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Temporarily embarrassed millionaires pt. 2
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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We have roughly 8 billion people on earth. If a person's inventions and solutions combined improved the life of every person by a value of 13 cents, then they would have EARNED a billion dollars (because they would have created thta value).
Imagine I made a product that saves the life of 1,000,000 people (from an otherwise deadly desease). Is that not worth 1B dollars?
This is where the disconnect between "left" liberals and socialists come in. Left liberals will often say "nobody should have a billion dollars", or even "nobody can legitimately accumulate a billion dollars", and even in your example that's probably true (no single person can manufacture, distribute, and administer a billion vaccines), but to steelman your argument, a better version would be a solo streamer who has a billion viewers, each donating $2 (half of it going to the streaming platform). That would be a legitimate accumulation of a billion dollars. Whether or not some of that should be taxed is an orthogonal discussion to the whether or not the accumulation was legitimate.
What we actually need to separate is legitimate and illegitimate accumulation of wealth. Socialists do this correctly. We recognize stealing the surplus generated by value of workers through private property rights (either of IP, or industry like factories) is a form of theft, and this happens to be how every current billionaire got their wealth, most millionaires, and even some people with net worths under a million got all their net worth.
It's wrong to steal the surplus value of labor of your workers, even if it just amounts to 100k a year, while solo streaming to 10k viewers and making 100k a year is not wrong.
Those are very good points and I would agree with everything except for the statement that capitalists are stealing "surplus" value from workers.
Because workers are not (and should not be) paid for the value that the finished product adds to the market if they do not take the risk for it. Otherwise you would have to accept that if the product a worker was told to produce doesn't sell, he shouldn't be paid for it (since he produced nothing of value).
Picture this: Imagine I could buy a whole loaf of bread for 5$. I could slice it up into 20 pieces and sell each slice for 1$. If I did that, the 15$ total revenue would be rightly mine, correct? Now if we assume that the work of cutting it up and selling it was next to zero, i basically wouldn't have worked at all and still made 15$, so you're saying the 15$ would have to be stolen surplus value. But stolen from who? The baker who made the original loaf? But his laofs are just 5$ in value...
Now, if I had to work hours to sell the individual slices, we can agree that I have added value by working and thus I earned the money. But if I didnt have to invest any time (eg. if I could automate the process), should I still be entitled to that money? In my opinion, YES. What do you think?
Risk isn't value. Risk isn't something to incentivize in and of itself. The only reason we want to push capitalists to risk their capital is to circulate money in the economy. It's not that we have society setup to reward risk takers (as capitalists will often frame it), it's rather that in isolation, people would hoard all the money they make if there's no way to use that money to generate more money, so to "effectively" (in the short term) circulate money back into the economy from rich people, the act of recirculating must have a monetary value. Of course in the long term this leads to run away wealth accumulation and massive inequality, as we're seeing in the real world.
Risk in itself is actually bad. We want to reduce the total amount of risk in society.
If you buy a loaf of bread for $5 and turn it into $20 of value with zero effort, other participants in the market would do the same thing. Some would sell it for $10 (50¢ a slice), and people would continually undercut each other until the difference in price is roughly equivalent to the time-value of the labor spent. This entire process would be feasible in a market socialist setting, you didn't introduce any capitalistic elements here.
As for automation, did you create the automation? If not, then you don't deserve the full fruits of the automation. Even the person who "invented" that version of automation was doing so on the backs of other people's ideas. Nobody has these ideas out in the wild without influence from society. To assert that some inventor of a product or even more specifically some user of a product deserves the full fruits that product yields is ignoring the fundamental reason the product exists in the first place, human cooperation. Capitalism ignores this.
I disagree: Having something for sure is better than having something with a risk. You also mention that risk is bad. Thus, taking on risk should be compensated for by a higher value.
They still would need the 20$ upfront to be able to buy it in the first place. If I provided the money necessary to buy the bread and another person provided their time necessary to cut it, shouldn't we both get rewarded?
I think of work itself like a product: I can offer my "workforce" on the market and someone can buy that workforce. If an employer uses my workforce suboptimally so that I dont generate much value, I dont care, they still owe me the amount that my workforce was worth. And if they combine the workforce's of multiple people and generate more value, I dont think they should owe me more because the value of my workforce has not inherently changed. They just put it to better use.
About the automation thing: If I buy any product (in this case: automatic machine) and both me and the seller agree on a price and exchange the goods, then I concider any future claims on the fruits of that product as unethical and illegitimate. The surplus value that I potentially generate would not be stolen, it would, in my opinion, be explicitely given to me as part of the transaction.
We agree risk is bad, and that it's the opposite of value. The end of your first paragraph is a non-sequitur though. We shouldn't compensate things just because they're risky. Jumping out of a plane and pulling your parachute at the last possible moment is risky, but we shouldn't compensate that. Doing drugs is risky, but we shouldn't compensate that. Driving 140mph is risky, but we shouldn't compensate that.
Like I said before, we don't compensate wealthy individuals for "taking risks". Taking risk has no value. It's about money circulation. Without incentives to circulate money, they wouldn't do it of their own accord. Of course, we could just circulate money through other means so we don't run into problems like runaway wealth accumulation.
You mean the $5, right? Nobody was paying $20. Someone was buying a loaf of bread for $5 and selling slices for $1 in your example. At no point did anyone spend $20 in one go.
Are you making a descriptive claim or a normative one? Work is commodified, that's a fact of a capitalist society. Are you saying it should be commodified or that it is? You have to do a much more in depth material analysis to arrive at the conclusion that it should be commodified. The act of renting out people and extracting their surplus value alienates people from their labor and continually contributes to further exploitation and inequality. This is how we end up with decades of wage stagnation as the richest people in the world multiply their wealth over and over and over again.
You can construct a society that doesn't allow people to be bought or rented. That doesn't view people as property or their labor power as a commodity. We have half of this figured out (you aren't allowed to buy people), and most abolitionists of the 19th century also wanted to abolish wage slavery along with chattel slavery, but dismantling capitalism didn't have support from the north like dismantling chattel slavery did.
Again, you seem to just be making descriptive claims about how society is currently structured, and then using that to imply normative truths simply on the basis that this is how it is right now. When human labor can be entirely automated in a capitalist society, what we will end up with is the 2 classes of people (bourgoise and proletariat) fundamentally changing.
Right now the bourgoise rents out the proletariat's labor power, extracts the surplus value and uses property rights to continue this cycle of exploitation. The proletariat still have all the power if organized, and this is why organization (e.g via unions) was originally in capitalist thought a form of terrorism, because it goes against the very nature of what capitalism is about, serving capital.
With a fully autonomous society this changes. The bourgoise ends up being the class with all the power, no matter how organized the proletariat is. The proletariat is no longer the working class, instead they are the destitute class, the class that still only owns their own labor power and nothing else. They becomes worthless in an autonomous capitalist society.
At the very least it should be clear that a fully autonomous capitalist society would entail a utopia for the bourgoise and a dystopia for the proletariat (99% of the population). And the goal of capitalism is to continually get as close to this as possible. We can do better.
Yeah my bad, I meant the 5$.
I am saying that I think that you should be able to sell the results of your work or, if you so please, your work itself. Im not saying that it should be commodified automatically but rather that you should have the option to do so (eg. by applying to work for someone else). I have no issue with people selling their workforce on the market because they choose to do so.
Not this time. I basically say that the following should be the case because it's the most fair:
You can't sell me a machine and then claim it's "theft/exploitation" if I make a ton of money with it later down the line because "possibly making a ton of money with it in the future" was part of the agreement of you selling it to me. You knew the possibility existed and if you didn't want that, you should not have sold it to me.
Conservative "libertarians" make the same argument about selling their body. They make idealist claims that people have the right to their own body, so you should be allowed to sell your entire personhood to a capitalist for say 1 million dollars so someone you care about can get immediate access to that kind of money (say to pay for your kid's medical treatment).
Their claim is everyone is better off, the capitalist has a slave that'll likely produce more than a million dollars in value over their life, and the slave's child gets life saving medical treatment. In isolation this seems correct, when you don't consider any possible alternative way to structure society. That's where these idealist claims about commodificafion of labor or personhood fall apart, when we compare them to decommodified systems and see how much better the outcomes are for the vast majority of people.
Hopefully you agree that having a society where it's legal to sell yourself into slavery would be bad, because what that really means is people with no other options become slaves. The exact same is true when you strive for the ideal of renting yourself out, only people with no other options do it. There's a reason there are 0 millionaires taking on wage labor roles, they don't have to so they never would. Nobody ever would if they have the resources not to. We don't do it of our own will, but rather because society demands it of us if we want food/shelter/healthcare/etc.
I'll jump back into the automation argument once we align on this first point, because an understanding of true freedom and liberty is needed before we go into structuring an autonomous society.
Absolutely, because this would be selling your freedom itself, that it unacceptable. There are certain rights that you shouldn't be able to abandon.
Well, there will always be a "worst option", no matter what. However, doing work for someone that you wish to do work for and getting payed for it according to your time and skills sounds good to me.
Even though this is not really relevant to the duscussion, I think you're overlooking quite a large number of high-payed professionals, freelancers and people in management positions.
Yeah but isn't that the case in every economic system? Sure, you could make basic life necessities a default but that can exist under capitalism too. You shouldn't have the right to get everything you want without working.
Okay so we've reached the "yeah capitalism sucks but doesn't everything suck" stage of the conversation. It's wild to me how similarly all these play out.
No, not everything is as fundamentally flawed as capitalism. People said the same thing about slavery, "yeah slavery sucks but who will pick the cotton?".
We don't need to setup society in a way to coerce people to do work they don't want to do. People don't believe it until they see it, and I'm sure those slave owners really did think the cotton industry would collapse without slaves. There have been societies with millions of people that are setup without coercive capitalist "incentives", and believe it or not people don't just crawl out into the streets and die because they don't feel like making food.
That's your interpreration. I don't think that it (= having to work if one wants anything from society) sucks or is wrong. I still think there is no society where you don't have to do anything and get everything you wish for (that would be working 100% out of free will) but whether it exists or not: I don't see how it would be fair anyway.
Socialism isn't about some utopic vision of a labor-free society. On the contrary, socialism is a rational response to seeing capitalists siphon away the vast majority of constructed wealth for no work (some capitalists might work, and some don't, but none of them get paid on the basis of their work, they get paid on the basis of their ownership).
Socialism is about the proper and fair distribution of wealth on the basis of labor, not property rights. People who work get wealth, not the people who own. This removes issue with runaway wealth accumulation (capital allows generation of capital in a capitalist society, this is a fundamentally flawed way to structure society), among other issues (often symptoms of this condition).
But then your criticism of our capitalist system would also apply to your proposed socialism. You said that it "sucked" that under capitalism, people dont work out of their free will but rather because society demands it from them if they want food/shelter/etc.
You may find other things fair than I do but I think it's fair that with my wealth I can choose to e.g. lend it to somebody and get back more in return (if both parties agree). I think it's fair that I own the means of production if I created them. I think it's fair that I can sell them to somebody and subsequently that someone can buy them from me (and own them).
Everyone has a different concept on what is fair and what isn't. It was interesting hearing your opinion on this though. You have really given me some great insights and I can see where you're coming from, even though I don't always agree.
To be fair I had several critiques of capitalism, by far the most frequent and important being about wealth distribution, accumulation, and extraction under capitalism.
But yes, in a socialist society you generally have basic necessities exist not as commodities but rather as guaranteed services. This looks different depending on the specific type of socialism (communism, mutualism, etc.). Even in a pure market socialist society, they would still be priced substantially different than in a capitalist society.
Under a capitalist system (as commodities), these goods/services are not priced at the labor value required to output them, they're priced at their market value. This is why in the U.S, shelter pricing (mortgage/rent, utilities, repairs, etc.) account for 50-75% of an average person's income. In the USSR it was 5-10%. Not to say the USSR was entirely socialist, but rather that the way they setup housing was the same way a (state) socialist society could setup housing.
Under a socialist system where these goods/services are decommodified, they could still have their value calculated as a product of labor time, and instead of being bought/sold on a market, they'd be instead provided for by the state. That way laborers would still be compensated if that was the work they wanted to do, as their products have value to society.
The common capitalist critique to this is "what if nobody works" then we start to get into the idea of socially necessary labor and not necessary labor. Working for an ad agency, for example, is socially unnecessary behavior. It's actually socially harmful (encouraging greater consumption, often of harmful substances like high sugar drinks or in the past tobacco). Socially necessary labor would be construction, food, etc. This distinction would be an early step in democratizing the economic sector, prying it out of the hands of authoritarian capitalists.
If there aren't enough people volunteering for socially necessary labor, then the state mandates it the same way it's mandated in many countries to go through a couple years of military service. But instead of learning how to effectively bomb kids in some middle eastern country, you're instead building houses for homeless people or making food for starving children.
This is a very idealist way to look at the world. Socialists are materialists, capitalists are idealists. What this means is capitalists will have some principle that they use as a foundational concept, like "property rights exist" and then use that to determine your concept of fairness. Socialists look at real outcomes in the real world. We see what capitalism actually creates, what real, physical conditions exist in the world because of this so-called "fair" presumption of property rights, and we come to the determination that there's nothing fair about a dozen people having as much wealth as 4 billion poor people, even though that's a natural outcome of what capitalists call a "fair" system.
Would I be allowed to build my own house? If so, would I be allowed to sell it? If so, am I forced to sell it at "labour value" or can I choose freely (that would be market value)?
Pricing it at "labour value" would also mean if I'm a bad builder and take a huge amount of time to build it, I'm entitled to more money, right? Or if there were huge amounts of people wanting to move into a home because they need one, is the faster builder payed at best the same as a slow builder that finishes their house 1 year later when nobody needs it anymore?
Market value means that people pay whatever it is worth to them (or don't buy it). Now, you may argue that surviving is worth indefinite money to a person so let's assume that we have some very basic accomodation provided by the state if needed.
About that last paragraph: Unequal does not necessarily mean unfair. If I (literally) threw away all my money and then you started looking at only the physical outcome (e.g. the distribution of wealth) without it's backstory, then you may also come to the conclusion that it's unfair that I don't have any money. But the way of acquirement does matter. Not just the end result. Or is it unfair that I don't have any money after the hypothetical scenario?
Yup
Nope, houses would be decommodified. You could move out of it, and someone else who needed it could get it, so they could still be exchanged, but there wouldn't be a market for it. Same way we approach organs, sometimes people don't need organs, and they give organs away, and we have systems for managing organ transplants etc, but we don't have an organ market because the material effects of having an organ market are bad (of course there's still a black market for organs, and there'd be a black market for houses, but it wouldn't be an open market and would be severely less harmful as a result).
The next couple paragraphs are based on the idea that housing is still commodified and being bought/sold, so I won't address those because my above comment already does.
Correct, but ~10 people having the same wealth as 4 billion people happens to actually be a result of unfairness in the system. We will soon live in a world with trillionaires (estimates are within the next 10-15 years). This means a single person will be able to give a million people a million dollars worth of capital. That's a symptom of a failed system, not a cause of it. It's not unfair because it's unequal, but it is unequal because it's unfair. Capital shouldn't be a method by which you can accumulate more capital. It allows infinite feedback loops of extraction that end up materially hurting the vast majority of humans. Wage stagnation is a real thing that has happened for the last 40 years as we eased restrictions on capital. Stock buybacks for example were illegal from 1920->1980, now stock buybacks are used more than ever and allow massive amounts of capital accumulation for corporations without reinvestment of capital into materially beneficial avenues like R&D. There are many ways unrestricted capital allows for exploitation and materially detrimental outcomes.
You wouldn't have made a product that saves a million lives. Teams of doctors and scientists, not to mention the pharmaceutical companies they work for, are the plurality of people required to release and market a life saving medicine. If one person did everything, the R&D, the experimentation, the trials, the marketing, the backend business of running a pharmaceutical company, etc, then sure, have your billion dollars.
If we were a team of 1000 people and each saved life was worth 1 million, then we would still have earned enough money to make everyone of the 1000 team members a billionaire...
No. It isn't
Then a human life would be worth less than a million dollars...