just thought i'd share my recent experience at revleft. I do not consider it trolling since I'm not really interested in pissing them off but rather to try new approaches to explaining why they might be wrong or a better alternative. anyway, here's an excerpt, where i ended up explaining economics
Quote:
Originally Posted by NecroCommie View Post
If we change the "at the point of a gun" to a more valid: "in face of necessity", one might argue that you contradict yourself. For one might say, that the deals made by the mob are two way agreements.
one thing is physical necessity, other is Coercion. Do not mistake the two. The system which has more freedom is the one that allows people to fulfill their necessities the most, without going into other people's freedom. If you wish to live, you must choose the rational choice of supplying for yourself. You can choose that by working your own land (in which you were born, in a more poverty centered way) or to sell your skills to people who seek them. Or steal. But all of them have consequences, and you must decide which one you wish to take.
Quote:
But land ownership (and later on factory ownership) gives birth to wage slavery. So if someone originally aquired land by finders keepers method, and used this "ownership" to enslave others, why is it unethical for the slaves "steal" back the taken land/factory/space/food.
How did he used his ownership to enslave others?
"Slavery is a form of forced labor in which people are considered to be, or treated as, the property of others. Slaves are held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and are deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive compensation (such as wages). "
Quote:
OK, there might have been a misunderstanding here. No one tries to deny ALL private property. I deny the legitimazy of privately owned means of production, which is basically the cause for most of the suffering in this world. Private ownership of community objects such as roads factories and fields (and air water and space), holds no philosophical base.
i don't see how people being able to make what they want and buy what the want is the cause of the most suffering in this world. Kings and wars, religion, totalitarianism, collectivism is what i would argue what has killed more humans.
Quote:
The road workers dont have money to buy any stocks. Otherwise they would be road owners. You REALLY need to learn the concept of wage slavery. Job is not an agreement. It is slavery, for one has to get a job from capitalist. If not, you die (out of hunger, disease etc...) Therefore the workers agreed to nothing, and the employers are really just exploiters. We have had several discussions on the subject on this forum, and I'd prefer you see them before we start those discussions yet again.
the road workers don't need to buy the finished product. They can make it themselves right? Let them organize themselves gather enough money to buy the tools themselves and then keep the road to themselves and whoever they want to share it with.
And yes, a job is an agreement, especially in more poorer countries. What do you think has made the people stopping living of the countryside and started coming to the cities? Because by the same hard work (and trust me, it IS hard work) they did in the fields they could get better benefits in the cities doing something else. And you don't need to get a job from a capitalist to earn a wage. You can self employ yourself. You can sell whatever you can produce on your own with whatever tools you can buy to whoever is willing to buy.
but let me adress this from another perspective. "It is slavery, for one has to get a job from capitalist. If not, you die "
by that same logic, if i were an employer, i am enslaved by the workers i hire, because if they don't produce, I die too. Capitalists are as "enslaved" by the workers as the workers are by the capitalists.
Human beings must always engage in production in order to consume and survive. Thus, by your theory, man would be enslaved to nature itself. If man is always enslaved in some form or another, according to this view, the concept of slavery is of little use in order to draw distinctions between what is a coercive interpersonal relationship and what is not, thereby defeating the analytical purpose of wage slavery theory.
I honestly dont care about what other talks you had on this subject before. If your arguments are good enough, then you will want to show them to me.
Quote:
The slight difference is, that many capitalist economists define hiring labour as labour in itself. This can be disputed rather easily by noticing how the act of hiring produces little else than... well... hiring. We cant run a state by just hiring people, but we can run a state by just working.
i believe there doesn't need to be any state, nor would I have any desire in running it such i found its existence a "necessary evil"
Quote:
This means that if you hire labour but do not work yourself, you eat, but dont produce. You would be quite literally a parasite, and in communist terminology: a capitalist. Do notice that I dont mean YOU, but I just use the "you-passive" in order to demonstrate.
Money does not come out of thin air. It had to be produced. Imagine i were to start as a capitalist. How would I go? I decided to take some old cardboard in the trash can and use my engineering skills to make a chair out of it. then in the street, i put it for sale, and i discover, that people are willing to pay me more than it cost me to produce the chair (in this case it cost me nothing because it was regarded as trash. But in other businesses, the cost of making something is usually very low, but people are willing to pay more for it. And if they are not, then that "forces" me to lower my price and profit margin if i want to sell at all). Same with other assets, foods, products, you name it. That is how capitalists make their money. Then, I would wonder: this has real potential here, people really seem to like this recycled chair I invented. But, i cannot make more than 3 chairs a day. If i could find someone to help me then i could make more money. Thus they employ. Desperate people may be willing to accept low wages, but there comes a time when it might be better for them to go to another job because it pays them better. I could then try and find, hopelessly, someone who would accept my poor conditions or be "forced" to raise my wages in order to keep the best to myself.
(i think actually you might have mixed the fact that capitalists usually make so much money that they don't need to physically work in whatever business they made after a while, so the business carries on with little attention needed, only requiring money to pay for new machines, wages, etc.
Quote:
Also, capitalist economists make the assumption that all money is earned by waged labour, which in the case of corporate leaders is rarely the case. The money is rarely earned, but more often inherited, or exploited from the workers. (exploitation takes many forms including economic globalization, imperialism, wage slavery and the parasitic leeching of the excess value.) If this basic assumption of capitalism were right, I just might live with capitalism, but since all these faults exist, I am disgusted with the economic system I live in.
I think that both you and I can agree on something. What we have here today is state capitalism/crony capitalism, which I define as "an allegedly capitalist economy in which success in business depends on close relationships between businesspeople and government officials. It may be exhibited by favoritism in the distribution of legal permits, government grants, special tax breaks, and so forth."
how does this work? My business is losing profit because i made some bad decisions or because i am facing fierce competition. What do I do? I go to the government and tell them that the kind of work i need to do is very specialized work and that there needs to be regulation in how its done because it is very dangerous etc. Then the government passes that regulation, and appoints a comitte to decide who gets to produce what and when. And guess who's in the comittee? that's right, the leading experts of the field. and that includes "older and more experient busineses" like mine. In the end, my initial firm benefits the most. Not only will i lose a heck of a lot more competition, but since i start to grow as a monopoly, at some point i will be "too big to fail" and the government will bail me out, thus encouraging me to not care about how i make my profits at all. and if something does go wrong with my firm, i can just blame it on the "free market" and ask for even more regulation. Lobbyism, "asking for favors", whatever, the truth is this is how most of the big companies have gotten where they are today.