I’m so bored with his class-baiting. As if a capitalist wasn’t a worker before he was a capitalist. How do you think he earned enough money to buy productive capital?
Yes, they are.
No, it is imposition of harm that is unethical. Harm can be impossed without aggression, and aggression can be used without imposing harm, so, no, aggression in itself in not unethical.
The worker is pretty close.
Almost none were, but gained their wealth by inheritance or connections.
Here’s what Stsoc wants, he wants a scapegoat for what’s wrong with the world. He wants someone to blame. For stsoc, the capitalist becomes the scapegoat for everything that’s wrong with the world. Socialism creates an ethical boogeyman, an enemy, that can be hated and aggressed against, a lightning rod of anger for everything anyone’s mad at.
You realize this is not an argument, right? It’s not reason, it’s not rationale, it’s just bald restatement of your position. I gave an argument about aggression. Please give your argument for what it is that makes hierarchies in any way unethical.
How do you define harm? I define harm as invasion of property rights. Please lay out how you knew when harm has occurred.
Those who gained it by inheritance may still be legitimate, if their ancestors had been workers and can legitimately give their money to whomever they want. This is especially true in the US.
As for those whom earned their wealth by feudal style appropriation, I’ll agree their wealth is suspect and despicable, but such is not true in the US such as in much of the world, and it’s not legitimate to denigrate all rich people as a class on such a basis.
unilateral expropriation is not justified by a priori norms of communication. Indeed, such an activity is unjustifiable.
property is a social relation, governmental permission is but one component.
plunder. You cant justify reclaimation by your own axioms. A renter depreciates the house while the landlord must input labor and materials to maintain its value. The landlord mixed his labor with the house that he already owns. You just want to impoverish people who were wise and fortunate enough to create more than one house. Of course, if people cant own houses they arent occupying, fewer houses will be built. Workers who build houses will be impoverished. People who accumulate surplus capital, having no means of investing it, will spend it on consumption items, thus driving up the price of consumption goods and further impoverishing the working class.
because it occupies it permanently and immovably, much like how you cannot simultaneously have a citrus orchard and a limestone quarry on the same land.
It means you implicitly acknowledge a difference and so you also acknowledge the equivocation. Youre learning. Now learn to use a different word than “slavery” for mutually voluntary relations so we can be clear when we discuss these things.
yes they are. One person has a comparitive advantage at producing commodities, whereas one person is offering the most liquid good, money. Even in a barter transaction, there is someone who has relatively greater demand andso initiates the transaction, and thus pays a slight premium for the exchange. This is seperate from, but related to, the premium that is paid by the party with the less liquid good.
I dont think he exploited anyone and neither do you, since he didnt have any capital to rent out, seeing as how he was saving to buy capital goods in the first place.
The capitalist is the true culprit of many things that are wrong in the world.
Where exactly? You have just muptile times restated your fetishism of non-aggression. Whereas I have multiple times given the rationale for lack of hierarchies by reffering to what you call “argumentation ethics”.
Physical damage done to person’s body or legitimate property. NAP validates murdering someone by starvinging him. Also NAP invalidates saving someone’s life unless you are explicitly warranted by the person in question to do so.
Which is pretty much irrelevant. Making your money honestly doesn’t justify you in buying slaves, nor in doing anything else whish is illegitimate.
No imposition of harm (physical harm to someone’s body or their legitimate property) and absence of power inequality (hierarchies) are a priori norms of discourse.
As far as the reclamation is conserned, taking someone’s illegitimately gained property is not theft.
Reclamation.
I want to impoverish people who were “wise and fortunate” enought to live off other people’s labor.
What a waste, they would stop being robots moulded by division of labor and would have to learn do something else.
Investmens are a bait to fraud capitalism is based on, and would be abolished. Also, only the working class would exists, that is, it would be a classless society.
A, that can be occupied, and B, that occupies it, are identical? Wow.
Houses are industructable?
Wage-slavery? 
they are not. Discourse can occur with a starving man and between the members of what you consider a hierarchy.
only if you have a superior claim to it. In a deal between Gerald and Xavier, Archibald may not justifiably unilaterally decide that Xavier has been defrauded and expropriate Gerald. You have no standing to a claim.
thats another concession I value. Youre not concerned with increasing wealth, but depriving a class of people of their wealth. You absolutely do not care if other people (working class) suffer as a result.
like live in caves, all because you dislike their lifestyle. Sounds awfully hierarchical and authoritarian to me.
too bad people will decide to stratify themselves no matter what you do because humans are diverse and multivarious individuals. We have division of labor specifically because people are not robots and posess different skills, including the skill of choosing wise investments, which makes capital available to workers who havent accumulated any themselves.
the uses are rivalrous. Articulate an effective distinction and I will listen.
you could stop trying to be a smartass and realize a distinction between permanence and invincibility, but if you had that much sense you wouldnt be a left-libertarian.
“employment” works just fine, although given the weakness of your argument I can see why you might resort to histrionics.
Clearly stsoc does not believe in free association, because he does not believe that people should be allowed to freely stratify themselves in voluntary hierarchies.
Further, he admits he is a tyrant, for he would impose himself into voluntary contracts where there is no victim.
Stsoc, i would defend your right to try to explain to an empoloyee why you think he’s being taken advantage of and see if it he agrees, at which point he can voluntarily withdraw from the contract and join your co-op.
But at no point do you have a right to go thieving property you claim is stolen, nor to impose yourself between voluntary associations. Those are examples of aggression.
This “pay for permission to labor” concept is a little fuzzy, could you clarify it? It seems to me that a worker is not asking or paying for permission to labor, he’s asking or paying (in some sense) for permission to use someone else’s property. You make it sound as if the capitalist can prevent the worker from laboring in general, but that’s not true: he can only prevent the worker from using his property to labor. Hence, I think the way you phrase this “pay for permission to labor” idea is deceptive, it would be like saying consumers have to pay for permission from McDonald’s to eat, but that’s absurd; consumers have to pay for permission to eat food belonging to McDonald’s, not food in general.
There’s not a sharp distinction between owning and renting. To have property rights in some object is to have the right to exclusive use of it in some sense. To own an object means to have the right to exclusive use of it, period (i.e. in all ways, with no conditions). To rent something is to have the right to exclusive use of it on certain conditions. To say that a worker can buy a machine but not rent it because in the latter case the machine “remains [the property of the capitalist” is to make the own-rent distinction appear more black-and-white than it is. When a worker buys a machine, he is buying the right to use the machine, period. When he rents it, he is buying the right to use it on certain conditions (e.g. for a certain period of time, or provided he doesn’t damage it, etc). To say that one is absolutely just and one is abslutely unjust misses the fact that it is only a difference of degree, not a difference in kind.
Now, let me ask you this. You say it is illegitimate for a person to pay for the use of someone else’s property for the purpose of using that property in production. What if someone wants to rent property for a purpose other than production (i.e. consumption)? For example, can I rent a vacation home? Can I rent a storage unit? Can I rent an apartment? Consider that any time a person pay someone else for the use of their property, but does not buy it outright, he is renting. Though it sounds funny in the common parlance, strictly speaking a person who eats at a restaurant is renting (he is paying to use the facilities, but isn’t buying them); likewise if you buy a ticket to a concert, an amusement park, or any other such venue. Are these all illegitimate?
If you say that those instances of rental are all legitimate because they involve someone renting property for consumption, not for production, well then let me suggest that the distinction between property-for-consumption and property-for-production is not so clear. One and the same unit of property can be a capital good or a consumer good depending on how it’s used, and this can vary day to day. For example, one would normally consider an apartment a consumer good and insofar as I use it for protection from the elements, or for sleeping, etc, it is a consumer good. But suppose I make eggs. Remember that production is nothing but the transformation of something into something else which the producer values more highly. Turning raw eggs into scrambled eggs is production. What are the factors of production here? The eggs, the pan, and the spoon, all of which I own, but also the stove in the apartment. Do I own the stove? Nope, I’m renting it. Therefore, I am renting some of the means of production involved in the production of these scrambled eggs. By your view, this must be illegitimate, the landlord is exploiting me and denying me the full product of my labor because he is renting me the means of production, correct?
The underlined bit is another fuzzy concept, it’s not clear to me what it means. In your view, a wage laborer is not “in control of his productive life” because the capitalist can “tell him what to do” - but this does not include forcing him to do anything. While, in your view, a self-employed craftsmen like a cobbler remains “in control of his productive life,” because…the demands of his customers are somehow less an instance of “telling him what to do” than the demand’s of a capitalist on a wage laborer? How so? What is the reason that customer’s requests don’t lead to loss of control, while bosses’ requests do? It’s seems to me an arbitrary distinction. Let me put it this way; if you were explaining your system to an alien, and he asked you for a rule/guideline to follow in order to distinguish between economic relations between people that cause one party to lose of control over his productive life, and economic relations between people that don’t cause such a loss of control for one party, what would you tell him?
The boss says to the worker, “Make widgets like this Jones or I’m not paying you.” The customer says to the self-employed worker, “Make widgets like this Jones or I’m not paying you.” It seems to me that part of the socialist objection to employment is this idea that the boss sort of coerces the worker with the threat of unemployment and impoverishment…but doesn’t the customer do the same thing? If Jones the worker doesn’t obey the boss, he loses his livelihood. If Jones the cobbler doesn’t obey his customers, he loses his livelihood.
Right, but it seems like an arbitrary distinction based on some intuitive bias against capitalists; whereas, when customers stand in essentially the same power-relation to self-employed workers, somehow that’s unobjectionable.
You say that service jobs are legitimate. Doesn’t the plumber take orders from the customer? Doesn’t a waiter take orders from the customer? Doesn’t a butler take orders from the customer? Doesn’t a building contractor take orders from the customer? In each case, can’t the customer prevent the service-worker from laboring, by refusing to hire him? Just like the boss can prevent the wage worker from laboring, by refusing to employ him?
So it can between a aggressor and aggressed, I can beat you up and when I catch my breat explain mathemathics. Or I could explain the mathematics before or after beating you up. The point is the manifestation of imposition of harm or hierarchy invalidates discourse, just like aggression, only aggression is much narrower and sometimes in contradiction with imposition of harm; So, discourse can happen between people practicing those things, but not really while practicing those things, that is- manifestation of those two things invalidates discourse, meaning they are it’s a priori norms, meaning no imposition of harm and no hierarchy are axioms of ethics.
So you say.
Yes, depraving of wealth a class that has gained it by depraving another class of it’s fruits of labor.
I don’t see how will they suffer in getting back what is theirs.
Abolishing social stratification will not bring uniformity, but power equality.
By accepting hierarchies you reject free association, being that hierarchies are the opposite to freedom.
Yes, I would ban tyrannies. How tyranic of me.
Is it possible to be an anarchist without opposing hierarchy?
Why is voluntarism not enough?
To use someone else’s property to labor.
It is, being that capitalists as a class own all the means of production.
There’s a diametrically opposite distrinction. If you rent something, that means you don’t own it.
By extension that only labor should entitle one to income most probably all rent will be abolished in socialism, nor only rent of means of production, and almost all socialists are for abolishing all rent.
He uses the facilities for free, and buys food. There is no rent.
Hint: read the next sentence.
And the employee not being payed say “ok, I’ll go starve untill I find another master to sell my labor to”, and the self-employed worker not being payed would say “ok, f* you, I’ll make it and sell it to someone else”.
The boss being the superflous connection between Jones and the customers, that is- society, that also does some productive labor that Jones benefits from, whereas the boss doesn’t contribute anything, but the opposite, he parasitizes.
Exaclty. Absense of power ineqality is an a priori ethical axiom.
No.
Fixed this so you could see the irony, stsoc.
So I could see how brainwashed by capitalist propaganda you are? You didn’t have to, I saw that before.
Then why did you wrongly label the capitalist as “superfluous”?
The capitalist is not only superfluous, but a damaging factor.
Funny how the workers consider capitalists both necessary and beneficient. But its alright for you to consider him “damaging” as your definitions of words are not customary, for example you consider “leaving someone alone” to be the same as “causing someone harm.”
Maybe managers and bank employees. From other workers, hundreds of whom I’ve met, I have met only two workers, total, that support capitalism and support existence of the capitalist class.
So you propertarians not only hijack and redifine word but also project your misdeeds onto others.
Well then you must live in a mutualist habitat somewhere. Nearly all the workers I know of support capitalism.
you seem to have lost your last connection to reality.
Serbia, where we have a “transitional economy” for over two decades, and I have mostly woker blue-collar and gray-collar jobs and among those workers, almost none support capitalism.
By reality I’m sure you mean “capitalist propaganda”.
maybe you guys should figure out how to make your own economy work before suggesting that other people stop renting and whatnot because you dont like it?
We had two socialist economies in Europe, and they work.
…because it’s illegitimate.
Says you. But, unless you are in a hierarchical relationship with others, they do not have to submit their contracts to you for approval.