laws guaranteeing a decent wage and working conditions. — Isaac
It's possible, is it not, that the reason capitalist countries are rich is nothing more than that they stole resources from other counties and didn't pay their ecological 'bills'? — Isaac
what kind of business model did you have, if you have to pay people so little even to keep the business afloat? Maybe that's a business that doesn't really work. — Srap Tasmaner
we should both raise the minimum wage and provide support for employers and employees to get through the transition to a better way of doing things. To say, it will hurt to change, is not an argument that where you're at is good. — Srap Tasmaner
I submit there's a transition there from a business arrangement that is in some sense inclusive to one that is extractive, but not a shift from socialist to capitalist. — Srap Tasmaner
us tankies* — Isaac
Are the old IBM inclusive nationally but extractive internationally? Did their subsidising of middle management jobs come out of profits, or out of exploitation elsewhere — Isaac
what's not going on is IBM taking, for itself, some fixed amount of wealth from some third-world society. Colonialism is an important part of the story, but it's not a simple matter of theft (as you put it earlier). What about exploitation? Yes, of course, but we have to start with an analysis that doesn't treat exploitation as simple theft. — Srap Tasmaner
My point was that IBM created a lot of value, meaning stuff, services, and intellectual property, that did not exist before, and their customers handed over wealth to get it. — Srap Tasmaner
But if there's a limited pot of wealth, then what material form could that thanks take other than a bigger than before share of that pot. — Isaac
But is there a limited pot of wealth? — Srap Tasmaner
an idea like theft — well that's social right? How far would you want to take the claim that British colonists stole North America from its inhabitants at the time? Did they own it? — Srap Tasmaner
Were their claims to ownership "natural" somehow? Or stronger than our later claims because earlier? Is that how we divvy up the earth — whoever gets there first? — Srap Tasmaner
There's definitely a limited pot of stuff and labour, and at the end of the day, that's what things like wealth and value are for. — Isaac
Ownership is always about power. — Isaac
I own my phone here because I have the power to do what I want with it uncontested and you don't. — Isaac
So in taking a European-type possession, the British stole something because they took away power. — Isaac
Maybe the extent to which wealth is the basis of a society is the extent to which that society defines itself by in-groups/out-group distinctions, such that "I own..." has real meaning, whereas for societies where out-groups are rarely even encountered, wealth might be less relevant as there's not much meaning to "we own..." if there's no-one that excludes from those rights. — Isaac
first, it's not the total at a given moment that matters, but what's available, what's controllable, and that changes — Srap Tasmaner
second, we have credit, and the future is a long time, even at a discount. — Srap Tasmaner
We both have the capacity to doom scroll on your phone, but only you have the right to, and I'm obliged to respect that right. You're saying further that there is some entity (perhaps yourself and some of your friends who work out, perhaps cops and courts, perhaps just the vocal disapproval of surrounding citizens) with the capacity to force me to respect your right, so rights come down to power in that sense, and thus property as well. — Srap Tasmaner
how does it help us? — Srap Tasmaner
now power — the guarantor of property — is itself a possession that can be stolen. What would underwrite possession of power, since it can't be power? Is it going to be right after all?
(I hope it doesn't seem like I'm nitpicking here — Srap Tasmaner
No anthropologist here, but we tend to name isolated societies for the word in their language that just means "people" right? But from my studies in college (wonderful lefty anthropologist who taught us from a book called Europe and the People Without History) and my son sharing what he's learned from Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, population contact goes back as far as you want to go. The isolated tribe in a state of nature is mostly myth. — Srap Tasmaner
With such a social technology available, a group within a group could deny the rest of the group use of something, claiming ownership the other members of the group are bound at spear-point to respect.
Now if that's the story, then the Europeans are just another out-group, and rather than being denied use of land and resources, they have the capacity to deny those already here such use. Seems like more of the same, not a break with history. — Srap Tasmaner
I think there are genuine changes between the deep past and the present, and those changes include new forms of political economy that don't just amount to gang warfare. Economics may be the science of decision-making under scarcity, but that scarcity is relative, defined by opportunity, and not necessarily some definite depletable amount, but a pool we can grow and shrink by our actions. — Srap Tasmaner
We have not expanded the wealth of the world by expanding opportunity, we've done so by stealing opportunity from future generations via over-exploitation of non-renewable resources. — Isaac
what has value depends on what you can do with it. Rare metals don't have inherent value; they have value once you invent electronics that need rare metals for components. (There is a cobalt mine re-opening in the US because cobalt is needed for the batteries of electric vehicles and wind turbines. Cobalt is precious again.) — Srap Tasmaner
Leaving that aside, what is the fair way of handling finite resources across all future generations? They will run out, unless we go extinct or leave the planet. Do we calculate how much fossil fuel we can burn per year working backwards from the sun going supernova? Every lump of coal we burn is a lump of coal countless future generations have a claim on. I don't think there's any plausible solution to that sort of double-bind without the invention of new possibilities. And I think we can do that. — Srap Tasmaner
Humans being kinda dumb, and greedy, even that doesn't always work. I think of the example of Norman Borlog and the green revolution. It's a tragic story, because he only intended his work to provide a stopgap, a way to relieve starvation and buy humanity 20 or 30 years to get its shit together. Instead, it was rolled out everywhere at terrible cost, and integrated into the new world system to enable even more population growth and the ever faster consumption of resources. In some ways, he's more to blame than anyone else for our current climate catastrophe, but it's not what he wanted at all. — Srap Tasmaner
What you can do with it is not only a question of technical know-how, but of power. — Isaac
there's lots of other aspects of the non-renewability of Western growth that don't suffer from that problem - exploitation of labourers, pollution, habitat loss... These are all direct 'thefts' which don't have the problem of simple finite resources. We could just leave all the potential value from labour exploitation, pollution, and habitat loss untapped. We could just say it's not worth it. — Isaac
the systems we set up have emergent properties which none of us would rationally want individually. — Isaac
(3) Where do the profits go? — Xtrix
Let's suppose there is a way of using the earth's resources that is largely sustainable — perhaps only up to a certain total population, whatever constraints we end up with — something more than using no resources but less than what we've been doing so recklessly. Can there be some similar happy medium with labor? Is employment inherently exploitation, or can we imagine an arrangement with safe working conditions, reasonable work/life balance, compensation above some level we'd see as fair? — Srap Tasmaner
I believe Robert Thaler's choice architecture stuff would be one way of attempting to address this sort of thing. — Srap Tasmaner
The reason employees do not have a say in where the profits go is because they are not owners. — creativesoul
. I'd be equally happy with each person having their acre (or return to common land) and then if you don't want a job, you can grow your own food, build your own house etc. I — Isaac
Humans don't have a random set of objectives and desires. — Isaac
Terrible idea. Not all land is equal. Nor is human capability. I'd prefer a capabale individual tending to valuable land over the state issued bum, in all cases. — Merkwurdichliebe
The reason employees do not have a say in where the profits go is because they are not owners.
— creativesoul
But ought they be? — Isaac
With top executives' compensation often linked to share price performance metrics, buybacks have emerged in the past decade as a relatively simple, quick means by which to raise a company's stock price, much simpler in many cases than it is to grow sales, expand operations, or increase profits.
Markets have also seen an increase in the practice of public companies issuing debt in order to buy back their own shares, a practice that some economists believe poses a threat to the long-term health of the U.S. economy.
capitalism itself — jorndoe
Where do the profits go? Why am I being exploited? This is unfair. It's already in the equation from the start- prior to even being a part of capitalism or any political economic system. — schopenhauer1
It doesn’t have to be.
Also, there are many forms of what we call capitalism. I’m not arguing about that. The answer to my question isn’t simply caked into the system. It’s a very specific and fairly recent way of transferring wealth to shareholders, and it’s worth understanding. — Mikie
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.
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