Lol I love that pane 3 just skips over all the important bits. "Yeah so I'm just in possession of capital as an a priori part of my existence which you don't have, please don't focus on why that is the case, maybe I got all that money from making pie charts really good, who knows."
Most of the panels skip over very important questions. Mr. Moneybags has some kind of vision, which implicitly seems to mean he has a right to privately own an industrial process. He analyzed the market, which just so happened to tell him exactly what he wanted to hear. Then it turns out none of that actually mattered because he needs the laborer to actually manifest the tea cups into reality.
And yet, despite all the backround capital and investment and research, without that one key element his dream will only and forever remain a dream. It couldn't possibly the most valuable part of the production process as a result; it couldn't be!
without that one key element his dream will only and forever remain a dream
The investment capital and research are essential elements, too. The takeaway isn't that Mustache Asshole Guy deserves nothing. The takeaway is that he should get paid in accordance with whatever actual work he did developing the marketing plan, whoever built the machinery should get paid in accordance with the actual work that went into that, and the laborer on the line working the machine should get paid in accordance with the work he's doing. What shouldn't happen is Mustache Asshole Guy getting to take other laborers' hard-earned money just because (somehow, magically, without any explanation) he was sitting on a boatload of capital to begin with.
Realistically what actually happens is all 4 panels is a boss explaining what others workers came up with.
maybe I got all that money from making pie charts really good
Data scientists irl
Anyone else love how something like 90% of being a lefty is having to contend with lazily wrought strawmen? Love when more than half the burden is getting people to correctly understand what they're arguing against.
Hey, it's in many ways easier than having to deal with good arguments.
I guess, but I personally struggle with it more almost, because there's something weirdly demoralizing and frustrating about people throwing out arguments that shitty because they've picked them up from chud youtube or whatever. Like, for every one I go through to try and refute, it feels like a dozen more jackasses come to parrot the same anti-communist propaganda.
The overwhelming horde of chud takes vs one leftist sword person
Yeah, it can be grating. What I find heartening is that talking to people and gradually pulling them left is working. Just look at the presence of anything left of Obama today vs. 2014 or 2015. It's night and day.
But it's always good to log off for a bit, too.
It depends. The guy (and yes, it's a guy) who mainlines Ben Shapeeno videos and was president of his College Republicans chapter? Yeah, you're not going to convince them of anything.
But in a media environment that's been saturated with militant anti-communism for at least the last 70 years, you're also going to find plenty of people who regurgitate bad arguments because they've passively assimilated them from the background noise and never really dug into the matter. If you get them interested in digging a little deeper, you might get somewhere.
And of course -- especially online -- there are always the folks reading, listening to, or watching the conversation but not participating. They might be closer to that second guy, but they have enough doubts about a bad argument to not voice it themselves. They might be persuadable even if you can't reach the first two.
We don't want free stuff for ourselves, we want free stuff for everyone.
My favorite thing about my job is showing the CEO just how much turnover and the lack of a coherent on boarding process costs our company, and that those costs are 10x more than just paying people a wage that's in the middle, as opposed to the bottom 10th percentile.
My previous employer sent me for external training once in ten years and it was basically just to keep me leaving for a bit longer. It cost them under $1000.
I should have been more clear. I meant they don't tend to want to train new employees. They hire people who already know the job so they can save money and "eliminate risk" They'll train employees that have been there for a while already "proven themselves" sometimes.
No this is fair, we can place a value on the bosses initial labour.
once that loan is paid back they can, of course, fuck off.
I want to know more about this magical tea cup making machine. One that doesn't require any labor to run
Atlas, why don't you just do it yourself then? If it doesn't require that much work, why don't you just make all the teacups without purchasing others labor?
I forgot that shopping is hard labor, I guess being a billionaire isn't bad then!
I'm pretty sure billionaires would actually be less bad if they spent money instead of just hoarding it all
Not ideologically, but in practice in our current system
Well yeah, right now they just pass it between each other. If they spent it all on labor, there wouldn't really be an issue as they wouldn't be billionaires anymore and would just be glorified planners.
Even if they just spent it all on random goods or services instead of shares, moving more money around would benefit the rest of us as I understand it.
They love painting owners as entrepreneurs, but never bother defending the owner who's not the founder. Their entire justification collapses when the owner is not the founder, but just a rich leech who bought out the company. A lot of entrepreneurs basically have to go beg these leeches for more capital when they run out and trade huge stakes of their company's ownership just to keep going. Or they get established and just sell it to the rich for a payout.
Yeah, I notice these sorts love to bring up Henry Ford as an example to try to defend billionaires and CEOs, which, even if we ignore the fact that he was a turd to the laborers he relied upon for his fortune, isn't an accurate comparison the vast majority of the time, because most of these modern business giants are just some chode that walks in to an already extant company and manages to simply avoid crashing the gravy train.
Also Henry Ford was a fascist. Like so bad that he may have influenced Hitler with his "the International Jew" magazine.
Their entire justification collapses when the owner is not the founder, but just a rich leech who bought out the company.
Or the founder's big wet failson. A great place to point this out is in pro sports teams.
Yeah, if you are actually doing something, than yes, you can get paid for it. CEOs, in theory, are doing a job in the way that a captain of a ship is doing a job (organizing, directing, steering, etc). In practice, however, CEOs just hire a team of people to do all the work of running a company and just collect a paycheck. See also: landlords
Also that's just a job in the mode of production like any other one and should be compensated as such. No idiot deserves 20000x the average laborer because they planned shit, get the fuck out of here.
the company I work for would be better off without our idiot CEO/owner. If we unionized, fired him and hired some kid with an MBA instead not only could we split their 20000x paycheck between the people actually doing work, but also the company would be better ran smh i hate it
Unironically same, our CEO has made so many bad business decisions that the actual workers have lost their jobs over his bad choices. He came up with one cool idea like 30 years ago but literally has dementia brain now.
He tried to branch our very niche company into an unrelated field with a ton of competition, which failed and cost us $$$$$ and caused layoffs. He hired an award-winning documentary team to focus on an issue related to our company's sector, but then had them reshoot it like 3 times as he wanted a bigger and bigger role in it instead of the people we're supposed to be helping with our product. Oh and of course all the nepotism. Literally paid his kid $$$ for some mediocre music to go in this documentary (which is being shot by Actual Literal Hired Professionals). Is constantly saying shit that should get you dragged to HR for, being inappropriate and always bullying. Oh, also when someone was being sexually harassed at work, he just made the guy and his victim sign NDAs and made the whole company take online "here's not how to sexually harass anymore" and did nothing more.
i've straight up noticed everyone's productivity tanking considerably whenever the CEO reminds us he's still alive and that we work for him, too.
No they "make decisions"
Weird how a job that is just about your decision making ability requires you to be paid immense sums of money in advance and have a golden parachute.
vs say performance bonuses for making decisions which improve key metrics (which I'm pretty much fine with if those metrics include worker set goals).
This is probably the most common petty bourgeois fairy tale. It has nothing to do with material reality under late imperialism, where 500 colossal multinationals control most of the world economy.
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Your vision cannot possibly exist without workers and public infrastructure. Unless you can somehow produce and teleport teacups to everyone in the world by yourself.
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Where did you get the money to make the investment? Who made the cup making machine? Who is doing the training? Why wouldn't someone be paid a salary or for training?
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The employee will be doing the labor, not sure what the point is. Why not just operate the machine yourself? The employee's labor will more than cover whatever administrative costs you'll have. Remember, you did market research and you know everyone will buy these cups. If not, then you're not entitled to make gains on your investment. And it's not the employee's fault you made a bad investment. Investments carry risk, as you pointed out. So if your market research pays off, you will make enough money to cover the employee's salary, raw materials, and equipment, rent, power, insurance, etc, and even pay yourself a salary for doing managerial work. The question is how much of a salary do you get for sitting in a chair and using Quicken. Why do you get to take the surplus labor of the employee when your production is based entirely on them?
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The most exasperating part of this "comic" is that it's a strawman of a strawman; you're simultaneously arguing that Moneybags' labor deserves compensation, but also that despite his own prior labor, one aspect of the process of making the product has inherently more value than any of his prior research, investment, etc. Where do you even start?
"I did labor and now I expect I should be paid for it" is what both people are saying.
But only the second character is portrayed as entitled.
Just realized now that the first two panels are nearly inherently contradictory; you can either have a dream about wanting every household to own your product, AND you can do extensive market research to determine every household's needs, and the two results need not coincide. Either people want your prodcut or you want to ensure every household has it; if buyers do not want your product, you had best think up another strategem. The comic posits a priori that his dream is shared by the market as a whole.
spoiler
Yes, I know this entire comic is a strawman, no I will not elaborate.
Why should “shares” be able to be bought and sold in a company?
It's just another form of debt. And once you establish that debt can legitimately exist, there's no strong argument against allowing it to be transferred.
"Took the risk of investing my money" - if you have enough cash on hand to start a manufacturing business, you're already sat on a pile of extracted wealth (either personally stolen from your workers at other companies you own, or inherited from your family who did the dirty work for you).
