this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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Well, I don't know about your but I'd prefer a system where it wouldn't be possible for a single person to amass that many resources in the first place
Worker co-ops, social safety nets, guaranteed income and a robust, free universal healthcare option are all things we could do RIGHT NOW without hurting our precious capitalist empire at all. In the long run some businesses like the Healthcare companies will suffer and have to downsize, but it's always been absolutely astonishing to me that a company like Tesla, IBM, Boeing, Walmart or other mega-companies close plants or stores and send tens of thousands of people into joblessness and poverty nobody bats an eye.
The moment we talk about actions that might impact the insurance empires suddenly we have to all worry about the workers and all the businesses that are connected to the insurance company and so on.
There is literally nothing that stops someone starting a business from organizing it as a worker co-op.
That's what I'm sayin.
While there is a list of cooperatives with varying degrees of worker-ownership and company profit, what usually stops them is the allure of money and how a business owner can easily embrace the long-standing culture of becoming a micro-baron and controlling the flow of wealth without any worry of repercussion or losses.
What's the most amount of resources that it should be legal to acquire?
The answer is either "None of it" or "No more than you need", depending on how based you are.
Accumulation should be removed, there should be no individual Capital Owners trying to collect more and more and more.
Can you clarify a bit more? I have enough money where I could stop working for the next 8 or 9 months if I chose. Should I be allowed to keep this?
What about my neighbor, his house is 3x the size of my wife's and mine, and he lives alone. He could sell one of his three cars and survive for a year if he had to. I'm sure he has a savings that could last him 5 years or more. How much should he be allowed to keep? Or should he just be forced to take a vacation until he gets closer to average?
Or should the cap be more around one lifetimes worth of savings?
We are within Capitalism, so without replacing it with a better system, we cannot remove accumulation.
I am not advocating for putting a cap on accumulation in Capitalism, I am advocating for replacing the entire Capitalist system with one where accumulation is not only impossible, but unnecessary and unwanted.
Capitalism will naturally burn itself out by eventually resulting in such an efficient creation mechanism that there will be no more scarcity. Maybe this mechanism won't care about preserving humanity, though, so that might suck. I suspect that trying to replace capitalism with something else would just make it continue on in a different costume so it can continue its mission.
Capitalism is juat a reflection of human nature. Not many people are genuinely interested in living in a way that isn't selfish. It is a spectrum, but have you ever met anyone who always puts the necessities of everyone one else above at least some unnecessary pleasure for themself?
Capitalism will naturally destroy itself, yes. Socialism will then be the next step.
Capitalism isn't a reflection of human nature, it has been around for less than 1% of Humanity.
Medical surgery is new, but it is also a reflection of human nature, and humans desire to learn about and control their environment and to survive. In the same way, capitalism is both new and a reflection of human nature. People are just getting better at manifesting their selfish desires. If you gave a chimpanzee the option to have herself and her offspring have absurd abundance at the expense of strangers, she'd absolutely go for it. It's just an issue of selfish gene survival. The same is true of us, and every generation since our common ancestors with chimpanzees, and way before that. It is just our increasing intelligence(individual and collective from our ancestors) that has made it so common now.
Capitalism will eventually evolve into techno-socialism. Premature, pipe-dream socialism would just cause societal decay. Capitalism is the long, hard walk to a better place.
Human Nature itself is a fallacy, what is considered Human Nature changes based on environment.
Why would Socialism cause decay? Why is Capitalism a road to a better place when it results in deliberate over-exploitation of the Global South, preventing development?
Changing based on the environment doesn't make human nature a fallacy. Humans want their DNA to survive like any other animal, different environments just require different strategies.
Capitalism is leading to more and more efficient methods of creation. Eventually, the methods of creation will be so efficient that everything will be free. Historically, socialism has never led to any such thing because it crushes motivation. Pretty much nobody works extremely hard their whole life just to give everything away and never enjoy the fruits of their labor. These people exist, but they are a tiny percent of the population.
The Global South is way more developed than 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, etc. They are just not as developed as the Global North, but the gap is decreasing in recent decades.
Defending a system by saying it is Human Nature is the fallacy, not saying that people want to survive.
Capitalism is making goods cheaper, and is increasing exploitation. Wealth disparity is skyrocketing.
Socialism absolutely resulted in rapid development, and retains motivation. This is entirely ahistorical.
The Global South is not developing as quickly unless they throw off the Global North, like Burkina Faso is doing. The Global North exploits the Global South to retain cheap cost of labor and make more profits.
You're assuming that all possible future economic systems would have to work the same way as our current one. Even in the current one eg. taxation could be used to limit wealth after some arbitrary amount of millions owned, but note that I'm not advocating for this, just illustrating the point
I assumed you meant we should be taxing people who make too much money or just not allowing them to acquire more resources. Although this stuff is easily beaten since the people who enforce the taxes are the puppets of actually powerful people who have lots of wealth. I was just curious where you thought that line should be.
I think the actual future will be much more like an AI-powered hippy commune where money is mostly just found in history lessons. Maybe the most powerful people/entities will have something like money in their negotiations, but not the average person. I think this will naturally come about as a result of our current system.
I think this is where capitalist understanding of capital goes into contradiction with marxist understanding of capital. I won't go over everything in Das Kapital that relates to this topic, but I'll give the short gist. Capitalism takes a very general "everything is capital" approach which means whatever money you collect is capital. Marx defined capital different to show the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system. From the point of view of money it becomes capital when you use that money for the specific purpose of making more money.
Let's say you give someone the tools to make a thing and then you pay them $40 to make that thing. You then sell that thing for $50 making $10 for yourself from that. If we imagine this as a black box, you put in $40 and you get $50. Collect until you have $80 and then you get back $100. That is capital. You do nothing but you make money and you use that money to make more money.
What isn't capital is if it costs you $40 to make something, you sell that thing for $50, you take that $10, collect until it's a million and then buy a house or something. That is not capital because that's the product of your labor and that money returns into circulation.
You're allowed to keep your money because you've earned it. Your neighbor is allowed to keep his house, his cars and all the savings assuming he did the worth to earn it. There is no actual cap beyond what you're capable of earning from your labor. I won't get into the "what if he didn't earn it" or the "Person X made billions of their own work" discussions because I'm not here for that. I'm here to give a quick explanation to your questions because we're not taught Marxism. The outcomes of Marxism comes across as very nonsensical and puzzling, when all you've been taught is capitalism. If you don't care to read Das Kapital this is a good summary where the 4-5th video starts to get into the meat of the subject
Thanks for the videos.
It would be amazing if there really was a black box that could guarantee $40 in and $50 out! Sign me up, lol! As it is, the best capitalism has done is ($40 and research in) and (a chance at $50 out). If that first box existed, then everyone would use it. Many people think it exists, and then they are confused when the box just eats their money. That's because they naively neglected the research input and didn't realise that it was only ever a chance at $50.
It does exist, it's called being the owner of a company or in modern times, being an investor.
From Marxs critique those people were factory owners. The factory made X amount of money and the owner chose how it gets split between him and the workers. The factory owners only input in the labor process is owning the tools, they themselves don't put any labor into what the factory produces.
In modern times you still see the same thing in some companies that are big enough that the owner doesn't do any work but small enough to not be publicly traded (obviously with some exceptions like Valve corporation), but usually the "owner" is replaced by a board of investors. The investors don't do any actual work, their input is cash and in return they get more cash back. And what's the requirement to be an investor? To already have a large amount of money. That's why everyone can't do, because they don't have that kind of money and they never will.
This is why leftists are against billionaires and such, because they're essentially leeches. The vast majority if not all of them didn't earn that money, their wealth comes from the collective pocket of the workers like you and me. We do the work, we make the money and they take a part of it because they own our workplace.
Do you think that everyone who starts a business or invests in companies is guaranteed to make a profit? I don't think so, but I have no idea what percent end up profitable. It seems like a big gamble to me, so I can't help but wonder if the ones that we see and pay attention to just so happened to be the ones that either chose really well or got really lucky. I have no idea which is more common.
I do know that there are a shitton of trust fund kids that don't end up as billionaires. If it really was just as simple as having "lots" of money automatically gets you way more money, then it seems like there would be a runaway affect where there would just have to be more and more money created at a faster and faster rate in order to keep paying off all these rich people and their black boxes. There is something about that that doesn't seem quite right to me, like just on a mathematical level, doesn't it seem like the amount of money in existence would have to be going up exponentially in order for this story to be true?
I don't know, I'm not an economist, it's just that something feels a bit off to me in this narrative.
There are no guarantees in life. There's no guarantee that working for a company gets you paid either, the company could go bankrupt and all you have is a claim for unpaid work. And in that sense anyone who starts a business isn't likely to make a profit. Anyone investing, there are very safe investments that are essentially guaranteed to make money. If you want an easy example I'm sure your bank is happy to take your money, invest it, take the risk, and guarantee you something like a 2% payout on your money. My rainy day fund is currently invested by bank on a guaranteed 4% return to combat the inflation. Unless you're investing irresponsibly or with a very high risk it's as close to a guarantee to make money.
It's not about becoming a billionaire. Billionaire is a blanket term some people use to refer to the ultrawealthy. They don't need to be billionaires, they just need to be wealthy enough live off of investment returns. If I had 10 mil at hand I'd consider myself ultrawealthy, because I've done the math and if I invested that much money into a relatively safe investment I could spend the rest of my life living off the investment returns. I'd be set for life. And remember, 10 million is still more than 900 million away from a billionaire. At about 20 mil I'd be getting more from my investment returns than I do at my actual job, but I live in a relatively cheap area.
don't know where you're from so I'll use America as an example. 20 million at a 4% return in a year (which is what my bank gives me) is 80k a year. The average annual wage in the US in 2022 was 77k. Minus taxes at 20 mil on a 4% return you'll make just below what the average american makes, without doing anything. You can do a similar calculation for your country. Find out what's the safest maximum rate your bank provides (that will be the floor of how much you'd make investing), find out what's the annual average wage in your country (or better yet, use your own wage), find the tax rate, throw them all together and see how many millions you'd need to live the rest of your life without ever needing to work. From there you get a relatively good idea how much money you'd need for that runaway effect, where you can do pretty much whatever and you'll just keep getting richer. And if you to the calculation, maybe for you that number is 100 million. That's still 900 million away from a billionaire, just to remind you of how obsenely wealthy billionaires are.
That's really interesting. Thanks for taking the time to lay it all out like that. In the US, inflation is currently at 3.36% according to a quick search. Doesn't that mean that in order to actually be profiting 4% in terms of actual wealth gained, I would need to find a reliable investment that is paying out 7.36%? Or am I making some sort of error here?
I guess that's up to you how accurate you want to go with your calculations. If you also want to account for inflation go for it. I didn't account for inflation because I originally did the calculation out of interest to see if I was just safe investing at 4% how much money I'd need to cover my current expenses. Once I got the number I wasn't interest in going more specific because I instantly realized it would be effectively impossible for me to make that much money. For me that number was enough to get the ballpark of what it would mean to be the ultrawealthy, I wasn't looking for a specific threshold.
Too late for that, that's the problem.
Yeah absolutely true. Frankly I don't think we'll be able to unfuck ourselves before it's much too late from a climate viewpoint – and I'm not entirely convinced we haven't already passed the point of no return