this whole post is absurd, and your definition of capitalism is about as far off from the meaning as rothbard's capture of the word libertarian
[…]
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
If you do not understand capitalism you will never defeat it. Nor will you be able to effectively convince capitalists that they’re wrong or people that capitalists are wrong.
It doesn’t matter what you call them it matters what they think. And you have to engage with that.
So in a capitalist framework a group of people deciding that they, the workers, should own the capital and then setting up that structure violates no tenets of capitalism. Under capitalism the workers are banding together to make investment decisions based on their shared values. Literally no different than people who don’t “work” doing the same thing. You’re the capitalists now dog is the response they would give.
except for all the accrued capital that creates perverse incentives, market distortions, and stagnant labor conditions when the people that don't work do it in this, our neo-feudalist dystopia
this is disingenuous af and your clearly know enough about economics to understand the imbalance in leverage here, what are you doing?
Please read the rest of the posts by me on this page? Like. I do not see how this is disingenuous? Capitalists do not see coops as non-capitalist. It is neither theoretically nor practically non-capitalist.
That doesn’t mean capitalism is prefect it just means that coops aren’t “not capitalist”. Is a worker buying stock “communist”?
you're the one with the completely heterodox definition of capitalism here bud
I can assure you that the Marxist definition of capitalist is a heterodox definition. While i am being very wide with the definition of capitalist such to accommodate people that marxists consider capitalists who may not consider themselves capitalist. It most definitely is the case that private ownership of capital production regardless of whom its owned by is considered by just about fucking everyone to be capitalist.
this whole post is absurd, and your definition of capitalism is about as far off from the meaning as rothbard's capture of the word libertarian
[…]
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
If you do not understand capitalism you will never defeat it. Nor will you be able to effectively convince capitalists that they’re wrong or people that capitalists are wrong.
It doesn’t matter what you call them it matters what they think. And you have to engage with that.
So in a capitalist framework a group of people deciding that they, the workers, should own the capital and then setting up that structure violates no tenets of capitalism. Under capitalism the workers are banding together to make investment decisions based on their shared values. Literally no different than people who don’t “work” doing the same thing. You’re the capitalists now dog is the response they would give.
except for all the accrued capital that creates perverse incentives, market distortions, and stagnant labor conditions when the people that don't work do it in this, our neo-feudalist dystopia
this is disingenuous af and your clearly know enough about economics to understand the imbalance in leverage here, what are you doing?
Please read the rest of the posts by me on this page? Like. I do not see how this is disingenuous? Capitalists do not see coops as non-capitalist. It is neither theoretically nor practically non-capitalist.
That doesn’t mean capitalism is prefect it just means that coops aren’t “not capitalist”. Is a worker buying stock “communist”?
I don’t know, the steadily growing income inequality and degradation of life for anyone who isn’t rich as fuck seems to be doing an excellent job of showing a lot of folks that capitalists are wrong.
Just not, oddly, the people still benefiting from the inequity of the system.
Well
Not that oddly
So you're not going to answer the question or respond to the comments I made?
again, it's not owned privately, it's owned by the collective of workers, if that changes via retirement without transition of ownership to new workers it ceases to be a true coop and will gradually morph into something horrible like publix or half the startups i worked for with predatory, obfuscated division of ownership
Yea... Its privately owned by a collective of workers. Who get to decide how to allocate their ownership. And are free to enforce sale at retirement and buy in to work. Or free to not do that. They own it, they get to decide. They get to decide their ownership structure. They get to decide their governance structure. It is not "not capitalist" because they decided something that seems like snidely whiplash would disapprove.
Unless you're saying that Google is a communist system because its "publicly" owned. No. Google is privately owned by various members of the public. Those owners even get to vote on many things google does in order to change the direction of the company in accordance with the founding documents and the sales agreement for equity.
These structures are not exactly the same in the eyes of a capitalist but not because one of them isn't capitalist.
Like. Yall(lanz/sammic et al) call the fucking Soviet Union capitalist. But a coop isn't? Man fucking what?
A state is made up of private citizens, as is the government. That doesn't make state ownership a form of private ownership. You are effectively arguing that all ownership is private and that there is no system that falls outside of capitalism.
No. I think that if the government owns it its public ownership. I do not think that "state capitalism" is "capitalism". I do not think that google is communist because its "publicly owned". The point was that that was ridiculous.
But a coop isn't public ownership. Its really not. Its private ownership. Only the members of the coop get a say in the governance and membership is determined by the members and the governance documents. The state does not own a coop. The public does not own a coop. Its privately owned.
Coops aren't a form of public ownership, but they are a form of common ownership. The fact that a coop is not publicly owned - that the profits it gains belong to the coop, and not to society as a whole - is indeed an important distinction from state ownership or any other society-wide form of social control. A society organized according to worker-owned coops satisfies some conceptions of socialism, but not communism. But the fact that they are organized according to the principle of workers collectively owning the enterprise is divergent from what is commonly thought of as "privately owned," and, while I can't speak to how the neoclassical or Keynesian schools of economic thought divide and define such concepts, I would say that what is meant by "privately owned" in classic political economy - from Smith through Marx - is not a worker-owned cooperative.
Just as a coop is a form of common ownership so is a corporation a form of common ownership. Yet we do not say that corporations are anti-capitalist.
A society that is strictly organized along worker coops then that probably would not be what is meant by "privately owned" by smith. Because the state (or lack of state or whatever) is enforcing that capital be owned in that manner. But the existence of a coop itself is not such a breach. It would be the prevention of other forms of capital organizing that would be the breach. If people want to organize in that manner they would be free to privately own property in that manner is something that smith would be likely to have said. If he was writing in a time when worker owned coops were a "thing" people were arguing about. (i cannot find any quotes about smith regarding worker coops and do not want to re-read his work just to like, figure out if he did. I've found some stuff from the smith institute but its not the same)
Anyhow here’s some silly socialist, speaking his silly socialist talk. Some yokel named… [squints] Albert Einstein?
The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.
For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production—although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is “free,” what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists’ requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the “free labor contract” for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present day economy does not differ much from “pure” capitalism.
Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers’ goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.
This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.
this whole post is absurd, and your definition of capitalism is about as far off from the meaning as rothbard's capture of the word libertarian
[…]
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
If you do not understand capitalism you will never defeat it. Nor will you be able to effectively convince capitalists that they’re wrong or people that capitalists are wrong.
It doesn’t matter what you call them it matters what they think. And you have to engage with that.
So in a capitalist framework a group of people deciding that they, the workers, should own the capital and then setting up that structure violates no tenets of capitalism. Under capitalism the workers are banding together to make investment decisions based on their shared values. Literally no different than people who don’t “work” doing the same thing. You’re the capitalists now dog is the response they would give.
except for all the accrued capital that creates perverse incentives, market distortions, and stagnant labor conditions when the people that don't work do it in this, our neo-feudalist dystopia
this is disingenuous af and your clearly know enough about economics to understand the imbalance in leverage here, what are you doing?
Please read the rest of the posts by me on this page? Like. I do not see how this is disingenuous? Capitalists do not see coops as non-capitalist. It is neither theoretically nor practically non-capitalist.
That doesn’t mean capitalism is prefect it just means that coops aren’t “not capitalist”. Is a worker buying stock “communist”?
you're the one with the completely heterodox definition of capitalism here bud
I can assure you that the Marxist definition of capitalist is a heterodox definition. While i am being very wide with the definition of capitalist such to accommodate people that marxists consider capitalists who may not consider themselves capitalist. It most definitely is the case that private ownership of capital production regardless of whom its owned by is considered by just about fucking everyone to be capitalist.
this whole post is absurd, and your definition of capitalism is about as far off from the meaning as rothbard's capture of the word libertarian
[…]
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
If you do not understand capitalism you will never defeat it. Nor will you be able to effectively convince capitalists that they’re wrong or people that capitalists are wrong.
It doesn’t matter what you call them it matters what they think. And you have to engage with that.
So in a capitalist framework a group of people deciding that they, the workers, should own the capital and then setting up that structure violates no tenets of capitalism. Under capitalism the workers are banding together to make investment decisions based on their shared values. Literally no different than people who don’t “work” doing the same thing. You’re the capitalists now dog is the response they would give.
except for all the accrued capital that creates perverse incentives, market distortions, and stagnant labor conditions when the people that don't work do it in this, our neo-feudalist dystopia
this is disingenuous af and your clearly know enough about economics to understand the imbalance in leverage here, what are you doing?
Please read the rest of the posts by me on this page? Like. I do not see how this is disingenuous? Capitalists do not see coops as non-capitalist. It is neither theoretically nor practically non-capitalist.
That doesn’t mean capitalism is prefect it just means that coops aren’t “not capitalist”. Is a worker buying stock “communist”?
I don’t know, the steadily growing income inequality and degradation of life for anyone who isn’t rich as fuck seems to be doing an excellent job of showing a lot of folks that capitalists are wrong.
Just not, oddly, the people still benefiting from the inequity of the system.
Well
Not that oddly
So you're not going to answer the question or respond to the comments I made?
again, it's not owned privately, it's owned by the collective of workers, if that changes via retirement without transition of ownership to new workers it ceases to be a true coop and will gradually morph into something horrible like publix or half the startups i worked for with predatory, obfuscated division of ownership
Yea... Its privately owned by a collective of workers. Who get to decide how to allocate their ownership. And are free to enforce sale at retirement and buy in to work. Or free to not do that. They own it, they get to decide. They get to decide their ownership structure. They get to decide their governance structure. It is not "not capitalist" because they decided something that seems like snidely whiplash would disapprove.
Unless you're saying that Google is a communist system because its "publicly" owned. No. Google is privately owned by various members of the public. Those owners even get to vote on many things google does in order to change the direction of the company in accordance with the founding documents and the sales agreement for equity.
These structures are not exactly the same in the eyes of a capitalist but not because one of them isn't capitalist.
Like. Yall(lanz/sammic et al) call the fucking Soviet Union capitalist. But a coop isn't? Man fucking what?
A state is made up of private citizens, as is the government. That doesn't make state ownership a form of private ownership. You are effectively arguing that all ownership is private and that there is no system that falls outside of capitalism.
No. I think that if the government owns it its public ownership. I do not think that "state capitalism" is "capitalism". I do not think that google is communist because its "publicly owned". The point was that that was ridiculous.
But a coop isn't public ownership. Its really not. Its private ownership. Only the members of the coop get a say in the governance and membership is determined by the members and the governance documents. The state does not own a coop. The public does not own a coop. Its privately owned.
Coops aren't a form of public ownership, but they are a form of common ownership. The fact that a coop is not publicly owned - that the profits it gains belong to the coop, and not to society as a whole - is indeed an important distinction from state ownership or any other society-wide form of social control. A society organized according to worker-owned coops satisfies some conceptions of socialism, but not communism. But the fact that they are organized according to the principle of workers collectively owning the enterprise is divergent from what is commonly thought of as "privately owned," and, while I can't speak to how the neoclassical or Keynesian schools of economic thought divide and define such concepts, I would say that what is meant by "privately owned" in classic political economy - from Smith through Marx - is not a worker-owned cooperative.
Just as a coop is a form of common ownership so is a corporation a form of common ownership. Yet we do not say that corporations are anti-capitalist.
A society that is strictly organized along worker coops then that probably would not be what is meant by "privately owned" by smith. Because the state (or lack of state or whatever) is enforcing that capital be owned in that manner. But the existence of a coop itself is not such a breach. It would be the prevention of other forms of capital organizing that would be the breach. If people want to organize in that manner they would be free to privately own property in that manner is something that smith would be likely to have said. If he was writing in a time when worker owned coops were a "thing" people were arguing about. (i cannot find any quotes about smith regarding worker coops and do not want to re-read his work just to like, figure out if he did. I've found some stuff from the smith institute but its not the same)
Yeah, under no circumstances do I want to read The Wealth of Nations again either, we can agree on that much
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
I agree with the notion that a coop-based economy doesn't fit the bill for anarcho-communism. Exchange value and profit aren't compatible with my understanding of communism. My understanding of anarcho-communism entails that society has free access to the goods produced by social labor, so ownership in the sense of a coop which sells goods and makes a profit doesn't fit. Markets, more generally, seem incompatible with anarcho-communism or communism generally.
However if instead of communism we use a broader term and describe the coop-based model as some form of socialism then I would agree with that.
maybe? personally i don't see anything stopping a communist planned economy from continuing to use currency as an exchange and store of value for goods, a pure barter economy is pretty hard to do, and idk that even most communists would want the exact apportionment of their labor value, luxury spending, whatever you want to call it, to be allocated exactly the same as everybody else's
but i'm very much not a communist because i don't think you can plan an economy to a degree where you don't miss something, eventually, to catastrophic ends
i think a more centrally structured communist government could coexist just fine with anarchist or syndicalist zones, so long as there's free movement, and i think that that parallel economy that handles some of the things that do less well with top heavy planning and administration would provide resiliency when the planned economy wobbles
the biggest obstacle between us and that kind of society is the artificial scarcity that capital creates to squeeze profit
Boy, I am sure glad to know my living conditions, in communism, will be dictated by how charismatic I am, and how good I am at negotiation, and public speaking. That sounds great and not at all like a way to create an authoritarian system.
just curious, how do you think interviewing works for most people currently? 👀
Because people keep telling me in this thread that a better, more equitable world isn’t possible, and cite as their reasons Van Gogh’s artistic output, the Beatles, and apparently that not everyone can live in New York City, Seattle or the Grand Canyon.
Literally nobody in the thread has said a better world isn't possible.
Please don't strawman us.
"We are skeptical of your utopia" is not the same as "what we have is the theoretical optimum."
okay, but i've been following along in this thread and it's pretty literally where a handful of y'all end up
incenjecuar's whole argument is that because his family has suffered personal hardship (but not enough hardship to prevent them from having enough intergenerational wealth and community to build a petit bourgeoisie collective) a collectivist society just can't work
spool literally said we have to force people to do shitty jobs, with the example of modern sweatshop shoe production, for society
but those labor conditions wouldn't even exist without capitalists in a country on the other side of the planet manipulating local markets to create conditions in which they can exploit workers
The bolded never happened. Spool responded to a post from another forumer who was at the time advocating for slavery, and I misread that as being his stance. The person who advocated for slavery has also recanted that position. So I think we can move on from the idea that communism or socialism has to be built on the back of slave labor.
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
Don't worry about it Funsworth, Heffling is playing calvin ball here. Remember, according to him, explaining that slavery is one method upon which people are forced to produce labor under both communist(Vanguard) and capitalist societies (historically) is the same as advocating for it.
If you want to say that they are both socialist and capitalist at once then ok, I guess, although I think that if that's where your definitions bring you then you should probably redefine one or the other term.
But maybe not? Should worker cooperatives in the context of markets be best understood as having socialist and capitalist aspects, rather than trying to place them firmly in one category or the other?
Marx, of course, may have no input on anything. Nor, seemingly, a century’s worth of academics following Marx.
But Adam Smith?
Adam Smith, he is eternal.
Marx can say things relating to the ideological descendants of marx sure. You are free to utilize marx to say what is and isn't of that descent.
But capitalism really is the ideological descendant of Smith. The capitalist utilize that form of thinking. They follow in those footsteps. The things that unite them are the ideological constructions that he started(or at least popularized, smith didn't create markets he thought they were swell and that they were the reason why some nations were more wealthy than others). And that means markets. And... they use markets.. like all the fucking time.
This is why when my use of the term dictatorship of the proletariat was brought up i cited Marx. This is why when discussing marxist labor theory i cited marx. Marx is relevant to those things. But not to define who the capitalists are or what they believe.
Marx, of course, may have no input on anything. Nor, seemingly, a century’s worth of academics following Marx.
But Adam Smith?
Adam Smith, he is eternal.
Marx can say things relating to the ideological descendants of marx sure. You are free to utilize marx to say what is and isn't of that descent.
But capitalism really is the ideological descendant of Smith. The capitalist utilize that form of thinking. They follow in those footsteps. The things that unite them are the ideological constructions that he started. And that means markets. And... they use markets.. like all the fucking time.
This is why when my use of the term dictatorship of the proletariat was brought up i cited Marx. This is why when discussing marxist labor theory i cited marx. Marx is relevant to those things. But not to define who the capitalists are or what they believe.
Nah, Smith’s dead. We can criticize his theory, and the nightmare it’s foisted upon our present, to our heart’s content. His zombie ain’t shambling after us for it.
It’s kind of like Christians in America
On paper, sure, it’s a faith that believes in the redemptive sacrifice of God Incarnate and is dedicated to the practice of doing well by your fellow.
In widespread American practice it’s a shoddy dime store mask worn by white supremacy to lend itself the airs of divinity
But yea. Markets, their utilization, and existence, are a central tenet of "capitalism". Moreso inviolate than even private property in some instances. Though there are definitely levels of restriction on either that would probably make you "not capitalist". You can say its a "flaw in my reasoning" but you're just wrong. That is what capitalists think. Its a fundamental aspect of capitalism since Smith defined it.
If utilization and existence of markets are a sufficient component of capitalism, then we must conclude that mercantilism - you know, that economic system that Adam Smith was criticizing - was capitalist.
Well, maybe it was. Perhaps Smith was wrong in his defin -- sorry, my assistant is in my earpiece informing me that Adam Smith did not in fact define capitalism. Just kidding, I don't have an earpiece nor an assistant. However I have actually read Wealth of Nations. Smith's arguments gave rise to modern capitalism, but he neither defined nor even used the term. That honor goes to William Thackeray, in his novel The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family. Never heard of him? That's okay. Neither had I, until I started reading modern Marxist and leftist texts.
False etymologies aside, you can use the term 'capitalism' in your sense, but at best that renders it nondescriptive; it causes the term to encompass too many vastly different economic systems for the term to be useful.
At worst, that use of the term 'capitalism' is a strategic ploy to reify capitalism as a system much more fundamental than it is; after all, if a phenomena that has been around since the first day a homo sapiens used shiny rocks or shells to measure the value of fish they were bartering to a neanderthal in exchange for meat is the defining feature of capitalism, then it leads us to a logical conclusion that capitalism is a defining feature of humanity itself. Perhaps you don't mean this, but I've seen plenty of Libertarians and anarchocapitalists attempt this conflation.
A much more fruitful framework: The utilization of markets is a necessary component of capitalism, but it is not a sufficient component of capitalism. If it's capitalist, it involves markets. But if it involves markets, it may or may not be capitalist.
They kinda do. Nobody remembers Thackeray. After all, you certainly didn't.
The modern use of 'capitalism' to refer to the post-mercantile economic system of Europe was popularized by Marx more than any other single writer, and spread by Marxists more than any other movement.
There are two definitions of capitalism that I find useful. Both are extensions of Marxist and post-Marxist leftist thought.
The economic definition: capitalism is an economic system where capital owners and laborers are separate classes of people. In this sense, a worker cooperative is not 'capitalist', as the workers own the capital. (Granted, a sole proprietorship with no employees but the owner is also not necessarily 'capitalist', unless the owner is hoping to someday sell his stake in the business and collect dividends as an owner or investor.) 'State capitalism' correctly describes an economic system where the government owns capital and does not share that ownership with its workers.
The political definition: capitalism is a political system where political power is consolidated among capital owners, and non-owners are de facto disenfranchised. I use this definition when engaging in discussions with non-economists, because I think it reflects the motivations behind popular anti-capitalist sentiments of the day. Therein we see frustration at American oligarchy; at the perception (and reality) that our political system is deeply distorted by moneyed interests at all levels, and that the only way to secure a halfway decent quality of life for yourself is to somehow break in to the capital-owning class, whether that's through stock options or buying real estate.
We can argue (and I have argued quite a bit elsewhere) over whether those two definitions are, to quote the Office meme, the same picture. Regardless, they're both far more useful and far more reflective of how these terms are actually used than pretending that capitalism is anything where markets are.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
This part is so frequently ignored by capitalists. "Well it's not just the laborers that create the product, they need the machine, and that guy who owns the machine provides it!"
Yeah ok, who built the machine though? Who came up with its idea? What previous machines and ideas did it build off of? What scientific advancements were necessary for it to be engineered? How were the engineers educated in their trade - who taught them, and at whose expense?
The machine is the common heritage of humanity.
Yeah, no, another guy built it with another machine, all the way down to the extraction of the ore. It's the twenty-first century. Everything, and I do mean everything, is produced via capital investment first and labor second.
i can see why capitalists want to frame it this way when their accrued capital was mostly extracted via genocidal white supremacist policy, but that doesn't make the capital any less derived from slave labor
"Getting a bank loan" is not exactly something a reasonable person is going to accept as "extraction via genocidal white supremacist policy," Giggles.
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
This part is so frequently ignored by capitalists. "Well it's not just the laborers that create the product, they need the machine, and that guy who owns the machine provides it!"
Yeah ok, who built the machine though? Who came up with its idea? What previous machines and ideas did it build off of? What scientific advancements were necessary for it to be engineered? How were the engineers educated in their trade - who taught them, and at whose expense?
The machine is the common heritage of humanity.
Yeah, no, another guy built it with another machine, all the way down to the extraction of the ore. It's the twenty-first century. Everything, and I do mean everything, is produced via capital investment first and labor second.
i can see why capitalists want to frame it this way when their accrued capital was mostly extracted via genocidal white supremacist policy, but that doesn't make the capital any less derived from slave labor
"Getting a bank loan" is not exactly something a reasonable person is going to accept as "extraction via genocidal white supremacist policy," Giggles.
shit, remind me why historically redlined districts exist again? we don't gotta go back to pre-emancipation
it's like y'all don't even remember cory booker's campaign
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
This part is so frequently ignored by capitalists. "Well it's not just the laborers that create the product, they need the machine, and that guy who owns the machine provides it!"
Yeah ok, who built the machine though? Who came up with its idea? What previous machines and ideas did it build off of? What scientific advancements were necessary for it to be engineered? How were the engineers educated in their trade - who taught them, and at whose expense?
The machine is the common heritage of humanity.
Yeah, no, another guy built it with another machine, all the way down to the extraction of the ore. It's the twenty-first century. Everything, and I do mean everything, is produced via capital investment first and labor second.
i can see why capitalists want to frame it this way when their accrued capital was mostly extracted via genocidal white supremacist policy, but that doesn't make the capital any less derived from slave labor
"Getting a bank loan" is not exactly something a reasonable person is going to accept as "extraction via genocidal white supremacist policy," Giggles.
Off the top of my head, there are damn few places on Earth where mineral rights on a plot of land were sold by the first residents on an open and free market, or one where the first residents took a bank loan of their own free will to obtain extraction machinery so they could then sell that ore on an open and free market.
The entirety of North America is off the table, given that any mineral rights we're talking about are on land taken from Natives. Most of South America as well, except those few places where people have actively (and often violently) resisted colonization.
Perhaps aluminum mining in Iceland, maybe. Arguably. Some of the tiny mining operations in Japan, perhaps.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
This part is so frequently ignored by capitalists. "Well it's not just the laborers that create the product, they need the machine, and that guy who owns the machine provides it!"
Yeah ok, who built the machine though? Who came up with its idea? What previous machines and ideas did it build off of? What scientific advancements were necessary for it to be engineered? How were the engineers educated in their trade - who taught them, and at whose expense?
The machine is the common heritage of humanity.
Yeah, no, another guy built it with another machine, all the way down to the extraction of the ore. It's the twenty-first century. Everything, and I do mean everything, is produced via capital investment first and labor second.
i can see why capitalists want to frame it this way when their accrued capital was mostly extracted via genocidal white supremacist policy, but that doesn't make the capital any less derived from slave labor
"Getting a bank loan" is not exactly something a reasonable person is going to accept as "extraction via genocidal white supremacist policy," Giggles.
shit, remind me why historically redlined districts exist again? we don't gotta go back to pre-emancipation
it's like y'all don't even remember cory booker's campaign
Cool. How about someone with a factory in Greece? The United States is not the world, and its particular failures are not generalizable.
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
This part is so frequently ignored by capitalists. "Well it's not just the laborers that create the product, they need the machine, and that guy who owns the machine provides it!"
Yeah ok, who built the machine though? Who came up with its idea? What previous machines and ideas did it build off of? What scientific advancements were necessary for it to be engineered? How were the engineers educated in their trade - who taught them, and at whose expense?
The machine is the common heritage of humanity.
Yeah, no, another guy built it with another machine, all the way down to the extraction of the ore. It's the twenty-first century. Everything, and I do mean everything, is produced via capital investment first and labor second.
i can see why capitalists want to frame it this way when their accrued capital was mostly extracted via genocidal white supremacist policy, but that doesn't make the capital any less derived from slave labor
"Getting a bank loan" is not exactly something a reasonable person is going to accept as "extraction via genocidal white supremacist policy," Giggles.
shit, remind me why historically redlined districts exist again? we don't gotta go back to pre-emancipation
it's like y'all don't even remember cory booker's campaign
Cool. How about someone with a factory in Greece? The United States is not the world, and its particular failures are not generalizable.
Where are the resources the factory uses being sourced from?
Like, that’s the thing Monwyn; the global north is benefiting from the, often slave-conditions, exploitation of the global south.
You can’t just say “ignore America!” cause it’s the sin of the whole rotten system. That’s the horror of global capital!
The only place virtually free of it is that one island where they kill you if you try to even get near it
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
This part is so frequently ignored by capitalists. "Well it's not just the laborers that create the product, they need the machine, and that guy who owns the machine provides it!"
Yeah ok, who built the machine though? Who came up with its idea? What previous machines and ideas did it build off of? What scientific advancements were necessary for it to be engineered? How were the engineers educated in their trade - who taught them, and at whose expense?
The machine is the common heritage of humanity.
Yeah, no, another guy built it with another machine, all the way down to the extraction of the ore. It's the twenty-first century. Everything, and I do mean everything, is produced via capital investment first and labor second.
i can see why capitalists want to frame it this way when their accrued capital was mostly extracted via genocidal white supremacist policy, but that doesn't make the capital any less derived from slave labor
"Getting a bank loan" is not exactly something a reasonable person is going to accept as "extraction via genocidal white supremacist policy," Giggles.
shit, remind me why historically redlined districts exist again? we don't gotta go back to pre-emancipation
it's like y'all don't even remember cory booker's campaign
Cool. How about someone with a factory in Greece? The United States is not the world, and its particular failures are not generalizable.
Right, Europe definitely never benefited from genocidal white supremacy or colonialism.
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
This part is so frequently ignored by capitalists. "Well it's not just the laborers that create the product, they need the machine, and that guy who owns the machine provides it!"
Yeah ok, who built the machine though? Who came up with its idea? What previous machines and ideas did it build off of? What scientific advancements were necessary for it to be engineered? How were the engineers educated in their trade - who taught them, and at whose expense?
The machine is the common heritage of humanity.
Yeah, no, another guy built it with another machine, all the way down to the extraction of the ore. It's the twenty-first century. Everything, and I do mean everything, is produced via capital investment first and labor second.
i can see why capitalists want to frame it this way when their accrued capital was mostly extracted via genocidal white supremacist policy, but that doesn't make the capital any less derived from slave labor
"Getting a bank loan" is not exactly something a reasonable person is going to accept as "extraction via genocidal white supremacist policy," Giggles.
shit, remind me why historically redlined districts exist again? we don't gotta go back to pre-emancipation
it's like y'all don't even remember cory booker's campaign
Cool. How about someone with a factory in Greece? The United States is not the world, and its particular failures are not generalizable.
Greece's manufacturing industry is highly reliant on its chief imports, oil and petroleum. These imports come in by way of Germany, but the majority originate in Russia. Russia's top oil-producing region is West Siberia, which was annexed by military power under Russian imperialism from the sparsely-populated (and often competing) tribes that lived there previously (themselves filling a void left by the collapse of the Mongol Empire). These regions were further developed by forced labor of political exiles under both tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, and today Russia's somehow-dirtier-than-average(-and-that's-a-really-low-bar) oil industry has been bleeding pollutants into the environment and wrecking the natural resources that the indigenous peoples of Siberia rely on to survive.
Perhaps, on a technicality, you might say "a ha! that's not white supremacy, that's just (sparkling) imperialism!" Regardless, owning a factory in Greece, even if you treat your immediate employees well, requires you to obtain your raw materials from places where modern superpowers have wrenched the land and those resources from people who were previously (or currently) living there.
Does that make the factory owner a bad person? Not necessarily. But when people say "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism," this is a good example.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
This part is so frequently ignored by capitalists. "Well it's not just the laborers that create the product, they need the machine, and that guy who owns the machine provides it!"
Yeah ok, who built the machine though? Who came up with its idea? What previous machines and ideas did it build off of? What scientific advancements were necessary for it to be engineered? How were the engineers educated in their trade - who taught them, and at whose expense?
The machine is the common heritage of humanity.
Yeah, no, another guy built it with another machine, all the way down to the extraction of the ore. It's the twenty-first century. Everything, and I do mean everything, is produced via capital investment first and labor second.
i can see why capitalists want to frame it this way when their accrued capital was mostly extracted via genocidal white supremacist policy, but that doesn't make the capital any less derived from slave labor
"Getting a bank loan" is not exactly something a reasonable person is going to accept as "extraction via genocidal white supremacist policy," Giggles.
Off the top of my head, there are damn few places on Earth where mineral rights on a plot of land were sold by the first residents on an open and free market, or one where the first residents took a bank loan of their own free will to obtain extraction machinery so they could then sell that ore on an open and free market.
The entirety of North America is off the table, given that any mineral rights we're talking about are on land taken from Natives. Most of South America as well, except those few places where people have actively (and often violently) resisted colonization.
Perhaps aluminum mining in Iceland, maybe. Arguably. Some of the tiny mining operations in Japan, perhaps.
This whole line of argument(besides seeming pretty irrelevant) has a pretty shakily level of congruence with communism.
As a communist revolution wouldn't actually return any of these things to them, as the concept of them being theirs at all is fundamentally incompatible with the lack of private property.
The Government seizing first peoples land(along with everyone elses) and making it federal land is one of the first steps of communist.
Also, loans are an interesting example because we just make up money now. A loan is not a transfer of capital anymore, it's 90% creation of capital. My wife started a side business with our COVID checks. That didn't come from someone else's capital, and it didn't come from someone's labor either. It was created by fiat.
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
This part is so frequently ignored by capitalists. "Well it's not just the laborers that create the product, they need the machine, and that guy who owns the machine provides it!"
Yeah ok, who built the machine though? Who came up with its idea? What previous machines and ideas did it build off of? What scientific advancements were necessary for it to be engineered? How were the engineers educated in their trade - who taught them, and at whose expense?
The machine is the common heritage of humanity.
Yeah, no, another guy built it with another machine, all the way down to the extraction of the ore. It's the twenty-first century. Everything, and I do mean everything, is produced via capital investment first and labor second.
i can see why capitalists want to frame it this way when their accrued capital was mostly extracted via genocidal white supremacist policy, but that doesn't make the capital any less derived from slave labor
"Getting a bank loan" is not exactly something a reasonable person is going to accept as "extraction via genocidal white supremacist policy," Giggles.
shit, remind me why historically redlined districts exist again? we don't gotta go back to pre-emancipation
it's like y'all don't even remember cory booker's campaign
Cool. How about someone with a factory in Greece? The United States is not the world, and its particular failures are not generalizable.
Right, Europe definitely never benefited from genocidal white supremacy or colonialism.
Greece was literally under Ottoman Imperial rule for four hundred years and were definitely never even a minor colonial power. Might want to try again?
it definitely did, but i understand how you could get this impression with the way they talk around their actual beliefs, and their implications
maybe try PMing them, they're a lot more honest about their material conditions and positions in private
You know dude, everyone in here is mostly having a polite conversation, and some are even learning things, and the situation is not helped by you wading in here and flapping your dick around and attacking folks, no matter how fly your Always Sunny references are.
I'm not saying this as a mod, I'm saying it as a member of a community that I would like to make not abjectly miserable.
And if you'd like to respond to this, please do so via PM, so as not to drag this thread off topic. Thanks.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
Regardless of communism being involved, I would absolutely love to see wealth redistribution, the erasure of generational wealth, the reconsideration of the idea of non-government entities owning land, and the elimination of the idea that government agents should live in fancy houses.
Regardless of communism being involved, I would absolutely love to see wealth redistribution, the erasure of generational wealth, the reconsideration of the idea of non-government entities owning land, and the elimination of the idea that government agents should live in fancy houses.
This is "thoughts and prayers" for economic struggles because you're unwilling to engage in the work necessary due to your own complacency and material conditions.
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
This part is so frequently ignored by capitalists. "Well it's not just the laborers that create the product, they need the machine, and that guy who owns the machine provides it!"
Yeah ok, who built the machine though? Who came up with its idea? What previous machines and ideas did it build off of? What scientific advancements were necessary for it to be engineered? How were the engineers educated in their trade - who taught them, and at whose expense?
The machine is the common heritage of humanity.
Yeah, no, another guy built it with another machine, all the way down to the extraction of the ore. It's the twenty-first century. Everything, and I do mean everything, is produced via capital investment first and labor second.
i can see why capitalists want to frame it this way when their accrued capital was mostly extracted via genocidal white supremacist policy, but that doesn't make the capital any less derived from slave labor
"Getting a bank loan" is not exactly something a reasonable person is going to accept as "extraction via genocidal white supremacist policy," Giggles.
Off the top of my head, there are damn few places on Earth where mineral rights on a plot of land were sold by the first residents on an open and free market, or one where the first residents took a bank loan of their own free will to obtain extraction machinery so they could then sell that ore on an open and free market.
The entirety of North America is off the table, given that any mineral rights we're talking about are on land taken from Natives. Most of South America as well, except those few places where people have actively (and often violently) resisted colonization.
Perhaps aluminum mining in Iceland, maybe. Arguably. Some of the tiny mining operations in Japan, perhaps.
This whole line of argument(besides seeming pretty irrelevant) has a pretty shakily level of congruence with communism.
As a communist revolution wouldn't actually return any of these things to them, as the concept of them being theirs at all is fundamentally incompatible with the lack of private property.
The Government seizing first peoples land(along with everyone elses) and making it federal land is one of the first steps of communist.
Also, loans are an interesting example because we just make up money now. A loan is not a transfer of capital anymore, it's 90% creation of capital. My wife started a side business with our COVID checks. That didn't come from someone else's capital, and it didn't come from someone's labor either. It was created by fiat.
I'm not a communist, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I'm not a communist, partly, for a reason congruent to your criticism here. I don't think we can get from point A (private ownership of capital) to point B (collectivization of capital) without atrocities. More accurately, eventually somebody gets tired of waiting for the machinery of history to put late-stage capitalism out of its misery and tries to hurry it along, and whoops you just made state capitalism.
I might be wrong about that. It could be a fruitful line of argument.
However, that's not going to stop me from criticizing the political and economic system in which we live. Alexander Rustow once said something like (paraphrased), "We agree with Marxists and socialists in their conviction that capitalism is untenable and needs to be overcome. However, we reject the errors which Marx has adopted in his predictions." (This is not an exact quote, nor is it an unqualified endorsement of Rustow's ideas.) Or Martin Luther King, "Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both."
(I now need to go put a quarter in my "white guys shouldn't quote MLK" jar.)
I'm mostly interested in fixing the issues we face right now, in the year 2022 and in the immediate foreseeable future. Ecological collapse, climate change, economic inequality, shitty health-eroding workplaces, exploitation of indigenous peoples, anti-Black racism in the US. Far from being "irrelevant" as you say (a bizarre criticism, to be blunt), these problems are products of, or at least deeply intertwined with, our global economic system. We need to dramatically alter our economic system, and we need to do it yesterday.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Regardless of communism being involved, I would absolutely love to see wealth redistribution, the erasure of generational wealth, the reconsideration of the idea of non-government entities owning land, and the elimination of the idea that government agents should live in fancy houses.
This is "thoughts and prayers" for economic struggles because you're unwilling to engage in the work necessary due to your own complacency and material conditions.
This seems to presuppose the only solution to those issues is communism, which is as yet only an assertion. (It also seems to presuppose the only possible source of resistance to communism is personal failing and selfishness, which I don't find to be accurate or compelling as an argument.)
False etymologies aside, you can use the term 'capitalism' in your sense, but at best that renders it nondescriptive; it causes the term to encompass too many vastly different economic systems for the term to be useful.
At worst, that use of the term 'capitalism' is a strategic ploy to reify capitalism as a system much more fundamental than it is;
No. The definition exists so that you argue against the position taken by the actual people who consider themselves capitalist and what they believe in.
If you want to argue against a strawman i cannot stop you. But i do not have to respect your position.
Regardless of communism being involved, I would absolutely love to see wealth redistribution, the erasure of generational wealth, the reconsideration of the idea of non-government entities owning land, and the elimination of the idea that government agents should live in fancy houses.
I would too. But in the vein of the Onion meme, "the worst person you know just made a good point" Bill Maher observed that the rich aren't candy machines, they're pinatas. They only drop their goodies when you beat them with sticks.
Is that a metaphor. Far be it from me to advocate violence. That's against the rules, anyhow.
But we can't fix any of these problems without organizing, and you know who knows how to organize? Labor activists. Unions. People who have read Jane McAlevey and Saul Alinsky. And guess what? A lot of these people have read Lenin, too. (The royal) we really need to get over our belief that change comes from voting once every two years and bitching each other out online in between, channel our inner Gimli, and say 'I never thought I'd get pepper-sprayed fighting side by side with a Leninist.'
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
False etymologies aside, you can use the term 'capitalism' in your sense, but at best that renders it nondescriptive; it causes the term to encompass too many vastly different economic systems for the term to be useful.
At worst, that use of the term 'capitalism' is a strategic ploy to reify capitalism as a system much more fundamental than it is;
No. The definition exists so that you argue against the position taken by the actual people who consider themselves capitalist and what they believe in.
If you want to argue against a strawman i cannot stop you. But i do not have to respect your position.
By "actual people who consider themselves capitalist" you mean, "Me, Goumindong, high arbiter of unsourced definitions."
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
False etymologies aside, you can use the term 'capitalism' in your sense, but at best that renders it nondescriptive; it causes the term to encompass too many vastly different economic systems for the term to be useful.
At worst, that use of the term 'capitalism' is a strategic ploy to reify capitalism as a system much more fundamental than it is;
No. The definition exists so that you argue against the position taken by the actual people who consider themselves capitalist and what they believe in.
If you want to argue against a strawman i cannot stop you. But i do not have to respect your position.
My good dude, on this very page you attempted to lump worker owned cooperatives with a modern corporate structure. Dont get stingy on sticking to definitions now.
Also, loans are an interesting example because we just make up money now. A loan is not a transfer of capital anymore, it's 90% creation of capital. My wife started a side business with our COVID checks. That didn't come from someone else's capital, and it didn't come from someone's labor either. It was created by fiat.
This is incorrect. Fiat currency does not mean that capital is created by fiat. You had to physically acquire goods from someone else. Liquidity allows that to happen more easily but it does not lead to the creation of capital. That money came from someone elses labor.
False etymologies aside, you can use the term 'capitalism' in your sense, but at best that renders it nondescriptive; it causes the term to encompass too many vastly different economic systems for the term to be useful.
At worst, that use of the term 'capitalism' is a strategic ploy to reify capitalism as a system much more fundamental than it is;
No. The definition exists so that you argue against the position taken by the actual people who consider themselves capitalist and what they believe in.
If you want to argue against a strawman i cannot stop you. But i do not have to respect your position.
By "actual people who consider themselves capitalist" you mean, "Me, Goumindong, high arbiter of unsourced definitions."
Man i don't know what to tell you. This shit isn't unknown. You can go and read modern capitalist thought and that is the definition you will get from that reading. I am not a high arbiter of definitions but i am fairly steeped in the practice of capitalism.
Also, loans are an interesting example because we just make up money now. A loan is not a transfer of capital anymore, it's 90% creation of capital. My wife started a side business with our COVID checks. That didn't come from someone else's capital, and it didn't come from someone's labor either. It was created by fiat.
This is incorrect. Fiat currency does not mean that capital is created by fiat. You had to physically acquire goods from someone else. Liquidity allows that to happen more easily but it does not lead to the creation of capital. That money came from someone elses labor.
'In a fractional reserve banking system, new money is generated when banks offer loans to customers' is undergraduate level, my good man. There are great online continuing education courses in basic econ these days.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Also, loans are an interesting example because we just make up money now. A loan is not a transfer of capital anymore, it's 90% creation of capital. My wife started a side business with our COVID checks. That didn't come from someone else's capital, and it didn't come from someone's labor either. It was created by fiat.
This is incorrect. Fiat currency does not mean that capital is created by fiat. You had to physically acquire goods from someone else. Liquidity allows that to happen more easily but it does not lead to the creation of capital. That money came from someone elses labor.
'In a fractional reserve banking system, new money is generated when banks offer loans to customers' is undergraduate level, my good man. There are great online continuing education courses in basic econ these days.
My disingenuous goose i know that. But that does not mean what you think it means. For one, the money creation system involves buying bonds. So this is "capital neutral" as it were. Its trading long term loans for short term liquidity. When the US has a deficit, it borrows money on the bond market. That money is the money that goes for things like covid checks. Or it taxes that money. That money is from someones taxes. Either way, its "someone elses". This is a physical reality of economics. The sum total of stuff that everyone does in a year cannot be violated. Capital is not created from fiat.
That being said I could maybe have been more strict. You bought something with the money. The thing the money bought came from someone elses labor. I mentioned that. But maybe i could have used capital in the last sentence
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
This part is so frequently ignored by capitalists. "Well it's not just the laborers that create the product, they need the machine, and that guy who owns the machine provides it!"
Yeah ok, who built the machine though? Who came up with its idea? What previous machines and ideas did it build off of? What scientific advancements were necessary for it to be engineered? How were the engineers educated in their trade - who taught them, and at whose expense?
The machine is the common heritage of humanity.
Yeah, no, another guy built it with another machine, all the way down to the extraction of the ore. It's the twenty-first century. Everything, and I do mean everything, is produced via capital investment first and labor second.
i can see why capitalists want to frame it this way when their accrued capital was mostly extracted via genocidal white supremacist policy, but that doesn't make the capital any less derived from slave labor
"Getting a bank loan" is not exactly something a reasonable person is going to accept as "extraction via genocidal white supremacist policy," Giggles.
shit, remind me why historically redlined districts exist again? we don't gotta go back to pre-emancipation
it's like y'all don't even remember cory booker's campaign
Cool. How about someone with a factory in Greece? The United States is not the world, and its particular failures are not generalizable.
Right, Europe definitely never benefited from genocidal white supremacy or colonialism.
Greece was literally under Ottoman Imperial rule for four hundred years and were definitely never even a minor colonial power. Might want to try again?
Greece is the ur-white-colonizer. Greece is the genesis of western civilization. What are you talking about???
Goum maybe when at least three or four different people across nearly 20 pages of thread tell you that you are incorrect about what defines Capitalism, and further go on to suggest your definition is overly broad to the point of encompassing all human commerce, maybe that means your definition is not correct.
Your definition is beginning to sound less like economic theory and more as an article of faith. Like back among the Christians I’d grow up with who’d argue Christianity wasn’t a religion, it was a relationship
False etymologies aside, you can use the term 'capitalism' in your sense, but at best that renders it nondescriptive; it causes the term to encompass too many vastly different economic systems for the term to be useful.
At worst, that use of the term 'capitalism' is a strategic ploy to reify capitalism as a system much more fundamental than it is;
No. The definition exists so that you argue against the position taken by the actual people who consider themselves capitalist and what they believe in.
If you want to argue against a strawman i cannot stop you. But i do not have to respect your position.
By "actual people who consider themselves capitalist" you mean, "Me, Goumindong, high arbiter of unsourced definitions."
Man i don't know what to tell you. This shit isn't unknown. You can go and read modern capitalist thought and that is the definition you will get from that reading. I am not a high arbiter of definitions but i am fairly steeped in the practice of capitalism.
The concept of “capitalism” includes a reference to markets, but as a socio-economic system, it is broader; its defining feature is the private ownership of capital (see e.g., Scott 2011). This typically leads to pressures to find profitable investment opportunities and to asymmetries between owners and non-owners of capital. Markets are a core element of capitalism, but in principle they can also exist in societies in which the ownership of capital is organized differently (see e.g., Carens 1981 for a proposal that builds on “moral incentives”; for the debate about “market socialism” in general see e.g., Bardhan/Roemer 1993).
Archaeologists who study commercial economies can be divided into those who define their focus of study as 'markets' and those who study 'capitalism,' as most edited volumes and review essays focus on archaeological approaches to either markets or capitalism. Part of the division is chronological: archaeologists concerned with markets tend to study periods before 1500, while those concerned with capitalism tend to study later periods.
Capitalism is often characterized as a 'market economy', with markets the defining feature, and anything that reduces their scope is apt to be seen as a threat or impediment to the system. This gives the impression that markets have a bond with capitalism and only came to the fore during the capitalist era. Yet markets were well established in pre-capitalist economies and are not uniquely capitalist, so a market interpretation of capitalism will fail to distinguish it from other economic arrangements. The extended realm of markets was building upon organized trade that had existed for many centuries.
...
Rather than being just the spread of markets, capitalism imposed wider social and economic changes from new ownership structures, production methods, work discipline, and consumption patterns.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Goum maybe when at least three or four different people across nearly 20 pages of thread tell you that you are incorrect about what defines Capitalism, and further go on to suggest your definition is overly broad to the point of encompassing all human commerce, maybe that means your definition is not correct.
Your definition is beginning to sound less like economic theory and more as an article of faith. Like back among the Christians I’d grow up with who’d argue Christianity wasn’t a religion, it was a relationship
Listen, let's be clear about something, many more people disagree with you, it's just Goum has the patience of a saint to keep engaging with your non-replies and now he's getting dogpiled as mostly communists are bothering to reply.
The sheer hypocrisy of claiming his position is dogmatic compared to yours is just so ridiculous.
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Just as a coop is a form of common ownership so is a corporation a form of common ownership. Yet we do not say that corporations are anti-capitalist.
A society that is strictly organized along worker coops then that probably would not be what is meant by "privately owned" by smith. Because the state (or lack of state or whatever) is enforcing that capital be owned in that manner. But the existence of a coop itself is not such a breach. It would be the prevention of other forms of capital organizing that would be the breach. If people want to organize in that manner they would be free to privately own property in that manner is something that smith would be likely to have said. If he was writing in a time when worker owned coops were a "thing" people were arguing about. (i cannot find any quotes about smith regarding worker coops and do not want to re-read his work just to like, figure out if he did. I've found some stuff from the smith institute but its not the same)
https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
maybe? personally i don't see anything stopping a communist planned economy from continuing to use currency as an exchange and store of value for goods, a pure barter economy is pretty hard to do, and idk that even most communists would want the exact apportionment of their labor value, luxury spending, whatever you want to call it, to be allocated exactly the same as everybody else's
but i'm very much not a communist because i don't think you can plan an economy to a degree where you don't miss something, eventually, to catastrophic ends
i think a more centrally structured communist government could coexist just fine with anarchist or syndicalist zones, so long as there's free movement, and i think that that parallel economy that handles some of the things that do less well with top heavy planning and administration would provide resiliency when the planned economy wobbles
the biggest obstacle between us and that kind of society is the artificial scarcity that capital creates to squeeze profit
Don't worry about it Funsworth, Heffling is playing calvin ball here. Remember, according to him, explaining that slavery is one method upon which people are forced to produce labor under both communist(Vanguard) and capitalist societies (historically) is the same as advocating for it.
But maybe not? Should worker cooperatives in the context of markets be best understood as having socialist and capitalist aspects, rather than trying to place them firmly in one category or the other?
Marx can say things relating to the ideological descendants of marx sure. You are free to utilize marx to say what is and isn't of that descent.
But capitalism really is the ideological descendant of Smith. The capitalist utilize that form of thinking. They follow in those footsteps. The things that unite them are the ideological constructions that he started(or at least popularized, smith didn't create markets he thought they were swell and that they were the reason why some nations were more wealthy than others). And that means markets. And... they use markets.. like all the fucking time.
This is why when my use of the term dictatorship of the proletariat was brought up i cited Marx. This is why when discussing marxist labor theory i cited marx. Marx is relevant to those things. But not to define who the capitalists are or what they believe.
Nah, Smith’s dead. We can criticize his theory, and the nightmare it’s foisted upon our present, to our heart’s content. His zombie ain’t shambling after us for it.
It’s kind of like Christians in America
On paper, sure, it’s a faith that believes in the redemptive sacrifice of God Incarnate and is dedicated to the practice of doing well by your fellow.
In widespread American practice it’s a shoddy dime store mask worn by white supremacy to lend itself the airs of divinity
Mercantilism utilized markets. Manorialism utilized markets. Market socialism utilizes markets.
If utilization and existence of markets are a sufficient component of capitalism, then we must conclude that mercantilism - you know, that economic system that Adam Smith was criticizing - was capitalist.
Well, maybe it was. Perhaps Smith was wrong in his defin -- sorry, my assistant is in my earpiece informing me that Adam Smith did not in fact define capitalism. Just kidding, I don't have an earpiece nor an assistant. However I have actually read Wealth of Nations. Smith's arguments gave rise to modern capitalism, but he neither defined nor even used the term. That honor goes to William Thackeray, in his novel The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family. Never heard of him? That's okay. Neither had I, until I started reading modern Marxist and leftist texts.
False etymologies aside, you can use the term 'capitalism' in your sense, but at best that renders it nondescriptive; it causes the term to encompass too many vastly different economic systems for the term to be useful.
At worst, that use of the term 'capitalism' is a strategic ploy to reify capitalism as a system much more fundamental than it is; after all, if a phenomena that has been around since the first day a homo sapiens used shiny rocks or shells to measure the value of fish they were bartering to a neanderthal in exchange for meat is the defining feature of capitalism, then it leads us to a logical conclusion that capitalism is a defining feature of humanity itself. Perhaps you don't mean this, but I've seen plenty of Libertarians and anarchocapitalists attempt this conflation.
A much more fruitful framework: The utilization of markets is a necessary component of capitalism, but it is not a sufficient component of capitalism. If it's capitalist, it involves markets. But if it involves markets, it may or may not be capitalist.
They kinda do. Nobody remembers Thackeray. After all, you certainly didn't.
The modern use of 'capitalism' to refer to the post-mercantile economic system of Europe was popularized by Marx more than any other single writer, and spread by Marxists more than any other movement.
There are two definitions of capitalism that I find useful. Both are extensions of Marxist and post-Marxist leftist thought.
The economic definition: capitalism is an economic system where capital owners and laborers are separate classes of people. In this sense, a worker cooperative is not 'capitalist', as the workers own the capital. (Granted, a sole proprietorship with no employees but the owner is also not necessarily 'capitalist', unless the owner is hoping to someday sell his stake in the business and collect dividends as an owner or investor.) 'State capitalism' correctly describes an economic system where the government owns capital and does not share that ownership with its workers.
The political definition: capitalism is a political system where political power is consolidated among capital owners, and non-owners are de facto disenfranchised. I use this definition when engaging in discussions with non-economists, because I think it reflects the motivations behind popular anti-capitalist sentiments of the day. Therein we see frustration at American oligarchy; at the perception (and reality) that our political system is deeply distorted by moneyed interests at all levels, and that the only way to secure a halfway decent quality of life for yourself is to somehow break in to the capital-owning class, whether that's through stock options or buying real estate.
We can argue (and I have argued quite a bit elsewhere) over whether those two definitions are, to quote the Office meme, the same picture. Regardless, they're both far more useful and far more reflective of how these terms are actually used than pretending that capitalism is anything where markets are.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
"Getting a bank loan" is not exactly something a reasonable person is going to accept as "extraction via genocidal white supremacist policy," Giggles.
shit, remind me why historically redlined districts exist again? we don't gotta go back to pre-emancipation
it's like y'all don't even remember cory booker's campaign
Off the top of my head, there are damn few places on Earth where mineral rights on a plot of land were sold by the first residents on an open and free market, or one where the first residents took a bank loan of their own free will to obtain extraction machinery so they could then sell that ore on an open and free market.
The entirety of North America is off the table, given that any mineral rights we're talking about are on land taken from Natives. Most of South America as well, except those few places where people have actively (and often violently) resisted colonization.
Perhaps aluminum mining in Iceland, maybe. Arguably. Some of the tiny mining operations in Japan, perhaps.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Cool. How about someone with a factory in Greece? The United States is not the world, and its particular failures are not generalizable.
Where are the resources the factory uses being sourced from?
Like, that’s the thing Monwyn; the global north is benefiting from the, often slave-conditions, exploitation of the global south.
You can’t just say “ignore America!” cause it’s the sin of the whole rotten system. That’s the horror of global capital!
The only place virtually free of it is that one island where they kill you if you try to even get near it
Right, Europe definitely never benefited from genocidal white supremacy or colonialism.
Greece's manufacturing industry is highly reliant on its chief imports, oil and petroleum. These imports come in by way of Germany, but the majority originate in Russia. Russia's top oil-producing region is West Siberia, which was annexed by military power under Russian imperialism from the sparsely-populated (and often competing) tribes that lived there previously (themselves filling a void left by the collapse of the Mongol Empire). These regions were further developed by forced labor of political exiles under both tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, and today Russia's somehow-dirtier-than-average(-and-that's-a-really-low-bar) oil industry has been bleeding pollutants into the environment and wrecking the natural resources that the indigenous peoples of Siberia rely on to survive.
Perhaps, on a technicality, you might say "a ha! that's not white supremacy, that's just (sparkling) imperialism!" Regardless, owning a factory in Greece, even if you treat your immediate employees well, requires you to obtain your raw materials from places where modern superpowers have wrenched the land and those resources from people who were previously (or currently) living there.
Does that make the factory owner a bad person? Not necessarily. But when people say "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism," this is a good example.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This whole line of argument(besides seeming pretty irrelevant) has a pretty shakily level of congruence with communism.
As a communist revolution wouldn't actually return any of these things to them, as the concept of them being theirs at all is fundamentally incompatible with the lack of private property.
The Government seizing first peoples land(along with everyone elses) and making it federal land is one of the first steps of communist.
Also, loans are an interesting example because we just make up money now. A loan is not a transfer of capital anymore, it's 90% creation of capital. My wife started a side business with our COVID checks. That didn't come from someone else's capital, and it didn't come from someone's labor either. It was created by fiat.
Greece was literally under Ottoman Imperial rule for four hundred years and were definitely never even a minor colonial power. Might want to try again?
Weird reverse American Exceptionalism
You know dude, everyone in here is mostly having a polite conversation, and some are even learning things, and the situation is not helped by you wading in here and flapping your dick around and attacking folks, no matter how fly your Always Sunny references are.
I'm not saying this as a mod, I'm saying it as a member of a community that I would like to make not abjectly miserable.
And if you'd like to respond to this, please do so via PM, so as not to drag this thread off topic. Thanks.
This is "thoughts and prayers" for economic struggles because you're unwilling to engage in the work necessary due to your own complacency and material conditions.
I'm not a communist, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I'm not a communist, partly, for a reason congruent to your criticism here. I don't think we can get from point A (private ownership of capital) to point B (collectivization of capital) without atrocities. More accurately, eventually somebody gets tired of waiting for the machinery of history to put late-stage capitalism out of its misery and tries to hurry it along, and whoops you just made state capitalism.
I might be wrong about that. It could be a fruitful line of argument.
However, that's not going to stop me from criticizing the political and economic system in which we live. Alexander Rustow once said something like (paraphrased), "We agree with Marxists and socialists in their conviction that capitalism is untenable and needs to be overcome. However, we reject the errors which Marx has adopted in his predictions." (This is not an exact quote, nor is it an unqualified endorsement of Rustow's ideas.) Or Martin Luther King, "Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both."
(I now need to go put a quarter in my "white guys shouldn't quote MLK" jar.)
I'm mostly interested in fixing the issues we face right now, in the year 2022 and in the immediate foreseeable future. Ecological collapse, climate change, economic inequality, shitty health-eroding workplaces, exploitation of indigenous peoples, anti-Black racism in the US. Far from being "irrelevant" as you say (a bizarre criticism, to be blunt), these problems are products of, or at least deeply intertwined with, our global economic system. We need to dramatically alter our economic system, and we need to do it yesterday.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This seems to presuppose the only solution to those issues is communism, which is as yet only an assertion. (It also seems to presuppose the only possible source of resistance to communism is personal failing and selfishness, which I don't find to be accurate or compelling as an argument.)
No. The definition exists so that you argue against the position taken by the actual people who consider themselves capitalist and what they believe in.
If you want to argue against a strawman i cannot stop you. But i do not have to respect your position.
I would too. But in the vein of the Onion meme, "the worst person you know just made a good point" Bill Maher observed that the rich aren't candy machines, they're pinatas. They only drop their goodies when you beat them with sticks.
Is that a metaphor. Far be it from me to advocate violence. That's against the rules, anyhow.
But we can't fix any of these problems without organizing, and you know who knows how to organize? Labor activists. Unions. People who have read Jane McAlevey and Saul Alinsky. And guess what? A lot of these people have read Lenin, too. (The royal) we really need to get over our belief that change comes from voting once every two years and bitching each other out online in between, channel our inner Gimli, and say 'I never thought I'd get pepper-sprayed fighting side by side with a Leninist.'
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
By "actual people who consider themselves capitalist" you mean, "Me, Goumindong, high arbiter of unsourced definitions."
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
My good dude, on this very page you attempted to lump worker owned cooperatives with a modern corporate structure. Dont get stingy on sticking to definitions now.
This is incorrect. Fiat currency does not mean that capital is created by fiat. You had to physically acquire goods from someone else. Liquidity allows that to happen more easily but it does not lead to the creation of capital. That money came from someone elses labor.
Man i don't know what to tell you. This shit isn't unknown. You can go and read modern capitalist thought and that is the definition you will get from that reading. I am not a high arbiter of definitions but i am fairly steeped in the practice of capitalism.
Tell me you don't understand monetary policy without telling me that you don't understand monetary policy.
'In a fractional reserve banking system, new money is generated when banks offer loans to customers' is undergraduate level, my good man. There are great online continuing education courses in basic econ these days.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
My disingenuous goose i know that. But that does not mean what you think it means. For one, the money creation system involves buying bonds. So this is "capital neutral" as it were. Its trading long term loans for short term liquidity. When the US has a deficit, it borrows money on the bond market. That money is the money that goes for things like covid checks. Or it taxes that money. That money is from someones taxes. Either way, its "someone elses". This is a physical reality of economics. The sum total of stuff that everyone does in a year cannot be violated. Capital is not created from fiat.
That being said I could maybe have been more strict. You bought something with the money. The thing the money bought came from someone elses labor. I mentioned that. But maybe i could have used capital in the last sentence
Greece is the ur-white-colonizer. Greece is the genesis of western civilization. What are you talking about???
Your definition is beginning to sound less like economic theory and more as an article of faith. Like back among the Christians I’d grow up with who’d argue Christianity wasn’t a religion, it was a relationship
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Is this a bit
This is a bit isn’t it
Listen, let's be clear about something, many more people disagree with you, it's just Goum has the patience of a saint to keep engaging with your non-replies and now he's getting dogpiled as mostly communists are bothering to reply.
The sheer hypocrisy of claiming his position is dogmatic compared to yours is just so ridiculous.
"Is this a bit" ?