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Capitalism made your iphone (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 32 points 1 year ago (57 children)

What the capitalists did was pay all the workers right after they did the work, even though the phones wouldn’t actually be sold for some time after that. Capitalists bring capital. Money. It takes money to get things started.

I completely agree that the rewards are all disproportionate. The people who put up the capital shouldn’t get all the rewards. But it’s just dumb to claim that they play no role at all. If that’s true, walk out of your house and make a phone you designed yourself out of sticks you find on the ground.

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  • [+] 22 points 1 year ago* (48 children)
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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    No, you can get a better product. Capitalism is designed to focus wealth and that means that all companies that get big enough will, eventually, turn towards the “increase shareholder value at all costs” path. Apple was actually doing really well with how they did things until Tim Cook was in charge and then, when capital became more important than the actual product things started to go south. I have Apple products and they’re still very good, but they aren’t the same company that they used to be at all.

    Capitalism is all about the distribution of wealth and putting it at the center of every decision. There are plenty of other ways to have a world very similar to what we have now without that poisonous way of think permeating everything we do and buy. There are more options than unfettered capitalism and Soviet-style communism.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    there are more options

    Okay. What are they? And what are these “better products” these other systems have produced?

    I often hear people say there are better alternatives to capitalism but when pressed to show evidence of them, they are obscure, extremely limited examples, or they resort to “we’ve never REALLY tried TRUE communism.”

    I’d like to have alternatives. But I don’t see them, or if I see them, I don’t see them doing anything much.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Democratic socialism? Literally just use your own imagination for three seconds or google it. You haven’t even begun to try, why should I engage with you in any detail if you’re just going to plug your ears and then claim nonsense?

    Capitalism is not just “money exists”, it’s the extensive privatization of all goods and services and pinky-promising that the market will protect people. It’s a naive ideology that insists on a nonsense idea that corporations will have everyone’s best interests at heart and that everyone will always be able to work. It is so full of holes, holes represented by real human beings suffering even through no fault of their own.

    You can keep money, private business, and variation in salaries and still have a system with public utilities and regulations to keep businesses in check. If you need examples there are places all over the world that show that there’s not just extreme capitalism or extreme communism. No one is hiding this information from you and you clearly know how to use the internet so do that first before saying nothing is real simply because random people on a forum won’t peel your eyelids back for you while you kick and scream against them.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (42 children)

    The only thing you can remove from the process and still get the same result is capital…

    People want to be paid for their labor, and with no capital you aren't paying them. You just fell flat on your first purchase order for the first component.

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  • [+] 8 points 1 year ago (14 children)
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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    The only reason people have to be paid for their work is because the capitalist system requires it

    Naw, people like being paid for their work.

    Having food is nice, having a home is nice, having a car is nice, having a vacation is nice.

    People like being paid for their work.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (10 children)

    People don't like getting paid, they like to get things with the money.

    In a decommodified economy you would not need this.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    If you go straight to giving people the end things, the payment is the food, home, car, vacation, etc. People like being paid for their work.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    You are still thinking of it in terms of commodity production

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    If you include 'food', 'shelter', 'transportation' in 'commodity production', then yes, people want things like food, shelter, and transportation. People like being paid for their work.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    These things should not be directly associated with work

    Of course rewarding people for work is good in some sense in every economic system, just putting it in the sense of being paid just makes it very stuck in that sort of capitalist mindset.

    Other economic systems can exist.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    These things should not be directly associated with work

    Unfortunately for humanity, food, shelter, and transportation doesn't place itself in front of you. People have to work to make/gather those things.

    • I would also love to live in a place where nobody had to work in order for shelter to exist. But, someone has to work to build the home.

    • I would love to live in a place where nobody had to work for food to exist. But someone has to grow and gather the food.

    • I would love to live in a place where nobody had to work for cars/trains to exist, but someone has to work to build the car.

    Other economic systems can exist.

    And in those systems, people will still be working for food, shelter, transportation. People like being paid for their work.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    We shouldn’t confuse the use of currency with the capitalist system.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    In a decommodified economy, any sort of "currency" would not even be money in the modern sense of the word.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago

    The only reason people have to be paid for their work is because the capitalist system requires it for those workers to survive.

    Can you perhaps go back over this and explain what these words actually mean? I actually want to understand what you mean better. Because money is not identical to capitalism. And workers need to be paid for their work because they need to eat to survive. What is it that capitalism specifically is requiring here? I’ve seen one or two replies that are like “sure yeah people want to be paid but that’s capitalism’s fault too” and I genuinely don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Compensating someone for their work is a very basic concept not necessarily tied to capitalism. Even in the natural world there is very little labor that is not focused on some reward outcome. There is even compensation between species in symbiotic relationships. Compensation doesn’t seem like some weird forced artificial thing to me at all. It’s primal.

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  • [+] 11 points 1 year ago* (24 children)
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  • [+] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (17 children)
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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago* (16 children)

    I was being ironic. The rich definitely aren’t a different species. They are just another window on human nature.

    We can abstract money until it’s meaningless and then say “see, it doesn’t do anything.”

    But even if you regress everything to a basic barter economy, capital still matters. You want to gather 40 workers for a year to create an irrigation canal? Well someone has to be prepared to feed them for a year, THIS year, before the canal can benefit any crops. Otherwise they’re going to fuck off back to their own arid fields and scratch out another year.

    So you see, the village can’t get a new canal without the labor of the workers, but you can’t get the labor of the workers without some ready capital. Theres absolutely nothing abstract about it. Capital matters.

    What we all get mad about is that the guy with the capital then OWNs the canal and charges high prices for the water. And the way to solve that is by collectively bargaining for some worker ownership at the start. People like yourself get lost hating the guy with the capital and convincing yourself he doesn’t matter. He does. You just need to negotiate for a better shake.

    That has been hard to do historically because there’s always some jackass who comes along and says “I’m starving, and I can dig ditches, just feed me while I do it.”

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    If a village needed something done, then they could figure it out collectively, you don't need business to get things accomplished.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Literally in that above example, I'm pretty sure they're just going to redistribute their efforts. There will still be people growing crops and they'll share with the people working on the irrigation canal, knowing it's for their own benefit.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    It’s not the only way things can ever get done under any circumstances. But for the guy to say you can remove it and get the same result is BS. And if we’re being real, capital drives some things that collective village action never could, like advances in medicine. And capital drives things on a scale that collective village action never does. Everyone thinks there isn’t enough housing but most of what we have was built with capital, not village collectivism. And we need more, the village needs something done, so where’s that village collectivism? Fact is a village can erect shantytowns in rural India but it can’t out in sewage lines and pour foundations for a new housing project.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    You cannot simply just change society at will. Unless you want to burn it all down, it has to be done incrementally.

    But people still do try to work towards collectivism, such as socialism and such, look at the NYC mayoral race for example.

    Just because our system is what is now doesn't mean it has to remain, things can change for the better.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago

    I agree with all that. I just speak out in these dumb threads where people say things like “you can literally just remove the capitalist from the picture and nothing changes.” Capitalism needs to be reformed, not discarded, and it certainly doesn’t need to be misunderstood completely (as some others here seem to be doing).

    My dad did his MBA dissertation on places that have no liquidity markets and it’s very ugly when there is no capital to grease the gears. He then spent 30 years approving small business loans for a bank. So I guess you could say that I have a proud family tradition of valuing capital. But the world keeps minting teenagers who think the world would somehow just keep going without it.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Fact is a village can erect shantytowns in rural India but it can’t out in sewage lines and pour foundations for a new housing project.

    See that's funny because when the street my ancestral is on was being built out, that's literally what happened. The folks building the houses got together and did the sewage lines for the street. This was way before my time, but that's what my grandpa told me, anyway.

    Also this was the 1980s in what was then a soviet republic, so obviously everyone built their own houses, there was no construction company to hire, people were lucky enough to be allocated plots they could build on in the first place.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Cool example. I did think twice before saying a community can’t build a bridge or dam, because I’m sure it has happened. Apparently sewers as well. I’d love to know more, like what they did for equipment and engineers, not to mention sanitation during the project.

    I do think that people mustering the wherewithal to provide themselves with essential services in a failing state does say something larger here about the capitalism topic though. In the capitalist US of the 1980s, people didn’t have to band together to provide their own sewers.

    It’s cool that these folks did. Does that really show that capital has no benefit? I still don’t think so.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago*

    Capital is just a motivator for people not otherwise invested in the project, really. These projects can be done without capital if enough people agree they're beneficial.

    Now, people's skillsets differ so maybe a village's folks aren't enough to take on a project they desperately need - but even then, you don't need capital to persuade someone from another village to join in and help. You could exchange labor of a different skillset (you help me build X, I help you with Y), etc.

    As for equipment - they dug it with shovels, literally. It's not a long street, roundabout 10 houses on either side. Engineering - no idea, but I'm assuming there was a project already, but nobody to do the physical work.

    Cool example. I did think twice before saying a community can’t build a bridge or dam

    You were right there - it depends. If a beaver can build a dam, so can a community. A community probably won't build the Hoover Dam, though - unless the community is hundreds of thousands of people (that can allocate several thousand to designing and building the thing). Same for bridges. In my country the leftover DIY mentality from the harder times in history is so strong, if you have a stream running through your property and you need a bridge over it, you build it yourself, or get your family or friends together to do it together. Usually that would mean pedestrian bridges of course. BUT I've also driven my car over wooden bridges that looked like they were built by the very small local community and felt very sturdy. That would be to go to the parking lot of a nature trail of course, not something on a public highway lol

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  • [+] 3 points 1 year ago* (7 children)
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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    CAUGHT IN THE ACT

    Hey look everybody - here’s doomcanoe clearly trying to use a separate sock puppet account to chime in and make it sound like someone supports his side of this argument. But OOPS he forgot to actually sign out and back in and posted it under his doomcanoe account! You can see right here his deleted comment, once he realized his mistake. It’s still cached in my inbox though.

    Nice try, sir. Now I know where all the downvotes came from overnight. This is SERIOUS weaksauce. And you still don’t know the difference between hyperbole and irony!!!

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)
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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Pff. Your refutation is there in black and white, and not just from me. The fact that you won’t recognize it doesn’t change anything.

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  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The only thing you can remove from the process and still get the same result is capital...

    people want to be paid for their labor.

    You willfully missed the memo, but this was /thread.

    You keep moving the goalposts. First you say your points stand unless we disprove them (as if that’s the way it works). Now we have to prove this new statement you -and no one else - have said, that money is the only way something gets created.

    Really, just stop struggling. You made the point that capital can be removed with no effect, and that’s just plain bullshit. The rest is you dancing around trying to shift the goalposts.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    So sure, people want to be paid. But let’s be clear: they don’t inherently want money, they want to survive, create, and ideally thrive in the society they inhabit. Capital is just the tool we happen to use right now, it’s not essential to the concept of creation.

    Money existed long before modern systems, too. Bartering an exchange of goods for other goods sucks ass. It was almost immediately swapped out for some form of money in basically every society in history. (And to be clear, 'money' doesn't just mean a coin or bill, it was often a standard, easy to exchange good the society agreed upon, such as a grain or a precious metal.)

    they don’t inherently want money

    Let me ask you, if you work for a company that makes washers (the things one pairs with bolts), and your employer offered to pay you every paycheck completely in washers, would you find that acceptable? Or would you demand something easier to work with, would you demand your services be rewarded with money instead?

    they don’t inherently want money

    I bet you don't get paid in fucking washers, you demand payment in money.

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  • [+] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I have made things with my hands for which I was not paid. I even gathered the materials. I am bad at capitalism.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    You were rewarded in some way. You got the thing you made, or if it was a gift to someone, you enhanced your relationship with that person.

    If a person gets no reward of any kind for their work, they stop doing that work. As they should.

    Money and capitalism come into the picture when you want to motivate people to make something they won’t necessarily get to keep or use themselves, which they cannot then give as a gift, which does not give them the pleasure of artistic expression.

    So yeah people can make things without money in the limited cases where there’s another form of reward. But modern societies are scaled way past people just making the things that they themselves receive immediate benefit from. You get economies from scale by mass production, and no one needs 10,000 k kitchen knives.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    It only "takes money to get things started" because our economy is organized that way.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    How else are you going to get 200 people together to assemble phones for a week?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    A much higher financial incentive because they'd actually be the ones profiting from the sale of the phones. There are organizational structures other than corporations.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    I was once asked to join a startup, and after a few chats I was ready to talk turkey. Then they sprung it on me that since there was no revenue yet, no one was making a wage. But my equity in the company would be correspondingly high.

    I couldn’t do it. I had bills to pay. I was stunned that they thought I could do this, and I slowly realized that everyone else there was an ex-Googler and basically rich already.

    So you see, I’ve been in the exact position you suggest your workers will jump at, and it does. not. work. People need to pay rent this month and can’t wait through a months long production chain and months long sales cycle all of which is full of risk. They need to get paid, for sure, not maybe, and now.

    I’m not in here touting the glory of capitalism as if it’s a wonderful system. But I’m also not spouting pure fantasy bullshit about alternatives we can just switch to easy-peasy, because that’s a bunch of half-baked idealistic crap.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah I mean I know it doesn't work under this economic system, but that's kind of the point I was making

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    I have heard this several times throughout this thread that sure, capital is necessary in this system, but that’s just an artifact imposed by this system. Under another system you wouldn’t need it.

    I’m still waiting to hear any system where startup costs are not a factor and people can work on a thing that does nothing to meet their short term needs.

    Are we talking about a utopia where all human needs have already been eliminated by magical technology so we can simply wander where we will and work on enriching projects that strike our fancy?

    To keep it focused: show me a system where you can get 200 people together to assemble phones with no capital at the outset.

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