of profit being the unpaid labour of the producers.
Would someone please help me understand what is meant by "unpaid labour"? Is it this:
unpaid labor = (net value of labor) - wages
?
@ech @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220
Different people will look at this from different directions and explain it different ways, ranging from very basic, simple mathematical formulas about surplus value like your example (Richard Wolff gives a good example of this), to more philosophical understandings of the concepts we use to justify these social structures at all.
There is validity to the economic perspective, but I prefer not to validate economic theory much because I think it's mostly a religious phenomenon.
If you ask @HeavenlyPossum, they might tell you that what's really happening is that people are renting the right to labor for someone else. Why would anyone do that? That's a good question to explore.
I like to think of a fantasy scenario (extraterrestrial virus? lol) where everyone just keeps doing what they do but somehow capital is removed from the picture and money suddenly becomes meaningless. Functionally, everything still works. We can take care of each other.
Is coercion really the only way we can function?
Or have we just been scammed?
@RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum heh to me it seems funny to talk about any of that being coercion.
@ech @RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum
Why?
Like, I look after a category of products that brings in a 7 figure sum in sales per week. On gross profit, that turns into a (high) six figure sum.
There is then a further calculation, called "DPP" (direct product profitability), which takes into account all the associated costs (warehousing costs, staff labour costs in branches, bills and so on - you name it, it's accounted for).
After all of that - which is complex to run - my labour earns the company six figures per week.
So, every week, I earn six figures. I give that six figures to my boss, he says "thank you!" and gives me back a 3-figure sum.
In any reasonable sense, it's obvious that I am paying him the difference between what I make him, and what he gives me back, to work there.
Now, that's a difficult thing to wrap your head round.
Why the utter fuck would I do that?? I'm clearly an idiot!
And the answer is that other forms of income have been shut off from me, until I'm in a position where this is the "best option" from an incredibly poor bunch of options.
I mean, I dunno. Sounds like coercion to me.
@RD4Anarchy @ech @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum
Also - there's a bit of "he's taken all the risks" (leaving aside the "he" for now)
WHAT RISKS?
What risk is Simon The CEO taking?
"When I was on my skiiing holiday last week, I came up with this *next slide please*"
Ok, so he gets it wrong, what's the actual risk for him? He loses his job, and has to survive on the savings he's put away from his 6 figure salary?
And hundreds/thousands of folk with no savings ALSO lose their jobs!
Don't tell me they're taking risks. Or, if you do, at least be honest and tell me that they're taking risks with other people's livelihoods - but not their own.
@neonsnake @RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum
This is a good point – and how risky a job is is something I think a lot about when I look for a job.
I guess the difference here is theoretically the non-investing employee just has to find a new job, while investors lose their invested savings. (And some investors lose a lot more than you're making it sound like here – lots of people borrow against their house or whatever to start a business.)
But your point remains, of course – that oftentimes doesn't work out so great for employees of companies that go under.
(Fixing this doesn't seem straightforward to me, though, and investors diversify.)
@HeavenlyPossum @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @ech @RD4Anarchy
"Betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him who makes instruments and him who uses them, in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them, and appropriates to himself the produce of both. With as niggard a hand as possible he transfers to each a part of the produce of the other, keeping to himself the large share.... While he despoils both, so completely does he exclude one from the view of the other that both believe they are indebted him for subsistence."
Hodgeskin
@neonsnake @HeavenlyPossum @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @ech @RD4Anarchy
NeonSnake's use of the Hodgskin quote led me to Kevin Carson's "Anarchism and Markets", for which I am grateful!
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-carson-anarchism-and-markets
@IrrevBlack @HeavenlyPossum @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @ech @RD4Anarchy that's where I copied the quote from to paste in.
(There's a bit in there as well about the myth that there's a capitalist somewhere who has a massive store of money, who is needed to finance operations otherwise no-one gets paid)
@HeavenlyPossum @SallyStrange @neonsnake @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @RD4Anarchy "not something at all intrinsic to production" – I feel like risk is pretty fundamental, at least in that any decision regarding allocation of resources might be suboptimal, and execution might be flawed.
To tie it back to OP: suppose I spend a month adding some awesome features to my fork of Mastodon, then launch my new instance, and nobody joins or upstreams my changes. Oops.
@HeavenlyPossum @SallyStrange @neonsnake @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @RD4Anarchy Although, it does seem like risk management is much nicer in the kind of non-capitalist systems that we're discussing here – it seems unlikely that anyone would feel compelled to e.g. mortgage their house out of desperation to save their business, which in and of itself is nice.
@neonsnake @ech @pixelpusher220 @RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark
The capitalist does not collect revenue by adding features to a mastodon fork. The capitalist collects revenue by owning the cooperative labor of other people who add features to the mastodon fork. If the capitalist does incidentally perform actual labor, then the capitalist could just earn a wage like any other worker, but the capitalist doesn’t earn wages—the capitalist collects rents from someone else’s effort.
To the extent that a capitalist “takes risk,” it’s in the sense that the capitalist must first buy into the capital class.
@RD4Anarchy @ech @neonsnake @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @mmclark
We have this myth that to engage in new economic activity, we first have to defer consumption and save up a big pile of stuff to use in future production. But that’s not how it works at all.
What we do is collect a big pile of money, which we then exchange for stuff now, in the present, that other workers make and extend to us as a form of credit, with the knowledge and expectation that you’ll extend the future product of your own production to them someday, in a giant network of people doing and making and extending to each other.
That big pile of money could come from literally anyone, but the production of currency is monopolized by the state and the production of credit is monopolized by the state’s partners, usually financial institutions.
As a result, the capitalist takes a risk—sometimes by accumulating a big pile of money, more often by borrowing against the expected future revenue or the workers—that exists *because of* capitalist enclosure.
@RD4Anarchy @pixelpusher220 @neonsnake @SallyStrange @ech @mmclark
The capitalist saves up, or more likely takes out loans, to buy into the capital class. That risk is not related to production. Workers take the risk that their efforts will fail to generate sufficient revenue and, as a result, they will fall into destitution and maybe starve. Capitalists take risks that workers’ efforts will fail to generate sufficient revenue and, as a result, the capitalist will lose ownership for their capital.
People could once save up to purchase slaves. Maybe some of them mortgaged their homes. The mere act “saving up to make a purchase” doesn’t convey any meaningful moral weight to the calculation.
@SallyStrange @neonsnake @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @ech @RD4Anarchy
The “risk” that accrues to investors is entirely an ancillary byproduct of capitalist violence and not something at all intrinsic to production.