Capitalism Exploits Us

wtf!

Capitalism is private property rights.

Until you can deal with that, then you're pulling a don quixote on windmills.

 

And all you have is personal attacks. Nice. That means you have nothing to back you up. Get lost.

 

So? Exploitation is a subjective value. Value itself is subjective. You cannot present data that measures the feeling of exploitation, or satisfaction for that matter. Exploitation has no objective measurement.

Is a Chinese laborer exploited when he chooses to work for 2 dollars a day when his only alternative is attempting to scrape rice out of the ground as his father did? Is that laborer more or less exploited than a teen flipping burgers for 7 bucks an hour? How do you pretend to speak on behalf of either of these two individuals who have their own rationale for their own choices? Who are you to tell either of them that they are wrong if they disagree with you.

The willingness to provide labor for a wage is itself a refutation of exploitation. Your concern for exploited people is based on a false abstraction, not data.

 

So? Downtrodden people who agree they are exploited for the gain of others have a valid argument, subjective or not.

I would be arrogant to do so. I state my views and let others state theirs and do as they choose.

That is not valid. People have been exploited under many systems for many centuries. That is why capitalism came about to begin with. If exploitation is so subjective and false and an abstraction, tell me why people rebelled against feudalism and gradually transitioned to capitalism. Was feudalism just as good?

 

You socialists have no clue.

Have you ever tried to consider the situation that Marx was talking about when he and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848? It was feudalism where a very few aristocrats and merchants owned everything. Capitalism was in its infancy, with the industrial revolution still isolated to a few Western European nations until the 1850's. With the exception of a very few craftsmen, soldiers and clergy in the local towns and villages, everyone lived on a farm - no plumbing , no heating, dirt floor, no toilet paper or "sanitary napkins". Women tended to die very young and it was not unusual for a man to have 10 or 11 kids by 3 or 4 wives. If the farmer had a good harvest, he and his family ate well - if not they starved - and the local overlord always took his 20% or 30% of the harvest.

There are parts of the world where this still goes on - the Sudan and central Africa - India and other parts of the far east. The Plague, polio, small pox, typhus, dengue, yellow fever and a variety of other diseases are still alive and doing well out there where 50 is old and 60 is ancient wrinkled, palsied and crippled.

Have you ever tried to squat over a 6 inch hole in the floor to take a crap. Try not to piss all over your feet and don't let your pants fall to the floor - oh, and you have a choice of little squares of newspaper or a "finger" bowl. Also, do you know how odd it feels to be the only person within ten miles who has teeth and not rotten stumps. The people I dealt with were considered well off. I took a "bath" in the local river and got a "fungal" infection in both ears that took me years to get rid of.
All of this happened in the late 60's, but it's still out there today - ask a soldier.

Socialism is mental masturbation

 

Well, at least you see why many of us do not want to slip backwards into another system which would return most of us to the status of serfs.

 

It's a simple question.

 

What personal attacks I'm complimenting you for helping me prove a point! What I have offered is many years of working with a wide diverse range of people at which you choose to see as

And you're offended Like I say, some people can only see their POV and nothing more.. These are the folks I experienced in my time working within crew settings over many decades! What you fail to see is, everything I have posted you have demonstrated to the letter! And this is exactly why most CO-OPs fail, because one or two like yourself INSIST that no one else has the better idea or more experience then you and as you clearly see will not have it any other way! In a CO-OP environment your personality would be disruptive and only cause a bitter and disruptive work place, and eventually the reason to dissolve equality and adopt a hierarchy or arbitrator to calm the atmosphere and other workers..

 

Interesting story, but it has nothing to do with anything I know of. Your "point", if there is one, is a mystery. But that's ok. Nobody gonna stop you from posting pointlessly.

 

There is no backward slipping possible as a trend. Any back-sliding is temporary and recoverable in most of history. So you're safe.

 

And yet this in itself is not a criticism of capitalism. Downtrodden people are allowed to feel exploited, and allowed to make different choices to rectify that feeling. The trouble is, feeling exploited, and being exploited are not necessarily the same, are they? Value, after all, is as we have agreed: subjective. This precludes the idea that it can be zero sum. Either everyone exploits their own strengths and everyone exploits the strength of others, or no one does. In all trades both people make the trade specifically because they feel like they are gaining something worth more than they have given up.

How can this be exploitation?

It's well and good to say this. It's an entirely different thing to empower a governing body to force people to do as you choose. The only alternative to capitalism is such government empowerment. Else, left to their own choice, people will trade as they always have.

Feudalism violates the non aggression principle. It was rebelled against because force is necessarily used to redistribute property. Just like all other systems that pretend to be alternatives to what Marxists denounce as capitalism.

 

I wonder if the Kulaks felt exploited as they were executed for the dastardly crime of sifting the dirt of what used to be their own farms for dropped grains of wheat to feed their starving families?



Of course, after murdering everyone that knew how to grow grain for the crime of being successful at growing grain, that's when the real starvation started.

Why do we keep seeing this same false narrative play out over and over?

 

Capitalism is merely modern day Feudalism with your boss as your lord and master.

 

Feelings are subjective, by definition. Exploitation is objective. Either it exists or it doesn't in any given situation. When a person has power that creates a relationship in which he obtains work from another and benefits from that relationship, there is exploitation.

Is it such a trade if I aim a gun at you and demand your wallet, and you give it to me? There are situations in which people make a choice because alternative choices are limited only to others that are very undesirable or even harmful. That is normally the case in capitalist exploitation.

You don't think you are compelled by economic forces beyond your control to make choices you make? Actually capitalism utilizes much more force than socialism probably would. Socialism is the most democratic system. Read my signature lines.

So you say that under feudalism exploitation was not a subjective abstraction. True. Nor is it under capitalism. Your last sentence is a bit "confusing". You seem to want to criticize socialism but only by innuendo and not directly, and what you say is not true.

What was the "property" that feudalism redistributed? Crops? Capitalism is big on redistribution of property .... to the rich.

 

We don't. Not today. You're imagining it. But what's noteworthy here is that you believe you are criticizing and attacking communism, but you aren't. You're attacking mistaken people in difficult situations where they tried to improve life using strict, forceful intolerance for one reason or another. But what they were working with was not communism. And their methods have been thoroughly rejected by Marxists today, except for a tiny, insignificant fringe of extremists.

 

Existence is not the factor that determines whether something is objective or not. Feelings exist. They are not objective. In fact, objectivity is specifically exclusive of feelings. Exploitation is a feeling. Person A who does X amount of work for Y amount of compensation can feel exploited and at the same time Person B can do X amount of work for Y amount of compensation and feel appreciated. Exploitation is not something that can be measured. It is not objective. You don't feel that something has a mass of 10kg You don't feel that you earned 10 dollars an hour. What you feel is that you worked too hard for that ten dollars and that feeling is quite subjective.

What you are describing is theft. Theft is not a feature of capitalism. In fact it is the one system that has any mechanism to protect against it. It is the only system that enshrines the ownership of property in the most expansive definition of property ownership. Without property rights, there can be no such thing as theft.

Of course. I'm compelled by the government to pay taxes. I'm compelled to buy LED bulbs instead of incandescent ones. I'm compelled to surrender certain property to prevent it from being imported from one geographic area to another. I don't call that capitalism. And democracy is most certainly accomplished through the exercise of force. It is a system that uses a government gun to impose itself on another group. Democracy exists because of the premise that people need to be compelled to behave a certain way. Whether that be simply to protect the boundaries around individual rights, or as it's more broadly applied, to accomplish an intended goal.

I did not say that. I said that feudalism violated the non aggression principle. So, not true. And the thing that I called an abstraction was the group of people you label as exploited. This is the classic fallacy of the identity politician. You pretend to speak on behalf of a large group of people that only exist as an abstract monolith in your mind. This leads you to make false conclusions about real groups of people, and you saddle these real groups of people with real "unintended consequences" when you implement policy intended to improve the lives of your fantasy people.

Property is the ownership of the product of one's labor. Under feudalism, the feudal lord owns your labor. That is the property that feudalism redistributes through the threat of force. For if you keep your own labor he simply sends over his collectors to take it, imprison you, or kill you. People don't rebel against the redistribution of property. They rebel against the involuntary redistribution of property.

Under capitalism property is redistributed through voluntarism. People trade property voluntarily. Walmart doesn't come to your house, steal your wallet, and stuff a set of Martha Stewart hand towels into your linen closet.

 

Ahh the old: not communism canard. We do see this playing out today, just as it played out the first time around. Over and over, round and round.

People felt they were being exploited by the Kulaks because they felt they were paying too much for the food that the Kulaks produced. To address these feelings they stole the Kulak's farms, they stole their food, they stole uncountable millions of their lives. After completely wiping out everyone that was thought to be too skilled at producing food, they were unsurprisingly left with a society that was devoid of food and countless more millions died. This happened in Russia. This happened in China. This happened in Vietnam. This happened in North Korea. This happened in Africa. This happened in the Caribbean basin. This is currently happening in Venezuela. Who are these perfect people that you think can truly usher in the real utopia? Replace Kulak with "Da top ten purrrcent of the 1 purrrcent" or whatever the heck Bernie is raving about today and you cannot deny that his plan is absolutely no different.

 

Capitalism is an economic system controlled by price moves, nothing more, nothing less. Capitalism has no potential to be exploitative. People can be exploitative, but capitalism is not an economic system controlled by people; it is an economic system controlled by price moves.

The OP complains about the aspects of our economy that are not capitalistic. The entire thread, every post in it, is premised upon a gross misunderstanding of capitalism. Capitalism is nothing more or less than an economic system controlled by price moves.

I recommend, to everyone who posted above, the book "Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell.

 

It's controlled by value structures created by the choices people make. Yeah, it's controlled by people. The premise that's wrong is that the value structure can be designed & modified independently of individual choices.

Capital refers to individual assets and the value individuals assign to those assets. No one can command you to value your own assets the way they value your assets. But you are both people, and it's the negotiation between you and another person that controls the value of that asset. It's when you both agree that price is set. There's no "non-people" entity that sets that price.

 

No, you are in error. Capitalism has a very concise definition. Capitalism is an economic system controlled by price moves. That's it. That's all it is. The value of a thing is represented in a price, but so is it's scarcity and utility along with many other attributes.

A thing is worth whatever someone will pay for it, and it costs whatever someone else will pay for it. If an individual considers a thing to be worth what it costs, that thing is a good value to that individual. That's capitalism.

 

socialism/communism is an impossibility because not all humans are equally intelligent or hard working.
there's always a hierarchy in nature, and nature doesn't give a **** about socialism or SJWs.

 

Socialism is an economic system wherein everyone lives at the expense of everyone else.

 

That's what I said.

No it isn't. Increasing poverty of one because of increasing wealth of another is not a feeling.

No. That would be sloppy, inaccurate wording by that person. Exploitation cannot be felt. Anger, depression, rage, distress, and resentment are feelings that can arise due to the fact of being exploited. This is clear when we use language rigorously.

That is all in how you see and define it. Organized, legal theft is still theft even if it isn't a crime as define by law. European settlers like my ancestors stole land from Native Americans when they forced them onto reservations. But it wasn't illegal. When the police confiscate property because of a suspect's criminal activity and sell the property, only to later find out that the person was found not guilty by a court, it is legal theft. And when a businessman lawfully starts with little by way of assets, hires workers, pays them what they will accept under prevailing conditions, and builds the business into a multi-million-dollar enterprise and makes himself wealthy while his workers squeak by and accumulate little or nothing, that is theft, -legal theft, but theft just the same.

-to protect him from prosecution or attack when he commits legal theft as I just described.

Similarly for capitalism. Under capitalism, the capitalist owns your labor. That is the property that capitalism redistributes through the threat of force. For if you keep the product of your own labor the capitalist simply sends over the police to take it, imprison you, or kill you. There you have redistribution of property by threat of force.

 

Great. I'm waiting to see what you say about my comments on the theft of land from Native Americans, etc.

No, feelings are subjective. Exploitation is objective. If they were paying too much for food and it enriched the seller, that is objectively exploitation.

That would be a different subject, but you want to conflate it with your story above. If you call the conditions in the USSR, China, Vietnam, or North Korea "socialism", you really don't have any clue as to what socialism is, and that can be clearly proven but I suspect you don't want to upset your current fantasies about it. So you will choose to remain in your coveted and accepted propaganda rather than find out, won't you? Am I wrong?

 

I disagree Capitalism is the ownership of the means of production. If you own the means of production, you decide what the price is.

The American system is liberal Capitalism where such laws as anti-trust allow competition and deny price fixing and also allows for unions when called for.