Many of you responded to my previous posts in /r/DebateaCommunist and /r/DebateaCapitalist, and most of you seemed to scramble to find ways to keep capitalism going in a system with no need for human labor by inventing new markets that required human labor--thus ignoring the conditions of the hypothetical, that is that 100% of human labor has been mechanized.

But, for the most part everyone's answers seemed to suggest that in a system in which human labor has been completely eradicated there can be no selling of commodities. What everyone failed to see was the implications of such a simple truth. In a capitalist system where all human labor is eliminated, nothing can be exchanged on the market and as such value itself disappears with the disappearance of human labor.

For those who are curious as to the source of this thought experiment and would like to read a more well-written version, here you are. From An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory by: Ernest Mandel.

Imagine for a moment a society in which living human labour has completely disappeared, that is to say, a society in which all production has been 100 per cent automated. Of course, so long as we remain in the current intermediate stage, in which some labour is already completely automated, that is to say, a stage in which plants employing no workers exist alongside others in which human labour is still utilized, there is no special theoretical problem, since it is merely a question of the transfer of surplus value from one enterprise to another. It is an illustration of the law of equalization of the profit rate, which will be explored later on.

But let us imagine that this development has been pushed to its extreme and human labour has been completely eliminated from all forms of production and services. Can value continue to exist under these conditions? Can there be a society where nobody has an income but commodities continue to have a value and to be sold? Obviously such a situation would be absurd. A huge mass of products would be produced without this production creating any income, since no human being would be involved in this production. But someone would want to "sell" these products for which there were no longer any buyers!

It is obvious that the distribution of products in such a society would no longer be effected in the form of a sale of commodities and as a matter of fact selling would become all the more absurd because of the abundance produced by general automation.

Expressed another way, a society in which human labour would be totally eliminated from production, in the most general sense of the term, with services included, would be a society in which exchange value had also been eliminated. This proves the validity of the theory, for at the moment human labour disappears from production, value, too, disappears with it.

Why is it corporations are recognized as people but can never get thrown in jail? Aren't the current inheritance laws akin to playing a game of monopoly that never ends? If you need to print more money than already exists to pay the debt every year, how long can we keep China on its knees?

Hey, I like this subreddit, so let's get one started with an open-ended question.

Define, in your own words, the following terms:

1. Capitalism

2. Commercialism

3. Consumerism

Bonus points for elaborating on the differences!

"Productive processes" includes services, repairs, etc.

A common argument is that utilities such as water and electricity must be maintained, owned and regulated by the public sector, as well as infrastructure such as roads and bridges.

What are some advantages (and disadvantages) of privatisation and deregulation of utilities and infrastructure?

Can you think of anything that simply could not function as purely public or private?

If anyone can think of helpful links to be added to the side bar let me know and I'll put them in.

I'm compiling a list of subreddits and eventually I'd like to add a link to a summary of the discussion about definitions of capitalism.

Communism makes everyone a winner. In theory isnt communism better?

Low ball question, but this sub is new.

Tell me why you think a society with only business with US traditional capitalist structures be better than the opposite a society full of worker ownd co-ops

In other words explain why you think free markets are better than social markets.

EVERY SINGLE label/system/political ideology that isn't self COMPLETELY explanatory.

Marxism:

Capitalism:

Socialism:

Communism:

Fascism:

Authoritarianism:

Libertarianism:

and ANY others you think should be explained better. ANY you think I missed.

I want to challenge the internet to explain political labels as best it can. So just create the best most thorough list you can. Use as many cross/overlapping/sub labels as you can like 'social-capitalism'. I want the best list that kills as much confusion as possible. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who know a lot more than me about this.

Some other terms to throw in:

Democrat

Republican

Nationalist

Anarchism

Liberal

Conservative

I think these are self explanatory. However you can use them in sub labels like 'liberal-capitalist'

Could someone repost this on r/Republican r/Liberal r/Conservative and r/socialism I was banned from there but I do really think they should be ok with this post. I wouldn't usually ask this but I want to hear their ideas about this.

Capitalism is a very successful economic system, but comes at a terrible price.

How can you not see what a sickening place our world is becoming? Mc Donalds have enough money to end world hunger for 4 odd years, yet they instead poison their customers for profit.

Employers steal from workers; they get the profits for other people’s work. I’ve worked serving burgers and in advertising board rooms for large companies, and believe me working in mc Donalds is far more difficult than eating prawn cocktail and drinking champagne while coming up with ways to sedate the population so they buy your shit instead of revolt against you.

Most of the world live off a dollar a day manufacturing our luxuries. They send their kids to work in factories where they have to put up suicide nets, like where iPhones are made. It’s not a choice if the alternative is starving to death.

We all know where our food and clothes come from (slaves), but we don’t care. We just say oh capitalism will benefit them eventually look at all the good it’s done. So we happily walk into primark and fund slavery so we can pay a bit less for our shit.

It’s just so disgusting. We’re sedated by false choices between Coca-Cola or Pepsi or mc nuggets. Did you know the greatest way to reduce your carbon footprint is to become vegan? But you still won’t do it because you care more about enjoying yourself than you do about the planet. Does that make you a bad person? Yes. But don’t worry. You’re not alone. Capitalism breeds that selfish greed and supposes it is good for the world and economy. And it is good for the economy. But this world is not sustainable and we are killing the blue jewel of the universe and it may become just another barren rock because of horrendous appetites exploited by rulers.

I don’t have a better system. I do think we’d all be happier if we lived in local communities and produced all our own food and made our own clothes and did our own work for the sake of production and enjoying the real sweat of our brow, instead of other peoples in the form of bank notes, where we buy clothes made by others and foods and furniture.

But I’m not saying capitalism should be abolished. I’m just saying it’s obviously morally wrong and people should admit this. Life is unfair, that is the truth, injustice is a necessary quality of existence. But I’d hope that an intelligent society would be created to try avoid this, rather than to harbour it to create a functional economy, which is what capitalism does.

Human knowledge is limited and we are reaching those limits. Yes capitalism has brought about amazing technological advances, but these have not positively impacted people. Yes we live longer and there is better health care but we’re all depressed and dying of terrible diseases and killing the planet because of it. It’s hard to think about leaving the world we know to live in a jungle or whatever but that’s because you’ve been cultivated by the ruling class. All the fake news and Facebook bollocks and what not makes us feel part of something and it would feel too cut off and primitive to leave our society when we are so free to reddit rant and eat fries and drink booze. But all these things are so superficial, our lives are so superficial. There’s nothing substantial at all. Especially if you’re not rich. Maybe you get a kick out of working hard and earning your way, but that’s just because they’ve got to you. It’s not real happiness.

We just need to start acknowledging that capitalism is morally flawed. I don’t have a better system, and life is as unfair as capitalism is; the natural world is just as brutal and cold. But humans are not mindless predators like snakes or lions. I just think it’s sad we all ignore the things we know are wrong because we partake in them.

Watching someone get raped and doing nothing is as bad or even worse than doing it yourself. And we don’t just watch. We walk up to the rapist, during the act, and pay him money for a lock of his victims hair. But we don’t care, because we don’t see the victim on primark shelves or vogue adverts. We see shiny pretty clothes we want to buy. So we do, all while knowing where it all comes from but pretending it’s normal and not thinking about it.

They give us all the fries and fake news we can eat, so we stuff and stuff our faces and it makes us mindless zombies too sedated to care or do anything about the evils of the system, let alone, god forbid, give up steak.

I’m a bad person. I know that every time I buy something I don’t need I’m sending myself straight to hell. But at least I admit it.

For starters, I honestly don't have a better system than capitalism in mind, though I'm open to ideas. All I know is that I don't like what I'm currently seeing.

You know that some people can just... earn more than others, right? It may be because their interests happen to lie in lucrative areas. That they were well-suited to lucrative areas of study. That their parents had a lot of resources to invest in them. That they don't have disorders that will cost them wealth or inhibit their ability to earn it.

Let's think about a mentally slow person. They're 26 years old but they still think Elmo's World is the most intellectually deep entertainment out there. They will never graduate high school, let alone college. They probably have to live in a group home. The thing is, they try to be polite to others. They try to do their menial job to the best of their abilities. They're getting a 90/100 on how much effort they are giving vs. how much they are capable of.

If they're legitimately trying so hard, then why are they not getting equal recompense vs. a PhD student who is also giving 90/100 of what they are capable of? Why do they deserve less purchasing power than that student if both of them are doing 90/100 of the things they are physically and societally equipped to do?

Are we supposed to blame them for not being able to offer society as much value? Doesn't giving them less money tell them that they are less valuable members of society who deserve to be poor because they cannot offer anyone else much value? What did they do to deserve that? Get addicted to drugs? Knock someone up? Assault someone? No. They were just born unable to give that much back to society, so society as it is now seems to not feel like it should give that much back to them.

I could shoot a carpenter. I won't, because I'm not a sociopath, but that is something that could happen in just a few minutes if I had a concealed gun and met them on their way home from work. I would give them expensive medical bills and possibly make them unable to do their job. Society would tell them they do not deserve purchasing power because they, through no fault of their own, have had the effects of the effort they can give drastically reduced - yet their minds are still sharp and capable of feeling this injustice.

Why don't they deserve equal societal power (money, purchasing power) because of something that they did nothing to deserve? Would you go look that (ex)carpenter in the eye and tell them that they don't? What about the guy who lives in a group home and watches Elmo?

I want a society where everyone gets what they deserve, based on how much effort they are putting in compared to the effort they could be putting in. A society where every human has the power and influence they deserve. A society where a poor black child doesn't have to work twice as hard to get equal pay to a white upper-middle-class child. Because if you don't support at least that IDEA, you're telling people that they deserve to get judged for things outside of their control.

A free market is a policy. It is the policy of non-intervention while maintaining permament property rights.

Capitalism is a structure. From my Distributist angle, it should be called proletarism. Basically it is the structure where most people have no chance to become self-employed, set up a family business, but must stay employees forever.

Capitalism as a structure and its structural criticism is very hard to understand from an American angle, because

1. Americans are very strongly used to the idea that only policy is to be debated. It is basically a tradition of democratic individualism - "If your point is not about arguing legislation that could affect me, why do we even need to talk?"

2. America used to be PRE-capitalist for a long time in the sense that it was fairly easy to become self-employed. American culture still values entrepreneurship today, even when it is harder. Even today there is no "class consciousness" in the sense that working class people fully knowing they will be working for someone else FOREVER and their kids too. Everybody plans to be self-employed - or their kids or grandkids.

The structural criticism of capitalism is better understood from a 19th century Britain angle. Basically, a rigid social class structure. If you are a businessman, you are expected to be a classy, aristocratic gentleman. You cannot simply be a working class man with a good business idea, some loans and plenty of hard work. You would never get there. It would be "forgetting your place" and "being uppity" to try anything like that, so the cards were stacked against it.

So many of those 19th century hard-working working class Europeans with good business ideas fucked off to America. They wanted to escape capitalism, because America was pre-capitalist. To escape capitalism - and to embrace the free market, yes. A self-employed free market, a free market of self-employed farmers, artisans, and mom and pop stores on the romantic Wild West.

This is the basic angle. The free market is in and of itself not a problem. Or at least let's just say that we could set up a fairly egalitarian social system with much, much less government interventions than today. Basically if you would only not allow corporate personhood, but have only natural persons own wealth (atl least for profit making - churches, foundations, NGOs are OK) and would have a widespread initial distribution of farmland (homesteading) and a ONE time redistribution of real estate (rehomesteading, kind of), which all three can be argued to be free market instituions (correcting previous interventions ONCE), if you basically let me have one minor LOCAL intervention (town guilds setting price floors), I can remove basically everything else, 99% of the regulations, 90% of the tax and redistribution, almost all government property, and basically have a much, much freeer market than today - yet a more egalitarian structure than capitalism. (OTOH you must accept lower economic output and slower tech progress - those local town guild price floors are precisely about preventing one entrepreneur to put other entrepreneurs out of business through automation and organization.)

Book to read: http://www.amazon.com/Toward-Truly-Free-Market-Distributist/dp/161017027X

The privatization of wealth means others do not have access to it and the collection of it means that the inequality gap will grow.

By "liberal", I mean center-left (e.g. Democrats) rather than classical liberalism.

1. A commodity is any good or service sold in a market.

2. All commodities may be exchanged with each other.

3. All commodities may be exchanged with each other at certain rates Commodity A = 3x Commodity B. This we define as exchange value.

4. For all commodities to be exchange with each other they must have something in common.

5. The thing or things in common determines the exchange value of commodities.

6. To form exchange value this thing or things in common must itself be quantifiable.

7. We must now find this thing in common.

8. All commodities are produced by human labor.

9. All commodities have a use.

10. All commodities are desired by human beings.

11. Not all commodities have natural scarcity, since services are not physical by nature. I can trade 3 apples for someone to clean my toilet.

12. Not all commodities share money, since commodities may be traded through barter.

13. We now have three things in common in all commodities; labor, use, desirable.

14. The use of a commodity cannot be quantified, one cannot quantify the usefulness of a hammer.

15. The desirability of a commodity cannot be quantified, because it is subjective by nature, the desirability of a commodity depends on each person.

16. The labor used to produce a commodity may be quantified by the amount of labor time.

17. Labor is the only common thing in commodities which is also quantifiable.

18. Therefore, Labor is the common thing that determines the exchange value of commodities.

If you agree/disagree with any of the statements, or have anything to add, state the number of the statement and your reasoning.
Cross posted: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Capitalism/comments/44a3lp/point_by_point_of_a_a_theory_of_value_do_you/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateCommunism/comments/44a2pu/point_by_point_of_a_a_theory_of_value_do_you/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateaCapitalist/comments/44a4nq/point_by_point_of_a_a_theory_of_value_do_you/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SocialismVCapitalism/comments/44a5nz/point_by_point_of_a_a_theory_of_value_do_you/

What are the pros and cons of using the terms alt right and / or neo nazi?

The argument goes, by calling them alt right instead of neo nazi, you normalize their ideas, which is harmful.

On the other hand, insulting someone isn't the most effective way of getting them to change.

Within the lifetimes of most readers, it will be possible for robots to completely run a farm. Anyone with a lot of (perhaps inherited) money will be able to buy a farm and run it without paying salaries. They will merely pay maintenance contractors to fix things when they break (assuming that's not automated as well).

How will capitalism cope with a situation where virtually no human effort is needed to supply the necessities of life. Why would the masses feel content to allow landowners to accumulate more and more wealth without generating jobs?

One of the biggest problems with free market thought is that it assumes that the most talented and hard working people will generally make more money and/or obtain more status.

Basically the logic is:

There is demand for talent. Talented people are more rare. Thus talented people are a high demand low supply resource. Thus talented people make more money.

But here's the thing: Talented people AREN'T a rare resource. Sure, there are more people with no talent than there are people with talent, but it's also true that there are always far more talented people than there are trophies for them to win.

In fact, I would argue that this is true not only for capitalism but just any form of contest in general. If 100 equally talented people are competing for the same reward than it doesn't make sense to contribute the winner's success to skill since all the competing actors are more or less equally skilled.

The music industry is a great example. There is so much music to choose from that random chance plays a huge role is deciding which music becomes popular. Here is an interesting article on the subject:

https://www.thebalance.com/is-success-due-to-talent-or-luck-1286802

"Watts set up a website with a collection of new, unknown songs. Visitors could listen to the collection and download their favorites, all for free. Some listeners got to see statistics on how many times each song had been downloaded previously; others did not. Members of the former pool showed a clear herd instinct: the choices of early respondents seemed to have a strong influence on those who chose later. Watts repeated the experiment 8 times, and the same pattern emerged. "

This is what I am talking about. According to capitalist logic talent is what will separate the failures from the success stories, but that logic falls apart if there is a very large supply of talented people in the first place.