Question the capitalist system

How do I argue this ?

Where does the owner get his money?

from us, to which they respond: "And who provides the work, the facility and resources?"

tell them thats not real capitalism because the state owns everything there and there are not any transactions going on, the type of person who would argue those premises will likely agree with you there and admit he is actually arguing for socialism
he might change his argument afterwards and you will be fighting a harder battle once he has his rhetoric in order

The workers make the tools. The workers built the facility. The workers got the materials. The workers work to make the final product.
All workers pay bills.
All workers pay taxes.
All workers pay their own individual insurance costs.
All workers pay fees.
All they don't pay is a wage.

Tbqh. The owner is merely an administrator, another type of work. They still make a profit and exploit the surplus value. It is still exploitation if a profit is being made.

i've used that argument before, and they just continued with the "The owner bought the machinery, the facility, the materials for you to create the products with. He pays for everything. "

How the fuck do I debate that ? It's objectively true.

How did they get that money?

from the bank. That doesn't win the argument though. They follow up with "yeah, he risked everything taking out loans. If the business wouldn't have succeeded he'd be poor and none of us would have this job."

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"[The mine owners] did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them!" - Bill Heywood

Why not point out that the capitalist workplace is structured like an authoritarian dictatorship?

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Perhaps a stronger argument is that owners incur risk. Something like 50% of businesses fail within their first 5 years of operation. Capitalists are forced to gamble in a way that someone working for a wage will never have to.

Communism btfo

the gamble is just to become a worker again lol
workers risk their lives/livelihoods/time etc

Prole taking a loan to start a business is a risk, yes. The more common way to do it is rich faggot spends a small amount of his or her already substantial fortune to start or acquire a business, or prole with ideas get investors aka money dictators. There is no REAL risk for already wealthy people to invest, because a potential failure does not have a significant effect on their material conditions because they're rich enough to fail.

"So you're against the redistribution of wealth such that we can help the least fortunate, yet you're all for property rights that allow the rich to hoard vast stockpiles of resources? Why're you such a bootlicker for someone who'd crush you like an insect if it were profitable?"


Pretty much what said, only I'd offer them a straw to suck it up.

This is known and (for some reason) accepted, it's even a a badge of honor among supporters of capitalism to endure it. I guess it's kind of a justification of effort.

The argument is that the business owner aka "entrepreneur" takes a huge risk in starting a business, arguably a greater risk than the workers, therefore his salary is "justified",etc.

yes, I understand that… I'm asking how to argue against it. I work with a bunch of libertarians who love capitalism and free market. I overhear them all the time but I'm not knowledgable enough to argue, I'd just make leftists look worse than we already do

You gotta be kiddin' me. You are kidding me, right?

I mean, I dropped that bomb at the youth mentoring program I volunteer at, and instantly the kids I worked with were speechless. The revelation itself was pivotal for me personally.

labour creates all wealth. it's pointless to argue with anyone who can't grasp that or just won't acknowledge it

It's my impression that at least some, maybe small but significant, portion of people are aware of it and think it's a-ok. Because during discussions about bosses overriding a workplace's general consensus on whatever I oftentimes hear someone say something along the lines of "yeah, but a workplace isn't a democracy, suck it up".

Was that on company premises? Because in my experience people have been almost universally dissatisfied with their workplace situation. Whenever I (someone outside the company, therefore untouchable) mention workplace democracy, they just look at me with this forlorn stare and say something like "That's simply not how it works."

Yeah, but keep going. Where do the loans come from? How did the bank form? At some level, the loans are only as good as the government that can protect that debt as valid. And that government was founded through conquest and plunder…

I dunno, maybe there's more to add but to me its not that hard to trace the lineage there between private property rights and exploitation

Basically, the "money" and resources backing the loan are (if we're talking about America) the result of unpaid slave labor. It's kind of fucked when you put it that way, but its true. This country wouldn't be as "rich" if it weren't for the forced labor in its founding. And same for all the other damn Euro countries. Is it any wonder why they're wealthy as fuck and so many other countries are poor?

Tell them that if this is true:
it would be ethical, as this in itself would essentially be a type of communism.

However. in capitalism, this never happens.

If they use that argument there's a good chance they ARE the owners.

Not at company premises, during free time. I should, however, mention that this comes from economic liberalist proles.

Yea like all those super rich african nations that had a shit ton of slavery before colonialism happened…. O wait.

got damn this is spicy

Here is the lie.

The workers do labor to turn a commodity into a more useful commodity, or to provide a useful service, and that generates profit. The business takes that profit, and pays all the bills, taxes, insurance, wages, etc. But the whatever is left over goes to the people who did not actually generate the profit, aka the owner(s). And the lower the wages are, the more profit the owners get that they did not generate.

And to compound this: productivity is ever growing while wages stagnate more and more. Automation lets 1 person do the job of 3, meaning "unnecessary" workers get laid off and the unemployed labor pool grows and then wages drop because more people are desperate to find work. Productivity directly relates to profitability, so basically the share of money that workers get is ever shrinking while the share that owners get is growing more and more.

Take into account the fact that the human population is growing rather than shrinking, and its obvious to even the densest bootlicker that unregulated capitalism creates an unsustainable situation where the share of wealth of the majority of people shrinks into oblivion.

And this is where more progressive liberals will miss the point and tell you that "unregulated" is the key word, actually we gotta get that minimum wage fam up to a thicc $10/hr so eryboddy can lick a boot forever, my dudes!!! #imwithher 😂👌

Home depot made 30 billion dollars last year, and I got a .20 raise. They also offload employee care onto employees with their "Homer Fund" scam.

So get a job where you're not in a competitive labor pool comprised of people who will work for pennies on the dollar?

Get a job where your labor is actually valuable instead of being a worthless cuck.

You are on the internet go learn something instead of shitposting for communism.

I can't believe you guys actually call yourselves cucks.

I'm a manager for Pizza Hut making $9 an hour but they made 1.6 billion in profit last year.

there's your problem
find a job that plays to your strengths, not something any brainlet can do

Does the worker have the contacts, understanding of existing systems, infastructure and competence to actually make a profit with their gold mine?

there's a reason Africa hasn't capitalized on its vast wealth of resources.

You're both fucking retards.

as much as communism is a meme, corporations able to lobby for legislation that prevents competition from entering the market, or opening the borders to devalue low labour and force the lower class to compete with foreigners isnt a good state of affairs either.

Every one of those is done or accomplished by a worker in some form or another nowadays so I don't see your point.
Also please explain how a shareholder provides any of that

I work with a complete classcuck and he's genuinely proud to be working a shit job and considers the labour market immediately after the 2008 crash as a great time because conditions were harsher and people 'worked harder.' The guy's only been working for two years though and just hears about it from older workers. He works over an hour for free each day and says he's just happy to go home to his videogames.
Modern life is truly pathetic.

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Labor exist prior to and independent of capital. I don’t get why this is such a hard concept to grasp.

So someone should have the right to exploit others because they got lucky?

A former coworker of mine literally crippled himself working for the company. There was something wrong with the tendon in his foot, and the job required lots of standing and walking. Even though he was in chronic physical pain, he would constantly volunteer for more shifts and double shifts, all for 9 bucks an hour. He walks with a limp he got before he was even past his mid twenties.

Same
I recently left my job and outright told my coworkers that it was because of the meager pay (which it was) and lack of work-place democracy.

They looked at me like I was crazy.

I could almost see in on their faces

Lol newfags.
Going through this piece by piece will show the first issue.
How nice of him, but he didn't provide those, he paid the price of having them delivered, etc… which was done by workers.
See earlier point.
This is nonsense. He doesn't pay wages and then distribute the rest of the money to workers. For one, in this equation he doesn't get paid (unless you count him as a worker I suppose) and it leaves out further development of production. He has paid people for all of the value they will produce. He has, assumably, paid for himself in here at some point too. He isn't going to be able to afford repairs on anything, because he has paid his workers with ALL of the money, even though some of it is clearly necessary for maintenance. He also isnt going to be able to compete in the Capitalist market, because he is paying his workers WAY over the norm, and has abysmal/no profit. Nice jup Capicuck. Whatever, perhaps the repairs are "fees". I am going to rewrite this in the way I believe it was intended. and what makes sense
For one, both of these common supports totally miss on the substance of Marxist analysis. The Capitalist can work just as much as everyone else(even actual production!!), and take on as much """risk""" as he wants but that doesn't eliminate the opposition between worker and Capitalist interests. No matter how much risk is taken or how much work is possibly done, the worker is STILL exploited for the value he produces and it is STILL in his interest to get that value. Not to mention that it is in the workers benefit to not have his workplace ruled over by the equivalent of a divine monarch, when they could easily have a more democratic system in place.
But this doesn't really matter here, as the Capitalist takes on little risk and no real risk, and doesn't do any amount of work approaching the amount he is paid.
The Capitalist is only risking his position as a Capitalist, the owner of the business. The workers on the other hand, risk their jobs going to work for the Capitalist. What is even further worse for the workers is that they benefit little to none from any increase in profits, while the Capitalist benefits massively. Further furthermore, if any problems are happening with the workplace, the Capitalist can elect to fix them as he chooses. The workers, on the other hand, can only hope and maybe advise(lol) the Capitalist in further proceedings when something is wrong. So in this, the workers have less power, less money, and less benefits.
Just to retouch on the amount of work Capitalists do, it doesn't matter how much they work, even if they worked 12 hours a day they would not justify their complete ownership or the amount of money they make. I'm bored now do I'm not going to write any further, but I was going to talk about Capitalist interests Vs. workers interests, the real world, and petty masters Vs Capitalists.

Might is right, and every time I see a small business, the boss has all his teeth, or has more education, or is smarter, or I dont know but I would not for the life of me side with his workers against him.


Yeah sorry I cant get over my class disgust. I know too fucking many people like this. My quasi-father (my real father being a worthless drunkard I barely even know) is a gardener, who spends almost all of his time in his huge garden, that he made himself, working as a locomotive engineer, grew up in an illiterate family who came to the city from a village. I spend all of my time with him. He told me that capitalism, and profit motive, are perfectly fine. Communism is already achieved for all he cares, in the west with its infinite safety nets. Even the utter fucking retard can reproduce and live a comfy life now. Fuck, western capitalism is TOO GOOD for most of the population.

For all I care, we could be colonizing other planets, but the only reason we arent doing so, is because we are paying service sector employees, instead of automation, because we dont want to exterminate them. Glorified vendor machines, all of them. Capitalism is too gentle.

I agree all the soft porky fucks will be swept away along with the present state of things

Yes, lack of capital.