Comments by "Wandering Existence" (@WanderingExistence) on "Why The Political Compass Sucks...And What's Better" video.

  1. 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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  2.  @monkemode8128  As much as I understand the "push towards Denmark" and I think that it is a preferable situation of capitalism, but it still pushes negative externalities onto developing or undeveloped country. It's not about the jealousy of somebody earning more money than somebody else, it's the power imbalance that creates unfavorable cost-shifting due to the authority of private property and incentives of profitability. Cooperatives that cooperate with other cooperatives allow people to arrange production and distribution in ways that allow for people to take care of each other without the underlying need to maximize profit for a few capitalists. As a Democratic Socialist I am not opposed to social democracy as a form of transitional change that could last a while, but I think eventually we will need to reduce alienation by allowing labor to control capital. Not about jealousy it's about liberation.
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  3.  @sunphoenix1231  Power imbalances will always form, but the insidious thing about capitalism is the regularity that it creates capital bias even with union bargaining. It biases capital profits over workers, local communities, global communities, and the planet itself.
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  4.  @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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  5. Of course the Mises Institute would do something like that.
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  6. "I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.“ — Slavoj Žižek
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  7.  @Salsmachev  I agreed all the way up to the part about the Soviet system. Where was the worker democracy for the Ukrainian farmers that were starved to death in the 1930s? Looks more like state-capitalism, tbh.
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  8.  @sunphoenix1231  Are you mad I agreed with you? Yes, power imbalance will always occur, the goal is to reduce the size and instances of alienation. I'm not sure what you mean by calling it the 'status quo' but not 'regularity', it's the same concept of "normalization".
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  9.  @josephcarriveau9691  Um, this is basically Marxist, lol (commodity fetishism and alienation). Even Marx based much of his economics on Smith- next you'll tell me that makes Marx a classical liberal/ libertarian. "Self ownership" doesn't have to be transferable, although Anthropologist David Graeber has talked about how some of the first instances of wage labor for the literal renting of a slave labor for day labor. Under modern capitalism the metaphysics of self ownership is non-transferable, although the labor power itself is transferable as you sell/ rent your time to a boss (so labor power, rather than the laborer, becomes the transferable/ disposed commodity). Unfortunately you probably missed the fact that I was using the language of classical and neoclassical economics to undermine the ethics from the inside out, but hey, welcome aboard. Admittedly I will say, this piece was partially unironically inspired by a libertarian... well a libertarian socialist/ anarchist, Benjamin Tucker. In his book 'State Socialism and Anarchism' he denounces land rent, interest bearing loans, and profit from wage labor as "the Trinity of Usury". From this we can see that land rent, interest, and wages are all rental agreements for different factors of production, for instance interest is just like the rental price for money or that a wage is rental price for labor. But this surely isn't the type of "libertarian" metaphysics you were thinking of, lmao. Now go put that cap on for rudely calling me a classical liberal 😜
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