PyramidHead
Contributor
This whole discussion is predicated on the misunderstanding that all work is inherently useful work, and none is a consequence of the specific mode of production that prevails in a social context.
In the exact same way that a business owner is a hard-working risk-taker whose labor is required for anything to happen, the feudal lord whose management of the peasants under his rule enabled the coordinated production and distribution of their product was also a hard-working risk-taker, and I mean that with no irony. Under feudalism, moving into a new territory to establish a lordship and contend with the local farmers and their customs would have involved a degree of risk that was, for the landowner, at least comparable to the risk of a modern-day entrepreneur.
The same could have been said of an enterprising buyer of human beings in the pre-Civil War south, whose plantation needed to compete with the others in the region, forcing him to make strategic decisions about how many slaves to buy, how well to treat them, how to deal with escapees, and other calculations that involve a risk/reward judgement directly affecting his livelihood. This situation does not change if you imagine him owning slaves in ancient times, as city-states were constantly in conflict with one another in ways that would have made such dilemmas commonplace.
However, since those economic systems are mostly gone, and we have gained a moral consciousness that condemns both as fundamentally unjust, it would strike most people as regressive to say that the slave owner and the feudal lord were rightly positioned as the decision-makers in their respective operations because "they had the most skin in the game". We should recognize by now that even as their activities were characterized by taking risks that could possibly turn out badly for them, they did so by placing a much larger number of people in a situation of precariousness and servitude, leveraging imbalances of power and dependence in a way that turned out not to be required for the fulfillment of society's basic needs (since, as evidenced by the present day, those systems are no longer the norm in human civilization).
Capitalism is no different from the feudal or slave systems in this respect. Due entirely to the social constructions that have been agreed upon as how we reproduce the conditions for our existence, the roles of capitalist and employee are both integral. And indeed, because capitalists must constantly compete with one another in order to remain profitable, there is always pressure to do the same thing with fewer resources, or do something better with the same amount, and these approaches are undertaken as real risks by the owners of capital. The problem with giving this risk the status of inherently useful and worth prioritizing over the risk workers take when they sell their labor is twofold: (1) the risk taken by the capitalist is usually mitigated by, in part, damaging the workers by cutting wages, hours, benefits, etc. and (2) precisely as feudal and slave modes of production did not excuse the exploitation of serfs and chattel by appealing to the risks required of lords and masters, the exploitation of wage workers cannot be excused by appealing to the risks required of capitalists.
Every system under which society's goods and services are produced and distributed requires workers to risk their bodies and brains to some extent, largely dictated by the interests of who they work for (including themselves), but NOT every system needs a class of risk-takers called lords, masters, or capitalists. These are dispensable, wholly contingent roles that cannot justify their existence by pointing to whatever contingent social arrangements require them to behave as they do. The fact that raising wages for the majority of people or implementing widespread automation might, when passed through the filter of the ownership class, end up causing harm to the workers is an indictment of the system that produces such a circuit, not an endorsement of the people whose presence is only required because of it.
In the exact same way that a business owner is a hard-working risk-taker whose labor is required for anything to happen, the feudal lord whose management of the peasants under his rule enabled the coordinated production and distribution of their product was also a hard-working risk-taker, and I mean that with no irony. Under feudalism, moving into a new territory to establish a lordship and contend with the local farmers and their customs would have involved a degree of risk that was, for the landowner, at least comparable to the risk of a modern-day entrepreneur.
The same could have been said of an enterprising buyer of human beings in the pre-Civil War south, whose plantation needed to compete with the others in the region, forcing him to make strategic decisions about how many slaves to buy, how well to treat them, how to deal with escapees, and other calculations that involve a risk/reward judgement directly affecting his livelihood. This situation does not change if you imagine him owning slaves in ancient times, as city-states were constantly in conflict with one another in ways that would have made such dilemmas commonplace.
However, since those economic systems are mostly gone, and we have gained a moral consciousness that condemns both as fundamentally unjust, it would strike most people as regressive to say that the slave owner and the feudal lord were rightly positioned as the decision-makers in their respective operations because "they had the most skin in the game". We should recognize by now that even as their activities were characterized by taking risks that could possibly turn out badly for them, they did so by placing a much larger number of people in a situation of precariousness and servitude, leveraging imbalances of power and dependence in a way that turned out not to be required for the fulfillment of society's basic needs (since, as evidenced by the present day, those systems are no longer the norm in human civilization).
Capitalism is no different from the feudal or slave systems in this respect. Due entirely to the social constructions that have been agreed upon as how we reproduce the conditions for our existence, the roles of capitalist and employee are both integral. And indeed, because capitalists must constantly compete with one another in order to remain profitable, there is always pressure to do the same thing with fewer resources, or do something better with the same amount, and these approaches are undertaken as real risks by the owners of capital. The problem with giving this risk the status of inherently useful and worth prioritizing over the risk workers take when they sell their labor is twofold: (1) the risk taken by the capitalist is usually mitigated by, in part, damaging the workers by cutting wages, hours, benefits, etc. and (2) precisely as feudal and slave modes of production did not excuse the exploitation of serfs and chattel by appealing to the risks required of lords and masters, the exploitation of wage workers cannot be excused by appealing to the risks required of capitalists.
Every system under which society's goods and services are produced and distributed requires workers to risk their bodies and brains to some extent, largely dictated by the interests of who they work for (including themselves), but NOT every system needs a class of risk-takers called lords, masters, or capitalists. These are dispensable, wholly contingent roles that cannot justify their existence by pointing to whatever contingent social arrangements require them to behave as they do. The fact that raising wages for the majority of people or implementing widespread automation might, when passed through the filter of the ownership class, end up causing harm to the workers is an indictment of the system that produces such a circuit, not an endorsement of the people whose presence is only required because of it.
