There’s also a guy who’s seething about socialism even though no one mentioned it. It’s really funny when people just get really mad when you explain literal basic economics straight from a capitalist textbook
Love that. I can hop on and call landlords parasites that don't deserve their profits and immediately get bombarded with anti-socialist shit, but I'm like, that's Adam Smith, my dude.
Capitalism defenders think Marx wrote some kind of necronomicon for an alternate world order when all he was doing was criticizing capitalism.
I am calling for a total and complete shutdown of Reddit,
until we can find out what the hell is going on.
He leaves out that it's workers' labor that "develops and de-risks" the business, not magic capitalist brain power.
But aside from that, he's just doing that thing where liberals explain capitalism to you, and when you say "I know how it works, I just disagree with it and think we should do something else" they explain it again. Like, yeah, privately held capital and economic competition means starting a business is risky and not available to everyone. I don't understand how they think that's a good argument for capitalism.
Okay, I see what the problem here is. My man does not understand (perhaps willingingly) what a profit is, he just thinks that it's when you acquire an income. Profit is the dividend left over when you've paid all other expenses. For a private firm those expenses defined in terms of "Fixed Inputs" (raw material & capital expenditures), and "Fluid Inputs" (direct compensation to labor employed by the firm in the form of wages & benefits), the names & implications of these terms used of course implies the goal. The successful firm ideally seeks to acquire the greatest output of product, the greatest inflow of revenue to itself, at the lowest level of expenditure on labor; because that is the cost that it has the greatest direct control over, through hiring/staffing practices & wage-rates.
That is the precise way by which the private firm seeks to exploit labor. Labor cannot exploit a private firm in the same way under Captialism, because they cannot (in the main part) define away their own expenditures, nor can they define their own wage-rate; at least in not the absence of large-scale collective bargaining, which does not exist at any serious level of saturation in the United States.
in my experience, most of the people who defend capitalism as an economic system have no idea what capitalism is, what economics is, or how to communicate the basic vocabulary of business management/accounting. the conflation of "revenue" and "profit" is one of the most common themes.
this is extremely annoying as someone who diligently took those classes and even fringe topics like non profit managerial economics, all taught under the ideology of economic liberalism, only to later study marx out of curiosity.
nothing drives home the ideological nature of economic liberalism quite like the realization that most of its defenders cannot articulate what it is, but "know" deep down that it is absolutely correct, has no contradictions or alternatives.
Most liberals think capitalism is when there's free markets and competition and consumers are all rational people making savvy choices. None of this is unique to capitalism though, that's just regular markets. Because in their concept of capitalism, actual capitalists and capital are abstracted to anything from a CEO to an actor to pretty much any rich person
Some liberal was collecting ballot signatures on two measures at the farmer's market. One was for affordable housing rezoning, the other was to protect small businesses from larger ones. I signed the first and laughed at the second. It horrified them and the only rationale they could come up with was "prices will be higher". Those small business profits are reinvested in local republicans and they're stolen from the most exploited workers in the city. Fuck any small business kulak for choosing their side and clearly choosing wrong. Maybe their bankruptcy will force them to get a job.
Small businesses are just as evil as big businesses, except they tend to pay lower wages and break the law more often
Big businesses do try to get in on that extra level of abuse too sometimes, and those are called franchises
We wouldn't need affordable housing zoning if small business kulaks paid us enough to get housing :thinkin-lenin:
WHAT RISK?WE BAIL THESE FUCKERS OUT EVERY GODDAMN DAY
WHERES MY SIX OR SEVEN FIGURE FORGIVABLE COVID LOAN YOU FUCKING JACKAL
The "personal risk" that a business owner takes on is that he might end up becoming a worker if it fails.
Whenever they say "risk" always throw it in their face that the risk they're talking about is the horror of becoming a worker again. And that only applies to small businesses, not large capitalists.
Capitalists being terrified of having to become workers is a great argument against capitalism, actually. If being someone else's employee is that awful then uhhh maybe we really need to get rid of the system where 90% of people have to do that. Thanks for your insight, comrade Porky!
The laborers take on a risk by working for a mediocre wage with little to benefits while the owner, that doesn't produce shit, takes the excess profit. How is this not common sense? How is having enough money to start a business and pay people to work for you a risk?
My boss actually creates surplus value and i as a worker am just a parasite to this . Workers are paid in direct proportion to the value their labor creates, actually :so-true:
a stable salary they didn't have to take on much risk for
- If you're making decent money in 2022, you've likely already taken on the risk of educating/training yourself with no guarantee of return.
- Your pay is as stable as the business, or more precisely, as stable as the owner's bottom line.
Mike Judge made a film about how smol bean business owners are exploited by evil greedy workers and it was (obviously) total balls.
