Sad to see capitalist propaganda leaking in here. But remember the fundamentals my fellow workers.
Profit, rent, and private property are all forms of theft.
So no starting resources, no buildings, and no place to build a building if there were anyone with the means an intent. Brilliant, an even more disastrous utopia than the Libertarians. Well done.
No you idiot, the resources are all held collectively instead of individually. You are so stuck in your individualist world view that you seem to be entirely incapable of understanding the premise of collective ownership.
There are no resources as no one was paid to create them. Storage problem solved! Your intellect is truly inconceivable.
Are you stupid to think that profit motive is the only reason anything gets done?
There are no resources as no one was paid to create them.
Good thing nobody has to pay you to breathe oxygen, eh?
Personally, I’m not a big fan of the “surplus value == theft” argument. At least not in every case.
The reason is that simply by being in the context of your employment, you can work more efficiently and produce more value than you could on your own. If your wage is between your ‘potential solo value’ and your ‘current value’, then the profit comes from the fact that you’re working in the context that your employer has provided.
This isn’t to say I’m against workers getting the full profit, but it’s not as bad as some people say it is.
That falls apart a bit when you consider that Capital, ie the tools and materials used to create Value by labor, is itself a combination of labor and natural resources. The context you speak of was not created by a Capitalist owning said tools, the act of arranging and managing labor is of course itself also labor, but that labor is not derived from Ownership, nor does said ownership provide labor nor value. It’s separate.
Your employer provides nothing that isn’t earned by the value of the labor of its employees
False, they front the non-labor costs.
…with capital they or their ancestors made off the backs of labor.
Great pretzel logic you’ve got going there.
True, but what would the employees’ labour be worth without the context of employment?
As an example of what I mean, I have a hobby similar to what I do for work (hobby: game dev, work: software dev), I can say for a fact that I am more productive at work. I can specialize more at work, can get second opinions, and I get free, realistic testing.
Still not saying wage labour is always good, just that there are cases where it’s not that bad. There are other things we should pick to be mad at.
I can specialize more at work, can get second opinions, and I get free, realistic testing.
All of those can exist without an employer skimming from the top, also none of it is free, as op mentioned in their previous comment - it’s all been paid for with money you made for them.
Idk why but it seems devs are incapable of comprehending theory.
Show me where that has worked?
Many places. A good, quick example is a Worker Co-op, which is more stable, with higher rates of employee satisfaction, than Capitalist businesses. FOSS is another example, the site you’re using is a rejection of Capitalism, which ruined Reddit with ads and horribly unpopular yet uncontestable changes like the API bullshit.
A Worker coop is in fact a Capitalist business. They produce goods sold for a profit to return that as wages. FOSS only exists because the folks coding it are sharing what they made for their own benefit and only able to do so as they are otherwise gainfully employed. Thus Capitalism is the engine which allows FOSS to exist. Well done disproving your theory. That is indeed the first step to discovery.
A Worker coop is in fact a Capitalist business.
Bullcrap. A worker co-op can easily exist outside a capitalist context.
produce more value than you could on your own
Sooo… more value that can be stolen by capitalists?
the context that your
employerfellow people doing all the actual work has provided.FTFY.
Your argument against "“surplus value = theft” is about as shit as it gets.
but it’s not as bad as some people say it is.
The only reason you can pretend that certain aspects of capitalism is “not as bad as some people say it is” is because of the fact that organized labor have spilt a lot of their own blood fighting to get it to the point of being “not as bad as some people say it is.”
I’m all in on the labor theory of value. It’s gonna be a long haul to displace all the people who believe value is created by magic in the market, though.
Not everyone who wants better rights for workers is a Marxist; the horror.
What about keeping some revenue to reinvest in the business? For example, say I’m a business owner and I save some of my profits to open a second location someday. Does that count as stealing?
Yes, because for you to get those profits, you had to not pay your workers the full value of their labor power.
Yes. Because you get to have a second location and your worker who created the value with which you opened it doesn’t.
Lol that’s ridiculous. You wouldn’t have enough jobs if nobody could expand their businesses.
Well the communist idea is that the capital the workers generate is collectively owned. So it can be used to expand business, but since its not privately owned but instead by the people who generated the capital they get to reap the long term benefits of said capital as well.
How would/“should” this theoretically work in practice? Direct (presumably equal) payouts to every worker? I could get behind some version of that, at least.
Completely forgot my literature recommendation as an example of such a study: “Blackshirts and Reds” by Michael Parenti. It’s a Marxist-Leninist view on the USSR, it’s shortcomings, it’s strengths, it’s fall and the effects of capitalist “reconstruction” on the lives of the workers.
That’s the crucial point isn’t it? The general idea is “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”, but how that should be determined, how the capital the workers accumulate should be administrated, how the capital that has thus far been expropriated be taken back, how it should be redistributed and how any such attempt should be defended is the cause for a lot of leftist infighting. The answer ultimately depends on the material conditions and while theories might provide broad strokes any practicable theory will need to be adapted, which is why in my opinion the discussion of which theory is better or not is secondary to the study of history and actually attempted revolutions, whether they succeeded or failed. And, in my opinion, some of the more important are the Haitian revolution, the Paris commune, the October revolution, the November revolution, the Spanish civil war and the Chinese peoples revolution.
That’s not what people are advocating for. Yes, you’re correct, if you assume Capitalism is the only mode of production.
Since ownership does not create Value, and is merely used to exert power over non-owner workers, if Workers collectively share capital then they can own the value they create.
Imagine a factory. One version is owned and run by the Workers, the other version is owned by a Capitalist. The first one is what people advocate for, it gives the Workers the ability to vote and elect a manager, and democratizes production. The second option is what we currently have, and there’s no actual choice.
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Or it is the return for having fronted the expenses. One of those two.
Its not. No capitalist invests in a venture where the most they expect is a return of their expenses.
What?
So if I work and make a profit, that money is stolen from the value of my labour?
No, its just that you get to keep all of the profit.
When you work for a capitalist they pay you a portion of the profit your labor generated to cover your labor cost (food, shelter etc.) and keep the rest for themself.
It might be better understood in Marxist terms: you have the cost of your input materials and the cost of the labor-power needed to transform them. Subtract them from the output value of the labor and you get the surplus-value. The capitalist will keep the surplus-value the laborer created for themself and the laborer gets enough to cover the cost of maintaining their labor-power.
I get what ypu are saying, but I have a different oppinion on the subject, and it appears that I have found my way to the wrong community, so I won’t go into details here.
I wish you all the best!
To you as well. If you ever wonder what those Marxist are talking about here is a good read on it imo
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Wage_labour_and_capital
What difference in opinion do you have? Self-employed laborers get to keep all of their created Value, whereas Capitalists take value created by others.
That’s not how all of us here feel. Sorry to see you go.
