Removed
This video explains the differences between all the associated and commonly conflated terms pretty well.
Good post, Peter.
The following is my favourite argument against the idea that an employee ought to emerge from a life of employment with a more equal share of the earnings of the company/companies they’ve worked for:
“The employer is risking a capital investment when employees are not, they have to found the business and organise all the management, and such skills are worth more than the workers’ due to there being a higher supply of workers and therefore less of a demand.”
Entirely circular - since there’s only a lower supply and higher demand of/for employers because the above “justification” ensures relatively fewer employees can earn enough to afford any capital to risk investing in the first place, whether they have the same skills or not - they so often never get to use them. It’s a different skillset anyway - to manage versus producing goods/services under management, meaning many employers would not be able to earn back their capital if the tables were turned, even with the support network that they are more likely to have already grown into that employers tend not to have had.
But at least the above argument has some basis in reality, unlike my least favourite argument - that all these associated ideas have been tried and tested and failed catastrophically.
The reason that this is my least favourite is because not only does it so distastefully take the lives of so many incredibly unfortunate people in vain just for the sake of a cheap jab, it shows complete and utter ignorance of terminology and absolute dimwitted gullibility in the face of ideological indoctrination. Why picking up a book on the subject and actually reading and independently understanding it is so hard, I don’t know…
one of the arguments for capitalism is the supply and
demand argument… but that argument fails when applied
to workers…as the Obama economy has lasted all through the
IQ45 years and there are less available workers, it should,
by theory drive up incomes because the demand for workers
is greater because there are less out of work workers…
if the unemployment rate is low, then you have to pay more
to get workers to work for you…
but the reality is, the income of people hasn’t risen at all…
the federal minimum wage hasn’t risen to match the
low number of workers available… in other words,
the demand should have driven income much higher,
but the incomes in America hasn’t gone up much at all…
if the federal minimum wage had gone up with inflation,
and the increase in worker productivity, the federal minimum wage
ought to be $18.67… but the today’s federal minimum wages is $7.25…
which is below starvation levels… you can’t survive on $7.25 an hour…
I make 23.00 an hour and I couldn’t survive on my own…
not when rental prices are 1,800 per month for a studio…
so, we must have a system that values the work and productivity of
its workers and it isn’t capitalism which devalues and negate
its workers… which is nihilism… when money become more important
then the workers, that is nihilism…when the the worker and their values
are less important then money/profits…
I can’t state this enough… we workers are devalued and negated because we
have less value then money… that is capitalism… modern nihilism…
Kropotkin
I’m definitely a social capitalist on that scale.
I appreciate the abstraction of currency. Barter economies only work in extremely small scales.
But that ‘work’, simpliciter, is done all the time by wage/salary earners. Every bit of the administrative work done by an ‘owner’… the actual things he does, e.g., book keeping, managing, planning, organizing, etc., is being done by some worker somewhere that is being paid a typical competitive wage for that skill set. That being the case, the capitalist is not worth more, simpliciter, when he does those kinds of things. If you wanted to show that his actual labor is more valuable, you’d have to have him doing something a worker couldn’t do. But the value of that kind of labor - running a company - can’t magically become higher just because a capitalist is doing it.
What’s more, that’s probably the ugliest and most abused, undeserved sense of importance and value that the capitalist has of himself… which is something that contributes to the joke of a character he truly is. The actual contribution the capitalist makes to the chain of production is so incredibly minimal it’s hardly noticed at all. Duddint matter what business your in.
Spengler derated Marx for treating labor as commodity, whereas the former referred to the Protestant german character’s signature of capitalism as conflated with the duty and honor inferred in work.
That the criticality of the change that entailed the former conflation, best defined by a predictable grade of linear continuity, a hyper elevated parabolic exponential stage has resulted with the earlier definition.
Another difference is situated with Spengler’s viewing Marx’s anglosaxon interpretation of conflict inherent in societal class differences.
In essence , Spengler viewed Marx emphasis on the emotional motive he engendered on envy between class differences being the basis motive of social conflict.
The way the chickens come home to roost is likened to the differences that first emerged in national socialism and international socialism, and have again appears to have been resurrected.
Marx, adopting theaterial dialectic co yeasts with Spengler’s more transcendent view, and again shows the misunderstandings arise between pure and practical reason.
That Marxism having fallen from it’s pertch, will Spengler be forever be stained by the horror or misunderstanding that befell national socialism during and after ww2?
That Nietzche retroactivelly went to the same devolving reduction into absurdity. should not come as a surprise to anyone, or, anybody.
While I agree that the way the Right couches (almost anything on one occasion or another) as Marxist and that they generally do not understand ALL THE THINGS Marxism is, Marxism is not just
fair benefits and conditions for workers.
To sum up Marxism that way is to radically simplify Marxism. This makes it sound like Marxism is the goals of good union negotiater, whereas Marxism is critical of capitalism per se, in toto.
And which Marxism are we talking about? There are a number of them out there.
And the revolution of the proletariat? Marx was critical of the idea that reform, within existing systems, could lead to a just society. Revolution and elimination of institutions he considered necessary.
And what is the society Marism (again, which one) is being strived for. It’s not a reform movement within capitalism.
Marxism has aesthetics, an ontology, an intended (depending on the version of Marxism) of a form of government and much more.
And anyone looking at what happens when people identifying as Marxists succeed, especially in large countries, in getting control of the economy, serious problems arise.
I think Marx’s criticism was often spot on. I think the solutions are extremely problematic, even on paper. Once they get enacted by humans all sorts of problems arise.
I dislike the aesthetics in the extreme.
If the title of the thread was ‘what Marxism INCLUDES…’ it would be much better.
And let’s be clear also that the Democrats would fight Marxism as hard as the Repblicans. They are not interested in a Revolution of the proletariat of the nationalizing of important industries. Obama kissed bankers ass. Clinton, take your pick, is a capitalist to the bone. They will toss the proletariat some localized reforms, but that’s it.
Sanders comes the closest of anyone and the Democrat party broke its own rules to fuck up his chances and to make sure their neo-con of choice, hilary, was the nomination.
Prom wrote
How’s about he’s working a full time job outside his company to subsidize the daily expenses of his company and purchase supplies for the first year as well as full time hours plus at his company, he’s using the equity in his home to pay for the first six months of ins., equipment, rent, util., and salaries, plus he has personal loans levied against his vehicle and life insurance policy to cover some of the expenses for the second six months. I don’t understand why you guys don’t get the idea of risk versus reward. Risk it for the biscuit, but most complainers don’t have the balls to go all in. Already listed three things that workers are not doing or offering to do to compete with the labor of the owner which stretches back to all his earnings, savings, investments up to and after he opens his doors. Workers need to buy into the business for which they work, to earn greater amounts. I think the business owners should ask each of their employees to invest at least two thousand dollars into their place of work to help it sustain for success. The more capital a worker invests into his job, the more the job pays. Having employees invest in their livelihood seems to be power for the workers to ensure their work place thrives rather than fails like 99% of the businesses when they start out or even later on during economic downturns, sounds Marxist to me.
But Marx became a radical communist later on, so there’s that too.
K: the scenario you postulated, actually doesn’t happen…
I know several people who started businesses and I worked in
a couple and every one of them borrowed money from family
to start the business… because banks won’t loan to you unless
you already have enough collateral to cover the loan…
in which case, you don’t need the loan…
these business owners like to portray themselves as working up
the business with no help at all and how they sacrificed to provide for their
workers… and none of it is true…
an excellent example is Bill Gates… he borrowed the money for microsoft
from his very, very wealthy father…and that is the point… it is very rare for
a wealthy business owner who “built” up their business from scratch, to actually
rise from rags to riches… most wealthy business owners come from wealthy families…
IQ45 is an another excellent example… he claims to have built his business from
scratch without mentioning that his father was worth hundreds of millions of dollars
and how IQ45 inherited over 400 million dollars at his fathers death…
George Bush Jr. is another example of succeeding because of his family
wealthy…nothing bush himself made any money… in fact, he ran two
separate companies into the ground before he was Governor of Texas…
he was able to buy controlling interest in the baseball team, the Texas
Rangers by borrowing money from his fathers friends… and when he sold
the team, made 15 million dollars and that is the only money he ever made
in business… like IQ45, he was a failure at being a businessman…
the GOP mantra of building a business from the ground up with only
the resources one has is a lie…of course there are people who have built
their fortune without family resources, Oprah for example, Larry Ellison,
and George Soros among others but the rule tends to be that to become
a wealthy person, you have to start by coming from a wealthy family…
in other words, the risk is rarely as severe as you claim it to be…
Kropotkin
now the next point to become aware of is that Marxism is
an economic system, not a political system…
so when one shouts, that is Marxism like social security,
that is simply false… social security is a political decision,
driven by political ideology and ran as a political position …
whereas Marxism is an economic system…not a political system…
and much of the failure to understand Marxism lies in the fact that
people think it is a political system whereas it is not…
and here lies the failure of Lenin and Stalin… they turned
an economic system into a political system and of course it failed…
political systems are democracy, monarchy, dictatorship, anarchism…
economics system are Marxism, capitalism, Mercantilism, and the
single most successful economic system of all time, hunter-gatherer…
which lasted a million years…
now the second point is we have our questions of existence…
“what am I to do?” “What should I believe in?” “what should I hope for?”
you cannot separate out our questions of existence without
understanding the point of our political, economic and social
systems we have in place today…
for example, “what am I to do?” is an political, economic and
social question…in a hunter-gatherer society, you have limited
choices as to “what am I to do?”… in our modern age, we have
a vast array of things in answer to the question, “what am I do to?”
today, to be a hunter isn’t a feasible economic answer to the question,
“what am I to do?” but it was one of the few answers to the economic question,
“what am I to do?” in a hunter-gatherer society… but you cannot
be a… computer programming in a hunter-gatherer society… it simply
isn’t possible…
so, the answer to the question, “what am I to do?” is just as much about
the current social, political and economic situation in use at the time of
the question…
we cannot go outside of our current political, social and economic
systems to answer the questions, “what am I to do?” or “what should I
believe in?” our answers are rooted within our political, economic
and social systems…
what brings about a change in any political or economic or social
system? usually changes in the environment that force a system to
change it nature…just like evolution is a response to the changing
environment… if an animal fails to adapt or change to a changing environment,
it will die… failure to adapt is the cause of death for individual animals and for
species at large…
we must adapt our political, economic and social systems to the ever
changing environment we live in…
and how do we know that capitalism is no longer effective…
we can see this by capitalism reaction to the ongoing pandemic…
capitalism has failed in its response to the pandemic…
we see this in our ongoing economic collapse we see all around us today…
we see this in the failure of hospitals to adequately respond
to this epidemic… capitalism as practice within hospitals,
have barely met the challenge of the pandemic…
and we can see the failure of capitalism in this pandemic by
the staggering number of job losses and the collapse of the
economy during this pandemic…if capitalism could have cope with
this pandemic, it would have… and we see the failure of capitalism
in America today… let us look at other countries to see their response
to the pandemic… take Germany for example, they had roughly 206,000 cases
with only a little more then 9,000 deaths…with a population of 83 million
people…why did they do far better then the U.S? I would suggest because
of their political and economic system being better able to adapt and change
to meet the ever changing conditions… and what kind of economic and political
systems do Germany have? it offers social security with universal health care
and tuition free collage… all of which in America would be called socialism
or Marxism…it is the very system which we condemn that has provided
Germany with the ability to adapt and change to meet the changing conditions
of the pandemic…
countries with a strong federal government did far better then the U.S has
during the pandemic and that is because the strong federal government allowed
the government to act and respond to the pandemic unlike in the U.S in which
any attempt to exert strong federal response is met with charges of socialism
or Marxism… and still millions die because we have not and we cannot respond
to the pandemic because of our economic and political system simply cannot
adapt or change to meet the ever changing conditions of the pandemic…
and we know that from evolution, a body that cannot adapt or change
to the ever changing environment is going to die, is going to fail unto death…
our current conditions is too complicated for capitalism to respond effectively
and that is a sure sign of the fact that capitalism has failed…
so we must change and adapt our political and economic systems to
meet the ever changing and ever more complicated environment…
as capitalism and democracy has failed the test of adapting and changing to meet
this pandemic… it must be changed…
but Kropotkin, we don’t have a democracy now… we have as a political system,
corporatocracy and this is why our political system failed…
corporations are unable to adapt or change rapidly enough to adapt or
change in time to met a every changing environment…
if we actually had a functional democracy, we could have meet this
pandemic with ease… but because our government is bought
and paid for by corporations, we are unable to meet this pandemic…
because corporations only exists to make profits, not to deal with
situations that lie outside of profit making… and so they are useless
and helpless as the world burns around them…
this crisis shows us the depths of our failure in the political and
economic and social systems we have in place in America…
we must change and adapt to be able to survive this crisis
and the next to come…
“what am I to do?”
this crisis suggest that we must find a new and more capable,
functional government that will be better able to cope with
and adapt to the ever changing and more complicated world
we live in…
Kropotkin
Ive read Marx and its not what you say it is.
Marx is a slave-revolt theory based on Hegel, who is the slave-revolt logician.
There can never be a slave revolt that makes things better because they don’t provide for the role the slave has to play after he has won.
Marxist actions always result in rulership of self-loathing, resentful people. This is why the wise Jesus said to leave to Caesar what is his.
The only beauty is in how literally reality of Marxist conquest follows what the theory implies, sad side-effect is how little of what is intended is accomplished.
What is lacking in Marx is a recognition of value outside of the paradigm of master-servant. Thats a very poor way to look at things.
Admit it.
K: Marx was a newspaper man and if you read his newspaper stuff which was most of his
career, then you would know that is exactly what he wrote about…
his books, take his news career and expands upon them…
for example Marx wrote for the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung when he was young…
and later he was co-editor of the newspaper “Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher”
and again later the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”… in which he was the sole editor
and primary writer…
and he was the main European correspondent of the “New-York Daily Tribune”
for years… his main source of income from 1852 to 1862 came from working for
the Tribune… this is where he writes about the working man…
from his long journalistic career, we can see his efforts to benefit the working man…
with his demands for 8 hour days and 40 hour work week and vacations and paid
vacations and sick leave and all the other things the workers need…
Kropotkin
Not true, at all.
Marxism is, and always was, about Class Warfare. It’s about instigating and manipulating those at the bottom, to rebel and revolt against those at the top. It has little-to-nothing to do with workers, economics, or unions. Although the Marxist and Communist ideology does crossover, here and there, to worker unions, it ultimately fails as a working man’s ideology. Capitalism is 100-times superior. You, Prom, and the other Commies should have learned this from day one. But you choose ignorance over enlightenment.
The difference is between Employee and Employer. The employee is not responsible for the success (or failure) of the business. As Wendy already, wisely, pointed-out, the Employee presumes no real investment in the business or enterprise. The Employee enters into the work-relationship with little-to-no Risk. The Employer, on the other hand, holds all the risk. Because of this, he should, and does enjoy the reward. In Communist/Marxist systems, the reward is taken/stolen, outright, from political parties, from unions, from the State.
You and Prom are still philosophical beginners, compared to the likes of me.
Are you asking if everything is forgiven if the employer is also an employee somewhere else?
This just passes the buck onto the employer’s employer, and so on.
Of course the initial hard work and value of new startups and small businesses ought to be encouraged, celebrated and rewarded - and given the fact that it’s so risky under the capitalist model, even more so. Risk versus reward is the easiest concept ever, but there’s so much more to it than that.
See that’s just the thing - in many ways it’s only so much of a risk because of Capitalism, where there’s such a big drop back down to being “only” an employee, and where you either have your private property or you have no property at all. The whole system not only forces risk into entrepreneurship, but like I covered in my last post - it circularly justifies itself. The vast majority of the time you only have the resources to invest into capital if “risking” it is rewarded so highly compared the necessary labour employed to enable it to happen at all, without which it could not happen at all.
There’s always exceptions as PK covers, and so long as the rags-to-riches “dream” is possible for at least a few people out of millions, then it’s taken as justification that anyone could do it and if you don’t do it, it must be your fault because other people obviously managed it. It’s also taken as justification for the already well-established companies who are way past the point of risking anything and earning back their initial investment. Even if people at the top of those hierarchies are involved in a failed company (which is even less likely now the state has been converted into more of a machine for corporate handouts), they gain so much proven “experience” being at the top, high profile contacts, as well as a financial safety net, that they’re much more easily straight back up there afterwards anyway.
By contrast, the vast majority of employees don’t earn nearly enough to get their foot in the door, even if they have the ideas and drive - even if occasionally the odd one does actually manage to slip through. Even if many employees would be able to outperform their employers they too often are never able to prove it.
There’s too little mobility - and of COURSE that’s intentional. Why would the rich have it any other way than to use their power to ensure they encounter minimal mobility “downwards”? The consequence of this is the inbuilt barriers stopping anyone moving “upwards”, threatening to displace the comforts to which the rich have grown a sense of entitlement.
Welcome to the leftist support of cooperatives. Nice to have you on board.
Of course, even this solution such as you present it has its issues - since $2000 investment can be pocket change for already rich business owners, and a pipe-dream to their employees who do the actual groundwork to enable $2000 to remain pocket change for someone else. I regularly see amounts of $2000 simply written off by businesses with hardly a second thought. I see huge sums earned by the hard work of employees far in excess of such amount, and yet it still takes an entire month for many employees to earn hardly a fraction of what they’ve earned for someone else over the course of that month. But it’s okay because it’s such a “risk” for those accustomed to the luxury lifestyles they have come to take for granted, right? Concentrating only on the virtue of “risk it for a biscuit” startups doesn’t absolve the entire capitalist world, where if you are lucky enough to not be in the large percentage of businesses that fail within in a short period of time, your winning only enables more winning and even more seemingly without limit. I’m sorry, but Jeff Bezos doesn’t do literally 10 million times more work than his employees - and what’s he really risking?
Given what PK has to say about people not having a clue what Marxism is, I’m curious as to what you think “radical Communist” means - specifically?
Sure, and Marx also based his philosophy on change: do you think once a slave always a slave? Once a master always a master?
How many “masters” remain slaves no matter how much control they try to take? How many “masters” remain masters no matter how slavelike they really are? There is some mobility under Capitalism, but aside from exceptional cases - primarily it fosters win-more/lose-more results. Without the measures I came up with in my “Solution to Economics” thread, there is too little in-built into the system to meritocratically throw contenders back into the fray - to shuffle things around so that genuine slaves actually get to be the slaves they wanted to be and latent masters actually get to be the masters they want to be.
But yes, I’ll freely admit it goes beyond just a master-slave dialectic.
Wendy I’m familiar with your argument and I’ll tell ya why it doesn’t hold with the marxist. Wealth accumulated either through inheritance or through profiting from buying labor, that gets lost in taking a ‘risk’, is wealth that the capitalist appropriated and did not create. Meaning he’s technically ‘risked’ what somebody else made.
Say I had a mil that I made off my sweatshop. I invest half of it in another business venture and fail. The risk I took was greater than any blue collar worker ever took, but I never worked a lick to make any of the money I lost. I literally haven’t even been to the sweatshop factory and dont even know who runs it. I got guys who handle that for me. Really it’s no problem because one of my other companies makes that much in profit in one day.
The ‘risk’ in the abstract is certainly greater- that’s a shit ton of money. But ‘risk’ by itself is meaningless unless we are able to evaluate the kind of ‘loss’ that is occurring. A good quick but crude example of what I mean is… we’d consider a man with only five dollars who lost two, to have experienced a more significant loss than a billionaire who lost a million.
So I’d sooner have sympathy for a worker who risked having car trouble for having to drive 75 miles to work every day, than a millionaire who lost a hunerd grand on a bad call.
How is the Entrepreneur, the ones who actually start the business and own it, “extraneous”?
He is the most essential core of the business! Without the Capitalism, there is no business! Without the ownership, there are no factories, no economy, no work at all!
You know how contracting works.
Imagine yourself as a Contractor. It’s not easy as you say. You could very well lose all of your investments. You could very well lose money, lay-off your workers, and go bankrupt. Most business startups fail.
You are ignoring this fact.