Wrong, they should CEASE to exist
Well, I don’t know about your but I’d prefer a system where it wouldn’t be possible for a single person to amass that many resources in the first place
Worker co-ops, social safety nets, guaranteed income and a robust, free universal healthcare option are all things we could do RIGHT NOW without hurting our precious capitalist empire at all. In the long run some businesses like the Healthcare companies will suffer and have to downsize, but it’s always been absolutely astonishing to me that a company like Tesla, IBM, Boeing, Walmart or other mega-companies close plants or stores and send tens of thousands of people into joblessness and poverty nobody bats an eye.
The moment we talk about actions that might impact the insurance empires suddenly we have to all worry about the workers and all the businesses that are connected to the insurance company and so on.
Worker co-ops
There is literally nothing that stops someone starting a business from organizing it as a worker co-op.
That’s what I’m sayin.
While there is a list of cooperatives with varying degrees of worker-ownership and company profit, what usually stops them is the allure of money and how a business owner can easily embrace the long-standing culture of becoming a micro-baron and controlling the flow of wealth without any worry of repercussion or losses.
What’s the most amount of resources that it should be legal to acquire?
The answer is either “None of it” or “No more than you need”, depending on how based you are.
No personal ownership at all? If someone likes that picture you drew, then they should have as much right to it as you?
Without going into the difference between personal and private property, yes, copyright law is bullshit
I agree that copyright is bullshit. We’ve been watching it get the shit kicked out of it for 20 years. I can’t imagine it’s got much more fight in it. I think both personal and private property will not go down nearly so easily - people really really like their special purple pants and their cozy familiar bedrooms.
Personal property = what you own personally.
Private property = what corporations own.
Public property = what we all own, and has been privatized (outright stolen) as much as possible.
The rich go out of their way to not actually “own” most of what they have stolen. Since even they acknowledge that it’s not technically theirs, outlaw corporations that aren’t worker owned, or nationally owned democratic co-ops and be done with the corrupt thieves at the top. Let them get a job for once.
Accumulation should be removed, there should be no individual Capital Owners trying to collect more and more and more.
Can you clarify a bit more? I have enough money where I could stop working for the next 8 or 9 months if I chose. Should I be allowed to keep this?
What about my neighbor, his house is 3x the size of my wife’s and mine, and he lives alone. He could sell one of his three cars and survive for a year if he had to. I’m sure he has a savings that could last him 5 years or more. How much should he be allowed to keep? Or should he just be forced to take a vacation until he gets closer to average?
Or should the cap be more around one lifetimes worth of savings?
We are within Capitalism, so without replacing it with a better system, we cannot remove accumulation.
I am not advocating for putting a cap on accumulation in Capitalism, I am advocating for replacing the entire Capitalist system with one where accumulation is not only impossible, but unnecessary and unwanted.
Capitalism will naturally burn itself out by eventually resulting in such an efficient creation mechanism that there will be no more scarcity. Maybe this mechanism won’t care about preserving humanity, though, so that might suck. I suspect that trying to replace capitalism with something else would just make it continue on in a different costume so it can continue its mission.
Capitalism is juat a reflection of human nature. Not many people are genuinely interested in living in a way that isn’t selfish. It is a spectrum, but have you ever met anyone who always puts the necessities of everyone one else above at least some unnecessary pleasure for themself?
Capitalism will naturally destroy itself, yes. Socialism will then be the next step.
Capitalism isn’t a reflection of human nature, it has been around for less than 1% of Humanity.
I think this is where capitalist understanding of capital goes into contradiction with marxist understanding of capital. I won’t go over everything in Das Kapital that relates to this topic, but I’ll give the short gist. Capitalism takes a very general “everything is capital” approach which means whatever money you collect is capital. Marx defined capital different to show the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system. From the point of view of money it becomes capital when you use that money for the specific purpose of making more money.
Let’s say you give someone the tools to make a thing and then you pay them $40 to make that thing. You then sell that thing for $50 making $10 for yourself from that. If we imagine this as a black box, you put in $40 and you get $50. Collect until you have $80 and then you get back $100. That is capital. You do nothing but you make money and you use that money to make more money.
What isn’t capital is if it costs you $40 to make something, you sell that thing for $50, you take that $10, collect until it’s a million and then buy a house or something. That is not capital because that’s the product of your labor and that money returns into circulation.
You’re allowed to keep your money because you’ve earned it. Your neighbor is allowed to keep his house, his cars and all the savings assuming he did the worth to earn it. There is no actual cap beyond what you’re capable of earning from your labor. I won’t get into the “what if he didn’t earn it” or the “Person X made billions of their own work” discussions because I’m not here for that. I’m here to give a quick explanation to your questions because we’re not taught Marxism. The outcomes of Marxism comes across as very nonsensical and puzzling, when all you’ve been taught is capitalism. If you don’t care to read Das Kapital this is a good summary where the 4-5th video starts to get into the meat of the subject
Thanks for the videos.
It would be amazing if there really was a black box that could guarantee $40 in and $50 out! Sign me up, lol! As it is, the best capitalism has done is ($40 and research in) and (a chance at $50 out). If that first box existed, then everyone would use it. Many people think it exists, and then they are confused when the box just eats their money. That’s because they naively neglected the research input and didn’t realise that it was only ever a chance at $50.
It does exist, it’s called being the owner of a company or in modern times, being an investor.
From Marxs critique those people were factory owners. The factory made X amount of money and the owner chose how it gets split between him and the workers. The factory owners only input in the labor process is owning the tools, they themselves don’t put any labor into what the factory produces.
In modern times you still see the same thing in some companies that are big enough that the owner doesn’t do any work but small enough to not be publicly traded (obviously with some exceptions like Valve corporation), but usually the “owner” is replaced by a board of investors. The investors don’t do any actual work, their input is cash and in return they get more cash back. And what’s the requirement to be an investor? To already have a large amount of money. That’s why everyone can’t do, because they don’t have that kind of money and they never will.
This is why leftists are against billionaires and such, because they’re essentially leeches. The vast majority if not all of them didn’t earn that money, their wealth comes from the collective pocket of the workers like you and me. We do the work, we make the money and they take a part of it because they own our workplace.
You’re assuming that all possible future economic systems would have to work the same way as our current one. Even in the current one eg. taxation could be used to limit wealth after some arbitrary amount of millions owned, but note that I’m not advocating for this, just illustrating the point
I assumed you meant we should be taxing people who make too much money or just not allowing them to acquire more resources. Although this stuff is easily beaten since the people who enforce the taxes are the puppets of actually powerful people who have lots of wealth. I was just curious where you thought that line should be.
I think the actual future will be much more like an AI-powered hippy commune where money is mostly just found in history lessons. Maybe the most powerful people/entities will have something like money in their negotiations, but not the average person. I think this will naturally come about as a result of our current system.
Too late for that, that’s the problem.
Yeah absolutely true. Frankly I don’t think we’ll be able to unfuck ourselves before it’s much too late from a climate viewpoint – and I’m not entirely convinced we haven’t already passed the point of no return
Wrong! I agree with you and OP but I also don’t know what the word “wrong” means!
They should exsist, as a footnote in human history.
Nah there should be a whole chapter about oligarchs that make future people go “what the fuck”. Hopefully followed by the one about how we no longer have oligarchs that makes future people go “based”.
%100. No one needs that much money to live comfortably. It is a mental disorder.
Why would I want to change your mind‽
No. Will not change your mind
Stop using this fucking format
They almost successfully erased the asshole in it, but the mug still has his name.
Are you a bot? If yes, nice bot.
This format is so cringe.
No I’m just sick of it because of the piece of shit who is normally in the image
Who wouldn’t be?
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They only exist because we allow it.
Why the fuck is Gritty a member of Crowder’s mug club? Fucking cancelled.
(If you’re not going to fully Photoshop that fascist out of the meme, use the Calvin & Hobbes version)
This one, right?
Gritty is really a far leftist on X:
I’m not clicking that fucking spam link.
Thought this guy looked familiar, turns out I was thinking of the Honey Monster from UK ads in the 90s.
Has gritty acknowledged this relation???
I’m with Jesse Ventura on this one. There should be a Maximum wage
Lots of Zimbabweans would disagree.
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Well then I guess you’re right. Billionaires are great!
Many have promised that when they die the money should be used for charity. Warren Buffet started this trend.
The bad part here is they can waste all the money however they want and nothing can stop them. Example, they buy cars just to blow them up, not one but 1000. They can afford it. Good for the environment? No, but fun for them as they might have found a new sport.
Often the “claims” of donating the money are complete bullshit. They set up their own charities that they or their children control and “donate” The money to it.
It is just another way to evade taxes and perseverance their generational wealth