IME, defenders of capitalism don't know what capitalism is.
They think it's trading for a mutually-agreed-upon price. Or being paid for work.
If I say to them landlords get paid for owning, not for doing, they say that landlords work: repairing dishwashers etc.
In other words, most pro-capitalists are.oblivious of the role of capital in the market.
And this is good news in a way because it means a little education could cgange their views.
Landlords don't even do that once they own an entire apartment block or all the land in a neighborhood. They obviously hire management and maintenance to do all the work for them. Or they form an LLC underneath themselves to do everything. The only landlords I've ever seen who did maintenance directly owned maybe two or three properties and worked because they couldn't afford not too.
I think a lot of liberals can only conceive of small independent businesses. Just endless expanses of independent bakeries, family owned tailors, and used car lots. Once it gets to the level of abstraction of capitalists owning companies that own companies that manage other companies, their brains get fried and it becomes harder to justify I guess.
So they just don't think about it.
Understanding capitalism is like learning an eldritch secret. It either drives you mad (ie makes you anti-capitalist) or you have to cope by intentionally misunderstanding it.
I think that's where liberals really struggle. Because the Bootstraps Theory of American Capitalism is that you work hard and get lots of surplus income, then invest the surplus at a profit. The capital was supposed to be something he created. He built the lemonade stand and made money and then he built a second lemonade stand and hired a retail worker. And then he used the profits from the second stand to build a third stand. So that's why he's CEO of Coca-Cola, earning $100M/year. He just worked smarter and harder than every other lemonade stand operator on the block.
And if you don't support his plan to install lemonade stands on every street corner or the $20B federal aid package intended to facilitate that development, then you are just a hateful, anti-lemonade communist who wants to deprive hard working Americans of their delicious fruity beverage.
A large part of the problem is that there has been an ongoing effort by the bourgeoisie to obfuscate just how big an impact generational wealth clearly has. Just think of how many times you've seen an article that has characterized Gates or Zuckerberg as a "college dropout". The stories of how basically all the oligarchs built their empires gets a lot less inspiring when you realize how much of a leg up they had.
Just think of how many times you’ve seen an article that has characterized Gates or Zuckerberg as a “college dropout”.
Sure. I remember getting a full biopic on Bill Gates in high school and never once hearing that his mother was on the board of United Way with the Chairman of IBM's own executive board. The fact that he was magically able to land a lucrative contract bid for the next generation IBM operating system just seems to be tossed out there as a product of his exceptional guts and gumption. Never a consequence of nepotism.
Even then, nobody asks why IBM was such a successful business (government contracts) or how Microsoft leveraged its relationship with IBM to rapidly expand its brand (government licensing / patent litigation to crush competition / huge injections of private equity) or what the consequence of a Microsoft-dominant OS market has been for developers (paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees paid just to remain system compatible with other enterprises).
Bill Gates was just a smart guy who did smart things and now he's rich.
And god forbid you mention that the great philanthropist and lover of humanity Bill Gates was party to one of the biggest anti trust suits of the 20th century for his company's illegal market suppression.
Oh sure. Incidentally, I'm always amazed a movie like "Antitrust" ever got made. Seeing Bill Gates and Jeffery Epstein together really put that pulp thriller in a whole new context.
“But they took on all the risk!”
The risk of what? The business failing and becoming a worker?
Not only that, but there's no reason we have to reward something just because it's risky. Like Hakim put it in one of his recent videos: human traffickers take on big risks.
Besides, the only reason there's risk in the first place is because capitalism is competitive and there's 300 other people trying to take over the same market. Muh risk is a perfect example of libs defending capitalism by explaining how it works.
Haven't you considered the risk involved? The capitalist took a risk. I know workers might "risk" their safety and health, but the business owner took a true risk. He risked his credit rating.
And because of that he's allowed to control all production. Also his kids.
No, no - usually they counter with "but those workers just did stupid manual work, HE did all the SMART brainwork/innovation". Not that that is a good counter, even if it as true.
I actually invented Diet Coke with Lime after having the lemon one and thinking "what if, but lime?". I am now a millionaire, because simply having an idea is what capitalism is.
The smart brainwork of sitting in meetings and agreeing every time with the guy in the room with the most power/money.
Elon Musk has some hazy day dream about going to Mars or "what if cars no gas" then buys a company working on it then claims he "did all the brainwork/innovation".
As we say in the Games business: an idea is worth nothing. Everyone has those.
As they say in the architecture business: No, of course the initial render isn't going to look like the actual blueprint and the actual blueprint and the as-built documentation will at best overlap 50% of the time.
The process of enacting an idea changes it. The raw idea becomes tested against actual reality, and inevitably does not look right when exposed. The person doing the implementation then has to figure out how to make the idea work. Perhaps this goes through a back-and-forth afterwards, but all the work of actually making the product or service work in reality is still the work of labor.
And sometimes you just end up with more i-beams than the blueprints specify and go, "Well, it isn't gonna fall down because of this..."
What great man theory does to motherfuckers.
That's the main reason why so many people put such outsized credit to the "visionaries", "innovators", and idea guys instead of the people who do the actual work. They believe that innovation, progress, and change are unattainable secrets of the universe that only available the gifted few, that history is only driven forward by the grace of these great men.
For example that's why nerds are so weird about Musk, like we laugh at Musk and points out how he bought out all of his company with his apartheid money. But to the worshipers of Great Men, Musk is the prophet of space colonization and only he can lead humanity to science victory. That's why despite of their rhetoric of humanist futurism these people have no faith to any other alternative platform of space exploration. NASA, China, Bezos, etc are false prophets who are doomed to fail, unlike Musk who knows the secret of space exploration that coincides with just having a lot of capital, they think SpaceX and Tesla even if he just bought them only flourished because of Musk.
That's why to them merely being the one who started and coined something is worthy of having the lion's share of the profit. They're confused by the insistence of us leftists that labor is the source of all wealth and so it's the workers who are entitled to their own work, when to them it's the capitalist visionaries who opened the gate to the garden of divine success and let us mere mortal taste greatness.
Who built Thebes of the 7 gates ? In the books you will read the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock ?
And Babylon, many times demolished, Who raised it up so many times ?
In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live ? Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?
Great Rome is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them ?
Over whom did the Caesars triumph ? Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants ?
Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it, The drowning still cried out for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India. Was he alone ?
Caesar defeated the Gauls. Did he not even have a cook with him ?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down. Was he the only one to weep ?
Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War. Who else won it ?
Every page a victory. Who cooked the feast for the victors ?
Every 10 years a great man. Who paid the bill ?
So many reports.
So many questions.
I think Musk's actual value is proved right there: he has an army of cultists. That's all he really contributes. Except for when he is getting in the way of the people doing the real work, because he's convinced that he is the messiah his weirdos assert he is.
normal people: "What if we slightly more equal?"
libs: "Then what would be in it for me?"
At either the end of chapter 10 or chapter 11 of Capital vol. 1, Marx has a really awesome explanation of this argument that capital owners "deserve" all the profit on their investment.
Edit: it's the end of chapter 11, this section in particular but also the paragraphs before it:
the head of the firm of Carlile & Co. actually imagines that if he sells his factory, not only will the value of the spindles be paid to him, but, in addition, their power of annexing surplus-value, not only the labour which is embodied in them, and is necessary to the production of spindles of this kind, but also the surplus labour which they help to pump out daily from the brave Scots of Paisley, and for that very reason he thinks that with the shortening of the working day by 2 hours, the selling-price of 12 spinning machines dwindles to that of 10!
This is more about the capitalist who buys and sells existing businesses rather than the entrepreneur who starts a business (the former is more common than the later, btw), but the same principle applies. A capitalist starts a business and when it comes time to cash out, they assume they are owed all the surplus labor the new buyer will appropriate. And the new buyer, since they "paid" for that surplus labor, sees it as something that is "owed" to them.
In my experience, they don't really short circuit, they just double down and call me a lazy, entitled communist.
The last argument I had was in the comment section under a meme complaining about taxes. I said, "If you think taxes are bad, wait until you find out how much money your boss is stealing from you. Workers create thousands of dollars in profits in a week, but they get paid a few hundred for their effort."
A chud came back with, "They took all the risk! They invested their own money into the business and spent countless weeks working 100 hours and not sleeping to keep the company afloat. An employee can just go get another job, the business owner loses everything if the company fails. When you're willing to put in that kind of effort and take on that kind of risk, come back to me."
If the owner needing to find an actual job somewhere else is "losing everything", doesn't that mean that the employees, who are already in that state to begin with, are victims to some sort of deprivation? :thonk:
love to earn "sweat equity" that is worth 100s of times less than the venture capitalist moving a small pile of their giant pile of money into the company
That, or just full blown psychopathic sociopathy.
"Inequality and greed is human nature actually."
"Some people are just better and more deserving of wealth than other."
"People are poor because they're lazy and stupid."
I've just started sidestepping the whole argument by pointing out "lazy, stupid, ugly, etc people need to eat too" and that seems to break their brains.
The amount of mental gymnastics people will go through to avoid just saying "I think the poor, disabled, elderly, and otherwise disenfranchised people should die in the street" is incredible. They recognize at some level that what they're advocating for is bad but can't go the last step to advocate for death camps or just shooting the homeless.
"People are naturally greedy and selfish. Which is why having a system which relies on a small handful of exceptionally greedy and selfish tyrants to be less greedy and selfish is the best system possible!"
I'm still looking for the 'good on paper' part :thinkin-lenin:
“But he invested capital, you just can’t take his profits”
“Yeah but he wants to stay alive with all of his toes”
