The hidden ugliness of Capitalism

That is your opinion. But if it requires $15/hr to live in an area of high prices, it's what is needed. Or they don't work, or work and collect supplemental income from the gov't.
Those who choose to pay lower, use the gov't to subsidize their wages.

 

If you're going to get into pomo, I could point out that absolutely none of the things we're communicating are material objects and we're just launching an endless series of abstractions at one another with the aim of impacting other abstractions.

Value is a social relation between people.

Labour, too, is a social relation between people.

If a worker does $100 worth of work, he should receive $100 dollars. It's difficult to decide on the worth of a thing, but that's just one of the many internal contradictions of the money system. As it is, capitalism requires that somebody's work materially benefit a capitalist more than themselves, which is unconscionable.

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Capitalism, by definition, cannot give the worker what they deserve, because the capitalist could not make money if he didn't leech off of his workers.

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You're very close to understanding the nature of the problem. Capitalism commodifies human beings in a way not dissimilar to chattel slavery, but forces them to sell themselves and be their own slave drivers.

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You're giving them what you have to in order to keep them around, not the minimum required by law.

And describing the market as doing anything is just idealist nonsense. The market doesn't do anything because it's a description of the material impact of falsely-abstracted economic actions. If everyone were to agree that all real estate was suddenly free, it would be so, despite violating every law that bourgeois economists try to create a hard science with. Because the market is not a natural force, it's something we're all just making up.

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In Marxism, the phrase "Material conditions" describes the real-life impact of something, rather than the ideals behind it. Marxists abhor the idea of history being driven by ideas, because it's driven by very physical things. It comes down to the split between Hegelian Dialectics and Dialectical Materialism.

Modern Marxists call what we're under today "Late Capitalism" because we view this as distinct from earlier forms of capitalism, and also as the beginning of the end. Capitalism is increasingly saturated in abstraction after abstraction, and it's getting to the point where it will soon fail to support its own weight under the contradiction between overproduction and under-distribution.

Human beings are inherently cooperative in nature. This is our evolutionary advantage. We aren't particularly fast or strong, but we're smart and we cooperate, and with these advantages, we can build things far greater than ourselves.

Social Democrats really aren't socialists though. They have no desire to end Capitalism, they just want a strong welfare state.

Right, because there was so much less poverty in the 1890s, before we had any sort of market restrictions.

Oh, wait, we call that time the Gilded Age because there was ridiculous poverty in spite of the massive wealth and advancement of the upper crust of society. I just remembered that.

The market is not a force that can be distorted. It's a material reality formed by relations between people. Your argument is metaphysical idealist nonsense.

Explain homelessness and all of the financial struggle in the first world then.

And Cuba is doing very well for a country that's been embargoed to hell and back for the past half century or so and lost its primary trading partner and economic ally. Most countries would have devolved into constant chaos and starvation by now.

Under socialism, distribution of resources is not done with a profit motive. This failure has taken place due to a characteristic of capitalism.

Congratulations. By exploiting the third world and paying workers pennies a day, I can have a (*)(*)(*)(*)ing pen. This clearly disproves any and all criticism of capitalism.

Do you seriously think that people just walked around the USSR with no writing utensils to speak of all the time?

Under Socialism, you don't need to. You just improve the same product. Having an inferior version of a product available in place of a superior version is an inefficiency of Capitalism.

This is essentially a variation of the "Kids are starving in Africa" argument. Things could be worse, but that's no excuse to settle for this when they could also be better.

The Marxist states of the 20th century vastly improved the living situation of the people within them. People erroneously blame them for famines without taking into account the fact that they managed to make sure that there was never any major famines in those countries again afterward.

The political instability was responsible for some violence, and that's abhorrent, but it was overall a great improvement.

I'm saying that it's naive to think that removing minimum wage laws would do anything but cause capitalists to take advantage of their greater ability to exploit the workers.

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Can any culture be meaningfully said to be superior to another one?

We're very early into the history of Socialism, and Socialist states thus far have done more good than bad. I find it more likely that this violence was a result of circumstance and political instability.

Yes, the economic mismanagement of the 60s-70s eventually resulted in shortages, but this was due to Khrushchev's decision to introduce decentralization and competition into the USSR's economy.

The economic problems people try to point to in order to discredit the USSR wouldn't have happened if the country had stayed on the path of economic centralization.

Someone has to make them, yes. But in a cooperative economy, it all comes back around anyway, so there's no need to depend on a profit motive in order to progress.

Okay. I don't really care.

Industrialization is much less invention and much more building infrastructure and factories.

There was no communist mass murder of the poor. Well, except the Khmer Rouge, and everyone hates the Khmer Rouge. Stalin's regime in the USSR was responsible for sending 800,000 people to the gulags in the purges, roughly 100,000 of which were freed, and most of those people were actually guilty of the crimes they were accused of. The famines in the USSR and the PRC were due to natural disasters exacerbated by some peasants deliberately hampering collectivization efforts (In the USSR, Kulaks destroyed their crops and livestock en masse. In the PRC, people misreported their production numbers in order to look better, and the government exported what they thought was surplus). And the Cultural Revolution got really out of hand in ways that nobody expected.

Yes. Stalin, for all of his faults, managed to take a country that had been devastated by two massive wars in the past 30 years and industrialize it to such an extent that it could handle WWII, while raising literacy and the standard of living of the average worker. This time had some struggles due to the war, but it was overall economically better than post-Khrushchev USSR.

 

Stalin killed millions , the only reason why he was quote-unquote successful was because of FDR's land-lease act and the British giving the Russian technology to modernize their factories.

 

Exactly.

I don't want the cheapest labor either, so the claim that employers will always Pay minimum of given the opportunity was a false claim by that other poster.

 

You just proved my point.

In a mere couple hundred years we have economically surpassed a country that has been around forever, who is doing everything they can to mimic us.

 

Actually, no. Even a person alone on a desert island values things. He might value vines because he can use them to make a net, for example.

Again, no. A person on a desert island could use his body and a pile of vines to construct a net. In otherwords a person on a desert island can labor.

Agreed. If a person agrees to perform some particular service for an agreed-upon price of $100, he should, upon completion of that service receive the $100.

Not really. Every day each of us demonstrate that they can determine the worth of one thing relative to the next. One buys a coke rather than a pepsi, demonstrating that the coke is worth more to him than the pepsi. One trades an apple for someone's orange, demonstrating that the orange is worth more to him than the apple.

You haven't demonstrated any contradictions of the money system.

No it doesn't. Under capitalism, workers can form their own worker owned business and reap 100% of the benefits. Capitalism doesn't prevent this.

 

You didn't answer my question.

What wage do they deserve?

 

That value is irrelevant in the economic sense until someone else enters the picture.

And that labour doesn't become economically relevant until someone else enters the picture.

The problem is that this agreement will invariably be designed to cause the worker to produce more than $100 for the capitalist, which means that he's not receiving the full value of his labour.

The contradiction is that it is in many ways both objective and subjective, prescriptive and descriptive.

It can happen. Does it? Rarely. And does it help the people who don't have that opportunity? No.

 

Everybody sells their skills and experience.

It doesn't matter if it's a sole proprietor, an employor, or an employee.

This doesn't make somebody an slave, it makes an person valuable to another.

 

A baker wouldn't make money if he didn't leech off the miller.

A carpenter wouldn't make money if he didn't leech off the lumberman.

A tailor wouldn't make money if he didn't leech off the weaver.

See how ridiculous your position sounds?

 

The most fundamental economic system, and the one that predates all others, barter and trade, depends on market values of commodities driven by supply and demand.

I believe that the value of a horse is not arbitrary. You can try and convince a horse sales man all day that one of his horses is worth the same as a potato sack. You won't win that argument and you won't be trading for a horse.

Just like you can try and convince me all day long that one's labor is worth something other than market value.

Or, you can deny market value even exists.

But go back to barter and trade and try to make that argument, and you will become a very hungry person.

 

False. Economics is the science of how people make choices in the face of scarcity. These choices are driven by what a person values.

Again, false. A person has only one set of hands and can only perform one form of labor at a time. He must choose how to best use these scarce means to achieve his ends. Again, we see economics in action.

Produce more than $100? The employer is not asking the worker to produce money. The employer is giving the worker money in exchange for performing a particular task. No money is "produced" by the performance of said task.

What is "it"?

It might serve you well to consider why this is.

Who doesn't have such an opportunity?

 

Most people who live in socialist societies do not make $50 a day. It is MUCH lower.

 

I will help you to understand the ridiculousness of this statement by asking you this question: Which item "has" more value, a five gallon bucket of clean, drinkable water or a one carat diamond?

After you've thought about that, I'll repeat my assertion that value is subjective, meaning each of us assigns a value to a particular thing based upon how we think that thing will help us achieve our ends. Nothing has intrinsic value.

 

Marx was cerebral. He never bothered about practical issues.

 

The value doesn't become economically relevant until groups of people try to distribute these resources in different ways. The material reality of how these resources are distributed can be objectively measured and used to approximate value.

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Bourgeois economists too often try to extrapolate these things into universal laws, as if they were natural scientists.

When you're concerned with the way societies distribute resources, it really doesn't matter how these things operate in island hypotheticals.

In a capitalist system, all labour translates into material resources. Currency is both an abstraction and a material resource. When one performs labour, it translates into some form of material impact that can be given a currency value.

Now that I think about it, this really doesn't matter and I don't understand why I'm discussing it when I could just bring up the fact that a capitalist must by definition live off of other people's work.

Money.

Because we live under the dictatorship of capital and most people with the resources required to produce capital have no interest in establishing worker cooperatives?

There isn't enough positions for all workers to work in cooperatives under a capitalist system, and these are too far from many workers.

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Capitalism isn't just markets.

Pretty much everything is arbitrary. To my frustration, nothing I do will ever have objective value and I can never have perfect clarity, and this is the same with all people. We're all condemned to ambiguity and everything is kafkaesque.

Or, we could establish Socialism and end hunger.

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The baker does actual work and contributes to the community, and he deserves to be taken care of.

So do these occupations.


Owning things, however, is not work, and does not contribute to the community. If you make a living by owning the means of production that other people work, you're a bourgeois parasite on the community.

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As I said, capitalism commodifies people.

 

The miller sells his flour to the baker for $100 and the baker turns around and sells the bread produced by the flour for $300. The baker is robbing $200 from the miller.

Come to think of it, the miller buys wheat from the farmer for $20 and sells the flour produced by that wheat for $100. So he's stealing $80 from the farmer.

 

Come to think of it, I really don't care about these things because they aren't a concern under Socialism.

 

Really? If I build a sewing machine and rent it to a tailor so he can produce 10 shirts a day instead of the one he could produce by hand, I'm not contributing to society?

 

The tailor is contributing to society using your machine. Your contribution was the machine. That's it.

 

So the fact that my machine allows him to produce nine more shirts in a week than previously doesn't help society, who need shirts?

 

And what's wrong with that?

Expecting that every brings some value to the collective?

 

Sorry no Marx did not think, sir, he felt and then tried to explain reality in a way that suited his feelings.This is a mistake quite common on the left of the political divide.

 

Not true. The JURY is still out. We may be gone in another 100 yrs. Material wealth doesn't mean it's the best. Whatever China has been doing for 3000 yrs must be working. How many other countries have been around that long?

 

Being that their society has such longevity, should we not take it as a compliment that they are mimicking our economic system?