Comments by "jeppen" (@jesan733) on "Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism | Lex Fridman Podcast #295" video.

  1. I'm a Swede, so my perspective may be a bit different, but I find that it's rarely the guy with the most money that get (all of) product X and the poor goes without. It's rather that some get bigger housing, some get flashier cars, some spend more on expensive food, some on vacations. But we can't all get anything we point toward, so we prioritize and choose some level for each product category. Now electricity has become expensive in Europe, so we find ways to reduce consumption a bit. A few really rich people may not care to save, but I'm not resentful about that. I get enough to manage, but I may e.g. take less saunas or do more laundry on weekends or when it's windy when the price is low. Now, I found the discussion about surplus lacking. I work at a huge telecom supplier producing not even consumer products, but the infrastructure for cellular networks. This cannot be small-scale developed and produced, nor small-scale deployed, and all of the products are "more" or "surplus" in a sense, because I can't use them myself. It also would make little sense that I got a base station every now and then to sell instead of money, it's better that my employer sells it and give me money. So shouldn't he give me all the money? Well, he does, almost, because over time, the average truly extracted profits from industry is rather low, probably single digits, which means most of sales goes to salaries (either directly or down the supply chain). I do get the surplus! So isn't it bad that capitalists skim off a little? Nah, it's rather cheap overhead cost for me to have a society with competitive businesses where the more successful products, managers and companies rise to the top and produce value for me to consume. Again, the resentment isn't there for me, to any appreciable degree. And would I get what I wanted if the huge company was owned by us workers and we tried to run it democratically? No, I think I'd be less satisfied with decisions, waste energy on that process and also earn less. It seems to me that these marxists simply have decided what matters, but that this decision doesn't align to reality. They've had more than 100 years to formulate alternative company structures that would be liked more and introduce them bottom up within the framework of capitalism, but they've been unable to.
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