How others explain Marx: astrotheme.com/astrology/Karl_Marx
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.
Although i, contra the communist, would permit passing inheritance in the form of property and/or savings. You have every right to be given personal property or money from your family. That’s none of the governments goddamn business what yo moms is tryna do with her stuff when she die.
Negative ghost rider. Techne is an inherent talent of the hooman being. We are inventors and creators before we are buyers and sellers.
You tryna tell me that people weren’t making shit before capitalism existed? Did you really just imply that? Holy history class batman.
Yeah but how do you measure how ‘bad’ that is? Is it what was lost, or where he ends up because of that loss? If the former, refer to my reply to wendy. If the latter, then, assuming this guy doesn’t become homeless (rare for failed business men), he’s now more or less in the same circumstances as a lotta workers; very little property and assets, but a place to live and an income allowing you to barely sustain it all.
If that’s the case, then you’d be sympathizing with te he working class because they’re ALREADY like that, bruh.
So which is it. How do you gauge the meaning of the word ‘loss’. Is it so bad because the cappy is now a wage worker living in an apartment, or because he lost a hunerd grand?
Do the math. Or better yet, do it yourself. Start a contract. Do you know the costs of the houses you work on???
The Contractor buys the materials. Have you not had deals fall through? Bad construction jobs? Accidents? The Contractor is taking the brunt of the risk, not you the worker.
But corporations are people …
The contractor takes zero risk.
What Marxism really is: half a billion murders.
A theory without a centre, without a ground, a logic without premises; a gigantic hype to rouse up the uninformed to kill people and feel good about it.
Dont pretend there is a peaceful way to be a marxist. No one believes it.
I don’t really have patience anymore to waste my time with people this disconnected from reality.
If you want to live in your own solipsistic bubble, fine, but keep it to yourself and don’t call it philosophy.
Go build a house and tell me “zero risk”.
Go drill for oil and tell me “zero risk”.
You sound like a child.
making a profit is a beautiful fucking thing
it’s like you put something together that is clever
and then you get rewarded for it
More like half a zillion murders. No wait I meant to say half a gazillion.
Sure, but modern capitalism allows banks (and thus bankers) to make money out of the act of loaning money. Not, mind you, just via interest, but the act of loaning money means they can now invest money they did not have before they made that loan. And they can loan money, of course, that they do not have, then invest the hallucinated money. Modern capitalism allows you to make profits off of other people’s ideas. It allows you do make money by betting or know that a company will fail. In fact it allows you to let other people make such bets for you. Modern capitalism, in the US say, allows you to pay lobbyist to press for legislation that will get you money. it allows you to buy or rentshare candidates (when they come into office) via campaign finance. Modern capitalism allows a politician to enact policies so that he gets paid incredible sums, by the companies he benefits, when he shifts to the private sector. And he may come back again to being a politician or cabinet member and do it all over again. There’s clever as in creative or genius
and then there’s clever as in
slimy bastard.
The latter accounts for why, for example, the US is not a democracy and not even really capitalist.
It’s an oligarchy and it’s a weird kind of mixed feudalism.
Urwrong,
If you know the laws you can succeed everytime you fail. Look how many times trump filed for bankruptcy.
There’s no risk if you know what you’re doing. Even for failing.
The question is then one about morality and integrity.