So this is the Socialist Argument In A Nutshell - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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As either the transitional stage to communism or legitimate socio-economic ends in its own right.
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#14369184
Capitalists do not work because they do not labor as in, sweeping floors or pumping out code. But they might do things like office work, hiring people and business planning and meeting people and making deals, they just don't do hands on labor.

All laborers have nothing to sell but their labor provides much of the value for the business, therefore laborers should own what they produce.

So an entrepreneur, comes up with an idea, invests in his idea with his own money which he has earned or borrowed or both, hires employees who do not invest money, but simply follow orders and work. The employees work for the employer and get paid a wage while the employer keeps the rest of the money to pay his or herself and to pay the bills for the business, like utilities, interest, accountants, and suppliers.

While the Entrepreneur assumes all the risks because if the business fails, well he or she loses money and potentially property and ultimately is held responsible while the laborer just go finds another job and loses nothing besides a job.

And somehow, the laborers should be owners?

The socialist argument is, the Entrepreneur/Capitalist does not provide any value because often times, the Entrepreneur just, provides the business idea, investment, management, and not do the actual labor - like turning wrenches.

So, socialism is in a nutshell, a fuck you to the Entrepreneur/Capitalist and giving all power to the laborer...

Right?
#14369190
While the Entrepreneur assumes all the risks because if the business fails, well he or she loses money and potentially property and ultimately is held responsible while the laborer just go finds another job and loses nothing besides a job.


Wow. DP seriously. Have you every had a serious job? Are you telling me that when I invest years of my life in helping build a company, order my life depending on earnings from it, invest my retirement in it and come to think of it as second only to my faith and family that when it goes under I am loosing "nothing besides a job"?

You have just articulated the perfect example of contempt for the labor force that is driving modern US business policy.

Further. You notion of what socialism is inspires me to advise you to take economics 101. Socialism is not one thing. It encompasses a very wide range of political and economic possibilities including some which would allow your entrepreneur a very nice return on investment.

So I am going to challenge you DeadPresidents. I am going to remember this thread. Any time that you refer to England, Germany, Holland, France, Norway and any other of the more progressive nations as "socialist" I am going to start listing all of the very successful entrepreneurs who live and have thrived there. I am also going to defy you when you refer to US institutions as "socialist".

I think you will have a very different opinion of the labor market once you have participated in it. Hopefully.
#14369337
DP, you've described a manager and called it the capitalist. While certainly a capitalist may simultaneously act as a manager, in most cases the capitalists are the shareholders that make money from the company by virtue of owning a portion of the capital and nothing else.
#14369354
So, socialism is in a nutshell, a fuck you to the Entrepreneur/Capitalist and giving all power to the laborer...

Right?


You got that right as opposed to your and capitalist's narrative of fuck you workers.
#14370577
The idea has less to do with amount of work and more to do with determination of production. Socialism assumes the communal ownership of production in some form so that those who produce can control their own product and work environment. This also goes for the structure of society. The "exploitative" aspect of the Marxian critique has to do with the fact that labor is used solely to produce capital and recreate capital. Thus the fundamental critique is that capital becomes the beginning and end of social production. Even capitalists serve capital--they merely serve as "personas of capital". Accumulation of capital thus trumps all needs and blinds from extrinsic costs, both economically and socially.
#14370902
So here's the deal.

You are not in charge of your life. An income is a survival requirement in a capitalist society. You can't simply go back to basics and grow your own food on your own land. They ain't givin' land away, it takes capital. You can't dig a well without a permit or dam a stream. If you grow tomatos on the roof of your tenement the cops will come and seize them.

The joke is that it's a perfect catch 22. There are, by design, never as many jobs as people looking for jobs. This means that someone is always gonna be left out in the cold, no matter what. It means that someone is always gonna be more desperate for that job than you, and more willing to debase himself to get it.

Your very means of survival are always dependent on somebody who views your very existence as a necessary evil, and who will be forever and always looking for some way to add you to the swelling ranks of the permanently unemployed.
#14374558
Drlee wrote:Wow. DP seriously. Have you every had a serious job? Are you telling me that when I invest years of my life in helping build a company, order my life depending on earnings from it, invest my retirement in it and come to think of it as second only to my faith and family that when it goes under I am loosing "nothing besides a job"?


I wouldn't attach such emotions to anything I do not own, that's fucking ridiculous. I don't own it. It's not mine. I just get money from it.

And like a long time job where you work for somebody? No. I don't work for anybody else, I work for myself, since working for somebody else is disgusting to me. I'll never ever work for somebody else for any lengthy period of time, it's a waste of time, I got things that I consider more important.


Drlee wrote:Further. You notion of what socialism is inspires me to advise you to take economics 101. Socialism is not one thing. It encompasses a very wide range of political and economic possibilities including some which would allow your entrepreneur a very nice return on investment.


I never gave a notion to what socialism is, I asked the question about the argument of socialism and I am working on a worker's cooperative right now so...stop assuming.



Drlee wrote:So I am going to challenge you DeadPresidents. I am going to remember this thread. Any time that you refer to England, Germany, Holland, France, Norway and any other of the more progressive nations as "socialist" I am going to start listing all of the very successful entrepreneurs who live and have thrived there. I am also going to defy you when you refer to US institutions as "socialist".


I don't even talk about the USA and compare them to other countries.

I don't even post in the USA forum about how socialist it is getting or whatever - fuck the USA and Europe. I don't even care how socialist Europe gets or don't get.

And I already know that those countries are not socialist, most countries aren't socialist, they are mixed economies or so called market socialist economies or whatever the the fuck people wanna name things these days.

mikema63 wrote:DP, you've described a manager and called it the capitalist. While certainly a capitalist may simultaneously act as a manager, in most cases the capitalists are the shareholders that make money from the company by virtue of owning a portion of the capital and nothing else.


Well the idea is, you don't get super wealthy by working for somebody else and thus somebody interested in becoming super wealthy would start a business and thus become a capitalists.

And persons that get money to invest in a successful business and don't work, would have to work to get the money, unless there is a money printing machine that shits out free money.

anticlimacus wrote:The idea has less to do with amount of work and more to do with determination of production. Socialism assumes the communal ownership of production in some form so that those who produce can control their own product and work environment. This also goes for the structure of society. The "exploitative" aspect of the Marxian critique has to do with the fact that labor is used solely to produce capital and recreate capital. Thus the fundamental critique is that capital becomes the beginning and end of social production. Even capitalists serve capital--they merely serve as "personas of capital". Accumulation of capital thus trumps all needs and blinds from extrinsic costs, both economically and socially.


So the "problem" socialism has with capitalism is the fact that capitalism is only interested in creating capital and doesn't give enough of a fuck about the workers.

So socialism ideally, not just gentle capitalism aka market socialist economies, would just create things for people to use.
#14661764
Drlee wrote:Wow. DP seriously. Have you every had a serious job? Are you telling me that when I invest years of my life in helping build a company, order my life depending on earnings from it, invest my retirement in it and come to think of it as second only to my faith and family that when it goes under I am loosing "nothing besides a job"?

DeadPresidents wrote:I wouldn't attach such emotions to anything I do not own, that's fucking ridiculous. I don't own it. It's not mine.

Is that how you also feel about your country, your family, etc.? You don't own them, so you don't mind losing them? Really?
I just get money from it.

Most people get more than money from their jobs, and it's sad that you don't.
mikema63 wrote:DP, you've described a manager and called it the capitalist. While certainly a capitalist may simultaneously act as a manager, in most cases the capitalists are the shareholders that make money from the company by virtue of owning a portion of the capital and nothing else.

And persons that get money to invest in a successful business and don't work, would have to work to get the money, unless there is a money printing machine that shits out free money.

Most of the money invested by capitalist investors is not obtained by working or making other contributions to production, but by extracting what are called, "rents" from the productive. The commercial banksters own the money printing machine that shits out money, and you can have some if you want -- as long as you pay it all back, with interest. Landowners extract the full market value of all government spending on services and infrastructure, which is paid for by other (mostly working) people's taxes, but do not labor or contribute anything in return. They also pocket, in return for nothing, the value of all the opportunities and amenities the community provides, as well as all the value of the physical qualities nature provides at each location on the earth's surface. Likewise, the owners of intellectual property monopolies own other people's rights to liberty, and extract payment from them for not stopping them from exercising those rights -- I.e., payment for not doing or contributing anything.

Almost none of the wealth of wealthy capitalist investors has been earned by any commensurate contribution of labor or capital goods to production. It's almost all obtained through privilege: legal entitlements to benefit from the uncompensated, forcible abrogation of others' rights to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor.
anticlimacus wrote:Socialism assumes the communal ownership of production in some form so that those who produce can control their own product and work environment.

No, it is so that those who do NOT produce can control others' product and work environment.
This also goes for the structure of society. The "exploitative" aspect of the Marxian critique has to do with the fact that labor is used solely to produce capital and recreate capital.

Which is objectively and self-evidently false.
Thus the fundamental critique is that capital becomes the beginning and end of social production.

Production is not social. Some people in society contribute labor or capital goods to production, others don't. Capitalism robs producers for the unearned profit of the non-contributing, privilege-owning rich, while pretending to reward the contributors of capital goods; socialism robs producers for the unearned profit of the non-contributing political class, while pretending to secure the material welfare of workers and the unemployed poor.
#14661769
DeadPresidents wrote:Capitalists do not work because they do not labor as in, sweeping floors or pumping out code. But they might do things like office work, hiring people and business planning and meeting people and making deals, they just don't do hands on labor.


It certainly isn't true. When I started my own business, I worked at the every job it needed, in place of six or seven men. Only when it started to produce money and the business model became stable, I started to delegate less important parts of work to others. Today it's fully automated though in case anyone cannot work, I will easily replace him. I actually do it sometimes just for pleasure. To have a finger on the pulse.

Maybe except sweeping floor. Though it was my duty too once. $300 a month you need to pay for a cleaner who visits the office twice a week - this can bury the young business very fast.
#14661868
Capitalist relations of production are hard to justify to the average person.

The workers in the factory do more than 99% of the work, and barely get 1% of the total revenues back in wages/salaries. Faceless men, some of which have never done a day's work since the day they were born, get the lion's share.

That's hard to justify. You should earn based on your performance. If you're performance is ZERO why is that person getting anything at all? You, along with the rest doing the work, that's your money.

The concept is similar to taxation by the government, only only anarchist-Right people don't accept taxes as legitimate. If we are talking about a self employed person, or a group of people pooling together the capital, resources and are self-made and get rich because of that, yeah that's fine. Whereas if we're talking about faceless men that aren't on the production line, seizing the profit to transfer to their bank accounts. Unless you're a ideological fanatic on the moderate-Far Right, you accept that's unjustifiable.

So even when it comes to mildly social democratic policies, it's a policy to reduce the negative effects of the market in that sector of society. So from 100% bad to successful reduce it to 80% = therefore a portion of that labour force saves from selling their houses, abandoning their children, etc, just to get by.
#14661869
redcarpet wrote:The workers in the factory do more than 99% of the work, and barely get 1% of the total revenues back in wages/salaries.

That sounds like an amazingly successful business. Fantastic labor productivity - 100x the cost! They should probably expand, and expand big. Which company are you talking about? Hopefully we can build more like it to similarly raise labor productivity across the whole economy.
#14662483
redcarpet wrote:Capitalist relations of production are hard to justify to the average person.

Actually, most people accept the capitalist relation of production because they accept (or, more often, have succeeded in preventing themselves from knowing) that their rights to liberty have been forcibly removed and made into the private property of landowners and other privilege holders.
The workers in the factory do more than 99% of the work, and barely get 1% of the total revenues back in wages/salaries.

No, that claim is self-evidently false and absurd. Wages make up about half of GDP in capitalist countries, depending on the country. Anyone who has ever worked at a high managerial level in a manufacturing industry can tell you that wages make up the lion's share of total expenses, which are typically close to total revenue. Your "logic" would indicate that every manufacturing concern is wildly profitable, and none would ever go broke. But they do. A lot.
Faceless men, some of which have never done a day's work since the day they were born, get the lion's share.

Certainly it is true that the owners of privileges such as land titles, IP monopolies, bank charters and land titles take large fractions of total production from society without having to make any commensurate contribution to production in return. But that is not the case with those who provide the capital equipment that makes modern production possible. They are the real producers, but they almost always get far less of total revenue than the workers get in wages. It is the privileged who take without contributing.
That's hard to justify. You should earn based on your performance.

You should earn based on your contribution. Your "performance" is not necessarily an accurate measure of what you are contributing.
If you're performance is ZERO why is that person getting anything at all? You, along with the rest doing the work, that's your money.

Fine, but you need to reread the above so that you understand exactly who the parasites are, and how they manage to get away with it.
The concept is similar to taxation by the government,

No it isn't.
only only anarchist-Right people don't accept taxes as legitimate.

Taxes are legitimate when they are levied according to the two most fundamental and widely accepted principles of fair and efficient taxation policy: beneficiary pay (which is most simply and accurately measured by the value of privileges owned) and ability to pay (which is most simply and accurately measured by assets or net worth).
If we are talking about a self employed person, or a group of people pooling together the capital, resources and are self-made and get rich because of that, yeah that's fine. Whereas if we're talking about faceless men that aren't on the production line, seizing the profit to transfer to their bank accounts. Unless you're a ideological fanatic on the moderate-Far Right, you accept that's unjustifiable.

You haven't understood capitalist production relations because you don't know the difference between the owner of a privilege, who takes a portion of production without making any commensurate contribution to production, and the provider of capital equipment to production, without whose contribution production, and thus wages, would be at the Stone Age level.
So even when it comes to mildly social democratic policies, it's a policy to reduce the negative effects of the market in that sector of society.

You need to understand the difference between a free market and a privilege market.
So from 100% bad to successful reduce it to 80% = therefore a portion of that labour force saves from selling their houses, abandoning their children, etc, just to get by.

Before you make proposals for solutions, first understand the problem.
#14663099
redcarpet wrote:What would you say 'the problem' is, Truth to Power?

The problem is privilege: legal entitlement to benefit from the uncompensated abrogation of others' rights. A closely associated problem is that most people -- mainly socialists, and especially Marxists -- don't understand privilege, or how it is different from rightful property in the fruits of one's labor, and thus mistakenly attribute to rightful property in the fruits of one's labor the evils that are actually caused by privilege. They consequently seek to abrogate rightful property, but that does not solve the problem, and in fact introduces additional and even more serious problems.

On the other side are the capitalists who are either frank apologists for privilege, or more commonly, naively imagine the problems caused by privilege are caused by government, or by the misbehaviour of the underprivileged, immigrants, etc. It is true that some problems are caused by incompetent, corrupt, or misapplied government, and that the underprivileged are sometimes the authors of much of their own misfortunes; but in advanced, democratic, capitalist countries, those problems are derisory compared to the effects of privilege.
#14663470
DeadPresidents wrote: . . . .
While the Entrepreneur assumes all the risks because if the business fails, well he or she loses money and potentially property and ultimately is held responsible while the laborer just go finds another job and loses nothing besides a job.

And somehow, the laborers should be owners?

The socialist argument is, the Entrepreneur/Capitalist does not provide any value because often times, the Entrepreneur just, provides the business idea, investment, management, and not do the actual labor - like turning wrenches.

So, socialism is in a nutshell, a fuck you to the Entrepreneur/Capitalist and giving all power to the laborer...

Right?

No. Not right. It's not about "shoulds". It's about solving problems. Morals and ethics have little bearing on the issue. But the question on my mind is "are you willing to consider that you may have something more to learn about socialism?" You sound like your mind is shut tighter than a drum.
#14663694
Davea8 wrote:It's not about "shoulds". It's about solving problems. Morals and ethics have little bearing on the issue.

How would you know you had solved a problem without a value (moral) judgment about what is desirable?
But the question on my mind is "are you willing to consider that you may have something more to learn about socialism?" You sound like your mind is shut tighter than a drum.

As they say in Japan, "It's mirror time!" You're obviously married to the false dichotomy of socialism and capitalism.
#14663815
Well TTP, we have problems of income and wealth inequality that is damaging America, we have problems of good-paying jobs moving overseas for cheap labor, and we have problems of the U.S. losing our standing in the world regarding respect and opportunity to name a few things.

"DeadPresidents" said "And somehow, the laborers should be owners?"

So I replied that it isn't about "shoulds". It's about solving problems and that morals and ethics have little bearing on the issue.

To that you offered a response that didn't really fit the conversation: "How would you know you had solved a problem without a value (moral) judgment about what is desirable?"

It seems you aren't so much interested in participating in a conversation as you are in just finding a way to argue for the sake of arguing, and I have no interest in such agenda. Have a nice day.
#14664117
Davea8 wrote:we have problems of good-paying jobs moving overseas for cheap labor

This is not a problem, this is called joining the global economy and competing with a larger pool of labourers. The U.S. has always preached competition, but is only actually experiencing the realities of what is preaches.
#14664146
Eauz wrote: This is not a problem, this is called joining the global economy and competing with a larger pool of labourers. The U.S. has always preached competition, but is only actually experiencing the realities of what is preaches.

It is a problem for those workers that corporations have abandoned and are now unemployed and underemployed. I was speaking from the point of view of those workers.

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