Welcome to the forums Rob, our newest Marxist member.
I have zeroed in on the more important highlights of your post, since the rest seemed to lack any point. I’m assuming what you came here to say would be found in the following statement?
Just for the sake of simplicity you should know that it is not in any way required of you to write long posts that revolve around a single point. I tend to encourage the avoidance of rhetoric, otherwise debates tend to get verbose and unnecessarily lengthy.
Now to address your point. Can you define capitalism for us? Please make your best attempt at using a non-marxist proprietary definition of capitalism. Since you bothered to post on an AE forum it would also be in both our best interests to agree on a definition that is compatible with Austrian Economics. Otherwise I’ll simply dismiss your definition and agree to dis-agree with you. No offense but getting into a semantics debate with a marxist, simply because they have no other real argument to offer, is very boring.
Many folk here will generally consider this statement as being nonsensical, or self-contridicting. The state is a framework built on coercion. IE States are inherently socialist, since they distribute services by force, and pay for those services by force. They are exempt from consumer sovereignty and as such cannot economically calculate.
That is incorrect. Capitalists earn interest, which are recorded as accounting profits over time. The difference between laborers and capitalists can be found in the frequency of their income, and the risks involved. Capitalists assume all the risk of capital, and they receive no pay until a profit has been made.
The interest comes from a discrepancy in time. Interest is a temporal phenomena. People tend to value present goods more then future goods. A good forecaster(Entrepreneur) will guess which future goods will be most desirable, make an investment to produce it, and generate interest in the long.
A Laborer by contrast does not earn interest, as he is getting paid in the present(now) before the time-discounting factor of the product is allowed to step in. IE before the finalized product is sold. The Laborer receives wages on a regular basis, and assumes no risk of personal capital assets.
See Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk.
We are in a credit crises simply because our central bank created one. Many here are adherence of the ABCT, and we in general believe it is the cause of our current financial problems.
It’s actually a misnomer to call it a credit crises. Alot of things happened, credit is just one of the things effected by the whole mess.
The greedier the better. Do you not seek to improve your own well being?
Remind me not to ask your predictions for the future. At any rate, socialist revolutions have already taken place. Several times. Many of them failed, but the most successful ones are modern day democracies. You should really rejoice that under the current democratic system people so readily adopt socialist principles.
It seems strange to me that people continue to expouse this notion that capitalism has an intrinsic flaw which is this supposed class struggle. The capitalists obtain profits by exploiting the workers, and the workers slowly lose their piece of the pie. Not only does this fly in the face of all pre-World War II (pre-modern welfare state, in other words) empirical evidence on real wages, but it’s difficult to see how one can simply ignore how vastly more wealthy capitalism has actually made the lowest income quintiles. Not only has health generally improved by several magnitudes (health expectancy, for example, grew by at least a half by the Second World War, compared to that of the late-19th century), but the sheer amount of economic goods a low-income worker can afford compared to a similar worker one hundred years ago is truly outstanding. The wealth of today is directly attributable to capitalism, and as such without capitalism the worker would not be nearly as wealthy as he is today.
Can someone post me data of pre-WWII real wages and poverty?And post wwII consumption
Someone tried to tell me that LBJs great society programs helped with poverty and looking at the data its too easy to draw that conclusion.
Pentahedron,
I am working on a compilation of data on real wages and productivity between 1870 and 1894, and so this will be made available somewhere and soon. Also, I recall finding information on real wages during the 1920s in Tom DiLorenzo’s book, How Capitalism Saved America, but I don’t have time to look through it now. What I remember is that the rate at which worker’s wages were rising at the time was many times higher than that of capitalist profits. In fact, the longest period (or, at least, one of the longest periods) of a sustained fall in real wages has occurred over the past forty years.
The logical error in your argument is that you attribute the wealth of the lower incomes to the system of capitalism, while at the same time you argue that in fundament the post-www2 government is socialst, so that these benefits of workers can (and which can be historically proven) only be attributed to socialism. If it were for capitalism, we would still have 6day work weeks with 12 hour workdays for both men, women and children. The capitalists, as we now, did nothing to abolish that, and acted and voted against any such progressive labor laws.
So you think banning people from being able to work long hours if they want to is doing them a favor? Did you ever think that maybe people don’t work as long anymore because they don’t need to, because their productivity is higher (thanks to that damnable accumumated capital structure)?
Who are the “capitalists” and who are the “workers”? Pls make this distinction in the following cases: (1) An employee of corp XYZ owning 2% of all XYZ shares in his portfolio, (2) The CEO of corp XYZ owning 0.5% of all XYZ shares, (3) An employee of XYZ owning 1% of shares in ten other companies, (4) An unemployed person owning 1% shares in ten companies, and (5) an unemployed person owning no shares. Pls go by the numbers and mark each by either “capitalist” or “worker”.
Finally, if being a “capitalist” was such a sweet gig, how about you stop whining and start saving up from your paycheck or borrowing and starting the gig for yourself? The more brutal and exploitative the other capitalists are, the larger the window of opportunity for you to jump in and attract/steal the most talented employees from them by offering them less “exploitative” terms. Everybody wins: The brutal and greedy capitalists go bust, while the decent ones (like yourself) would prosper, and employees would become better treated and richer allowing them to save up and enter the “capitalist” gig for themselves, thus furthering this positive feedback cycle.
Waidaminit! I think this is exactly what’s already going on. Sorry we weren’t the first ones on this.
It certainly was a progression that labour laws were in place, and it is a fundamental misunderstanding to claim that people worked that long days because they wanted too. They had nothing to choose, either accept an underpayed job for long hours, or face miserable poverty, hunger, etc. What choice did they have? It can be attested that in the early days of capitalism (when there still was a “pure” capitalist system, without interventions from the governent) wage labour was even worse as slave labour.
Socialism as a movement emerged as the opposition against such capitalist exploitation and repression, and the succesfullness of that struggle we benefit from still today, because there is the right to vote for men and women, there are labour laws that protect the labourer against inhumane working conditions and brutal exploitation, etc. Nothing of that, what we now commonly attribute to human rights, existed at the emerge of capitalism, and if it had been for the capitalists themselves, there would have never be such labor laws and human conditions, since they acted and voted against all such rights and benefits for laborers.
Your question is nonsensical, the 12 hour workday is a thing of the past, in which there WAS a clear distinction between worker and capitalist. Workers had for certaion no shares in corporations in those days. All they got was their labour force, and they could only rent themselves to the capitalist and accept the miserable working conditions, or die in the street. That were the choices.
Things are different now, but that is beside the topic.
What’s the topic, then? What’s your problem today? Or do you propose that we discuss/solve the “problems” of the past?
<<< What’s the topic, then? What’s your problem today? Or do you propose that we discuss/solve the “problems” of the past? >>>
We were not discussing solution, you just made a remark about workers and capitalist in the early days of capitalism, which was out of context, since at that time there was a clear distinction between the two. The only thing to be solved was your misunderstanding of that.
[edit] You can quote users with [$quote user=“NAME”$] without the $ signs.
This is empty fear mongering. It flies of evidence and theory. The iron law of wages has been disproven for so long its ridiculous.
If you actually look at the statistics, real wages double from 1819 to 1850, and the working week falls across the board continously even before government intervention into the economy. Despite what is commonly assumed, coal miners worked around 40hrs/week. This confirms that there IS competition between greedy capitalists for laborers. You have to offer workers better working conditions than what they already have, so we should expect a systematic increase in the standard of living for everyone.
Regardless, even if labor conditions never improved, it was not a controlled experiment. We had millions of immigrants flooding the market with cheap labor. No modern nanny-states open their borders to millions fleeing poverty and war. Capitalism clothed and fed this many refugees, more than any government has ever done. The socialist countries idealized by leftists have closed borders and ethnically homogenous populations. They are de facto racist good old boy clubs. See here for more analysis.
No it arose because people don’t understand economics or political philosophy. Its also a response to MERCANTILISM, not true capitalism, which is characterized by self ownership and homesteading rights.
Moreover, there is no direct conflict between socialism and capitalism. You can form organizations and co ops voluntarily with your socialist buddies. You just can’t go and attack everyone else because you think you own their means of production. Socialism is a very sorry system indeed if it cannot persist peacefully.
Democracy is a spectacular failure. This is simply more pandering the proletariat masses who, in a democracy, do not bear the costs of having bad political opinions.
And you conveinently ignore all the other ways in which workers are exploited BY laws. Basically every major industry in the United States is in partnership with the government to keep competition out so they can have government granted monopolies in their industries. Tobacco, medicine, defense services, education, insurance, steel, agriculture. If you can find a good industry, like technology, it is good because there is international competition inhibiting the effectiveness of a partnership between corporation and state.
Empty statement. Provide statistics showing that there were no “human rights” and that this condition would persist. You are guilty of pessimistic anti market bias in assuming that things can’t get better over time. Above I cited evidence that things DID in fact get better over time…
Just a question to probe your knowledge of US economic history, how did health insurance come to be a service provided by employers?
Capitalist exploiters do not vote at the polls :P. If they did it would be pointless because they do not have the numbers to advance their class interest by voting. Instead they simply bribe democratic governments to make rules in their favor.
Democracy is especially susceptible to special interest groups. If there’s a policy that will cost every american $1 but put $10,000,000 in the pockets of a few executives, who is going to fight it? If the average voter spends one hour trying to organize and fight the policy, he is working for $1/hr. The execs are going to work much much harder to try and get the bill passed. It is a collective action problem that repeatedly fails to be solved because it is so easy to co opt democratic governments.
I can’t even tell you where to start on political theory though… government has got to be about the worst way to oragnize society because you are making whichever group has political power (majority, king, etc) judge in its own case. There can never be any check against government power. A bill of rights or constitution is unenforcable because the government will not rule against itself systematically.
If your ideal system, maybe it is democratic socialism, cannot persist peacefully on a free market, it is pretty pathetic. People have a choice between forming democratic co ops and working for the capitalist “exploiters”, and still choose the latter. If you have to use aggression to get what your system, its probably not what people want…
ABCT = Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies?
Rob,
The logical error in your argument is that you attribute the wealth of the lower incomes to the system of capitalism, while at the same time you argue that in fundament the post-www2 government is socialst, so that these benefits of workers can (and which can be historically proven) only be attributed to socialism.
You misread my post. Since the beginning of the modern welfare state real wages for workers have decreased. As such, a decrease in real wealth is also attributable to interventionism (I wouldn’t go as far as to call it socialism).
If it were for capitalism, we would still have 6day work weeks with 12 hour workdays for both men, women and children. The capitalists, as we now, did nothing to abolish that, and acted and voted against any such progressive labor laws.
This is absolutely untrue, for the most part. While a number of labor laws did make life more convinient, to some degree, unfortunately introducing these laws early made the costs high. For example, laws against child labor limited a family’s ability to earn extra income. Children worked not because they were forced to, but because given the relatively low incomes of the early U.S. industrial revolution families usually needed their children to add to it.
However, as I write in something I’m working on, high economy growth during the final thirty years of the 19th century lowered the opportunity cost of leisure. This allowed the literacy rate of not only the white population, but the black population, to rise meteorically. Furthermore, it allowed the division of labor to further specialize, which directly led to the beginning of the medicinal field (which would lead to the ability to cure innumerable diseases which have plagued mankind for centuries, but now are no longer even relevant to our daily lives). The period between 1879 and 1893 represents the greatest increase in real wages the United States worker has ever seen. A second period of mass industrialization during the mid-1950s and early-1960s may have also contributed to a rise in real wages, but since the early-1970s the standard of living has actually fallen (of course, counteracted by a facinating increase in technology, including the computer-sector… no one can deny the value of that).
So, I would go as far as to claim that the “logical error” in your argument is that you have absolutely no idea on the source of wealth. You cite the 12-hour workday. This is not a source of wealth. This is a contribution of wealth, which allowed the marginal utility of extra wages to fall far enough to allow individuals to forego work for leisure.
Oh cool can’t wait to see them. In the mean time I heard Gordon Fishers “Estimates of the Poverty Population under the Current Official Definition for Years before 1959” could help with getting a good grasp on the situation since the census bureaus information start only at 1959 IIRC.
Can you explain the logical fallacy I am commiting in my logical error?
Can you back up that assertion? Logically it does not follow, if “capitalists” over-work their employers they will leave and work elsewhere. Can you prove to us that employee’s will not leave their place of employment to more attractive opportunities?
“ABCT = Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies?”
When this is what you have as a comeback to a thorough response after throwing out half a dozen cliches and a few sentences of actual argumentation then you know that you’ve just been owned.