Comments by "Wandering Existence" (@WanderingExistence) on "Second Thought"
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As somebody who feels lonely and constantly disempowered. Wage labor is renting yourself via "self ownership". Employment is literally renting another human being as if they're property. The employer-employee relationship is a very insidious dynamic. Employment is a rental contract, like if you rented capital (say, a chainsaw from Home Depot), you pay rent for the "time preference" (basically the cost of time) for a piece of property. Capitalism is based on a principle of self ownership, which sounds empowering, until you realize that most people don't own capital goods other than themselves, and must rent out the authority over themselves as pieces of "human capital". This is a process of dehumanization where human beings are valued for their return on investment as capital goods. This is why, at the very least, capitalism needs unions and safety nets (or abolishment), or else the system won't value people for their human value. Importantly we must also think about our sick, elderly, and disabled people, as they can't provide competitive economic return for the investor class to value. We must figure out a way to change this economic system if we wish to value each other.
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Wage labor is renting yourself via "self ownership". Employment is literally renting another human being as if they're property. The employer-employee relationship is a very insidious dynamic. Employment is a rental contract, like if you rented capital (say, a chainsaw from Home Depot), you pay rent for the "time preference" (basically the cost of time) for a piece of property. Capitalism is based on a principle of self ownership, which sounds empowering, until you realize that most people don't own capital goods other than themselves, and must rent out the authority over themselves as pieces of "human capital". Then they try to use tactics like management classification to deny people overtime. This is a process of dehumanization where human beings are valued for their return on investment as capital goods. This is why, at the very least, capitalism needs unions and safety nets (or abolishment), or else the system won't value people for their human value. Importantly we must also think about our sick, elderly, and disabled people, as they can't provide competitive economic return for the investor class to value. We must figure out a way to change this economic system if we wish to value each other.
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Wage labor is renting yourself via "self ownership". Employment is literally renting another human being as if they're property. The employer-employee relationship is a very insidious dynamic. Employment is a rental contract, like if you rented capital (say, a chainsaw from Home Depot), you pay rent for the "time preference" (basically the cost of time) for a piece of property. Capitalism is based on a principle of self ownership, which sounds empowering, until you realize that most people don't own enough capital goods to make enough income other than themselves, and must rent out the authority over themselves as pieces of "human capital". This is a process of dehumanization where human beings are valued for their return on investment as capital goods. This is why, at the very least, capitalism needs unions and safety nets (or abolishment), or else the system won't value people for their human value. Importantly we must also think about our sick, elderly, and disabled people, as they can't provide competitive economic return for the investor class to value. We must figure out a way to change this economic system if we wish to value each other.
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Why do you feel like a rented mule in capitalism? Short answer: capitalism rents you by the hour and works you like a rented mule!
E: Wage labor is renting yourself via "self ownership". Employment is literally renting another human being as if they're property. The employer-employee relationship is a very insidious dynamic. Employment is a rental contract, like if you rented capital (say, a chainsaw from Home Depot), you pay rent for the "time preference" (basically the cost of time) for a piece of property. Capitalism is based on a principle of self ownership, which sounds empowering, until you realize that most people don't own capital goods other than themselves, and must rent out the authority over themselves as pieces of "human capital". This is a process of dehumanization where human beings are valued for their return on investment as capital goods. This is why, at the very least, capitalism needs unions and safety nets (or abolishment), or else the system won't value people for their human value. Importantly we must also think about our sick, elderly, and disabled people, as they can't provide competitive economic return for the investor class to value. We must figure out a way to change this economic system if we wish to value each other.
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"There are three kinds of violence. The first, mother of all the others, is institutional violence, that which legalizes and perpetuates domination, oppression and exploitation, that which crushes and laminates millions of men in its silent and well-oiled wheels. The second is revolutionary violence, which arises from the desire to abolish the first. The third is repressive violence, the object of which is to stifle the second by making itself the auxiliary and the accomplice of the first violence, that which engenders all the others. There is no worse hypocrisy to call violence only the second, while pretending to forget the first, which gives birth to it, and the third which kills it." - Dom Helder Camara.
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@hydromic2518 First of all capitalism is a terrible system. "Why?" You may ask, well wage labor is renting yourself via "self ownership" and employing someone is literally renting another human being as if they're property. The employer-employee relationship is a very insidious dynamic. Employment is a rental contract, like if you rented capital (say, a chainsaw from Home Depot), you pay rent for the "time preference" (basically the cost of time) for a piece of property. Capitalism is based on a principle of self ownership, which sounds empowering, until you realize that most people don't own capital goods other than themselves, and must rent out the authority over themselves as pieces of "human capital". This is a process of dehumanization where human beings are valued for their return on investment as capital goods. This is why, at the very least, capitalism needs unions and safety nets (or abolishment), or else the system won't value people for their human value. Importantly we must also think about our sick, elderly, and disabled people, as they can't provide competitive economic return for the investor class to value.
We must figure out a way to change this economic system if we wish to value each other. Which is where socialism comes in. Socialism creates worker and community control of the means production which empowers workers to control the full product of their labor. For this reason capitalism cannot coexist with socialism because socialism is the abolishment of private property and the exploitation of people through wage labor.
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@jbturtle The economic exploitation under capitalism is twofold, firstly they alienate decision making from the people who are doing the tasks. This division of decision making from material consequence is a prime factor in negative externalities associated with authority. But the primary economic extraction of value comes from renting people out and then pocketing the change. Profit sharing is a way that workers collectively share the full product of their labor. They can earn a wage and then collectively they decide whether to reinvest in certain aspects of production or to share the added value. In downturns less people are laid off and jobs are rearranged to make sure people have the ability to stay afloat and not be discarded and alienated by the institutions they depend on most. Personally I am a fan of cooperatives and their ability to subtly shift the mindset of people to think more in terms of community wealth building. Here is an example of how profit sharing has decreased exploitation by allowing people the full benefit of their product.
"In the 11 years since then, Evergreen Cooperatives has added three more cooperatives to its ranks, growing from two companies with a total of 18 workers in 2010 to five companies with approximately 320 workers. Those workers are paid 20 to 25 percent higher than employees at the cooperative’s competitors. “Our average pay rate is close to $15,” says John McMicken, CEO of Evergreen Cooperative Initiative. “But when you take profit sharing into account, which could equate to $4 to $5 an hour, we’re hoping that we have a shot at breaking the $20 an hour ‘blended rate,’ if you will.” In 2019, the average compensation at Evergreen Cooperative Laundry was around $18 per hour." - Despite a Rocky Start, Cleveland Model for Worker Co-ops Stands Test of Time, by Brandon Duong
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@sunphoenix1231 No worries, man. Philosophically speaking, I would agree if we're talking about a pure form of liberalism. Although I would add some specificity, acknowledging that capitalism has historically utilized other forms of production too, like indentured servitude and slavery, as was the case in 17-1800's. In the book Debt: the First 5,000 years by David Graeber talks a bit about how it's rather odd that there's not much written history on the development of wage labor as compared to slavery, but that one of the key formations of wage labor was that of renting slaves. Where the slave would be rented and their owner would collect the whole sum or a large portion of the slave's wages.
Ideologically and through the material conditions of the industrial revolution capitalism has incentivized wage labor into a normalized pattern, but as seen in the young American colonies and states that capitalism's drive for profit sometimes mixed wage labor, indentures, and slavery into the capital owners algebraic equation of the factors of production. This is not static, but changes historically so I don't know how "fundamental" it truly is, but I completely agree that wage employment is a deep function of modern capitalism.
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@realgabrielflandes Hardly. Capitalism is authoritarian even if there is an equal defense of property rights, as there is an inequality of property that one class uses to dominate another. You see the capitalist notion of equality only is of equality among property, this does not pose as libertarian to man, but it is only libertarian to property- it means capital is free to reproduce and multiply at the expense of labor.
The employer-employee relationship is actually a very insidious dynamic. Employment is a rental contract. Like if you rented capital (say, a chainsaw from Home Depot), you pay rent for the "time preference" (basically the cost of time) for a piece of property. Capitalism is based on a principle of self ownership, which sounds empowering, until you realize that most people don't own capital goods other than themselves, and must rent out the authority over themselves as pieces of "human capital". This is a process of dehumanization where human beings are valued for their return on investment as capital goods. This is why, at least capitalism needs safety nets (or abolishment), or else the system won't value sick, elderly, and disabled people, as they can't provide competitive economic return for the investor class.
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There are people working to build connections for community wealth, like the Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland, Ohio;
"In the 11 years since then, Evergreen Cooperatives has added three more cooperatives to its ranks, growing from two companies with a total of 18 workers in 2010 to five companies with approximately 320 workers. Those workers are paid 20 to 25 percent higher than employees at the cooperative’s competitors. “Our average pay rate is close to $15,” says John McMicken, CEO of Evergreen Cooperative Initiative. “But when you take profit sharing into account, which could equate to $4 to $5 an hour, we’re hoping that we have a shot at breaking the $20 an hour ‘blended rate,’ if you will.” In 2019, the average compensation at Evergreen Cooperative Laundry was around $18 per hour." - Despite a Rocky Start, Cleveland Model for Worker Co-ops Stands Test of Time, by Brandon Duong
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