Debating with my libertarian colleagues is so frustrating

I pointed out "we have a democracy to elect government officials. What's wrong with having democracy in the workplace? Fascism is not ok in government but it's fine in the workplace?"

"Most people are too low IQ to run a business"

"So then most people are too low IQ to vote on government policy too right?"

Libertarians don't realize how fascist their ideology is. And the funny thing is, they defend their ideology on the basis of "freedom."

I talked to one petit-bourgeois colleague (I'm not petit-bourgeois, I am a NEET/way underemployed freeter (I have my own little local side business but I don't have many customers). She has 5 employees. She tells me, "why should I give 83.33% of my capital that I worked so hard for my entire life to my 5 employees when they don't have the intelligence and know-how to run a successful business like I have."

It's like they think that entrepreneurship is something that only a select few people in society are blessed with. Most people are too low IQ to run a business. They pretend like entrepreneurship isn't really just about having access to capital and using your capital to provide you with leverage in negotiations in business deals. Yes some entrepreneurs manage money better than others. But ultimately you need capital to make capital.

My side business involves selling bitcoin locally for cash (due to fraud risks, I stopped selling bitcoin over the internet. I got banned from one email money transfer service and it was only a matter of time before I would get banned from PayPal as well). I tried negotiating with a cash e-voucher company (kind of like paysafecard) so that I can start accepting cash e-vouchers from customers online and expand my business. Instead of just doing local sales. And the company told me that they don't work with individuals. Only corporations.

The rep said that my idea was interesting and he would check with the executives. And then when I followed up with him, he was stalling. And then I never heard from him again. Porkies don't want small-time business. Unless you show porky the money, they don't want to work with you.

And it's amusing how these libertarian colleagues are not even rich. Even the petit bourgeoisie girl probably doesn't make all that much money. They are all working class. I even called the girl a "petit bourgeois" and she said "no, I'm working class!" LOL. And yet these working class people feel no sense of unity with other working class people.

I point out to them, "if you work for a wage right now, you would make more money under socialism than capitalism. Because you would keep the full value of your labour instead of giving a large percentage to your boss." But instead on reflecting on this, they say that the unproductive lazy workers would just mooch off the productive hard-working workers. They don't see themselves collectively as working class. They see themselves as productive hard-working workers vs. the lazy unproductive workers.

In their mind, they think that they need the porkies to keep the unproductive workers in line. Because they think that the unproductive workers are going to bring everyone down.

I then tell them "in a co-op, the majority would vote to kick out the lazy, uncooperative workers or reduce their pay."

Then the petit-bourgeois girl shoots back "even if you did kick them out, who is to stop this band of misfits from deciding that it's just easier to pull a gun/knife on us and steal from us?"

I then tell her, "well that's the thing. In order for society to function, compromise is necessary. If you want people to behave, they need to feel like they have something to lose. If you take away everything from a so-called lazy, unproductive worker and he feels like he has nothing to lose, what's stopping him from shooting you? You libertarians have to learn how to cooperate with people and realize that the world doesn't revolve around you. If you want people to cooperate, you need to give them a seat at the table.

Libertarians want their cake and to eat it too. They talk about freedom and non-coercion. But yet they don't understand that coercion is necessary to enforce their private property laws. Individuals are not in a vacuum. Your actions impact other people. If you want to be greedy, there are consequences related to that. You could get mugged. You could get killed. You have to learn how to cooperate with other people and give them a seat at the table because there's nothing more dangerous than a man who has nothing to lose."

Libertarians like to talk about socialists feeling entitled. But they feel entitled to extract the vast majority of our labour value without risk of retaliation.

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These more established libertarian bitcoin dealers tell me that I'm just lazy and don't want to "work for it." But I do want to work for it. And one reputable bitcoin dealer scammed me out of 1 bitcoin ($600+ US). Telling me that he'll give me consulting services on how to improve my business. And he has been dragging his heels for 2 weeks. Claiming that he has been sending e-mails to companies in my area to try to set me up with a payment processor. But that it's taking awhile for him to get a response from these guys. He has been taking his sweet time. These people are fucking hustlers. Crooks. I want to expose him online. Claiming that I paid him $600+ worth of bitcoin for consulting services and he didn't give me jack shit in terms of advice. But I'm afraid that his company is going to sue me for libel. Libertarians love to talk about how evil the government. But they are perfectly fine with using the guns of the state to enforce libel laws I bet.

It has always been my dream to be a sole proprietor. Doing something that I'm passionate about for a living. I'm a very ambitious person. The problem is that commerce requires inter-dependence. I can't accept credit cards if credit card processing companies tell me, "you're too small scale for us to want to do business with you." How the fuck am I supposed to SCALE if you don't give me an opportunity to do so?

I think you basically have to give these companies bribes in order to get them to work for you. Pay for play. I don't know what else to do to get these payment processors to play ball with me.

I had about 3-4 sales/day when I was accepting money electronically. Going by that estimate, this company stands to make $4.47-$27.80/day in fees from me (depending on sale volume). And then that have to split those fees with the retailer. My guess is that this company thinks this is too "small time" for them to even bother forging a relationship with me.

Libertarians talk about all this freedom and how you should just create your own business. But they don't acknowledge the barriers to entry for self-employed people. If you are small-time, companies don't want to work with you.

I made like $1,500 US profit or whatever selling bitcoin. So being out $600US is not that big of a deal. I am struggling to get business locally so I'm desperate to try to get back into the e-commerce game. I understood that there were risks involved. But this guy has so much reputation in the community and his company address is available publicly so I didn't think that he would screw me over. But I'm very pissed that it's been two weeks and this fucker hasn't recommended one payment processor to met yet. Because he is apparently still asking around trying to find a company in my area who is open to working with bitcoin dealers.

Bitcoin has a high incidence of fraud. Scammers buy stolen credit cards and bank accounts on the darkweb. Send you fraudulent money. You then give them bitcoin. They then sell that bitcoin for cash money locally. And then once fraud is reported on that account, your money is charged back. And the scammer runs off with your bitcoins. So most payment processors want to stay the fuck away from bitcoin.

This is why I only accept cash money in-person for bitcoin now. But I get very little business. Last week I had $630 in sales. And this week I haven't had a single sale.

Democracy isn't good in government either. We should gradually phase it out.

Sounds like you got BTFO.

It's both, idiot. We'd have more wonderful things if we had less statism. The fact we have any at all is thanks to not being in a totally statism society like you guys want.

Libertarians and Aynclaps don't like democracy. The whole purpose of government to them is for the state to ensure that the bourgeoisie have license to continue to exploit the working class through the threat of government force

Yeah. I know. I am one and I literally just said that, with a flag to say so.

btw, the state exploits every class.

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The state doesn't exploit every class. lol The state serves the interest of the bourgeoisie. If you are wealthy, most of your income is generated through capital gains. The tax rate on capital gains is half the tax on labour income. This is fucking absurd.

Quantitative Easing = cheap loans for rich people to invest in the stock market. Inflation for the working-class.

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literally nothing more disgusting than this

Right, sin taxes which disproportionately impact the lower classes don't exist.

Wow, real caring for the workers here. You're sitting in your bourgeoisie home sipping champagne, posting on the internet about how the problems of the working class and the oppression they face doesn't exist and smugly telling yourself you're the one on their side. Sickening.

I agree that "sin taxes" "excise taxes" whatever you want to call them should be abolished. Since these disproportionately target the poor.

The casino already makes a lot of money exploiting the working class through the "house edge". For the government to steal from the pocket of the working class by introducing their own "house edge" in the form of excise taxes is inexcusable.

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Easier than I expected. You forgot to change your flag, btw. It's still a leftist one.

What are you reading? Didn't you see my post here where I said that the state at the moment exploits the poor for the benefit of the bourgeoisie?

Honestly no I didn't read it properly. Sorry.

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Informed /liberty/ and /ancap/.

I tried selling that libertarian girl on socialism. Saying she'd get to keep the full value of her labour under socialism. She doesn't have to give anything to a boss. And then she said "unlike you socialists, I'm not greedy. I give some to charity and I give to my employees"

And I'm like thinking "WTF, you don't give to employees. YOU TAKE FROM THEM YOU FUCKING RENTIER BITCH!"

Why are libertarians so classcucked?

I tell them they are being exploited and they say "I don't feel exploited. You need to get your shit together man."

Either libertarians are not willing to admit their economic troubles. Or they just havent been adversely impacted by capitalism enough yet for them to realize how exploitative it is. Notice how they are always quick to smugly call you a loser and tell you to pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you are not satisfied with capitalism. And how they always bring up anecdotal evidence of how they "made it" from rags to a good life through hard work. And I'm like "You would make even more money if you didn't have to give a percentage to their employer." And instead of that message sinking in, they continue with the personal attacks against me

When I went on a rant about Indians and Pakistan taking our jobs, the petit-bouegeois girl said "in their eyes, you are the bourgeois. You are the 1%"
And I'm like "you don't know what the ruck bourgeoisie even means! I don't own the means of production. How can I be bourgeois?"

God I fucking hate libertarians. Why do I even bother trying to get them to understand socialism? They keep bringing up the welfare state and high taxes too after my many lessons to them. And I'm like "that's not socialism! That's a welfare state!" Holy fuck. lol.

Hell I'm a social democrat reformist. And even I realize that socdem gibs me dats doesn't really work. UBI would not be necessary if employers shortened the work week to ensure full employment and paid a livable wage. Like $450/week, 30 hours/week. If you're a single parent, you'd get subsidised child care plus supplemental child care benefits because it's not fair to make the child pay for your fuck ups. And people who are truly disabled and unable to work would get a basic income benefit.

Daily reminder "statism" is a fundamentally meaningless abstraction

Its so typical how a petit-bouegeois like her who relies on third world labour (she has employees in Venezuela. lol) likes to pit third worlders against first worlders.

She is such an exploitative cunt. Doesn't think there should be a minimum wage. Yet when I criticise mass immigration into the first world from the third world, she's all of a sudden an ANTIFA and calls me a racist. lol.

I grew up in a first world country and I want to preserve our first world standard of living thank you very much. Mass immigration into the first world is going to lead to shittier and shittier wages. As there are too many bodies, too few jobs. Just like how the bourgeois like it.

This is the socialist version of "taxation is theft". Paying someone to do something is not taking something from someone outside of your private dictionary.

If you invest $1000 in equipment for the employee to use
Pay the employee $10/hr for 1,000 hours
And then sell $50,000 worth of product from that labour
Your costs are $11,000
Your revenue is $50,000
Your profit is $39,000
You are in effect taxing the employee's labour by 78% ($39,000/$50,000)

How is that not theft?

Because it's not what theft means.

If the mods here do it for free, and we benefit from their unpaid labour, how aren't we stealing their labour from them?

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BO and the mods want to spread class consciousness. Because they benefit from spreading class consciousness just like we do.

I have an alt-left 8ch board myself (not to be confused with turd positionism. Culturally I have more in common with Donald Trump supporters than B████ ██████ supporters. But Trump supporters are helplessly classcucked. Hence why I'm Alt-Left) but I stopped maintaining it. Because I don't know how to advertize it. lol.

Not an Argument

Theft means glittering ponies, and those are cool, so theft is okay.

Disagree me with me and you just don't understand what theft is.

If I buy $500 in tools, pay a man 1000$ to make garden gnomes with them and don't manage to sell anything, making a 1500$ dollar loss, does that mean that my employee stole 1000$ dollar from?

I'm pretty sure that if your company didn't manage to sell anything in a worker coop, no one would get paid.

But is it theft, does this make workers thieves every quarter the company makes a loss?

no because capitalism doesn't care about losers, it cares about worker exploitation that occurs under companies making a profit.

When companies operate at a loss its because the executives and management are overpaid! Why the fuck should a CEO be paid $4 million in salary plus stock options when the company is in the fucking red?

If you had one worker one vote, administrative pay would be far more sane than it is now. And the worker ants would get a larger slice of the pie than they are getting now.

Not really

It's not (always the case), and it's besides the point. If a bourg making a profit of the worker is theft, than so is a worker making a profit of the bourg, which leads to the conclusion that all economic activity is some form of theft.

Tying executive pay to stock performance instead of profits is fucking retarded. This creates scenarios where a company operates at a 2% loss but sees their stock go up 19% year to year because the executives fluffed up the stock price with stock buy-backs.

Main Street has benefited suffering for years while Wall Street made an"recovery". It's retarded.

In a worker coop, if your company is doing poorly financial, the payouts are less…

There are higher rewards for workers under socialism. But also higher risks. Because the company could go down the toilet. And their pay is tied to the value of their labour. And their labour value goes down if people aren't buying shit or the costs are too high.

Which is why co-ops aren't systematically more succesfull, it ads risk to it's workers.

This thread is the incarnation of retardation

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What you have there is crystallized labor time in the form of manufactured garden gnomes. The fact that you were unable to recoup the costs is your business. That's how it works under Capitalism.

However, if you take a big picture view of what happened, you saw this: you bought the man's labor time and tried to sell the product of that labor time at a higher price on the market, extracting a profit, which is your rent. The exploitation you didn't see comes from you buying a man's labor time and then selling it back to the aggregate bearers of market demand, the people, which necessarily alienates your working man from that group of bearers, because you are not giving the man equitable compensation for his work. The lack of equity stems from a great disparity between a unit of pay for a gnome versus the gnome's MSRP.

Story time:

I used to work for a company that made plastic sheet rolls for single-use blister packs, which sold for a dollar a pound, mostly. Every hour, depending on the size and speed of the machine, a roll would be produced, graded and put into storage for later sale or immediate shipment. Each roll weighed about a ton and a half and each machine was run by one operator to reduce costs. I would never be able to buy the product at my rate of pay since it would take me a week to be able to buy one roll. But that isn't the point.

Our general manager got sacked and was demoted to plant manager due to head office deciding they wanted a faster throughput and more product; our department was barely breaking even. They hired a new guy to run the operation who ran a shitton of experiments for new product for other companies. Everything was scrambled in order to get this guy his results. We did it. Except for one thing.

One of the VPs brother was a mechanic who decided to quit and become a contractor. He would generally pull $150/contract hour at the company vs us employees for just under $20/work hour. This sort of shit was allowed to continue and even minor repairs were expensive. This meant that much of our equipment was really unsafe/not fit for purpose. The consequences of this, plus the mandated work tempo meant that $100,000 worth of material was lost and the department had to close.

For my part I tried to organize the place after a couple months of working there because the guys knew that due to the fucked up company policies they were there on borrowed time. If we could have organized the department to strike for decent work rules where we could have challenged the pace of the work and the hiring of the mechanic, we could have kept our jobs and the asshole GM would have been gone, not us.

Workers are better off on average when they don't have to give a percentage to the owners. If a company is bleeding red ink, the workers will be out of a job soon enough anyways under capitalism.

China had massive GDP growth (maybe not anymore lately because they had problems since last year). But that GDP growth was mainly driven by investment and exports. Not consumption. China's consumption to GDP ratio is anemic. It's the wealthy in China who are making the dough. The workers are making a basic sustenance living. And they beat the shit out of them if they don't continue to be productive human machines.

Social democrats used to be Marxists at one point in history. Social Democratic and Labour parties used to include Marxist philosophy and language in their party platforms.

I would rather we fight for manageable short-term reforms like a $15/hour minimum wage, 30 hour work week and abolishment of "free trade" agreements rather than allow things to get so bad that the working class have to fucking starve to death and freeze their ass out on the street before they decide that enough is enough.

History has shown that things have to get really bad for the working class before they pick up a gun. Like in the USSR, Cuba and the Sandinistas.

Is that suffering worth it? If everyone who is able is guaranteed employment at $450/week at 30 hours/week + medical coverage and tuition, this would go a long way to alleviate suffering. We wouldn't get the full value of our labour. But we'd get a much better deal than we are getting now. And people would have more leisure while covering the basics (shelter, food, clothing, health care, education, transportation)

Are we in fantasy land?
You're not describing a stable equilibrium. All the same pressures and contradictions of capitalism still tug at such a state. It's not hard to see what unravels, even now as the historic gains of the working class are ever more forcefully rolled back.
What you're asking for is lovely. That's not in doubt. But it simply isn't realistic.

But it's not solely about averages, people who do own their means of production, work longer hours and have less income than wage workers.

*less income security

Nobody believes that people should be made or left uncomfortable for the sake of their egotistical vision of "revolution." It's purely a question of science here, how the world works and what can be achieved.

I swear, it's like you socdems bury your heads in the sand and ignore every real issue people take with your views, hearing from them precisely the same tired strawmen you always want to.

Democratic control of the means of production and abolishment of private property is something we are very far off from. I'm in favour of reforms however to make the workplace more democratic control (we need to bring back the unions!) and to give the workers a larger slice of the pie. While also providing guaranteed employment for everyone able who wants to work and more leisure as well for workers.

Libertarians hide behind "liberty". They speak out against statist tyranny but they worship private tyranny. Libertarians are fascists. The same arguments they use to justify private tyranny can be used to support statist tyranny (ie. People are too low IQ to run a business democratically -> People are too low IQ to vote on government policy)

How does the state exploit the bourgeois?

Taxes, user, it's like… literal slavery!