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XiphosAletheria t1_j1zupow wrote

Reply to comment by lilbluehair in Life is a game we play without ever knowing the rules: Camus, absurdist fiction, and the paradoxes of existence. by IAI_Admin

>You're honestly saying that people profiting from others' labor aren't excelling at the expense of others?

Outside of slave societies, this never happens. Why would someone labor to profit another when they could just profit themselves? People sometimes sell their labor to others, as one component of what that other person is making, but there the trades are generally fair.

>There is no such thing as infinite growth. The wealth of first world nations absolutely came at the expense of the resources and labor of less advantaged nations.

Nonsense. There's more to wealth than just resources. If you don't believe me, just smash up your phone and try to trade it for an unbroken one - after all, it's the same amount of plastic and metal either way.

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Funoichi t1_j20531c wrote

>Why would someone labor to profit another?

>This never happens

It happens every single day. It’s called work. What benefit do I get if a store or a business succeeds? Nothing. It’s the submission of one’s own goals before that of another. It’s exploitative because the employee receives less value than is produced by their labor. People work because they have to, it’s a captive audience and there is nothing fair about these arrangements.

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XiphosAletheria t1_j206vkk wrote

>It happens every single day. It’s called work. What benefit do I get if a store or a business succeeds?

You continue to have an organization you can sell your labor to. If it fails, you won't, and then you starve.

> It’s the submission of one’s own goals before that of another. It’s exploitative because the employee receives less value than is produced by their labor.

No, they recieve exactly the value of their labor. If you were receiving less than the value of your labor, you would sell it to someone else, instead.

>People work because they have to, it’s a captive audience and there is nothing fair about these arrangements.

Yes, right, you have to work to eat, because food needs to be produced before it can be consumed, and you have to work to get shelter, because houses have to be built before they can be lived in, and you have to work to clothe yourself, because clothes have to be manufactured before they can be worn. But this isn't some terrible unfairness that only occurs under capitalism. That is the nature of reality itself, and would remain true under any economic system.

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Funoichi t1_j209jyz wrote

Incorrect. Workers have no attachment to a particular workplace and always have the option of working somewhere else. The success or failure of any particular business is immaterial to the workers.

If I work at a bookstore and sell 10 $10 books, I do not receive $100. That’s what it means for a worker to receive the full value of the work they do. What would the business owner get under this arrangement, don’t know, the value of whatever books they sell also.

Business owners are not entitled to one cent of the value their employees produce. Maybe take 10 percent off for upkeep of the business, other than that, the workers should be getting the same value as they produce.

There’s many other proposed economic systems. Food being produced == food having a cost. You left that part out. X being produced is the part that has to do with the nature of reality. X having a monetary cost is artificial.

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Ibbot t1_j20gabf wrote

In the world where you sell ten $10 books and get paid, $100, does the store not pay the people who clean, stock the shelves, make sure the registers work, etc? Or is it just required to operate at a massive loss? What about other factors of production, like utilities?

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Funoichi t1_j20iqao wrote

Certainly I don’t want employers earning a profit off of the work of their employees. Certainly no more than they are making at maximum.

The value that each person contributes would have to be tallied and paid in full. It was a simplistic example.

Someone receives the books and someone buys new ones, I guess you have to chop the value of each book sold into pieces.

That’s kind of a coop model. Then if you want to go full socialism, the workers own the means of production so there’s no books to buy or utilities to pay.

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ammonium_bot t1_j26k8bq wrote

> and payed in

Did you mean to say "paid"?
Explanation: Payed means to seal something with wax, while paid means to give money.
Total mistakes found: 211
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VitriolicViolet t1_j2210t9 wrote

operate at a loss? no the boss just pays themself the same amount as they pay their employees.

its how i run my business, im not doing any extra work and im not the one risking homelessness so why i do i deserve all the rewards and the employees a pittance?

ever heard of Mondragon? largest worker coop is fucking Huawei, you dont need a traditional top-down ruled corporate structure to succeed, at all (as much as the Americans here would like to claim otherwise, they routinely try to claim huawei isnt a worker owned coop cause 'muh ccp')

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Ibbot t1_j2219yd wrote

>operate at a loss? no the boss just pays themself the same amount as they pay their employees.

Their hypothetical involved every cent of revenue going to paying sales employees, leaving nothing left for paying other employees/expenses, let alone profits. As they acknowledged in their reply to me.

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XiphosAletheria t1_j20hmq2 wrote

>If I work at a bookstore and sell 10 $10 books, I do not receive $100. That’s what it means for a worker to receive the full value of the work they do. What would the business owner get under this arrangement, don’t know, the value of whatever books they sell also.

Then you have merely failed to understand the value of labor. The value of the labor of a clerk at a bookstore is not equal to value of the books she sells. The value of the book is precisely the sum of the values added by the author, the publisher, the distributors, the bookstore, and, yes, even the sales clerk. She gets compensated for her portion of that value.

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Funoichi t1_j20jwfa wrote

And the ceo of the company gets their share, right? No they get significantly more.

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who519 t1_j1zw72w wrote

Ok, so let's say your are google, and you create this wonderful thing that meets an unmet need and makes you a ton of money. Then others see they could do something similar to make their own market share...you know what happens next, google/apple/coca-cola/mcdonalds etc...etc...do everything they can to annihilate the competition. They don't want to share that market, they want to own that market. Literally anything that threatens their growth will be destroyed, including politicians.

Capitalism even if you ignore its abuse of workers has to provide Profit to shareholders. The only way to continually get profits is to cut the costs that actually make your product good, healthy, useful etc... etc... So the endgame for the consumer is a shittier more dangerous product. Greed runs it all into the ground eventually.

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XiphosAletheria t1_j1zyxe0 wrote

I mean, I'm not sure that your own examples don't disprove your point. McDonald's has plenty of competion - even within the fast food subset of restaurants. So does Coke. Even Google has a solid list of alternatives you can quickly find by using Google.

There are specific markets that tend towards natural monopolies, and these generally need some form of regulation to keep whatever company gets that monopoly in check. And of course individual actors within capitalism can behave badly, and need to be policed as humans always do. But there's a reason all the wealthiest countries use some version of regulated capitalism instead of some other system, and that's because once you understand that wealth is something to be produced and grown rather than a limited thing to be fought over, society gets a hell of a lot better.

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Garacious t1_j203t4f wrote

What i dont understand is, in order for you to produce wealth, someone else needs to lose that same amount of wealth. In that case how can wealth be something that can be produced infinitely?

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XiphosAletheria t1_j205nkd wrote

>What i dont understand is, in order for you to produce wealth, someone else needs to lose that same amount of wealth.

But that isn't true. If you sit down and write a good book, you have created something valuable that didn't exist before. The same is true if you program a videogame. Or write a hit song. And so on. There are plenty of ways to make society (and yourself) richer without someone else losing wealth. Likewise, the value of your phone lies less in the material resources that make it up and the labor put into to arranging those resources and more in the ingenuity of the idea behind how to arrange those resources. The same is true of most of the material goods we collectively would call "wealth".

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Garacious t1_j207ik6 wrote

But when you write a song or a movie, its not like it has some inherent value to it. You assign some value to it and if enough people agree on the value you placed, you can sell that thing to generate wealth. Just because we assigned some abstract value to these things, does not mean it creates wealth out of nowhere. If people dont agree on the value you placed, they will not give you their wealth and you will not be producing wealth.

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XiphosAletheria t1_j209a7h wrote

>But when you write a song or a movie, its not like it has some inherent value to it.

So? Nothing has inherent value to it. That doesn't mean you can't creste things people will find valuable.

>You assign some value to it and if enough people agree on the value you placed, you can sell that thing to generate wealth.

Yes, right.

>Just because we assigned some abstract value to these things, does not mean it creates wealth out of nowhere.

Of course it does. That is what all wealth is - stuff that people assigned an abstract value to. To create wealth you labor to create something or to do something that either a) at least a few people will put a high value on or b) that a lot of people will put a low value on.

>If people dont agree on the value you placed, they will not give you their wealth and you will not be producing wealth.

Sure, yes, of course. You might try to write a good book and produce crap. You might try to grow a crop of potatoes and overwater them so they all die. You might dig up a bunch of shiny rocks and discover no one wants them. You might compose a song and find no one wants to listen to it.

I said wealth can be produced and grown. I never said you personally had the skill and talent necessary to produce it, or that every effort to do so would succeed. Creating wealth is difficult. It has to be, because economic value is largely a function of scarcity.

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Garacious t1_j20absv wrote

What im trying to say is, wealth and value are seperate things. Of course wealth can be produced and grown, im not arguing that. But to produce that wealth, first someone needs to agree on the value you placed on something, and they need to actually give you their wealth in order for you to produce it. Can you answer me how can one generate wealth, or money, without someone else giving up their own wealth?

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XiphosAletheria t1_j20i9li wrote

>What im trying to say is, wealth and value are seperate things. Of course wealth can be produced and grown, im not arguing that. But to produce that wealth, first someone needs to agree on the value you placed on something, and they need to actually give you their wealth in order for you to produce it.

Why? You don't normally pay the author of a book you buy for the book before you buy it, do you?

>Can you answer me how can one generate wealth, or money, without someone else giving up their own wealth?

The same way one produces anything - through their own productive effort.

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Garacious t1_j20j91a wrote

Okay let me ask something else, what do you think wealth is? Cause i feel like we are talking about completely different things. When i say wealth, i mean the money (or the capital) you own and i think a lot of people will agree with me on that. Also for the book example, you know preordering is a thing right?

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XiphosAletheria t1_j20lufh wrote

Money isn't wealth - it's just a symbol for it, so you don't have to barter item for item. Wealth is what the money stands for - which is basically anything people are willing to trade you for.

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Garacious t1_j20n53r wrote

So... capital. Money is a symbol for capital. Its amazing how much of a selective reader you are. Also if you read your own comment a few more times you can see that trade is an important element of wealth. People trade their wealth with each other, so no one actually creates wealth out of thin air.

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VitriolicViolet t1_j221tw9 wrote

>I mean, I'm not sure that your own examples don't disprove your point. McDonald's has plenty of competion - even within the fast food subset of restaurants. So does Coke. Even Google has a solid list of alternatives you can quickly find by using Google.

you realise that half those examples own the competition right? the companies that own coke also own some 50% of global beverages (the other global player being the owners of suntory).

all markets tend toward monopoly, its the entire inevitable end point of capitalistic growth. all wealthy people want more wealth and the easiest way to get it is not innovation or competition but bribery, nepotism and corruption. as a class they bribe gov (hence why its so slow and inefficient, its paid to be) to give them access to captive markets and grant them regulatory capture to crush actual competition.

wealth is less produced and grown and more gamified and almost purely speculative (massive growth in the most captive markets ie food, housing, healthcare, energy and gov keeps letting the wealthy have more and more of it because both sides work for the investment class)

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CreaturesLieHere t1_j209z8o wrote

If you're not under 25, please go work at a restaurant for a couple months or something, this is seriously detached-from-reality thinking. I was in the same boat in my teens, so believe me I understand, but this is outright incorrect and not how capitalism actually works. I'm sure this is how it's described in Atlas Shrugged or whatever, but reality has been twisted by the elites and that's the simplest way I can put it without writing an essay in response.

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