Re-Framing Capitalism

[Bomb#20]

As usual, you fail to understand.

The point is that there is nothing holding an individual in a 'class'. There was in the 1800s when Marx set out the basis of your philosophy.

I made no mention of class in the sense you refer to. There are poorly paid jobs that are poorly paid because individual workers have little or no leverage.

Isn't it clear by now that talking about the power imbalance between management and individual workers?

I explained what I meant. I supported what I said....yet you bring up 'class!!'

- You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship -- a self perpetuating autocracy in which the working class is --

- Oh there you go bringing class into it again.

- That's what it's all about; if only people would --

 

[Bomb#20]

The anti-capitalist problem is if they do not allow other individuals that are not in their union to compete with them. Historically, this has been done through extortion of the business to not hire anyone not in the union, and/or threats and intimidation of anyone who would dare to compete with them.

People call a lot of things "extortion". Historically, Coke won't sell a restaurant Coke products unless the restaurant agrees not to also buy Pepsi products. Is that extortion? Seems to me if a union negotiates a union shop contract with a company agreeing not to buy non-union labor, that's what Coke's doing to the restaurants. But if union members beat up scabs trying to cross the picket line, that's extortion.

 

[skepticalbip]

The anti-capitalist problem is if they do not allow other individuals that are not in their union to compete with them. Historically, this has been done through extortion of the business to not hire anyone not in the union, and/or threats and intimidation of anyone who would dare to compete with them.

People call a lot of things "extortion". Historically, Coke won't sell a restaurant Coke products unless the restaurant agrees not to also buy Pepsi products. Is that extortion? Seems to me if a union negotiates a union shop contract with a company agreeing not to buy non-union labor, that's what Coke's doing to the restaurants. But if union members beat up scabs trying to cross the picket line, that's extortion.

The difference being that Coke could only withhold their product unless the restaurant agreed. The restaurant could continue operation with only Pepsi products as many did. The Union threatens to, not only withhold their product, but to shut down the company by not allowing others (scabs) to take the jobs. So yes, that is extortion.

The threat of refusing to sell ones product is a pretty weak "threat" in a free market system where there is competition.

If for some weird reason the restaurant decided to agree to Coke's demand and then later Coke demanded 30% more for their product, the restaurant could say "fuck you", not order any more Coke products and instead order Pepsi, RC, Pop Cola, etc.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But note that wealth also dissipates over time because most people have more than one child.

Not in the developed world, they don’t. And if current trends continue, that claim will soon be untrue globally.

The Total Fertility Rate in the USA, for example, is 1.70 children per woman, or 0.85 children per parent.

Most people in the USA, Europe, and Australasia have fewer than one child. In the US, people have 85% of a child, on average.

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

Well, when I took math class 1.70 was greater than 1. Has that changed?

No. But 1.70 is nevertheless less than 2.

When I took a biology class, 2.0 was the expected number of parents per child. Has that changed?

For easy math lets use that 2.0.

How many children? 2
How many grandchildren? 4
How many great grandchildren? 8

See how the wealth gets dispersed even if those generations are good at preserving it?

 

[bilby]

But note that wealth also dissipates over time because most people have more than one child.

Not in the developed world, they don’t. And if current trends continue, that claim will soon be untrue globally.

The Total Fertility Rate in the USA, for example, is 1.70 children per woman, or 0.85 children per parent.

Most people in the USA, Europe, and Australasia have fewer than one child. In the US, people have 85% of a child, on average.

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

Well, when I took math class 1.70 was greater than 1. Has that changed?

No. But 1.70 is nevertheless less than 2.

When I took a biology class, 2.0 was the expected number of parents per child. Has that changed?

For easy math lets use that 2.0.

How many children? 2
How many grandchildren? 4
How many great grandchildren? 8

See how the wealth gets dispersed even if those generations are good at preserving it?

That 2.0 is the number of ancestors, not the number of descendants.

1.7 is the number of children per mother; That’s 0.85 children per adult.

Try your progression again, using these actual figures, and see that wealth isn’t dispersed at all.

Each generation, the wealth of two parents is passed to their 1.7 children. That’s not dispersing the wealth; It’s concentrating it.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Wealthy school districts with high property taxes have better schools than poor areas. That is a fact. If not class distinctions based on money we can invent a new term.

Except there is little relationship between school district spending and student outcome.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

There are many factors, and a principle factor in keeping wage cost down is leverage. That individual workers lack - unless certain skills are in short supply - the leverage to negotiate a better deal based on market share of the wealth they help to create, rather than poor leverage, therefore poor wages.

Continuing to preach doesn't make it so.

The market dictates the share of the wealth that the workers get, unions move it around between workers but in the long run they don't change the size of the pie. If unions manage to get a larger piece of pie the long term result is companies die off and aren't replaced and the pie shrinks again.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It is specifically collective bargaining that gives them the leverage to negotiate a better deal.

Extortion works. Duh.

Leverage.

Leverage works both ways. If management can capitalize on their leverage, so can workers.

"If capitalism is fair then unionism must be. If men have a right to capitalize their ideas and resources of their country, then that implies the right of men to capitalize their labor" - Frank Lloyd Wright

As power is more likely to be balanced in favour of management, collective bargaining creates better balance.

That's all. A fairer outcome for the underdog.

If unions are fair then blacklist must also be fair.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The anti-capitalist problem is if they do not allow other individuals that are not in their union to compete with them. Historically, this has been done through extortion of the business to not hire anyone not in the union, and/or threats and intimidation of anyone who would dare to compete with them.

People call a lot of things "extortion". Historically, Coke won't sell a restaurant Coke products unless the restaurant agrees not to also buy Pepsi products. Is that extortion? Seems to me if a union negotiates a union shop contract with a company agreeing not to buy non-union labor, that's what Coke's doing to the restaurants. But if union members beat up scabs trying to cross the picket line, that's extortion.

That's not comparable. Coke says "You can deal with us or them, not both." The union says "You can only deal with us."

Union power comes from being a monopoly. Monopolies are bad.

 

[DBT]

It is specifically collective bargaining that gives them the leverage to negotiate a better deal.

Extortion works. Duh.

Leverage.

Leverage works both ways. If management can capitalize on their leverage, so can workers.

"If capitalism is fair then unionism must be. If men have a right to capitalize their ideas and resources of their country, then that implies the right of men to capitalize their labor" - Frank Lloyd Wright

As power is more likely to be balanced in favour of management, collective bargaining creates better balance.

That's all. A fairer outcome for the underdog.

If unions are fair then blacklist must also be fair.

How so?

 

[DBT]

As usual, you fail to understand.

The point is that there is nothing holding an individual in a 'class'. There was in the 1800s when Marx set out the basis of your philosophy.

I made no mention of class in the sense you refer to. There are poorly paid jobs that are poorly paid because individual workers have little or no leverage.

Isn't it clear by now that talking about the power imbalance between management and individual workers?

I explained what I meant. I supported what I said....yet you bring up 'class!!'

- You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship -- a self perpetuating autocracy in which the working class is --

- Oh there you go bringing class into it again.

- That's what it's all about; if only people would --

There you guys go, the defenders of excessive wealth in the hands of the world's population, bringing up class again.

Classification is not the same as ''Class'' - someone of average income may come up with a product that generates millions and makes them wealthy, having millions classifies them as millionaires, Having billions classifies someone as a billionaire.

Someone who earns a wage is classified as a worker. That is not their ''Class'' because classification is not a fixed condition.

But of course, defenders of excessive wealth, power in the hands of the few love their Red Herrings.

 

[DBT]

It's not hard to grasp:

''When workers unite to call for better wages and conditions, the boss has to listen. That's called collective bargaining - and we need more of it.

There were few decades in the last century when work got worse, not better. But over the last ten years, that’s exactly what’s happened.

Work has become a harsher place, with less pay and less security. 900,000 people are on zero-hours contracts, 8 million people from working households are living in poverty, and the number of people going to food banks has sky-rocketed
People are working hard, but struggling to get by. Why? Because they don’t have enough of a say over their working lives.''

It’s hard for one person alone to challenge bad bosses and bad working conditions.

But if everyone gets together and proposes better wages and working conditions for all, then the boss has to listen.

After all, it’s workers who generate the wealth of a company, not the bosses. Without them, everything would grind to a halt.

The bosses know this, so they have to sit down, negotiate and compromise – and everybody wins.

Workers joining together to negotiate with employers is known as collective bargaining. It changes the balance of power in the workplace – and it works.

But collective bargaining rights have been eroded for decades and the law makes it hard to get unions going in new companies.''

 

[steve_bank]

Amazon warehouse workers today are good examples of where unions came in. Workers on Ford's original assembly lines had the same complaints. Being slaved to an assembly line machine and repetitive task physical problems.

 

[rousseau]

After all, it’s workers who generate the wealth of a company, not the bosses. Without them, everything would grind to a halt.

So my in-laws who worked 80 hour weeks completely re-vamping and pivoting the strategy of their two businesses to respond to Covid had nothing to do with keeping their businesses profitable? It was all the work of the college students serving tables?

That doesn't sound quite right..

 

[JohnG]

I have a bit of time to kill this morning so I'm going to draw out a few of my thoughts on this topic.

If we take the textbook definition of capitalism we get:

an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state

The way many of us tend to look at this is that we have ownership of land and property controlled by a few, to the exclusion of many who don't have access to direct profit generated by that land. Fair enough, but is there any other way of looking at capitalism as an economic model?

Lets backtrack a bit and recognize that the survival of any member or group of our species is contingent on the control of land. At no time in our history have we not been in competition for resources, except maybe when our population was so small that we were rarely in direct conflict with each other. IOW, conflict for resources is intrinsic to what it means to be a living thing in a world where those resources are finite. Put yet another way, property 'ownership' has been a thing long before capitalism as an economic model, but up until recently it wasn't quite as legalized, with no corresponding state apparatus.

This is where I like Max Weber's concept of rationalization. That is, the defining feature of our history is that we tend to increasingly rationalize, routinize, and organize how our cultures work. The routines we undergo throughout everyday life, more and more, become subject to calculation. What this can mean is that, in another light, capitalism as an economic model can also be seen as a new stage of rationalization in the organization of property. When there are an overwhelming number of people on the planet, we have to somehow devise a system that approaches fairness in who has access to property and who doesn't. Note, I'm not claiming that the current system is completely fair, but that our current economic model is an attempt at making it more meritocratic. And yes, there are a huge number of exceptions and gotchas and things that don't seem right when we talk property.

Put another way, now the fruits of our labor, market skills, and property can be protected, and accumulated toward the end of owning property. That doesn't mean that all of us are going to have an easy go at it, but at this point in history many are at least entrenched in a system where, in theory, we just have to gain some skills and everything we earn and own can be secured for us. This makes many of our lives more safe and secure, even if we aren't rich business owners.

Going back to the common way of looking at capitalism - that it concentrates power in the hands of the few - I have to wonder if economically we need to recognize that ideals only work in theory, and as a goal, and can't actually exist in practice. I believe Marx, fundamentally, had the right intent and the right (somewhat malformed) idea - that we need to increasingly work towards our communities working for everyone. However, I believe it's more realistic to let go of the idea that a 'perfect society' can actually be achieved. Rather than a hyper-focus on where we ought to be, we need to hyper-focus on knowing how things actually work in the present, so we can guide our economies into the future in a realistic way.

The Marxist stream of thought is what I'd call an 'equalization' philosophy, thought held by those who would benefit from an inversion of current power structures. It's a line of thought that's going to be present in an unequal world, but doesn't necessarily indicate a pragmatic way forward, and may just signify or symbolize current inequality.

That's about all I have for now. I'd love some critiques.

There is something kind of Paleo Conservative about the idea that we are destined to be in direct competetion for resources. I don't believe in the idea that because at points in our evolution we exhibited trait A (in this case is product of our environment), we therefore must accept that as core to our being, and future being - for better or worse, ie: Trait A defines our species and behavior.

There will be, and should be new ways of going about things.

 

[rousseau]

There is something kind of Paleo Conservative about the idea that we are destined to be in direct competetion for resources. I don't believe in the idea that because at points in our evolution we exhibited trait A (in this case is product of our environment), we therefore must accept that as core to our being, and future being - for better or worse, ie: Trait A defines our species and behavior.

There will be, and should be new ways of going about things.

We're not competitive just because it's a genetic trait, we're competitive because that's what reality requires. That doesn't mean we don't also co-operate or that competitiveness is core to our nature, but we do live in a world with finite resources. The idea that someday we'll be able to transcend this is a bit anthropocentric.

 

[steve_bank]

Plant species compete for light and nutrients, albeit in slow motion.

Competition goes all the back to the earliest civilizations. War over trade and resources along with nationalism. Greeks vs Persians. Rome vs Barbarians.

The Europen and North American idea post WWII was to comet but do it civily without destructive conflict. Russia and China are in the old conflict and conquest mind set. Neither want to see themselves as working in cooperation with the west.

 

[DBT]

After all, it’s workers who generate the wealth of a company, not the bosses. Without them, everything would grind to a halt.

So my in-laws who worked 80 hour weeks completely re-vamping and pivoting the strategy of their two businesses to respond to Covid had nothing to do with keeping their businesses profitable? It was all the work of the college students serving tables?

That doesn't sound quite right..

Of course there is more than one factor that makes a business profitable. A small family business may do well without needing to employ anyone, but that's not the point here. Which is, a profitable business may not be paying their workers fair market value of their input into making the business (one that requires workers) profitable.

Not necessarily because they cannot afford to offer better pay and conditions, but management, wanting to keep costs low, see no reason to do it.

It's only when the balance of power becomes more equatable for their workers - collective bargaining - that they are able to negotiate a better deal.

Human nature 101.

 

[rousseau]

After all, it’s workers who generate the wealth of a company, not the bosses. Without them, everything would grind to a halt.

So my in-laws who worked 80 hour weeks completely re-vamping and pivoting the strategy of their two businesses to respond to Covid had nothing to do with keeping their businesses profitable? It was all the work of the college students serving tables?

That doesn't sound quite right..

Of course there is more than one factor that makes a business profitable.

Perhaps you could explore those factors, rather than repeating the claim that 'it's workers who generate the wealth of a company'.

 

[steve_bank]

Bosses don't do work? A childish immature ignorant view.

Most people have no idea what it takes to get a company going and keep it going.