As far as I understand...

That's wrong, read Marx. Egalitarianism is just a result of a transformation in the relations of production.

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/

[...]

>Essentially, the architects of the Japanese system looked at the classic capitalist economy and reached the exact same conclusion as the average member of the Western world: that most of it is rational, but that an absurdly high proportion of national income is wasted rewarding the tiny elite that performs the capital-allocation function. Wall Street types do their jobs reasonably well, but why not replace them with elite bureaucrats who will perform the same function for $90,000 a year apiece, rather than people who earn ten, or even a hundred, times that? After all, one can teach bureaucrats the same technical skills of economic analysis.

>In the Japanese view, investment banking is a business which, because of its structural monopoly on extremely valuable information, tends to produce grossly excessive returns for those engaged in it.� The capital allocation function is irrationally priced because the intrinsic bottlenecks of information make it impossible for new entrants to drive down returns. Therefore the market cannot be relied upon to rationally price it. Capitalism, paradoxically, is rational except at its very pinnacle.

[...]

>Because the keiretsus in effect create a monopsony for the purchase of elite executive labor, they can avoid the problem that American companies have of getting into expensive bidding wars for executive talent. This helps drive down economic inequality without all the problems of redistributing income through taxation. The emphasis in Japan on teamwork and consensus decision-making also helps prevent the accumulation of valuable proprietary knowledge inside any one head, which would then have excessive leverage to extract wealth.

No since the theory is based on value extraction not how competent the capitalist is. If there was no exploitation i.e. if workers received the full value of their labor there would be no profits.

>If there was no exploitation i.e. if workers received the full value of their labor there would be no profits.
But just as the worker is entitled to the value of his labor, so is the capitalist entitled to the value of his investment
I don't really see how it is exploitation

"Work" in the sense Marx wrote was productive labor. While capitalists can perform duties relating to production (arranging deals with suppliers, choosing how to invest, picking managers), these duties are not all necessary of the capitalist. Should he want to, a capitalist can devolve all of those efforts to paid clerks and analysts, but he is still a capitalist because he owns the means of his production.

So while some capitalists perform some work, this work does not affect their role as the capitalist. All of it can be assumed by the workers in a system of collective ownership.

But even if capitalist outsources all the work, he still needs to invest his capital, risking to lose it.

That's correct. Marx wasn't really interested in the idea of equality as a goal unto itself (that emerged under Lenin, Luxemburg, and other early 20th c socialists) but believed equality of race, sex, and wealth was inevitable if production was socialized, as capitalistic hierarchy entrenched these divisions.

If you look at historical and contemporary examples, you can see that radical egalitarianism is pursued in aspects of life that go beyond economy. Marxists strive to eradicate differences between classes, genders, races, which leads to eternal conflict in those groups. its essentially a war against natural order. Natural hierarchy vs. radical egalitarianism.

>As far as I understand, one assumption of Marxism is that capitalist dont contribute to the production of goods
The assumption is that *capitalism* leads to an exploited worker class.

It's not a flaw in the capitalists themselves, it's an inevitability of the system of capitalism.

I can't pay you what your labor is worth, and still make a profit. I have to pay you for less than the value of your labor to make a profit, thus, inevitably, exploitation.

Not that his solutions aren't ass, and not that every country we call """communist""" hasn't been pretty much the incarnation of its literal opposite, and not that his ideals could ever be applied in the modern world to organizations larger than small coops, like most worker owned IT startups.

...and really, authoritarianism is what you need to be fighting against. Conflating it with communism just lets vicious totalitarian dictatorships off, as pretty much everything objectionable about historically applied """communism""", has been the result of extreme authoritarianism, and in no way has ever empowered workers anywhere, ala Marx pipe dream.

It just invites someone to instill USSR gulag style policies under another name with no one being the wiser.

Plus, communism is not "every time the government does something for the people". Throwing the word around every time they do doesn't help things much either.

According to Marx capital is just a set of exchange values (accumulated labor) the capitalist does not produce value himself. It's exploitation since the capitalist is just a manager of collective products and not a producer

but couldn't you argue that the task of capitalist is to reinvest the captial.
And if he makes good calls, then capital will increase in value, thus in increases the accumulated labor, or am i wrong?

>I can't pay you what your labor is worth, and still make a profit. I have to pay you for less than the value of your labor to make a profit, thus, inevitably, exploitation.
If i can create the product without your help, then why would i work for you in the first place?
If i cant create the product by my labor alone, then it means that the product is worth more than all the labor i put into it, thus i am not entitled to the entire margin of profit
Or am I missing something?

Under capitalism that isn't really possible.

A contradiction of capitalism is found when a man earns $60 a day building a cell phone that sells for $150. Let's suppose that the raw materials needed to make it cost $40. So the capitalist invests $100 to build a cell phone which sells for $150. Despite not actually assembling the device, he alone pockets the $50 profit.

This is what Marx opposed.

For the worker to earn money based on the sale of the cell phone, he would need to own a share of the company that employs him. If he owns capital, he's no longer truly proletarian.

Businesses that operate this way, like Publix or Fat Tire, are substantially different from normal capitalistic enterprises because employees also own a tiny piece of the capital involved in their own production.

That isn't work, especially because few very wealthy people make those decisions themselves.

It is possible to be a capitalist and do absolutely nothing except collect returns on your property. Any work the capitalist might perform is non-essential to his role in our system of production, because somebody else can do it.

Well Marxism is only anti-capitalist insofar as it is historically obsolete. Marx praised the middle class for increasing the productive forces.

The point being that the collective products of labor should be managed by one sole individual and that the individual firm tends to be very short sighted (not factoring in externalities) in its decision making.

>So the capitalist invests $100 to build a cell phone which sells for $150. Despite not actually assembling the device, he alone pockets the $50 profit.
But the capitalist takes a risk. It might very well happen that the cellphone wont sell and he just wasted 100$. I do believe that this risktaking also adds value to the product

*not* be managed

then how did those people get rich in the first place?

>Despite not actually assembling the device, he alone pockets the $50 profit.

Yeah, but he doesn't actually "pocket" the 50 dollar profit, he has to invest it or stagnate and eventually go bankrupt.

Marxists would do themselves a favor if they didn't use the strawman of a 17th century robber baron as an example of real world Capitalism.

Capital accumulation and hence the process of creative destruction couldn't exist if capitalists didn't gain surplus value from workers and used it to grow their business which in turn allows them to pay workers more money.

Look at any first world country, and ask yourself if there is a correlation between gross domestic product and average pay, and there obviously is.

Is Marxism defined by what Marx actually said or by your assumptions of contemporary Marxists?

Hierarchy is only natural because it emerged. Hunter gather societies were by contrast very egalitarian, with no social distinctions in class and far subtler distinctions of gender. Hierarchies developed due to the concentration of property in ancient times, with the history of gender and ethnic repression being intrinsically connected to access to property. The Romans enslaved and subjugated the Gauls for the same reason the Spanish enslaved and subjugated Africans -- because material circumstance allowed them to do so.

So while you're right hierarchies developed, so has egalitarianism. The ascension of liberal capitalism from the late 18th century up until the 20th was itself the emergence of equality, as old hierarchies were torn apart and new hierarchies predicated upon real material relations developed. The expansion of capitalism through processes such as the abolition of slavery and the entrance of women into the workforce drastically transformed race and gender, too.

Marx identified that under capitalism, the concentration of wealth and eventual destruction of independent producers would make the emergence of further equality inevitable. Allowing blacks and women to own property completely transformed their role in society. Socializing property would lead to another transformation. Thus, egalitarianism is just as natural as hierarchy.

The value of your labor is determined by the value of its output. So, a product generated by labor, cannot be worth more than the labor used to create it. Granted, most products are not entirely made of labor - there's materials and facilities involved as well, but each of those has labor values tied to it is well. In a profit based system, each and every one results in exploitation of workers.

Not that I personally have a problem with everyone effectively being paid marginally less than their total value in order to have a profit margin. Even in worker owned coops, which are probably as close to "true communism" as the world has or ever will see, workers usually elect to be paid less than their maximum value in order to maintain a profit margin from which the company can expand. (Though I suppose an ardent ancap might argue this is effectively a tax on the worker.)

But it is a fundamental and inevitable injustice of the system that Marx was trying to address. The value of the capitalists themselves doesn't really enter into that, so proving they have value in and of themselves doesn't really do anything to refute his points. Not that there aren't other effective ways.

But Marxism, for all its flaws, has never really been the problem. Draconian governments falsely claiming it as a selling point have. Refuting Marxism doesn't do anything to refute draconian rule.

Risk doesn't add value to the product at all. The price of a cell phone is not affected by whether or not investing in cell phones will ruin a particular capitalist.

>Hunter gather societies were by contrast very egalitarian, with no social distinctions in class and far subtler distinctions of gender.

Complete bullshit and you cannot possible know that to be true, and yet you and people like you peddle it as if it is true.

What if you do nothing but play the stock market? That way you aren't working for anybody nor are you employing anyone

>Capital accumulation and hence the process of creative destruction couldn't exist if capitalists didn't gain surplus value from workers and used it to grow their business which in turn allows them to pay workers more money.

This never happens. It's not in the capitalist's rational self-interest to pay his workers a higher wage unless labor is scarce. When the capitalist finds himself with more money, he invests it by hiring more workers or expanding to new industries.

Eh, if you think the folks who are figuring what to sell their shit for don't keep a margin for potential failure risks in mind, save when they have a golden parachute to fall back on and are just there to burn the company for a quick profit anyways, I got news for you. Risk is pretty key to pricing - in both directions - you don't risk pricing something so high it won't sell, no for so low you can't handle setbacks.

Labor wasn't scarce when Henry Ford paid his workers orders of magnitude more money than his competitors.

>he invests it by hiring more workers or expanding to new industries.
and this is bad how?

Which his shareholders took him to court over, and won, basically creating the precedent that you can't legally sacrifice profit to treat your workers better.

Publically owned companies are evil, by law.

>This never happens

>A supermarket worker in Norway is paid the same as in Guatemala

This is entry-level anthropology supported by all available research. Read a book before talking out of your ass.

psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways?amp

theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-women-equal-scientists

Yeah, because the cost of living is higher and Norwegian workers are able to demand higher wages

No it's not. It's ideology peddling as reality.

>>Hierarchy is only natural because it emerged.
Im not sure if you know what "natural" means. I use "natural" as a word, contrasted to "artificial". If you take a look at nature form a broader perspective, there is natural hierarchy everywhere; where is natural hierarchy, or we say natural order, there is harmony and wealth; where is artificiality, there is conflict and poverty.
There can be artificial hierarchy thats devastating, and there can be artificial egalitarianism that is as devastating.

Natural hierarchy emerges, not in a random or unjust way, but in a natural and harmonious way. Hunter gatherer societies werent egalitarian, they were in a natural order, that was less developed and needed therefore less hierarchy in it to be a healthy, functioning body. I propose there was of course hierarchy, as the adults reigned over the children, and the men were the leading figures, but those circumstances didnt develop in an abstract process of "wealth concentration" but things rather fell into their natural places, as they always do, if there is no artificiality intermingling.
This concept is important to be concious of, because from its Counterpart, radical egalitarianism, you could hypothetically, if you take it to the extreme, question every hierarchy, question, why the parents rule over their children, etc. and it soon gets absurd and horrible, and it already got absurd and horrible, as history shows.

>Yeah, because the cost of living is higher

So what? You just said it never happens that a capitalist pays workers more money unless labor is scarce.

Which is flat out wrong.

>Norwegian workers are able to demand higher wages

Norway doesn't even have minimum wage fagtron.

>you cannot possible know that to be true

But hunter-gatherer societies exist today.

>The term may be used in a moral sense—condemning, taking advantage of others' misfortunes—or in a legal sense where interest rates may be regulated by law. Historically, some cultures (e.g., Christianity in much of Medieval Europe, and Islam in many parts of the world today) have regarded charging any interest for loans as sinful.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury

Yeah they do, but if you think I'm going to believe that the random pleb who goes out to hunt is more valuable than the shaman, or the random pleb who goes out to hunt is more valuable than a young fertile woman, you're retarded.

Human sexual dimorphism literally demands inequality by definition, which is why women didn't go spear-hunting mammoths.

Step 1. Save or inherit a decent sum
Step 2. Invest it, or pay someone to invest it.
Easy, right?

>a random pleb who goes out to hunt is more valuable than a young fertile woman, you're retarded
That's, almost always the case. I mean, there's exceptions, but in a lot of primitive tribes, women are worth shit and passed about like party favors, if not downright reviled.

>All hunter-gatherer tribes are the same
There more varieties of culture in hunter gather tribes than there are varieties for freaking snowflakes. Yeah, some are pretty egalitarian, some are bloody nazis with royal bloodlines of all powerful chieftains. The consistency among such tribes is regional, at best, and even then you'll often find a wide variety of cultures in a small area, usually quite hostile towards one another.

>That's, almost always the case.

Yeah, just like Joe-Billy-Bob who works at the shoe factory is the most valuable in our society.

I thought we were talking about primitive tribes...

>Joe-Billy-Bob
Oh, you mean America... As you were.

Point I'm trying to make is that it's ridiculous to think that humans didn't have any social stratification just because agriculture and surplus food didn't exist.

Well I was agreeing with you in that post... Granted, the degree stratification varies quite a bit, and some societies were pretty damned uniform that way, but yeah, usually, get any two humans together, and you have top and bottom right quick.

Exactly, so while I could possibly agree that hunter-gatherers are more "egalitarian" than we are, they also have orders of magnitude lower life expectancy, and higher disease mortality, infant mortality, and a whole host of other problems which don't exist in a modern civilization.

And a good chunk of that infant mortality rate was due to infanticide.

Albeit, one could say much the same of less primitive societies such as Rome, or, apparently, even some parts of Europe, up till a few hundred years ago.

And some of those primitive societies were LESS egalitarian than we... We're actually quite a bit more egalitarian than most advanced societies in history, even accounting for the wealth discrepancy and specialization.

so the problems of capitalism can be solved by an inheritance tax?

but their hierarchies were way flatter than ours
Every person in a hunter-gatherer tribe knew their leader personally, while this is not the case in our society, which creates estrangement between classes

>but their hierarchies were way flatter than ours

Not disputing that. I'm disputing that it was some kind of egalitarian utopia where there were no social distinctions between people.

Which I think is pure ideology.

Well, it certainly wasn't utopia...

psychohistory.com/books/the-origins-of-war-in-child-abuse/chapter-7-child-abuse-homicide-and-raids-in-tribes/

Okay, there's a clear bit of bias in the other direction in that article, in addition to the related articles extending a sort of "default evil" behavior to all of man... But while Chief Twin Eagles had his points, we abandoned such systems for a reason.

There were certanly some people who had more influence and status that other, but there was no real class structure like we have it today.
In that sense, the society was more egalitarian than today

Sure, to some extent. But usually it's inflated to a degree where it is used as an argument for how Communism can work in our societies.

Provide any evidence that pre-agricultural society was hierarchical

The theory is mainly that the work the owners do not only does not result in more work than the employee would do, but the employees could do both the labour of production and the labour of administration easily.

I usually point to mega corporations who's CEO's could not possibly manage everything by themselves, so it's reasonable to hire someone to help with that sort of job expected of a owner, however at that point it becomes clear that no, the business owner does not need to be top dog and get more money if it's clear that others can do his job.

(Just to say I don't consider myself a commie or a socialist, but I can see why some people would resent people who claim superiority which in their eyes is doing a easy job they could do.)

How about you post any evidence that is actually evidence first and not links to the Guardian that are literally just copypastes from Anthropology 101 lectures and Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

This is fallacious. Again, you're supposing that something is natural because it happened. If the development of feudalism was natural, so then was the development of capitalist. And so too would be the development of socialism.

The capitalist adds value as labour-time and necessary useful labour the same as everyone else, this is not disputed.
The difficulty is in his remuneration, which is considered above the value expressed in labour-time.

Except if the worker & employer agree on X remuneration for the worker to produce something for the employer & then the employer with a different time preference then sells that on to the consumer for another seperately agreed amount how is that any different than someone building you a house and then you selling it 2 years later for more? Or even if considering the subjective value of the labour & of the house at different times among different people.

Like that's just the voluntary aspect of it let alone the time preference itself of a guaranteed income whether the product is sold in the future & how long the wait is, the premium for the use of the capital & everything else for example a small business owner might do to make the business possible....how can there be a dispute by a random 3rd party marxist among all of these factors & agreements between people? That's what confuses me the most.

>above the value expressed in labour-time
Key phrase, buddy.
>employer with a different time preference
could you elaborate?

Prove to me that the capitalist's work actually does anything that an organized group of workers couldn't.

> above the value expressed in labour-time
> Key phrase, buddy.
Hard to swallow when still thinking of value as subjective, all the other factors seem to rarely be considered which is kind of irritating, it comes across sometimes like an echo chamber position without any self-reflection in modern times even though we know Marxists have had to do a lot of self-reflection over the years.

> could you elaborate?
The basic idea you've probably heard before is that the employee values a lower nominal sum immediately & one that is guaranteed whereas the employer prefers a higher sum in future that is not guaranteed but likely/possible to be higher & potentially lower. Both of which are done in two seperate agreements & interactions; employee - employer & employer - consumer in a way.

Does that make sense? Is that something you've heard quite often?

Depends on the individual scenario.

Potentially you could have a furniture shop where the capitalist provided the capital, hired the staff, trained the staff, created the concept & product list, taught the new products to the employees, did all the negotiations that made the business possible etc etc & the employees are just temporarily using this business structure that the employer has provided, for a guaranteed immediate income without having to worry about whether the products produced are sold or not, & whether they sell for more or less. Potentially the small business owner does everything & just wants someone to provide the convenience of taking care of some admin, so the owner can be happier & a little bit more efficient whereas the admin assistant doesn't bring in any income, only indirectly through the increased efficiency of taking that load off the employer.

So then....knowing all of this, who determines what the admin assistant or worker should receive if not the worker & their employer? How does any third party marxist have any authority to butt in?

That hypothetical person should be doing something more than running a furniture store he's either a genius or a meth addict.

At some point leadership needs to learn to delegate. So your hypothetical situation is as real as a communist state.

managment is a job. Being the manager doesn't mean being the investor. Actually most CEOs are just an employee more.

>Hard to swallow when still thinking of value as subjective
which, in classical economics, is an odd way of thinking. Political economists, when they chose to comment on the matter, generally tended to favour labour as the source of value, though were perhaps unclear about it, in terms of theory. I mean, a dollar is a dollar and will work as it does without having to concoct an exact theory of philosophical concepts, so no need to elaborate too greatly; An economists discusses economics, not ethics. Ricardo and Marx disagreed of course, and I wager you do to some extent as well, albeit with a different concept of value.

Pardon me, brain fart, you'll understand that the mention of time in that context after the mention of labour-time means one must switch gears onto another language game. That price fluctuates based on a number of factors is not disputed. Price, after all, is not value itself any more than a dollar coin is value itself. perfect parity of value and price are therefore not to be expected.
It's a bit convoluted a system, you'll no doubt observe.

No actually, it's quite often a reality for small business owners & the workers that have helped build those business' up.

You'd be surprised at how much small business owners have to do bfore they can bring in enough revenue to start delegating to basic admin roles etc & then hire people to expand, this plight is often ignored when talking to marxists who seem to picture everything as a coprorate factory.

> Price, after all, is not value itself any more than a dollar coin is value itself. perfect parity of value and price are therefore not to be expected.

Exactly, so is it just some Marxists in general that seem to conflate the two? Or is it fundamental to the critique of capitalism? I know its more descriptive than prescriptive even though a lot of people have used ot for prescriptive moral arguments, however if the price is not value itself then how can there be a complaint specifically about the price of labour remuneration?

Marxists don't even bother thinking about shopkeepers and small business owners most of the time. Small businesses, like cottage industries, have pretty much always existed and they are part of the traditional economy that got devoured by the capitalist revolution.

>grow their business which in turn allows them to pay workers more money.
Why would you pay your workers more money? That doesn't make sense at all.

capitalists pay people to do work they cant do/ don't have to because they can pay them to do it for themselves in a voluntary contract

>Capitalists work hard
>create jobs
>owning a mean of production doesn't make a capitalist any less of a worker

if they're successful, they will be directing capital to the proper firms. if they're unsuccessful it doesn't matter to you i guess.

>implying

you've clearly never seen someone who is wealthy. they are almost entirely consumed with work. they don't have time to shitpost on Veeky Forums

>T-they're entirely consumed with work

> workers built the factory
> ignores every argument & the obvious logic of why that's fallacious
> still ignores employer contributions

Worst meme comeback I've ever seen.

Because value theory, subjective or intrinsic, is tied with ethics, and so the worker not receiving wages commensurate with the value in labour-time they add is considered a bad thing, and it's easier to "politically" understand a crisis of overproduction from the standpoint of value as opposed to price. Before Ricardo value theory was a pretty minor topic, nowadays folks always argue about in on the internet, because it's a matter of folks moralising to each other.

I mean my personal opinion is the lot of it muddies the waters and ought to be left to philosophers, not economists.

You just admited the flaw of capitalism. Capitalists work as hard as workers, but why do workers get nothing while the capitalist takes all the money?

i hate americans so damn much, fucking simpleton retards

If it was 100% it would go a long way in making a better society, yeah

Not them but the one of the greatest things about capitalism is that it provides cheap products to the masses which would have previously been considered luxuries. Capitalism enhances the living standards and does more for the workers than communism ever can.

>Norway doesn't even have minimum wage fagtron.
That's because employers' and employees' unions negotiate minimum wage for each industry separately between themselves in the Nordic model you dumb fuckface.

The thing that bothers me the most about theise threads is that people dont realize that times were way diffrent when marx was around. Back then capitalists basically made all the money generated when the workers got fuckall. Of course alot of his theories didn't really work out but it was the 19th century ffs times have changed we have workers unions now.

Capitalists =/= managers.

>I can't pay you what your labor is worth, and still make a profit. I have to pay you for less than the value of your labor to make a profit, thus, inevitably, exploitation.
This is a meaningless statement. Value doesn't exist, it only exists as far as someone values your work. You could say that the product of you labour is it's value, but that's just moving issue on step away.

>Plus, communism is not "every time the government does something for the people". Throwing the word around every time they do doesn't help things much either.
No, but that is the guise socialists and communist use to seize power and gain influence over the state. EU for example is full of "ex"-communists.

If all value is in Labour, then unowned land covered in gold is without value. When that gold-land becomes owned it suddenly has value because "private property" confers value onto it (note: value is NOT subjective), but there is only value in the gold if the gold is picked up by labourers, who also have no intrinsic value unless they're working.

Bravo, Karl.

>when the workers in a company buy shares in the company
>when a worker can own more in the company than the CEO (some are banned from owning shares in the company they manage)

Please leave Marxism and LTV in the 19th century where it belongs

Things weren't so different back then, capitalists contributed then what they do now (risk), and in the west at least factory workers VOLUNTARILY travelled to the cities for work, the capitalists weren't rounding them up in the bush and forcing them to abandon their idyllic rural lives.

Won't work. Marxists are master movers of goalposts -- anything a capitalist does that looks like work will be quickly redefined. It's like arguing with college radicals of the present about equity or gender issues -- you can't win because they will switch games n you.

Marxism falls apart on the presupposition that all private property is oppression. Its a strawman that has no legs.