Ok I’ll bite. God help me.
My employer bills me out for $400/hr and I make about $100/hr. I wouldn’t be able to make that much on my own because I don’t have the resources and infrastructure my employer has: admin, IT, expertise, manpower, marketing, legal, and so on. I have zero interest in being self employed. So this is a good arrangement for me.
My clients are happy paying those prices because we provide good service at competitive rates.
My employer is happy because they usually net about 30% profit margin so the partners walk away with $120/hr after paying me and other overhead.
It’s the very definition of capitalism doing exactly what it is supposed to do: providing valuable goods and services to people who want to buy it from people who want to sell it, and everyone walks away happy from the transaction.
I fail to see how this is a violent and exploitative war on civilization itself. Fuck everything about this comic. Why is it even on my feed? Gah.
Upvoting for good faith engagement, even if a little frustrated. I encourage other leftists here to do the same.
The situation you describe is capitalism working smoothly. Marx himself spoke highly of aspects of capitalism many times. The problem comes when your company’s owner, who has the power to abuse that ownership, does.
By analogy, monarchies are bad, even if your king is good. You can have a fair, just, wise philosopher king. It sounds like you’re lucky in having a good job with a reasonable owner, but your owner could sell to a private equity company tomorrow, who will lay you off, outsource your job to lower costs, bill out the same rate even when lowering the quality, and pocket the difference. They’ll do this for a few years until the brand’s value has been mined, then they’ll scrap your company and sell it for parts.
Socialists like myself argue that because the system can be abused, it inevitably wil be abused. It’s a structural argument, not an argument about each specific case. We argue that democratic control of our jobs is a good thing, in the same way that we got rid of kings to replace them with democratic control is a good thing, because we think that system is more just and fair.
Socialists like myself argue that because the system can be abused, it inevitably wil be abused
Does this imply that you have a system that can’t be abused? Or more probably the level of possible abuse is “less” in some way?
I agree that while well informed democratic control is great, there still needs to be elected representatives in some capacity just for practicality’s sake (not everyone has the time or energy to research and make decisions for every topic and problem) and then we’re right back at the abuse problem. The idea of assigning some people’s votes as having more weight can be necessary to avoid a tyranny of the majority deciding things outside of their knowledge set too…
If there was a way of guaranteeing fair, just, wise, philosopher Kings then wouldn’t that system be the best one? Like an AI would find the perfect leader through mass surveillance and that would be who would rule.
Does this imply that you have a system that can’t be abused?
Obviously not.
Or more probably the level of possible abuse is “less” in some way?
I make no claim about the level of abuse. Society will always have problems. The question is how we solve them. I think that political and economic democracy are necessary to give people a fair say, in many ways. Without economic democracy, we have the situation we have now: A democracy in name only. Economic power is too easily converted into political power.
What kind of democracy has people spend most of their life working for undemocratic institutions, which they depend on for food, clothing, house, etc.? Is it really a democracy if say you’re in west Virginia and your only opportunity to earn a living is to work in a coal mine? Your material reality necessitates voting in the interest of your employer, and against your own. How free is that voter to really, meaningfully participate in democracy, as we understand it?
I’d also argue that economic democracy is even necessary for a well informed public. Poor people send their kids to shitty schools. It won’t be until there isn’t generational poverty that we’ll fix that.
Like an AI would find the perfect leader through mass surveillance and that would be who would rule.
Fair
Surveillance
Pick one
This might be the first discussion I’ve had on Lenny in good faith as you say, so thank you for that.
My position summarized is that we definitely have massive issues with inequality, injustice, lack of rights, etc. But these are issues of legislation, corrupt government and leadership, enforcement, corporate governance, media disinformation, and so on. As you said any system can and will be abused. Swapping capitalism for any other -ism won’t change anything. (What would that even look like?)
Some of my meandering thoughts for potential solutions include controlling media disinformation, campaign finance reform, term/age limits, and ranked voting. It would be great to somehow change corporate governance to require leadership to prioritize stakeholders and not just shareholders, but I don’t really know how to do this. Maybe a requirement that all public companies be owned at least maybe 10% by non-officer employees, enough to get a seat on the board of directors.
It’s extremely complicated and there’s no clear solution. I’m not saying capitalism is perfect, I’m saying it’s overall ok and it’s very childishly naive to make a shitty comic about swapping it for another -ism to solve all of our problems. I really don’t want to argue about it though or get into a flame war, I just can’t handle the vitriol on this forum.
That’s a very shallow analysis, parts of which socialists have already responded to since Marx himself. First, it’s a little silly to just wave away changing the -isms, as you put it. It would change things a whole lot if we changed from capitalism to feudalism. Likewise, I suspect you do not actually understand how radical a change many socialists actually want, otherwise I don’t see how you can possibly think this.
Second, your implied distinction between politics and the economy is one that we on the left generally reject, and have for centuries. Marx wrote about the “political economy,” recognizing that the two are actually inseparable, despite the neoliberal proclivity to pretend that they are. Put another way, many of the policy suggestions you list are actually very popular, and yet they don’t happen. Researchers have measured this phenomenon.. The policies that wealthy people want correlate with what actually happens, whereas those that are popular have no correlation. Quote from that study:
Economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence.
Your suggestions will not happen so long as there is a class of people who own most of the things. That is the realistic analysis of our political economy. That’s the analysis we on the left bring that you’re missing – an explanation for why, in our supposed democracy, we have decidedly undemocratic outcomes. We will never legislate away the problems of capitalism because the capitalists have more power than we do.
Finally, you have this baseline assumption throughout your comment that things just fundamentally are what they are, and slapping a few labels won’t realistically change them. We have a term for this too! The late great Mark Fisher used the term “capitalist realism” to describe your attitude, famously saying that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” That’s what you’re doing. Even when talking to people who are explicitly proposing an alternative to capitalism, you are just… dismissing it? Waving it away? You’re definitely not engaging with it.
I hope that learning that Fisher wrote a whole book about what you’re doing, or learning that you’re making arguments writers from the 1800s were already critiquing, or even that I took the time to write this whole thing out to you, piques your interest in actually looking into what leftists have to say. Like actually, meaningfully engaging with it, not making a comment that is obviously the beginning of an argument, only to end the comment metaphorically throwing your hands up, which you’ve now done twice. We write about, think about, and try to organize around these ideas because we want the world to be better. It’s something I personally take seriously. I encourage you to take it seriously too, even if you don’t agree.
Ok, I make 7.25 an hour and my employer bill me out at $25/hr. My employer walks away with 30% or about $7.50, etc etc. The sample numbers are meaningless.
The material realities of someone making 7.25 (which I will concede is a little bit of a strawman, most people make more but not much) is very different than someone making 100/hr. The petit bourgeois exist for a reason. They’re still exploited but only to a point. They’re “commoners” that benefit from the status quo and wish to uphold it. They have it good enough and can relate to the disadvantaged people’s plight insofar as it allows them to dismiss their criticisms as being lazy, not working hard enough, bootstraps, yada yada. They’re a foil and a buffer between the proletariat and the bourgeoise. You can point to them to say the exact things you’re saying right now
Back when I did service work I made about $30/hr and was billed out at $60/hr. Seems outrageous right? Until you factor in worker’s comp, other insurance, admin, etc. They needed to bill at $45/hr to just break even, and you need to charge more than that to cover other unexpected costs, downtime, buy new equipment, building maintenance, etc.
The idea that capitalism “steals” the surplus value of labour can be true sure, but it’s often simplified and exaggerated so much like in this meme that it’s hard to take seriously. It’s probably hard to quantify depending on the industry too as there are different expenses and added value by the employer (I bet Wal-Mart is an order of magnitude worse than your local plumbing company for e.g.) If I were to just hire myself out at the exact same rate my employer did but covered all the additional costs and value they added I wouldn’t actually be ahead anything at all, and I’d have to work even more just to end up in the same place in the end, so at least in that case the system benefited us both.
Yes, precisely this.
Workers are absolutely exploited by plenty of shitty companies. But that’s not caused by capitalism, nor is it solved by any other -ism. The causes are complex and the solutions are even moreso, if there even are solutions at all. To sit here bitching about it in the form of a stupid anti capitalism comic is just childishly naive.
I’m happy for you, I really am! It sounds like you have a very good situation, but it’s important to remember that if the company is making profit, they are still taking value of your labor without doing the bulk of the work. Capitalism is designed to do exactly one thing, and that is to maintain the power of the wealthy elite. Any benefits are coincidental.
My example shows all three parties benefitting from the arrangement. Everyone would lose if I, the worker, quit. It’s not exploitation at all. I willingly enter into this agreement because I literally can’t do this on my own. So I benefit from company resources. My clients can’t be serviced by a small one man show so they choose a bigger company too. The firm owners make the most because it’s their company and none of this would be happening without them. It’s not exploitation and it’s not parasitic, it’s symbiotic. We’ve got loads of issues with legislation and enforcement, minimum wage should be like $20-30, corporate governance needs to address all stakeholders and not just shareholders, and so on. But that won’t be resolved by swapping capitalism for any other -ism. It’s overly simplistic to think one ism is the only problem and another ism is the only solution.
I agree that it sounds like you have a mutually beneficial relationship with your company. I’m curious, do you have a union in your workplace? I do have a point to this question, I swear.
Don’t believe that the company will struggle without you. In capitalism, you are replaceable. For the record I don’t believe that, I think you have extremely valuable skills that would be desirable in any society or economic system. I don’t need to know anything about you for me to say that, because everyone is inherently valuable to society. What is the difference between you quitting and you being fired, to the company? Effectively none, because capitalism requires a pool of labor that they can pull from as a threat to keep people in line instead of questioning the status quo. Why else would you think companies fire union organizers?
You, personally, are in a good situation. There are multiple engineers that are not, and will jump on the opportunity to take your job because people in the labor pool are second class citizens with no assurances of their basic needs. This precarious position is a threat to every single person in the working class. You are only a few paychecks away from homelessness.
Socialism, by comparison, ensures everyone’s basic needs are met. They are guaranteed the right to healthcare, housing, education, food, and access to a job. Companies can still exist in socialist societies, however they are not owned privately by any individual. Instead, they are owned by the workers. There are a lot of different socialist experiments that have done this in different ways, I highly recommend you do some research about this; it’s actually pretty fascinating if you like reading about politics. One very American example of worker ownership are worker cooperatives.