Real talk, I ain't seen a good counter against it yet. Say if somebody *legitimately* makes a whole lotta money by being driven and talented enough to climb to the top of the pile by say for example inventing some new fancy technology that everybody wants to get their hands on why's it wrong for that guy to make a fortune off it even if other people manufacture it on the factory floor for a wage? You know, kinds like The Zucc did with Facebook. I feel like people like him are a lot different from "dishonest Porkies" that make their fortune without ever really contributing to society, but instead by manipulating the stock market or buying and selling property that blue collar guys built and renovated for wages over a timespan of months or even years.
Also, if I legitimately earn a fucktonne of money through hard work that actually benefits society technologically or scientifically and I wanna pass that money onto kids that never had to work a day in their lives why's that a bad thing? I mean, think of money as a watch or car of sentimental value that you might wanna pass onto your kids or grandkids cuz they mean a lot to you. Who should get your shit after you die if not the people closest to you?
Not only is their acquisition of wealth only possible with the work of others, but whatever idea they had was not formed from a vacuum but upon past innovation. Inventors certainly earn and deserve something, somethinf more than what others in an identical line of work do, but the nature of how their businesses operate mean they are getting far more than is proportional, and they exploit all the same.
Leo Harris
Every power in history was "earned" fair and square at some point, be it absolute power, feudal title, slaver's despotism or Capital. It isn't about whether or not porkies are worthy, productive and well-meaning members of society (not an insignificant number are, most not), but about the capitalist system itself.
Nolan Campbell
capitalism is not a conspiracy on the part of capitalists or bosses acted out against unsuspecting workers. it is a system for mediating our social lives, as an engine for technological development, and for distributing resources (typically through markets) – based primary on the extraction of surplus value by owners of capital. (profit.)
it's what allows someone like zucc to be worth tens of billions of dollars. the chief way he does it is by extracting value at no cost from facebook users, which he then sells, although those users are not compensated for their labor. zucc is no more honest or dishonest than anyone else operating in a capitalist system.
as far as inheritance goes, marx wanted to abolish inheritance but actually-existing inheritance laws in socialist countries have varied. like to use the USSR as example, the soviet government wouldn't have confiscated your dad's watch upon his death. but the USSR had a monopoly over land, resources, big industries, etc. etc. etc.
Jackson Sanders
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Kayden Peterson
my main problem with facebook is also not censorship but the concentration of wealth: a relatively small company (in terms of actual, salaried employees) that makes hundreds of billions of dollars by extracting value from its users (data, which is sold to advertisers), who are the real "employees" although they are unaware of it. that sounds like alienation in marxist terms to me. they are working for a company and don't even know they're working for it.
and don't get paid for it.
and this causes all kinds of disruption in the economy. the media industry has been decimated by this. kodak employed more than 145,000 people at its height and is now nearly bankrupt. instagram employed… 10 people (?) before being bought by facebook. but that's capitalism. and this can benefit society technologically, but it also requires exploitation of human beings by other human beings, it cannot be otherwise in capitalism, and it will create a "crisis."
Hudson Bell
That's shady as fuck and Facebook should definitely ask for users' permission before selling their data like that, but couldn't you say using Facebook's reward enough for these unofficial "employees"?
Just gonna drop this collection of arguments and incidents here
Isaac Cox
yeah, that's facebook's offer to its users, more or less. you trade your data for access to the platform. i think it's a bad deal personally, and the consequences have just moved more wealth to the top (with all its bad, societally destabilizing effects).
Logan Gonzalez
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Elijah Murphy
basically the capitalist "deal" in the 21st century is access to cheap services at the cost of stable employment (that pays anything) and benefits. wealth is more and more concentrated in the hands of the few, who spy on us, and profit from the data we provide to them for free. and simply quitting facebook will not solve the problem because this is a trend that is happening in most of the big industries.
there's a market socialist theory on how to fix it but that's neither here nor there.
Christopher Hall
no compare the rewards - you get to chat with your friends and cousins, he gets a fuckload of money first the kraut and tea topic, now this
Caleb Collins
The thing about earned capital is its use to generate profit isn't representative of the work necessary to first obtain it, only the initial capital is.
Liam Murphy
This. The capitalist system does not suddenly justify itself because 51% or even 100% of capitalists are hard-working people who earned their position, because the problem is not the virtue of the people at the top but the structure of the system itself. No matter how virtuous the capitalist is he is still dependent on the worker, and he makes his wealth by exploiting the worker.
I think there’s a big difference between leaving somebody a watch and 100,000, or 10 million.
Jason Phillips
Because even if you "worked" hard like you said in the first paragraph, your kids didn't. And now they have advantages over everyone else's kids to make even more money then they already have. And then their kids have even more advantage, etc. This is how the Trumps, Romneys, Waltons, DeBeers, etc. families rose to such enormous wealth. Inheritance and nepotism creates oligarchies.
Aiden Phillips
As someone already said it ITT the point is not deserving something. History is full of people that deserved better and full of people that deserved nothing and yet they did not get what was theirs by "right".
The point of a economic system is not to distribute resources as they are rightfully earned, but to distribute them in the method that affords society the highest efficiency. Capitalism won over feudalism not because capitalists are better people than aristocrats or that they worked harder, but because capitalism outpaced feudalism and offered society a better alternative.
History does not care about what's deserved, only what works.
There's also an argument that needs to be made against meritocracy. No matter how fair it is the end point of competition is monopoly. A meritocratic system will eventually output a winning group that will continue to dominate the rest for as long as they are allowed to. This might take the aspect of a static oligarchy, like feudalism or a dynamic oligarchy, like capitalism, but the point remains. The "I deserve X" argument has weight only while the meritocratic game is still running and in our world this is not the case.
You can see this happening in real time constantly. Take the videogame industry for example, what are the chances that colossi like EA or Activision will fall? Minimal, they have the resources to survive pretty much anything. The industry is extremely young, yet the winners are already here. The game has already been played and won. Of course you can say that they will eventually fall, that's true, and that brings me to my final point:
For how long is society bound to respect this "deserved" right? How long is the winner allowed to dominate? A meritocratic system should, to work properly, get rid of the winners as fast as it gets rid of the losers, otherwise you run the risk of loosing potentially better winners under the weight of the current ones. Think of Google, is it the ultimate search engine? No, but the chances of a better one getting traction are very slim because the company has more than enough influence and resources to keep the competition down or even incorporate them to maintain their superiority. If you reach such a situation what's the point of a meritocratic system?
Robert Long
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Benjamin Howard
Lurk more, faggot.
John Evans
Made me smile
Jack Jackson
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Benjamin Taylor
Again, lurk more, post less.
t. not even a Black Nationalist
Angel Reed
you don't have a trip mate, anybosy can be afroplasm WE'RE ALL AROPLASM
Brayden Taylor
Man, I miss those days…
Brandon Carter
AFROPLASM GANG
Brandon Thomas
I beg to differ.
Retarded flag is retarded. Which is why I stopped using stalinstache - it perpetuates wrong idea.
David Jenkins
Yeah, cuz people like to assume they know everything about you based on something as irrelevant as a fucking flag icon…case and point you called me a black nationalist even though I ain't even American and it's actually a Pan-African flag.
Austin Scott
These are capitalist buzzphrases, you've been brainwashed.
"Talent" and "drive" don't exist, everyone is born with equal talent and drive, they've just been damaged in various ways by the capitalist society. The ones that are LEAST damaged are the people you consider "talented" which is pathetic.
Also the entire concept of "earning" raises the hair on the back of my neck. You can't earn things bro.
Robert Evans
Pan Africanism makes even less sense than fascism since Africa has Caucasians on it and Africans, these two groups split into Christians and Muslims for a total of four large groups and they all hate each other. Then there's about a thousand tribes, and they all hate each other too.
Pan Africanism was invented by former slaves in America, who needed a unifying philosophy and ethnicity in the Civil Rights era, since they had no philosophy before that and their ethnicity is heavily mixed with the very white people they were opposing. It can't actually work in real Africa, not even if genocide were an option, because the Arabs aren't an extreme minority.
In other words it's like Kwanzaa - a joke.
Whereas nazism is an actual real threat, they conquered Europe for a few years.
Isaiah Nelson
What Kraut and Tea topic?
Luke Flores
Bro it was only like 2 months ago
Zachary Jones
Trips of truth, nobody's business ever grew up not needing the input of others, particularly if this was a loan or even an environment made safe by non-corrupt police officials and working infrastructure.
OP please read this here, it is Marx's research into how capitalism started through the enclosure of land away from the peasants under the color of law:
Rightist here, I was under the impression that Marxism wasn’t about right and wrong, just about historical laws and such. So basically there’s nothing inherently wrong with being porky, but instead the system which made being a porky possible won’t exist in the future. Am I correct?
Noah Brown
Is this a Holla Forums falseflag or are people this foolish actually posting on this board?
Elijah James
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Ryder Kelly
Not just this but also the wealth "earned" by rich people is usually based on extraction of surplus value. The exceptions are things like famous artists, where they put in a certain amount of work and the product can be duplicated for much lower SNLT (e.g. actors in movies or musicians on albums). In most cases you have someone climbing to the top of a hierarchy, which sustains itself as such because value created by labor of workers gets distributed with an "upward" skew, more of the value going to the people running things than was created by those people. As for the idea of rising to the top, you always need most people in a hierarchy to be at the bottom. For someone to climb to the top means that such a position is scarce, and even if you assume that meritocracy is true (it isn't), you have the problem that how many people can reach the top doesn't relate to merit. If there's space for 1 in 100 people at the top of the pyramid, it doesn't matter whether the number of people fit for the top is 0, 1, 50, or 100 - there will always just be 1 person at the top.
The notion that "hard work" is rewarded meritocratically is a meme that doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny. You don't even need to interrogate whether the system is meritocratic to see why it's deeply flawed. When taken in a real context where meritocracy isn't a given, then it seems pretty obvious to me that this kind of ideology is really just useful propaganda to the people fortunate enough to belong to the ruling class, to fool the powerless into believing that if they serve the powerful well enough they get to join them.
Noah Clark
Every baby is just a brainlet all the same. Different people are born with different potentials though and their socioeconomic class the lower it is the more it restricts them
Austin Ramirez
Zuckerberg didn't invent shit. He also fucked over the guy who coded Faceberg for him so you really should use a better example.
They do. The EULA says they can fuck you in the ass any time they want. People still click yes. There are free as in alternatives to Faceberg yet nobody except a few autists use them because people want to be under someone's control.
Eli Bell
If you watermark your images they become unusable for them to use. If you have too much copyrighted logos of different unrelated companies in your image they can't use it because it would cost too much to liscense. I think there might also be a law that makes it so they can't use images of anyone under 13 so if a kid is in the image it's also unusable for them.
Jack Wright
How can one you say whether users are customers or employees? If they're customers then the actual employees of FB are being exploited for those billions, aren't they?
What is it?
You're correct. Marxism is inherently amoral. As such there is no such thing as "earned" or "unearned" wealth in Marxism, it's just a question of whether it comes from exploitation or not, which is also an amoral concept.
Joseph Cruz
In a nutshell, turn Facebook into a cooperative where the users distribute the proceeds using a market mechanism. Market-based redistribution away from Zucc and to the users. Strangely enough, there are some libertarians who have advocated this.
Same as with a surveillance camera following you on a street. If your whereabouts are being bundled and sold to private companies to better understand your behavior (like where you shop), then you deserve a cut of the profit.
Also yeah, I'd say Facebook employees (the employees who go to work at Facebook HQ) are being exploited since they're not being paid in accordance with the true value of their labor. But neither are Facebook users.
Andrew Price
There's still the concept of self interest. We want to abolish wage cuckery and exploitation because its in our interests to do so.
Its in the interests of the bourgoisie to use force to keep their property.
Joseph Butler
But couldn't the user data of the users simply be considered the payment for the service?
William Evans
Yeah, but the way Facebook tries it's hardest to keep it a secret that there's money to be made from it and that they sell the data makes them look like they know they're exploiting their users for profit. See, usually you get paid for taking part in market research by filling out questionnaires on sites like SurveyMonkey and shit…
Jose Walker
Black guy here.
What's the point of using that flag except trying to draw unneeded attention to the fact we are black? It really feels useless and you always get a bunch of reactionaries derailing the fuck out of threads. (I mean for troll threads and stuff I guess it's fine but for serious threads it gets really annoying and the threads end up going in a predictable loop once someone brings up race.)
Jordan Murphy
If a boy in the playground walks up to another kid and punches him in the head and takes it, does he have some moral claim that because he was willing to do that, it's his? And if you want the argument that "might is right" then it will be proven correct when the masses destroy the bourgeoisie.
Henry Ross
I stopped reading right about there. >>>r/AsABlackMan
Ethan Moore
To divert from the fact he's a filthy Anglo.
Cameron Sullivan
I remember reading this thing where it went on about how the richest families in America 300 years ago are still rich to this day.
Alexander Price
Pan Africanism is an ideology
Jonathan Powell
in a socialist society everyone is rich
Gavin Perry
Inventions are all collaborative, giving one or two people credit for an invention hides the fact of broad scientific knowledge that any one person is building off of.
Daniel Davis
Back to tumblr
Matthew Robinson
This is correct for Marxism as a science (economy and most of philosophy).
Marxism as a movement (Communist movement; ex: Second International, Third International, Communist parties and groups) intends to put this science to use. Consequently, there are goals and intentions - which means there are "right and wrong" things when it comes to putting things into practice.
No, there isn't. It's just an economic role someone will inevitably fill in. However, keep in mind: there is also nothing inherently wrong with putting a bullet into porky's skull either (once he had outlived his usefulness, which already happened practically everywhere).
Correction: a system that made porky inevitable.
Broadly speaking - yes. It will be harder and harder for this system (Capitalism) to keep functioning. This is already evident in World Wars (which are primarily caused by economic reasons) as well as all most of the counter-productive nonsense we are dealing with today. Capitalist nations are inherently unstable and often have to resort to extreme violence to keep things working as before (Fascism), but even that will not work long.
Christopher Roberts
Everyone read this
This is why people whose primary interest in the left is racial or sexual conflict should be highly scrutinized
Nolan Bailey
I believe in meritocracy too, in fact our criticism of capitalism is that there is barely such.
Nolan Bailey
The thing is facebook has a bunch of bots going over everything you post or like, processing it to try and find out just what kind of person you are; what music you like, your sexual orientation, your taste in sexual partners, your favorite kind of underwear, etc. So they can allocate their advertising contracts to the adequate audiences.
