Yes all profits are theft, you worked to make $100 profit for the company, they paid you $10, $90 is taken, it’s not hard.
So paying for union membership is fine, but paying for company membership, where you can make money, is not?
If you don’t like the architecture of this with the owner and his employees, or many owners, look at cooperatives, a very old anarcho-syndicalist idea, which, believe me or not, does work. It’s not very popular, but cooperatives and things similar to them do exist. Like kibbutz in Israel (I’m sure there are more mundane examples).
I mean, it’s the same logic. Working as part of a system has different efficiency that working alone.
Walmart: Please, PLEASE defend the billionaires that own Wallmart… #1 in stealing wages, yes, wage theft, actual theft. Please look it up. Even not considering Marxist ideas, just plain old theft of wages. Their employees have to live on government handouts, IE: You are paying more in taxes because Wallmart won’t pay their employees a living wage… They’re stealing from you… Like, this isn’t hard.
So a company is not fulfilling its obligations systematically, does not get sued sufficiently bad to stop, and you are blaming capitalism, not the judicial system, not lawmakers?
C’mon, just because it isn’t illegal doesn’t mean it’s not theft. Also wage theft, Amazon commits massive wage theft…
It is very illegal, just like what Microsoft has been doing for half the 90s. And maybe 10 or 20 years from now, when Amazon is not that strong, it’s going to lose a suit without real repercussions, just like Microsoft.
Only I don’t get how this is connected to capitalism. This actually (still being illegal, but being unlikely otherwise) utilizes trademark, patent and IP laws, which I’m against exactly because these are very notably not capitalist.
And plain power, which is not capitalist as well, it’s just a fact of life. Some enemies are orders of magnitude stronger than you. You can’t just vote for making them weaker and expect that they’ll magically just do that.
Same with Apple.
You are being contrarian for no reason.
That’s called the iterative process of improving oneself and the society around. I’m arguing so that we both could find and fix flaws in our worldview, only you are not even trying to do that, why?
Anyway, profits and competition and power and evil people exist, these are, again, facts of life. There’s no option to vote for ruling these out, and a vote can’t by itself make any radical change. So when you want something, consider how the balance of power would change, because that power won’t go away or be magically transferred to different people.
Powerful people can more effectively influence one center than many (that’s just logic and probability theory, nothing else). This means that more centralization means less checks on them, not the other way around. Many politicians promise this, but in reality the singular center never goes against power.
Sorry for another wall, there is a lot to discuss here.
let me start by saying that based on your response I actually think we have more in common than we don’t. We both believe that there are problems and society, but we may disagree on what causes them or how to fix them. Honestly this is better than what I was expecting, which is why I came out strong. I see a lot of people think that big corporations do nothing wrong and everybody is just being crybabies.
Furthermore, to defend why I believe capitalism is the source of these problems, requires talking about many nuanced topics that are all into related in complex systems. However, I don’t think my ideas are unique, and I don’t think they are hard to self-research. I’ll provide quick overviews as best as I can.
For example:
So a company is not fulfilling its obligations systematically, does not get sued sufficiently bad to stop, and you are blaming capitalism, not the judicial system, not lawmakers?
Ah, you bring up a great point. Why would we not blame lawmakers and the judicial system? Awesome, this really is a good point, let me explain.
Who makes the rules? Who decides the law? I’m not going to pretend to know all of the details. But it certainly isn’t you, or me. For now I’m going to chock it up to “politicians”, which in this case includes “lawmakers”. I know it’s more complicated than that, but this is a short post, not a ProPublica article.
Have you ever tried to sue a company for doing something wrong? First of all you are probably in a binding arbitration agreement if you are an employee. Even many of the services that you currently use, you have also implicitly agreed to a binding arbitration agreement. The law is stacked against you, we cannot sue these people with such a stacked deck against us.
The reason for this? Because those lawmakers allowed this to happen, because they are politicians are paid off by the corporations in the first place. Those corporations (as a “person” entity), and individuals, including but not limited to the billionaires, donate to big funds and super packs which get these politicians on the ballot and in front of the public in the first place.
Therefore, the people who are on the ballot, those that have commercials and other advertisements, have been backed by those companies willing to pay for those things. Therefore, those politicians, no matter who gets voted in, will support their real backers by backing laws that defend corporations, instead of defending you. And when corporations do break the law, they rarely get more than a slap on the wrist.
So what enables corporations and their very wealthy individuals to support this? Their massive profits. Capitalism incentivizes’ lots of profits and a high profit margin. Those profits go to the owners of the business, either in dividends or in stocks or in salary or bonuses. Either way, they get that money, not you. When the most successful companies are making the most profits, they are the ones that have the most power to buy off the politicians.
Therefore, capitalism is the source of dirty politicians, which is the source of dirty lawmakers, and a bad judicial system.
This is asking the five “whys” of why the system has a problem. If you only ask only one why question, you will say that these companies are corrupt because their leaders are corrupt. If you ask two why questions, you might find that the judicial system is broken or biased. But if you just keep asking the why question, if you keep following the money up the chain, you inevitably find the source of the problem is the profits generated by corporations. A system by which a few people make lots of profits off of the backs of many people, is called capitalism.
–
Okay some other minor points
So paying for union membership is fine, but paying for company membership, where you can make money, is not?
I didn’t say that…, I think union dues are a compromise. Unions help laborers, therefore sending money on union dues is “worth it”. More profits for a company just feed the rich. Union representatives aren’t rich. This is a different situation.
Also I’m very familiar with worker coops. They are also a compromise. If a company can make it work, great, but capitalism doesn’t reward an awesome self-starter group working together to make their jobs better, it rewards profits for the already rich. Therefore coops tends to perform ‘worse’, even if it’s just because of the rigged system around them. Outside the US, they seem to work better, inside the US, there’s a lot of difficulties with them.
It is very illegal, just like what Microsoft has been doing for half the 90s. And maybe 10 or 20 years from now, when Amazon is not that strong, it’s going to lose a suit without real repercussions, just like Microsoft.
Wage theft is illegal of course, I was referring to the “other” things (Paying less than you make for the company, paying less than a living wage, etc). I hope you didn’t copy that out of context on purpose 😉
And plain power, which is not capitalist as well, it’s just a fact of life
Capitalism is one group exerting power over another. You can’t live without a job, they have the jobs. This is power, money or no money. I also reject the notion that this is a fact of life. I think you should read about what socialism and communism really is, there are better ways.
You can’t just vote for making them weaker and expect that they’ll magically just do that.
Yup, you are correct and you’re hitting a core ML idea. You can’t vote people out, you can’t ask them to take their own power away. If so, we would be able to fix this system slowly (or even quickly) over time. I don’t see it going that way, therefore, revolution is what it will take.
Anyway, profits and competition and power and evil people exist, these are, again, facts of life. There’s no option to vote for ruling these out, and a vote can’t by itself make any radical change. So when you want something, consider how the balance of power would change, because that power won’t go away or be magically transferred to different people.
Similar to the same topic, but the idea of Socialism -> Communism is to remove the ability to gather power for the capitalist class. So long as laborers are in charge of the system, we can make change in the right direction. Start by getting rid of private enterprise, then accumulation of wealth is nearly impossible, then eventually you can provide, for free, the necessities of life, and eventually remove things like money, thus completely removing the majority of the possibility of holding power over someone else. There is no utopia, and socialists know this, but we can do better than what we have now, which is, in my opinion, just leaning into the power struggle and simply letting a few people hold authoritarian control over the population.
This means that more centralization means less checks on them, not the other way around. Many politicians promise this, but in reality the singular center never goes against power.
This depends highly on who is in charge. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I believe that, for example, if we remove private business (nuance here, coops and whatnot would exist, and without capitalism would work just fine), and we remove the ability to pay off politicians (Pretty much requires interrupting the system we have and starting over, IE: revolution), then we can have democracy based on real peoples opinion, and not the opinion of a handful of oligarchs. This isn’t just a made up theoretical example, this exists in Cuba today.
Oh, really a lot, but thanks. I’ll try to answer where I have an answer.
I see a lot of people think that big corporations do nothing wrong and everybody is just being crybabies.
Well, I subjectively don’t meet such people. This was definitely a problem with big tech corporations somewhere in 2006-2016, but it was specifically due to the common irrational belief that they are making the magnificent future closer, so wasn’t about corporations in general, just tech ones.
So what enables corporations and their very wealthy individuals to support this? Their massive profits. Capitalism incentivizes’ lots of profits and a high profit margin. Those profits go to the owners of the business, either in dividends or in stocks or in salary or bonuses. Either way, they get that money, not you.
Well, that’s where I don’t agree, because the ultimate incentive is survival. Some of the games we play for survival are zero-sum ones. And profit means strength. And those stronger are likelier to take power. And those who take power decide the future of our society.
So what you call capitalism here is as massive and natural as the Sun. Between draining the sea and making seaworthy ships the latter is more practical.
If you want to fix its problems, you need a strategy which wouldn’t put you at a huge evolutional disadvantage while doing that. Otherwise you are still going to participate in the same game, only as a target for beating.
Therefore, capitalism is the source of dirty politicians, which is the source of dirty lawmakers, and a bad judicial system.
So if I agree to such a definition of capitalism, and agree to this, we come to it being practically impossible to drain that source. Or the solutions being a kind of healing headache by decapitation (20-s “war communism” or Khmer Rouge, and neither did remove the problem of dirty politicians).
About smaller notes:
If a company can make it work, great, but capitalism doesn’t reward an awesome self-starter group working together to make their jobs better, it rewards profits for the already rich.
Well, it is normally harder to start than to improve on something big that you already have. The question is, how can one improve the protection of cubs from other males, if we use the lion analogy.
Wage theft is illegal of course, I was referring to the “other” things (Paying less than you make for the company, paying less than a living wage, etc). I hope you didn’t copy that out of context on purpose 😉
Oh, that was about non-competitive practices. I meant the fact that Amazon is a monopoly and the means used to remain such.
Capitalism is one group exerting power over another. You can’t live without a job, they have the jobs. This is power, money or no money. I also reject the notion that this is a fact of life. I think you should read about what socialism and communism really is, there are better ways.
There may be other ways, but I’m discarding those which lead to extinction, because following them means that in every generation (literal or figurative) the proponents of your idea will be of smaller and smaller relative power. That’s not a way to change the humanity.
I don’t see it going that way, therefore, revolution is what it will take.
Suppose I agree to that. But a revolution requires a design of the force to make it reality, and a design of the system which it will install. Both very specific, as systems intended to work very reliably.
Similar to the same topic, but the idea of Socialism -> Communism is to remove the ability to gather power for the capitalist class.
The known attempts resulted in another class gathering power.
So long as laborers are in charge of the system, we can make change in the right direction.
This is an assumption of not only having the same goal and interest as many other people, but also being able to trust most of them.
Start by getting rid of private enterprise, then accumulation of wealth is nearly impossible, then eventually you can provide, for free, the necessities of life, and eventually remove things like money, thus completely removing the majority of the possibility of holding power over someone else.
Who is going to provide those necessities? The answer is also who will become the point of failure.
There is no utopia, and socialists know this, but we can do better than what we have now, which is, in my opinion, just leaning into the power struggle and simply letting a few people hold authoritarian control over the population.
Change is usually better than stagnation, but otherwise the result is likely going to be the same.
This depends highly on who is in charge. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I believe that, for example, if we remove private business (nuance here, coops and whatnot would exist, and without capitalism would work just fine), and we remove the ability to pay off politicians (Pretty much requires interrupting the system we have and starting over, IE: revolution), then we can have democracy based on real peoples opinion, and not the opinion of a handful of oligarchs.
Oh. Here’s the problem. You don’t need official money to buy someone, to gather power, and to influence reality. You may use booze, or you may use medicine, or you may exchange favors. Money is standardized and monopolized by states, yes, but that doesn’t mean that if the state abolished it, there’ll be no universal equivalent (that is, money).
Supply and demand, sorry, these are real.
In USSR there was a developed social mechanism of favors, where you’d owe someone for helping you out, but your acquaintance or a relative would be a doctor, and the person you owe to would have an acquaintance who’d need to see a doctor (and not in the district clinic, that’d be useless at best), and so on, and somehow all those favors would be balanced out in the network of people.
This was all very complex and inefficient, but necessary, that is, in demand, with Soviet money being in fact coupons for Soviet stores, sometimes only good in combination with actual permission to buy something. And, of course, black market was something people would be more careful about.
What I’m trying to say - removing money you won’t remove all this dynamic of buying people. Even private businesses.
This isn’t just a made up theoretical example, this exists in Cuba today.
Frankly what I’ve read of Cuba says otherwise, but at least it’s becoming less poor.
Okay so I was going to type out a whole long thing debating each point individually. But now I feel like not only do we see more eye to eye than not, the point is getting really nuanced for a written discussion like this.
I don’t see it going that way, therefore, revolution is what it will take.
Suppose I agree to that. But a revolution requires a design of the force to make it reality, and a design of the system which it will install. Both very specific, as systems intended to work very reliably.
This is the only quote I want to respond to specifically. I actually think that based on this comment you understand my perspective. I want to make things better, and if I saw things getting better slowly, I would be convinced. But I’m not convinced, I see things going in the wrong direction.
In the end, every time we make progress as a society, we take five steps back somewhere else. Between my career, my partners career, the statistics I read about online, what people say in countries other than the united states, all I see are steps being taken in the wrong direction, by the people who are currently in charge (In America and other capitalist nations), who do not care about the needs of the regular person, and will not change their mind without being forced too.
In the end we can look at theory, and talk about the previous attempts at communism. The USSR and how they ran their government, China and how they run their government, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. We can learn from these countries experiments and we can try to improve on them if we want to make similar changes ourselves but without the disadvantages.
I will end this comment with this thought: Capitalism took a long time to become successful, there were many false starts and a significant amount of controversy during the transition. Life was not easy after capitalism started, and many people wanted to go back to Feudalism. Capitalism eventually became quite successful for the majority of people for a very long time, but as time grew on, we’ve started to see the limits of capitalist growths and we’re starting to see how this leads to monopolies and a preservation of power. Communism has a beginning, but I don’t believe we’re at the end.
So paying for union membership is fine, but paying for company membership, where you can make money, is not?
If you don’t like the architecture of this with the owner and his employees, or many owners, look at cooperatives, a very old anarcho-syndicalist idea, which, believe me or not, does work. It’s not very popular, but cooperatives and things similar to them do exist. Like kibbutz in Israel (I’m sure there are more mundane examples).
I mean, it’s the same logic. Working as part of a system has different efficiency that working alone.
So a company is not fulfilling its obligations systematically, does not get sued sufficiently bad to stop, and you are blaming capitalism, not the judicial system, not lawmakers?
It is very illegal, just like what Microsoft has been doing for half the 90s. And maybe 10 or 20 years from now, when Amazon is not that strong, it’s going to lose a suit without real repercussions, just like Microsoft.
Only I don’t get how this is connected to capitalism. This actually (still being illegal, but being unlikely otherwise) utilizes trademark, patent and IP laws, which I’m against exactly because these are very notably not capitalist.
And plain power, which is not capitalist as well, it’s just a fact of life. Some enemies are orders of magnitude stronger than you. You can’t just vote for making them weaker and expect that they’ll magically just do that.
Same with Apple.
That’s called the iterative process of improving oneself and the society around. I’m arguing so that we both could find and fix flaws in our worldview, only you are not even trying to do that, why?
Anyway, profits and competition and power and evil people exist, these are, again, facts of life. There’s no option to vote for ruling these out, and a vote can’t by itself make any radical change. So when you want something, consider how the balance of power would change, because that power won’t go away or be magically transferred to different people.
Powerful people can more effectively influence one center than many (that’s just logic and probability theory, nothing else). This means that more centralization means less checks on them, not the other way around. Many politicians promise this, but in reality the singular center never goes against power.
Sorry for another wall, there is a lot to discuss here.
let me start by saying that based on your response I actually think we have more in common than we don’t. We both believe that there are problems and society, but we may disagree on what causes them or how to fix them. Honestly this is better than what I was expecting, which is why I came out strong. I see a lot of people think that big corporations do nothing wrong and everybody is just being crybabies.
Furthermore, to defend why I believe capitalism is the source of these problems, requires talking about many nuanced topics that are all into related in complex systems. However, I don’t think my ideas are unique, and I don’t think they are hard to self-research. I’ll provide quick overviews as best as I can.
For example:
Ah, you bring up a great point. Why would we not blame lawmakers and the judicial system? Awesome, this really is a good point, let me explain.
Who makes the rules? Who decides the law? I’m not going to pretend to know all of the details. But it certainly isn’t you, or me. For now I’m going to chock it up to “politicians”, which in this case includes “lawmakers”. I know it’s more complicated than that, but this is a short post, not a ProPublica article.
Have you ever tried to sue a company for doing something wrong? First of all you are probably in a binding arbitration agreement if you are an employee. Even many of the services that you currently use, you have also implicitly agreed to a binding arbitration agreement. The law is stacked against you, we cannot sue these people with such a stacked deck against us.
The reason for this? Because those lawmakers allowed this to happen, because they are politicians are paid off by the corporations in the first place. Those corporations (as a “person” entity), and individuals, including but not limited to the billionaires, donate to big funds and super packs which get these politicians on the ballot and in front of the public in the first place.
Therefore, the people who are on the ballot, those that have commercials and other advertisements, have been backed by those companies willing to pay for those things. Therefore, those politicians, no matter who gets voted in, will support their real backers by backing laws that defend corporations, instead of defending you. And when corporations do break the law, they rarely get more than a slap on the wrist.
So what enables corporations and their very wealthy individuals to support this? Their massive profits. Capitalism incentivizes’ lots of profits and a high profit margin. Those profits go to the owners of the business, either in dividends or in stocks or in salary or bonuses. Either way, they get that money, not you. When the most successful companies are making the most profits, they are the ones that have the most power to buy off the politicians.
Therefore, capitalism is the source of dirty politicians, which is the source of dirty lawmakers, and a bad judicial system.
This is asking the five “whys” of why the system has a problem. If you only ask only one why question, you will say that these companies are corrupt because their leaders are corrupt. If you ask two why questions, you might find that the judicial system is broken or biased. But if you just keep asking the why question, if you keep following the money up the chain, you inevitably find the source of the problem is the profits generated by corporations. A system by which a few people make lots of profits off of the backs of many people, is called capitalism.
–
Okay some other minor points
I didn’t say that…, I think union dues are a compromise. Unions help laborers, therefore sending money on union dues is “worth it”. More profits for a company just feed the rich. Union representatives aren’t rich. This is a different situation.
Also I’m very familiar with worker coops. They are also a compromise. If a company can make it work, great, but capitalism doesn’t reward an awesome self-starter group working together to make their jobs better, it rewards profits for the already rich. Therefore coops tends to perform ‘worse’, even if it’s just because of the rigged system around them. Outside the US, they seem to work better, inside the US, there’s a lot of difficulties with them.
Wage theft is illegal of course, I was referring to the “other” things (Paying less than you make for the company, paying less than a living wage, etc). I hope you didn’t copy that out of context on purpose 😉
Capitalism is one group exerting power over another. You can’t live without a job, they have the jobs. This is power, money or no money. I also reject the notion that this is a fact of life. I think you should read about what socialism and communism really is, there are better ways.
Yup, you are correct and you’re hitting a core ML idea. You can’t vote people out, you can’t ask them to take their own power away. If so, we would be able to fix this system slowly (or even quickly) over time. I don’t see it going that way, therefore, revolution is what it will take.
Similar to the same topic, but the idea of Socialism -> Communism is to remove the ability to gather power for the capitalist class. So long as laborers are in charge of the system, we can make change in the right direction. Start by getting rid of private enterprise, then accumulation of wealth is nearly impossible, then eventually you can provide, for free, the necessities of life, and eventually remove things like money, thus completely removing the majority of the possibility of holding power over someone else. There is no utopia, and socialists know this, but we can do better than what we have now, which is, in my opinion, just leaning into the power struggle and simply letting a few people hold authoritarian control over the population.
This depends highly on who is in charge. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I believe that, for example, if we remove private business (nuance here, coops and whatnot would exist, and without capitalism would work just fine), and we remove the ability to pay off politicians (Pretty much requires interrupting the system we have and starting over, IE: revolution), then we can have democracy based on real peoples opinion, and not the opinion of a handful of oligarchs. This isn’t just a made up theoretical example, this exists in Cuba today.
Oh, really a lot, but thanks. I’ll try to answer where I have an answer.
Well, I subjectively don’t meet such people. This was definitely a problem with big tech corporations somewhere in 2006-2016, but it was specifically due to the common irrational belief that they are making the magnificent future closer, so wasn’t about corporations in general, just tech ones.
Well, that’s where I don’t agree, because the ultimate incentive is survival. Some of the games we play for survival are zero-sum ones. And profit means strength. And those stronger are likelier to take power. And those who take power decide the future of our society.
So what you call capitalism here is as massive and natural as the Sun. Between draining the sea and making seaworthy ships the latter is more practical.
If you want to fix its problems, you need a strategy which wouldn’t put you at a huge evolutional disadvantage while doing that. Otherwise you are still going to participate in the same game, only as a target for beating.
So if I agree to such a definition of capitalism, and agree to this, we come to it being practically impossible to drain that source. Or the solutions being a kind of healing headache by decapitation (20-s “war communism” or Khmer Rouge, and neither did remove the problem of dirty politicians).
About smaller notes:
Well, it is normally harder to start than to improve on something big that you already have. The question is, how can one improve the protection of cubs from other males, if we use the lion analogy.
Oh, that was about non-competitive practices. I meant the fact that Amazon is a monopoly and the means used to remain such.
There may be other ways, but I’m discarding those which lead to extinction, because following them means that in every generation (literal or figurative) the proponents of your idea will be of smaller and smaller relative power. That’s not a way to change the humanity.
Suppose I agree to that. But a revolution requires a design of the force to make it reality, and a design of the system which it will install. Both very specific, as systems intended to work very reliably.
The known attempts resulted in another class gathering power.
This is an assumption of not only having the same goal and interest as many other people, but also being able to trust most of them.
Who is going to provide those necessities? The answer is also who will become the point of failure.
Change is usually better than stagnation, but otherwise the result is likely going to be the same.
Oh. Here’s the problem. You don’t need official money to buy someone, to gather power, and to influence reality. You may use booze, or you may use medicine, or you may exchange favors. Money is standardized and monopolized by states, yes, but that doesn’t mean that if the state abolished it, there’ll be no universal equivalent (that is, money).
Supply and demand, sorry, these are real.
In USSR there was a developed social mechanism of favors, where you’d owe someone for helping you out, but your acquaintance or a relative would be a doctor, and the person you owe to would have an acquaintance who’d need to see a doctor (and not in the district clinic, that’d be useless at best), and so on, and somehow all those favors would be balanced out in the network of people.
This was all very complex and inefficient, but necessary, that is, in demand, with Soviet money being in fact coupons for Soviet stores, sometimes only good in combination with actual permission to buy something. And, of course, black market was something people would be more careful about.
What I’m trying to say - removing money you won’t remove all this dynamic of buying people. Even private businesses.
Frankly what I’ve read of Cuba says otherwise, but at least it’s becoming less poor.
Okay so I was going to type out a whole long thing debating each point individually. But now I feel like not only do we see more eye to eye than not, the point is getting really nuanced for a written discussion like this.
This is the only quote I want to respond to specifically. I actually think that based on this comment you understand my perspective. I want to make things better, and if I saw things getting better slowly, I would be convinced. But I’m not convinced, I see things going in the wrong direction.
In the end, every time we make progress as a society, we take five steps back somewhere else. Between my career, my partners career, the statistics I read about online, what people say in countries other than the united states, all I see are steps being taken in the wrong direction, by the people who are currently in charge (In America and other capitalist nations), who do not care about the needs of the regular person, and will not change their mind without being forced too.
In the end we can look at theory, and talk about the previous attempts at communism. The USSR and how they ran their government, China and how they run their government, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. We can learn from these countries experiments and we can try to improve on them if we want to make similar changes ourselves but without the disadvantages.
I will end this comment with this thought: Capitalism took a long time to become successful, there were many false starts and a significant amount of controversy during the transition. Life was not easy after capitalism started, and many people wanted to go back to Feudalism. Capitalism eventually became quite successful for the majority of people for a very long time, but as time grew on, we’ve started to see the limits of capitalist growths and we’re starting to see how this leads to monopolies and a preservation of power. Communism has a beginning, but I don’t believe we’re at the end.