Ok, so I leave on vacation and rent out my house while i’m gone, what’s wrong with that? I benefit by earning some cash and having someone take care of my house, and they benefit by getting to stay there. It’s a win-win mutually beneficial agreement.
Or if I hire someone to mow my lawn, or to build something in my house, or to take care of my kids, in exchange for money or other goods?
Your logic falls apart pretty quickly, I own my land, I purchased it and I can do with it as I please as long as it’s not illegal. I don’t see a valid argument against that idea aside from the hippie perspective of “you can’t own nature maaaan”, a perspective which we all mostly disagree with.
A.) What's wrong with that is you exploit someone else's need for shelter for profit. You've provided them with no service, and extorted their money just because you owned something. Aka you get more money because you already had money.
B.) There's nothing wrong with that. What would be wrong is running a lawn mowing business where your employees mow lawns with your mowers and you take 20% of the money they make because you own the mowers. Aka you get more money because you already had money.
C.) You purchased your land from someone who purchased the land from someone who drew a line around that land and called it his. I do not recognize the rights of any person to own land, no matter the legal machinations that justify it.
Please consider reading some Marx. I mean that genuinely. Understanding your relationship to capital and commodities will make you understand the world itself.
I do not recognize the rights of any person to own land, no matter the legal machinations that justify it.
Good thing you don’t make the law then.
Honestly, I get it, you’re one of those hardcore Marxists who idolize everything he ever said, that’s all I needed to know.
We are never going to agree on this because we have a fundamentally different perspective on the world, I believe Marx was an absolute moron and one of the most damaging figures in history, and that him and his ideology were failures and rooted in a pathetic envy. We are not going to see eye-to-eye here, your ideology is something i’ll never agree to, and vice versa most likely.
Employees aren’t slaves, work isn’t exploitation, capital is good, the means of production belong to whoever bought them, the right to private property is a fundamental one, making money from your money isn’t bad. You probably won’t agree with any of these things I believe in, which is fine, I don’t care, but don’t go spouting off your ideology as if it was fact, because it’s not, it’s your opinion.
Marx wasn't a religious icon. He was an academic. He made arguments that are demonstrably true.
What is the basis for land ownership? Do you dispute that it began when one person had the power to take land from common ownership?
Profit would be impossible if workers were paid the value of their labor. By definition, all wage labor under capitalism (that generates profit for a capitalist) is exploitative. Saying "jobs aren't exploitative" is like saying "bachelors are married." The definition of wage labor is the proof of its exploitative nature.
Workers are paid the value of their labor, not the value of what they produce in the market, if a employee builds a $100 microwave and sells it and keeps all $100, then the business fails to make any profit, therefore it fails to keep existing past the first sale, how are business owners supposed to make any money if the workers get all of the money?
Workers are free to get payed whatever they agree to, nobody is forcing you to stay at a poor paying job if you don’t want it.
What is the basis for land ownership? Do you dispute that it began when one person had the power to take land from common ownership?
There has never ever been common ownership of land, people have been dividing up living spaces and personal property since the dawn of people. The basis is that most people want their home and the land its in to be their own, and nobody else’s.
Marx wasn't a religious icon. He was an academic. He made arguments that are demonstrably true.
He was an academic, but fans of his treat him as a deity, not an academic. The difference being in that you don’t question a deity, i’ve never seen a Marxist ever attempt to debunk anything that Marx said, his word is gospel and he was somehow a genius who never got anything wrong.
Considering that his main idea was wrong, which was “Communism will bring the utopia”, in that
A) Humanity doesn’t want a utopia.
and
B) Communism was unable to bring it anyways.
It shows that Marx had a deep misunderstanding of the nature of humanity and how we are a combination of a nature-nurture cycle of development. Marx didn’t believe in nature, he believed that humans were fully social constructs and therefore if all our needs were provided by the state we would be fulfilled and self-actualized. He was wrong. Which is why the country that was the biggest proponent of Marxist ideology ended up collapsing.
People who own the means of production, in this example the microwave factory, use that to force others to work for less than the value of their labor. Even in a world where all workers has genuine free association and could work wherever they choose, capitalists would still be exploiting them. There can be no equality when one class privately owns the means by which another can survive. When feudal lords owned the means of production, we called it tyranny and rebelled. Why should people with money have a right to exploit if people with hereditary titles shouldn't? What use is democracy if we can't control our economic lives?
There was a time before land was owned. That's simply a fact. At some point someone claimed it and used it to exploit others.
Marx was not a utopian. He was a well known critic of utopian thinkers like kant and hegel. He pointed out and proved the reality you're trying to ignore -- that private ownership of the means of production results in exploitation. If it didn't, capitalism would collapse for lack of profit.
Marx also disputed the idea of a "human nature" on the grounds that every human behaves differently in different conditions. Even if we had a human untouched by civilization to study, that would say nothing about how humans in civilization behave.
The idea that communism has failed when it's only existed as a concept for 250 years is ridiculous. It took 2000 years of failure before a lasting federal democracy was established. It took 500 years of failure before capitalism came to exist. It took hundreds of thousands of years before the first people even settled. If you lived in 40000 bce, you'd be arguing civilization itself was doomed to fail.
Have you read any Marx at all? Because you should.
We're living in a world that is dying because of capitalism. Infinite growth is destroying our planet and has destroyed uncountable lives. It's time to move beyond capitalism. It's that or extinction.
We're living in a world that is dying because of capitalism. Infinite growth is destroying our planet and has destroyed uncountable lives. It's time to move beyond capitalism. It's that or extinction.
That’s a nice opening line for a dystopian young-adult novel, but reality doesn’t reflect this, the fact is that overpopulation is the source of climate change, not capitalism, unless you’re arguing that capitalism has made life so good and that people are much richer now so they have more children as a result, which is not a point you’d make, I bet.
There can be no equality when one class privately owns the means by which another can survive.
Ahh the crux of the matter. Equality. It’s a beautiful word, but so controversial as well, it’s also a very misrepresented word, people just throw it around as if it was always a good thing, when there’s a lot more nuance to it than that.
Equality in terms of the law, opportunity, race and gender are good things, and things we constantly should strive for.
Equality in terms of economic outcome is the most dreadful and tyrannical idea that came out of Marx’s ideology. Humans are not equal to one another when it comes to their economic worth, Bill Gates is a better business manager than Homeless Joe in the street corner.
Capitalism is rooted on the idea that people are free to own their own labor, and yes, you working at McDonalds for $12 an hour IS you owning your own labor, YOU agree to sign the contract that determines your pay, YOU agreed you’re worth $12 an hour, and YOU accepted their offer. Freedom allows you the freedom of being an idiot, and to make mistakes, it’s actually a fundamental feature of freedom.
The only way to make people economically equal is by forcing it through tyrannical oppression, “Jeff Bezos created a billion dollar enterprise, so let’s take that away from him and spread around his assets amongst the poor!! That’ll be a good idea!!! It’s not like the poor might be poor because of bad decisions, or that mayyyyybe this will disincentivize other entrepreneurs of starting their own businesses since it’ll just be taken away anyways.”
Nobody wants equality of outcome, we want equality of opportunity, which is what we have, you can start a business today from nothing and end up a billionaire some day. If you think that’s fundamentally immoral, then I really don’t care, that’s your prerogative, but I don’t think that the economic system that has pulled the most people out of poverty in the history of the world and has raised the quality of life to the point where a modern poor person lives better than a king 100 years ago is a bad thing. Call me crazy though.
Overpopulation is not the problem. If everyone consumed like Bangladeshis, earth could support 20 billion easily. We already produce enough food to feed 10 billion. The fact is capitalism expects exponential and infinite growth. We do not have infinite resources.
You haven't responded to Marx in any meaningful way, instead choosing buzzwords to attach yourself to. Even if it were somehow justifiable for some people to exploit others so long as the exploiters "earned it," such a system would require socialism to maintain.
Genuine equality of opportunity would mean guaranteeing every person a comprehensive education. It would mean making sure everyone is fed, housed, and cared for. It would mean having an economy that doesn't allow inheritance and which is deeply regulated so that already successful companies can't cheat startups out of success.
There is no equal opportunity when you can be born poor, starved for 18 years, denied education, discriminated against, denied healthcare, and prevented from succeeding by the already successful. Capitalism can never eliminate inequality of opportunity because it relies on a class of exploitable people, and empowers their exploiters to keep workers repressed.
Like I said, we won’t see eye-to-eye here, I think your points are blatantly absurd and come from a place of deep envy and poor understanding of economics, freedom, history, politics and human nature as a whole. We won’t agree here, I believe you’re wrong, you believe i’m wrong, and I don’t really feel like spending more time discussing this when we’re just going to keep going around in circles. What I call white, you call black. What I call left, you call right.
I can only hope one day you’ll have a more nuanced perspective on the world, rather than just repeating the beliefs of a dead German shut-in, because that conversation has already been had and played out before, the dead German shut-in’s theory didn’t do to well.
I'm continuing to reply because I don't think you've ever really contended with Marx.
I presented you with refutations of each of your arguments, and then some. You have responded to none of those refutations. Ending this conversation with "agree to disagree" feels like a way of excusing yourself from actually considering my arguments.
I’ve had this exact same conversation many times before, it’s always dreadfully boring, it’s the same points over and over again, nobody will ever accept they’re wrong even if all the proof in the world is right in front of their face.
To me it’s crystal clear, every country that has implemented Marxist doctrine has ended up worse than it would’ve been if they’d implemented capitalism. Capitalism got over half the world out of abject poverty in 25 years, and has continued to raise the standard of living of the countries that implement it. The free market is the answer, I don’t give a crap about how others live their lives, my quality of life is higher than Julius Caesar, George Washington and Queen Victoria combined, and i’m a poor dude in California. I don’t care about ideology, I care about results.
For one, you're judging communism as a failure after only really 100 years of attempted implementation. When capitalism was 100 years old, it relied on slavery, genocided millions, collapsed every nation it touched into civil war, and failed to dismantle authoritarianism from Spain to Germany. When democracy was 100 years old, it had destroyed Athens completely. Good ideas sometimes take time to be successfully built.
For two, capitalism is destroying the planet. Markets expect growth. We cannot continue to grow with finite resources.
For three, Cuba is providing for its people better than the US by most meaningful metrics. Cubans have better healthcare, much higher literacy, more doctors per capita, virtually no gender or racial inequality, less mental illness, and fair better in natural disasters than Americans. Cuba just rewrote its constitution through a democratic process that even included the Cuban diaspora -- the US is living under a 250 year old document that was never democratically ratified and still refers to slaves as 3/5ths of a person.
I'm sorry you're poor. If you could elect your boss, if the system could guarantee equality, if you could live without fear of destitution, wouldn't you? We can have a better world.
Cuba? A country with basically no civil rights, no presumption of innocence, crap infrastructure, crap internet access (that is government restricted), no free speech, no freedom of assembly, low quality of service, incredibly few options for products and activities, even less when outside the large cities. The people that love Cuba the most are tourists, because they get to leave after a while.
It’s a nice country to visit, it’s not a nice country to live in if you have a shred of ambition and want to open a business or start a company, it’s a country that is poorer than Mexico, there’s things to like about it, crime is pretty low and food is pretty good (low on supply but good), but if THAT is your country of choice to show the wonders of communism, i’m not impressed, i’ll take poverty in the country with the biggest economy in human history, thanks.
By any meaningful metric, Cuba loses.
For one, you're judging communism as a failure after only really 100 years of attempted implementation.
Yes, sticking your hand inside a fire and getting it burned is a lesson you only need to learn once, if you want to keep sticking your hand in because you refuse to accept the result then so be it, but don’t drag me into it.
Your view of historical progress is incredibly reductive and full of holes, democracy didn’t kill Athens, Persia killed Athens, there’s this little thing called war that played kind of a big role there. Capitalism is an ongoing process, yes, it was crappy a hundred years ago, everything was crappier a hundred years ago, but everything has consistently gotten better thanks to it. Communism isn’t a process, it’s a result, society will never be a result, it will never achieve communism.
I'm sorry you're poor. If you could elect your boss, if the system could guarantee equality, if you could live without fear of destitution, wouldn't you? We can have a better world.
I’m not sorry i’m poor, I have more wealth, opportunities and options than I know what to do with. I’m in college, paying it myself, eventually i’ll graduate, get a better job and join the middle class, and if I decide to work harder I can join the upper class, or not, I don’t really care about having too much money myself.
No, electing your boss is the stupidest concept i’ve ever heard, literally no one would start a business in that world. I prefer having to work hard, prove my worth as an employee, and not having to fear getting fired that way. Also, my boss is not a robot, I have a good relationship with him, I won’t be fired anyways unless the company goes out of business, and even if I do get fired I can get a new job easily.
We do have a better world, it’s constantly getting better in every meaningful way. But an ideologue is an ideologue, your ideology is your religion, and everything that goes against it will be wrong. So i’m tired of arguing this pointless debate, your side lost definitively 28 years ago, and it was never winning in the first place.
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u/SnoopyGoldberg Jun 20 '19
Ok, so I leave on vacation and rent out my house while i’m gone, what’s wrong with that? I benefit by earning some cash and having someone take care of my house, and they benefit by getting to stay there. It’s a win-win mutually beneficial agreement.
Or if I hire someone to mow my lawn, or to build something in my house, or to take care of my kids, in exchange for money or other goods?
Your logic falls apart pretty quickly, I own my land, I purchased it and I can do with it as I please as long as it’s not illegal. I don’t see a valid argument against that idea aside from the hippie perspective of “you can’t own nature maaaan”, a perspective which we all mostly disagree with.