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 😬

@pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange

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 @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum

Oh shit, never mind, I thought you were asking in good faith.

Should I be telling you to fuck off?

@RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum It's definitely good faith? I mean, I have a job where I get wages/salary – it doesn't feel coerced or unpaid, so I'm trying to understand that point of view. I guess yeah – theoretically/ideally some percentage of the value I add isn't paid to me in compensation, so if that's what is meant then I can see the point there.

I don't feel too bad about it, though, because I'm not taking on any of the risk, and my work is taking advantage of the infra/etc that was at the firm before I got there, and so on. (heh – I'm still weirded out by how much my CEO makes, though!)

In your virus scenario, I guess the standard retort would be that workers wouldn't work as hard and it would be unclear how means of production are allocated?

Is that what you mean by coercion – that we're coerced by need for money that makes us work? (I'm just guessing here.)

> Should I be telling you to fuck off?

Up to you, I guess; or just don't respond – I won't pester you.

@pixelpusher220 @RD4Anarchy @mmclark @SallyStrange @ech

Under wage labor, you pay your employer. You engage in economic activity that generates revenue, all of which you turn over to your employer. Your employer then returns some of that revenue as “wages,” which everyone pretends come from the employer. In reality, they were yours all along.

You do this because any alternative to wage labor was long ago eliminated, through violence—enclosure and colonial expropriation.

If you were to decline to pay your employer for permission to work, then property owners would starve you to death.

@HeavenlyPossum @pixelpusher220 @RD4Anarchy @mmclark @SallyStrange Thanks!

Heh, I definitely think of it as mine the whole time.

I like how you put it: "pay your employer for permission to work." Most firms have infrastructure that I am paying for when I work there. If I get a job scooping ice cream, I have to pay my employer for equipment, supply chains it set up, marketing, risk of not enough customers (insurance, effectively), etc. (Of course, as we've been talking about, all of this is done, practically, in the form of (value I add) - (my wages).)

This feels reasonable; my ice cream scooping wouldn't happen without those things. (Of course, some businesses are collectively owned by the workers, which is maybe nice because then you're paying yourself rent as a worker, but I suspect that doesn't meet the bar here? – workers still need to buy in (with capital) or starve.)

I think I need to educate myself more about alternatives: without *some* ownership of those things who would make decisions about investment? A coop would mean you're stuck in the same spot if you disagree with the outcome of the vote or whatever, or you opt out and starve. The ABCs of Socialism mentioned in this thread talks about state-run banks, so anyone wanting something different there would be subject to the same kind of coercive violence we're discussing in this broader thread, or starve.

I like the ABCs of Socialism for dispelling some of the silly caricatures of Socialism, like toothbrushes and iPhones, or that it is necessarily statist.

@ech @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @mmclark @RD4Anarchy

All of the capital costs are paid for with the revenue generated by those workers. They’re usually borrowed by the owner, against the expected future value of the workers’ labor, and provided by yet other workers in advance of production. The act of ownership doesn’t actually contribute anything to economic activity and isn’t worth anything in material terms.

@HeavenlyPossum @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @mmclark @RD4Anarchy Right; the ownership doesn't contribute directly; I get that.

IIUC with capitalism ownership is the mechanism for deciding investment allocation. If you have capital, you decide how that capital is to be used for productivity. (As noted in this thread the state can do that, too, in which case it's in some ways the same thing, which is something I hadn't really thought about before.)

Obviously any system needs a way to solve this problem of allocating resources – and "whoever happens to 'own' stuff" is obviously sub-optimal. I am aware of a few different answers to this problem; the part I'm trying to wrap my head around is how they might be better in ways like less coercion/etc.

@mmclark @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @RD4Anarchy @ech

Three points:

- capital isn’t really “productive assets” but rather a measure of social power over other people.

- productive assets don’t need to be owned by any individual actor (and even under capitalism are often owned in corporate), so there’s still no economic function for private ownership.

- all extant private ownership of productive assets originated in violent state expropriation and doesn’t really have any business in polite society.

@HeavenlyPossum @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @ech

And if there is capital, then the decision makers (whether individual, corporate or state) are actually quite constrained in what they can choose to do. Capital's demands are all-powerful in this context and to me, it's more like capital is making most of the decisions itself.

The concept of capital was given autonomous authority so that it could push us around like that.

So if we eliminate the idea of capital, is there anything left to the idea of "investment"?

Is it even useful for us to think in terms of "allocating resources" or is this framework of thinking only there to support capital's demands?

@RD4Anarchy @HeavenlyPossum @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange

> Is it even useful for us to think in terms of "allocating resources"

Maybe I'm using the wrong language; let me try this: Suppose we have a factory for making phones so people can read posts about anarchist collectivism on Mastodon. How do we decide whether to expand the factory so we can make more phones every year? I mean, maybe this is a great idea, or maybe it's a terrible idea – there has to be some mechanism for making that decision. "everyone who works there votes" is one way. "The owner(s) of the factory wants and can get investors, or not" is sort of Capitalism's answer.

> Capital's demands are all-powerful

By this do you mean like there's this pressure to optimize the bottom line at all costs even if it means you're building crappy products, destroying the environment, and making people miserable? Or are you getting at something else?

@ech @HeavenlyPossum @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange

I wasn't challenging your language, only raising a question to hopefully lead to thinking about assumptions.

As for the factory scenario that's way too complex to get into because the reality is that if we overthrow the very idea of capital we will no longer be able to pretend that these are viable options; that we have so many options to choose from.

I wish we could just "flip a switch" from capitalism to not-capitalism and be able to carry on all the things we're used to, just in some non-exploitive, somehow sustainable and "clean" way but that just ain't
happening.

Capitalism ruined that for us in two ways: by making us think all this shit we've done was fine in the first place, and by decimating our future options, even good sustainable ones, by consuming all our resources now, including seeing people as a resource, and utterly poisoning and disrupting our environment.

> Capital's demands are all-powerful

Capital demands to concentrate and accumulate. It does so by transforming everything into itself or waste or waste heat.

@RD4Anarchy @HeavenlyPossum @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange Oh interesting; it sounds like you are unasking my question, essentially – there would be no factories or complex industry/etc, yes?