@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 @ech That's a fun way of looking at it.

I tend to see the problem here in terms of the nature of money. It's TOO useful. So we have to swap time and labour for it at really bad exchange rates.

@fishidwardrobe @pixelpusher220 @RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @ech @mmclark

But literally anyone could create money at any time. There’s no reason to “swap time and labor at really bad exchange rates.”

@HeavenlyPossum @pixelpusher220 @RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @ech @mmclark What do you mean? I can create money by "borrowing" it, but that doesn't end well for anyone smaller than a small nation. I can invent a new currency, but who would take it?

@fishidwardrobe @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @RD4Anarchy @ech @mmclark

Money is simply an IOU. If I say to you “tomorrow I will give you one loaf of bread,” I have created a debt. If I write it down, I have created a record of that debt. If you then trade that record to someone else who trusts that I will deliver the loaf of bread to the bearer of my IOU, then we have circulating money.

The creation of money under capitalist modernity is monopolized by the state and its designated financial agents, such as banks and car lenders, but that doesn’t tell us anything about the creation of money itself.

@HeavenlyPossum @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @RD4Anarchy @ech @mmclark Sure, yes, but money is a medium of *exchange*. It requires the consent of *both* parties. If I were able to write a note that said "I owe you one loaf of bread" in the knowledge that I could use that in even 10% of my transactions for the week, then absolutely, yes, that would be money.

I'm sure there are people that could do that. In order for me (and I suspect most folks) to manage it, society would have to change.

@SallyStrange @RD4Anarchy @ech @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @fishidwardrobe

People have done this throughout history, from the great medieval trade fairs to the Irish bank strikes. We do not work to acquire money because money is somehow scarce; we do it because we are coerced into doing it.

Attributing the exploitation of wage labor to some function of money is just a variation on the capitalist “time preference” canard.

@pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @RD4Anarchy @ech @mmclark @fishidwardrobe

But yes, in order for this to function, the state would have to stop hurting us so routinely on behalf of capitalists. State-issued currency has value because the state promises it will hurt us if we don’t acquire the state’s money (primarily by laboring for capitalists) so we can extinguish the tax burdens the state imposed on us.

@HeavenlyPossum @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @RD4Anarchy @ech @mmclark Well, it *also* has value because everyone has been somehow conned into using it as the *only* medium of exchange – between strangers, anyway.

It's an easy trap to fall into. That's what I meant when I said it was too useful.

@HeavenlyPossum @SallyStrange @RD4Anarchy @ech @mmclark @pixelpusher220 I didn't mean it was scarce – clearly it isn't -- I meant I didn't have enough of it personally :)

I'm sure those with more power than me would find other ways to exploit me. It's just that the nature of money makes it much easier for them to do so.

I'm not saying money is the ultimate problem. It's the truncheon, not the bully.

@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.

@ech @HeavenlyPossum @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange

I should add, because it's very important, that capital demands all these things at certain minimum rate of change that you must not fall short of. It is not patient.

@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?

@ech @HeavenlyPossum @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange

I don't know what's going to be possible. I am not prescribing anything; I don't have a master plan or a list of forbidden things. We will all have to work this stuff out together.

To be clear, I am not saying that without capitalism we would not or could not have factories or complex industry. We could have whatever we want. For all I know we could have a technological utopia today if it weren't for all our efforts having been diverted into expanding Capital.

I'm saying that capitalism has wrought such extensive destruction that if we're able to overthrow it we are going to be so deep into damage repair mode that I doubt we'll be able to have a lot of things that we might have had otherwise.

Not because these things would necessarily be unacceptable or impossible in a truly free society, just that our chance to have them in a just and sustainable way may have been spoiled by capitalism's vast pillaging.

Cell phones are also a particularly complex example because they are very problematic in the ways they are produced now. Such a thing would have to look and function very differently in a truly free society without exploitation and without externalizing environmental costs.

Every bit of technology that exists today is deeply infused and shaped by capitalism. It can be difficult for us to imagine what things might look like outside the pervasive influence of capitalism.

And as useful as they can be, I'm old enough to remember a time when we did not have cell phones😲 Hell, I only just finally gave in and acquired my first smart phone in the last year or so. Before that I had an old flip phone that I only bought for emergency purposes and barely ever used.

So we have a couple layers of context to deal with, one being how things *could* work in a post-capitalist, free society, the other being what will be required of us to repair the damage that has been done by capitalism. It seems to me that this second requirement is going to put substantial limits on the first thing.

@RD4Anarchy @HeavenlyPossum @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange

"It can be difficult for us to imagine what things might look like outside the pervasive influence of capitalism." Yeah, that's basically my questions :)

A lot of things seem better in straightforward ways with socialism, a few things like this one I'm having trouble wrapping my head around. thanks!

@HeavenlyPossum @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @RD4Anarchy

> are often owned in corporate), so there’s still no economic function for private ownership.

Even in this case they do – the owners vote for directors to make decisions about resource allocation. But maybe this isn't what you're getting at?

> all extant private ownership of productive assets originated in violent state expropriation

There is/was certainly a lot of unacceptable violence (colonial oppression/theft, slavery, regulatory capture, etc, etc, etc), but I don't think I see how this is fundamentally or always true, or understand where you're going with this?

Like, suppose I work somewhere and save up enough to start a business or something – where's the state violence there? Are you getting at things like police protecting my assets? The place where I earned my money was on land stolen by colonialists? Or... ?

@ech @SallyStrange @pixelpusher220 @mmclark @RD4Anarchy

“Even in this case they do – the owners vote for directors to make decisions about resource allocation. But maybe this isn't what you're getting at?”

More or less—people are perfectly capable of making decisions together. Productive resources don’t need to be owned *privately* as they are under capitalism, in which one actor can own the productive effort of other people, in order to make decisions about allocating resources.

@ech @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @RD4Anarchy @mmclark

“Like, suppose I work somewhere and save up enough to start a business or something – where's the state violence there? Are you getting at things like police protecting my assets? The place where I earned my money was on land stolen by colonialists? Or... ?”

Both—all extant private property claims originated in violent expropriation—the land and the resources on that land were owned by someone else, probably in common, and forcibly converted into private property.

But the very idea of the hierarchical business that one person “starts” is a function of violence right now, today. From the police that guard your rights to someone else’s labor to the state’s issuance of a monopoly to financial institutions to create credit, the entire system is suffused with violence.

Most capital is not created or purchased through savings, but rather credit, the creation of which is an enclosed as the land the business is operating on.

@ech

Why do you care about this? You said you're happy working your job. I see now that you are a Christian, so I assume your hope lies in the kingdom of heaven, not in this doomed world of sinners or anything we could patch together ourselves.

I realize there are left-leaning Christians and Liberation Theology, but I'm not getting that vibe from you.

So what are you really doing here?

@SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum

@RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum The failures and shortcomings of capitalism are well documented, and I don't dispute them. I'm trying to learn about possible alternatives; I think the lament in this broader thread is accurate – unless people try pretty hard, they're going to only learn about a silly clown version of what Socialism is, either whatever Sweden is doing right now, or something about sharing toothbrushes. I appreciate threads like this – I learned a ton just reading the comments here, and got pointers to other materials like ABCs (I read some of that just now) etc.

So: Thanks!

I've read a bit about the righty version of anarchy – a lot of it appeals to me, but it seems ultimately unworkable or basically indistinguishable from what we have now. (They like to talk about "neighborhoods", but ultimately it seems like those are just "states", complete with coercive violence.)

@ech

I'm still skeptical about your motivations here but at least you are engaging reasonably. Sorry I bristled at your comment about coercion but it was very reminiscent of many trips down rabbit holes with people who want to insist that everything is voluntary and hunky-dory.

I would steer you away from "The ABCs", you can do much better than that. It's ok in some ways but I cannot endorse it because it is more of a statist version and lacks a lot of important fundamentals IMO (IIRC).

You've perhaps already checked out my profile but if not I invite you to explore my pinned thread of threads and other curated sources about "How we got here". This will keep you busy for a while!

https://kolektiva.social/@RD4Anarchy/110357255122736031

@SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum

@RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum Yeah, I think you're right – it did seem a bit on the statist side and I was having trouble finding material in it about fundamental stuff like how resource allocation decisions could be made better. Alright – thanks for the pointer!

@ech @RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum

Think about it. Your typical laborer is out in the middle of the city with some boss they barely know. They look around, what do they see? Nothing but barren concrete. "Oh, there's nothing for me to eat, nowhere for me to sleep, what am I gonna do, say no?"

And obviously, if the laborer says no, then the answer is obviously no. The thing is that they're not gonna say no...because of the implication.

Some 40-60% of laborers in the USA are in a paycheck-to-paycheck situation.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/because-of-the-implication

@mmclark @ech @SallyStrange @RD4Anarchy @corbin @pixelpusher220

Most “libertarians” have no problem understanding that an IRS auditor isn’t going to draw a gun on them, but belongs to an institution that will use violence if they don’t pay their taxes.

They struggle a bit harder with the whole “individual capitalist is an actor within a violent institution even if they never personally engage in violence” thing.

@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.

@neonsnake @ech @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum

heh!

@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.

@ech @RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @neonsnake

Capitalists “take risks” by borrowing against the expected future earnings of the employees who actually generate revenue through their labor.

The entire “risk” phenomenon of capitalism is a product of the enclosure and monopolization of credit production by financial institutions. It’s someone else’s money, it’s someone else’s stuff, it’s someone else’s work, but somehow the “capitalist” is the one taking the risk.

@HeavenlyPossum @ech @RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220

Like everything else, they're externalising the risk.

Some years back, my MD at the time got fired. He was shit, to be fair, but we all got pulled into a room to be given the announcement, and one of the board got teary-eyed while he was telling us about it.

Some months earlier, we'd made a whole bunch of entry-level redundant. "Difficult decisions, but surely necessary. "

Wankers

@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.)

@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.

@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.

@RD4Anarchy @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum Billions of people do unpaid labor daily. Some are formally enslaved, but the vast majority are simply women.

Edward Baptist argues convincingly that USA chattel slavery played a key role in the development of modern capitalism. Contrary to the propaganda, slavery was not inefficient and moribund.

I think qoto is on a blocklist? I can't see him

https://www.douglasdecelle.net/the-half-has-never-been-told-summary-and-notes/

@pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @mmclark @RD4Anarchy

Chattel slavery was absolutely integral to the development of capitalism. It was enslaved people who provided the raw material inputs and slavers who developed the disciplinary control of work schedules.

@HeavenlyPossum @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @RD4Anarchy

> How did you even stumble on this conversation?

The OP has a bunch of boosts so it shows up on /explore. (The "algorithm", I guess?)

The lede was intriguing – obviously the fact that hobbies exist and can be useful for others doesn't quite answer all my questions about a world without capital, but it's a good intuition pump. A lot of comments were super interesting and I was learning a lot, then I asked a question about a claim that I didn't understand.