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From The Slow Burning Fuse on Insta (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/latestagecapitalism@lemmy.world
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[–] 7 points 9 months ago (12 children)

The point is the baker is not free when they must buy back the fruits of their labor with their wages.

Neither is the farmer, if you're adding it in. The farmer that harvests the fields for the money to buy a sack of grain is not free. Nor is a miller working to buy a sack of flour.

Each produces more than they receive. The currency they recieve for their production is inadequate to enable their freedom.

So if a farmer didn't need to buy their grain back, or a baker their baked bread, then perhaps the fruits of their labor would be more effectively shared, instead of commodified and so attached to currency. (This is the concept known as labor owning the means of production.)

You can argue about how currencies and commodification of labor is handled, but then we're already on the right track, so to speak.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (9 children)

    If a farmer can't buy the amount of grain he produces is because he's not producing all of it. Why?

    Someone built the machines that the farmer used to farm. Whoever built those machines did partially produce the grain. Same goes for whoever owns the land and whoever produced the seeds and whoever marketed and sold the grain.

    If there is a farmer that:

    1. Built his own farming equipment with raw materials mined by himself.
    2. Owns the land the wheat is growing on.
    3. Produced the seeds to plant the wheat.
    4. Marketed and sold the grain.

    Then that farmer produced that grain with only his labor, therefore he should in theory be able to buy the same amount of grain he sold, just make sure to put the right price on it. But what is the point? If he did all that labor himself to buy some grain, he could've just kept some grain for himself.

    A baker that bakes a loaf of bread didn't produce a loaf of bread. It turned some labor+materials+capital into a loaf of bread. If those materials and capital are not the fruit of your labour, neither is the entire loaf.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (8 children)

    If a farmer can't buy the amount of grain he produces

    That's not the premise at all. This isn't about the ability to extract a 1-1 ratio. It's not about extraction at all. It is posing that the wage earner is not free despite the value they produce.

    They're producing products that increase that value. Grain into flour, flour into bread. Each phase of that labor is commodified around a wage which does not increase in value based on their produced value. Those wages earned are a portion of extracted value.

    The wage earner that produced the machinery was not paid a wage based on the value of grain produced. It's something different. And that difference is where the wage earner is not free.

    To your credit you have posed scenarios where the farmers and laborers are also the owners of the operation, which is a big piece of this puzzle. But something of note:

    Same goes for whoever owns the land

    What is the productive labor that is ownership of land? What value has the landowner produced in the bread?

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (7 children)

    That's not the premise at all. This isn't about the ability to extract a 1-1 ratio

    That's literally what the post is about.

    At what ratio of the loaf would the baker be free? 10%? 50%? 90%?

    The post implies that the baker would only be free at 100%. Since it just says "he was paid less than the whole loaf". At no point in the post was stated the size of the slice.

    If the post wanted to communicate what you believe it is communicated, it could say something like:

    You are not free if you aren't fairly compensated for your labor

    Or

    You are not free if you don't own the oven you are baking on

    Or whatever else that is not objectively wrong.

    But this post instead decided to go with an "iam14andthisisdeep" quote instead so leftists can masturbate to it and the right can ignore it as ridiculous. Changing the opinion of absolutely no one.

    It is true that land is not obtained by labor, but it is still a limited resource needed for production, so if someone owns it, that someone will most of the time only agree other people use it in exchange for part of the final product. But you can take land out of any equation in this conversation if you want. The post is still nonsensical.

    I can agree with you that the bottom 50-9X% of the population is compensated less than the labor they provide. But that doesn't change the fact that a baker will never earn a loaf of bread for baking a loaf of bread.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    It is true that land is not obtained by labor, but it is still a limited resource needed for production, so if someone owns it, that someone will most of the time only agree other people use it in exchange for part of the final product.

    in exchange for part of the final product.

    If that final product is 'money' then I understand your logic and also why this comic exists. At the most minimalist interpretation that inherent rentierism is an example of an unnecessary extraction of the value of labor from those who produce it.

    But again, this is about wages. You can't slide between 'wage earners' and 'owners' any more than you can define 'land' and 'landowners' interchangeably.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    Look, you can focus on land all you want. But as I said, remove it from the equation and my point still stands. I only included land to make a more real example. It is not needed for an argument. You're just using it to avoid arguing against my initial position.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I am consistently referring to 'wages' which is a word you've now categorically refused to use so far. If I am to avoid anything it is further perversing a discussion on whether Felix the Cat is out of his element here.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    I haven't refused to use it. I just didn't because there is no wage in this post. It's a transaction.

    You bake me a loaf, I give you a slice.

    Can convert it to a wage if you want.

    Bake me 500 loafs per month, I'll give you a wage of 500 slices per month.

    I've done it, I used the word wage. How does this change anything of the argument? It's still the same. You can't provide a wage of 500 loafs per month to someone that bakes 500 loafs per month.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    It's a fruitful discussion here, and I agree the comic is reductive. Notwithstanding the incomplete representation of the circumstance, the point the comic is trying to make is that there is inequity/injustice in the distribution of costs and benefits produced even in the complete picture from beginning to end.

    The debate eventually gets to difficult conflicts in ethical values around concepts of property/ownership, labor, individual/society, rights, and meaningful living.

    What the comic aims to illustrate is a symptom of a system that maximizes the opportunities to live freely for a minority at the expense of a majority who see their opportunities to live freely minimized, suggesting that the symptom indicates the system is unjust.

    I don't think the comic is that successful in doing so, there are many ways to poke holes in it. However, the degree of successful communication by the comic is a different thing from the argument it points to.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    It is a simplification, but it gets the point across. Socialist posters should be truthful and self-evident, I agree. What would you say would be a similarly pithy statement to put in Felix's mouth here, that is accurate to the reality?

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    I provided two possible quotes. Ofc they need some working since I'm not good at that.

    More possibilites:

    If you get paid the same for working hard than the guy next to you that spends the whole working day staring at the phone, you're not free

    If your manager just "manages" you and gets paid double, you're not free

    If you have to stay the 8h even after your job is done, you're not free

    If you have to ask for permission to go to the doctor you're not free

    If you have to ask for permission to take your vacation days you're not free

    If your wage increases don't even keep up with inflation, you're not free

    If your rent is more than 10% of your 40h/week wage, you're not free

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    This concept only works if you act like you can only do so much, but commercial bakers can make hundreds to thousands of loaves of bread a day. So then the argument falls apart and becomes pointless. Say they make 100-200 dollars a day, that's more than enough money to buy bread and food for the day. This isn't even a good argument for labor because the straight text makes it sound like they want to keep all the bread they make, but if it's more than one loaf than it would just be wasted.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    If the concept is lost that wage earning to survive is not freedom, then yes this meme does not appear to communicate it well enough. The use of bread and baker would be an attempt to draw the connection, but then again it is also a meme using a picture of Felix the Cat.

    The premise of Felix being read on theory is more an opening to engagement than a strict political art critique, imo.

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