Was Karl Marx right in his critique against capitalists? They contribute nothing to society

You don't have to venture into philanthropy to contribute to society. Simply investing capital, or using capital, benefits society.

Capital is not nothing in terms of the very real effects it has on our society. His critique is true enough, with some caveats and exceptions (he lazily blamed everything on Jews, for example). But his proposed solutions are proven failures, and he fails to properly understand human behaviour. We like personal property, and we are ingrained to gather resources for private benefit, and to expect to keep the rewards of our struggle. Too bad the advent of psychology was right before his time, or else his theories might have gone in another direction.

Otto von Bismarck and the modern German welfare state, and German trade union participation are better than communism.

As far as I understand Marx, he doesn't really offer solutions, he only makes predictions for future.
So he is not encouraging us to become communists, he predicts it will happen either way

The whole idea that the "surplus value" of worker production is somehow "stolen", is literally what makes Marxism a religion.

I don't know if it's true or not but someone told me it's quite of topic but it has to do with Marx: is it true that Marx anticipated general relativity before Einstein ?

You're right! This is totally a better system than when people didn't need to take out loans to have homes.

unions should buy majority share of the companies their members work for. So Labor has control of the companies.

or

co-ops. Where everyone owns a stake in the company and has say in high level decisions through a democratic process.

instead of wanting some nu-aristocracy to seize capital in your name and then provide you with welfare from the state.

you mean when families lived in homes for generation after generation, or you moved to the frontier and built it from your own labor as you could afford to get supplies?

That makes no sense at all. No it isn't true.

You mean back in magical fairy land where free houses grew on housetrees and nobody had to pay for anything?

>unions should buy majority share of the companies their members work for. So Labor has control of the companies.

>Employees own controlling share of company
>Vote to have the company's equity and assets liquefied and paid out as wages.

Yep. Now even the steppes are owned, and if you go out there and build something on your own, you'll be arrested for trespassing.

What are you doing on a history board if you honestly believe home loans came before houses?

To the anti Marxist here, you guys do realize that every great intellectual of the 20th century and up was Marxist

The mortgage system was invented in order to free up the capital that was being held within a house, which would be passed on generation to generation, it was one of John Blunt's many (Quite successful) attempts to enrich himself.

Before home loans most people didn't have a god damn house they were shacked up with dozens of people in tiny rooms or the shittiest of dwellings.

Like it or not, houses cost money and that money has to be paid.

it works in Germany.

cheap land in Alaska. build your own log cabin with your own labor.

The mortgage system allows me to buy a house with income I won't be able to earn for another 15 years. I do not understand why this is a bad thing for me.

>it works in Germany.

Please post examples. I'm very much interested in their profitability and studies comparing them to regularly owned companies.

>We like personal property
personal isn't the same as private

>capitalists contribute nothing to society

Marx never said that. In fact he said the opposite. The cost for working people was the problem.

>it works in Germany.
Where?
I don't know of a single company where the workers hold all the shares.

>cheap land
>if you don't want to take out a mortage on a house, why not take out a mortage on unused land?

This seems a bit different from the claim that houses did not exist prior to home loans.

Yup, agreed.

Right, he himself did not really call for proletarian dictatorship revolutions, but he was certainly inspiration for those who did. Now call me brave and sagely for saying so, but I think he was wrong, and I don't think it'll happen. I tend not to believe in utopian visions. Unless human behaviour really truly drastically changes, I don't think any mystical Pure Land Communist Shangri-La is every going to happen.

lol, no.

That's what I meant to say, sorry. English is not my first language.

That's what capital is though. A thing of value EXTRA to what is needed for mere survival and equilibrium, it's the share you expect to make profit from.

Industrialized labour has come to be time spent producing not so much for YOUR personal extra profit per se (although we think so), but for your manager, the owner of production (who is not you if you're a workerfag). Of course, your salary/wages let you live better than an utter poorfag, but not as well as the owners (so-called bourgeoisie). Insomuch as religions are philosophies considered 'correct' by their believers about how the world works, well yes. Now you can understand how deeply ingrained Christianity was in the West in past centuries. We no longer need that to explain the world, we've shifted to new 'religions'. Consumerism, capitalism, neo-liberalism/neo-conservatism, wealth creation, the middle-class dream, whatever you want to call it. Marx was criticizing that.

Who made such a claim?

>I can't afford $1000 for a plot of land I want it for free its not fair why do I have to pay for anything live shouldn't be so hard

Get a job faggot

You have no idea what you're talking about. Wages are set by the supple and demand of labor, and the amount of excess welfare that ends up in the hands of the worker/owner depends entirely on the elasticity of their respective supply and demand curves.

Read a book on economics once.

You did. Back here

You're such a labor adverse kike that you literally couldn't imagine anyone constructing a shelter without moneylending, and now you're back pedaling.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

That's not the point, you said "where free houses grew on housetrees and nobody had to pay for anything?" Implying that the mortgage had always been a thing, the idea of getting a large secured loan in order to pay for a house is a new thing, and by becoming more comfortable with borrowing money in order to buy a house price rises are more likely to occur.

>your purpose in life is to contribute to my society
no it isn't

Personally, I believe this will happen due to atomatization and digitalization.
We will reach a point when a large amount of people wont be able to contribute to economy anymore, since robots can do the work cheaper. Then, we have the choice to either let the people starve or establish a communist-like system

Indeed, I am German and this is basically how it is. They don't own all shares though, it works differently. Generally, large companies in Germany must have "work councils" who make decisions. The labour pool always has membership on the executive council. So if decisions are being made, workers cannot be ignored since their views must be incorporated. In other words, their hand is also on the steering wheel. This circumvents the need for the adversarial opposed-goals model of American labour unions (who have already lost to hyper-capitalists).

And this is also why labour unions here don't really exist as they do in America; they DO exist, but they are simply the collection of workers, who are already directly represented in their top boardrooms.

The same people that need to take out loans to buy houses now, wouldn't be able to get a house at all before house loans.

Never did I claim there were no houses before house loans (wtf?). If all you can argue is strawmen, you are more like marx than I thought.

>what is needed
>objective value
Wordplay without sense. The worker has a deal with the other guy. Both comply.

There is no intrinsic value in the ultimate sense.

You can't be serious.

Your assumptions are entirely within your own mind. Please refrain from debating against assumed viewpoints.

> the idea of getting a large secured loan in order to pay for a house is a new thing, and by becoming more comfortable with borrowing money in order to buy a house price rises are more likely to occur.

Oh no people can now buy houses they previously couldn't afford. Such horror! truly the alienation marx was talking about!!

>most people are...
You lost me.

Not that user, and it is not bad for you. But only insofar as buying a home is what you desire. That alone doesn't make it self-evident.

Ultimately, nowadays, wealth creation is intended to fill the debt vacuum. When anyone takes a loan, they are not being spotted for a pile of silver in a bank's vault, but for the PROMISE that they will somehow create wealth over the long-term to pay back the invented 'wealth' (dollar figure of the mortgage) that the bank created out of thin air. Your paying back the mortgage is the bank getting it's return on investment from your labour and 'wealth creation', whatever that may be (or not). In the 2008 financial crisis, this flimsy house came crashing down a bit, but was propped up and written off to some extent. Lost the battle but not the war (yet).

Having a seat on the board of directors does not give you any control over decisions. The board of directors appoints the CEO. This system means that employees have slightly more influence on the corporate governance of a company, but its hardly comparable to having a majority shareholder position.

if you can't protect your windmill, you dont own it. The state can take it from you with violence, so the windmill belongs to the state

>Oh no people can now buy houses they previously couldn't afford. Such horror! truly the alienation marx was talking about!!
You really don't see a problem in people buying things they can't afford? When houses are available, broadly speaking, to everyone, then the social relation we have to homes and home ownership changes, if you're expected to own a house at a younger age (Which the mortgage almost certainly caused) there is an increased demand for homes, due to limited supplies, house prices rise, leaving people who saved their money for houses more and more out of luck, the mortgage only serves to benefit the bank in making a secure, profitable, though illiquid inflow of cash.

Then your body belongs to the state, what doesn't belong to the state?

I was trying to explain the Marxist POV, not sharing my wisdom on how the world works.

Anyway, the 'invisible hand' is a myth, I hope you know...

You claimed that, to suggest there was a means of having a home prior to the home mortage market one needs to be engaging in fantasy about how houses used to grow on trees and be free.

I'm holding you to this claim. Do you believe, for example, early protohominids were unable to take shelter until home lones were invented? How many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years ago, do you posit the creation of the mortage market?

You use the word "wealth" but you mean money. The bank creates the money for you to spend, and the system works because you are forced to create value to earn money to repay the bank. As such it is certain (including a write-off for unpaid debts) that by giving out loans, more value is created. It is evident from human behaviour that the creation of value is something that makes us happy as we like having stuff.

Nothing. Learn some economics.

>Then your body belongs to the state
exactly

>I AM SILLY
Great argument.

>>your purpose in life is to contribute to my society
Society protects your capital, in exchange you agree to follow laws, pay into the state who provides the services for the protection of your capital, you also will become an economic actor, consuming and creating things to be consumed, and guess what? If you really want to live in an Ancap utopia, try declaring independence, because very quickly you'll understand why such a society would inevitably fall to warlordism, when a large amount of taxpayer funded troops take down your retarded operation, power is a thing that lends itself to nautral monopolies.

Then the state can take you, it cannot make you.

People want houses not because they can afford them. People want houses because they want houses, and mortgages allow them to afford them earlier on their consumption horizon. In your situation without mortgages, it only means houses are cheaper for the people who can already afford them anyway.

People who save are exactly the people who provide the money for mortgages. They essentially say "let others use this money now, and pay me a small fee for the privilige".