The only thing you can remove from the process and still get the same result is capital…
People want to be paid for their labor, and with no capital you aren’t paying them. You just fell flat on your first purchase order for the first component.
capital does “play a role”, at least insofar as incentive predicated on people’s ability to function in the capitalistic society we currently inhabit goes
How awkward, you must have missed me making that exact point…
So sure, people want to be paid. But let’s be clear: they don’t inherently want money, they want to survive, create, and ideally thrive in the society they inhabit. Capital is just the tool we happen to use right now, it’s not essential to the concept of creation.
People created long before money existed, and they still create today without a paycheck attached. Remove capital from the picture, and as long as the work has value to those involved, it still gets made.
The real kicker? Capital often corrupts the process, pushing people to maximize profit instead of maximizing quality or true value.
Before capitalism they still used capital. Barter systems are still capital based.
Equal exchange and cohabitation hunter gather groups are still capital based.
Capital is just time. That’s all it is. What ways you quantify that is meaningless and pointless and every system is just a different way to quantify time. Capitalism uses currency debt as a trade standard for time. But it’s still just time.
We compound it and trade cast quantities of other people’s time around this devaluing the individuals. Communism instead removes the ability to do so and tries to make it so each person’s time can only be traded by them. So the only way to get cast quantities of time is by working together.
Even in a post commodity environment capital will still be the way trade with others. It would just be in time.
So sure, people want to be paid. But let’s be clear: they don’t inherently want money, they want to survive, create, and ideally thrive in the society they inhabit. Capital is just the tool we happen to use right now, it’s not essential to the concept of creation.
Money existed long before modern systems, too. Bartering an exchange of goods for other goods sucks ass. It was almost immediately swapped out for some form of money in basically every society in history. (And to be clear, ‘money’ doesn’t just mean a coin or bill, it was often a standard, easy to exchange good the society agreed upon, such as a grain or a precious metal.)
they don’t inherently want money
Let me ask you, if you work for a company that makes washers (the things one pairs with bolts), and your employer offered to pay you every paycheck completely in washers, would you find that acceptable? Or would you demand something easier to work with, would you demand your services be rewarded with money instead?
they don’t inherently want money
I bet you don’t get paid in fucking washers, you demand payment in money.
I’m not saying that capital, as a universal equivalent or barter substitute, is inherently a bad solution to the problem of trade. What I am saying is that capital is not inherently essential. It’s an imagined system, useful yes, but replaceable in countless ways.
Think about it: Sure, I wouldn’t want more washers than I have use for, but I don’t inherently want money either. What I want are the things money represents. If money disappeared tomorrow and some other proxy system took its place, I’d want that instead.
And when it comes to creation, say building a phone for example, money contributes nothing to the actual process. You need materials, knowledge, labor, and coordination. The only truly non-essential element is money. It’s as you said, simply a replacement for bartering.
If you disagree with my actual point, I’d love to hear the argument. But I can’t keep arguing with your point that we “need the Matrix in order to live in the Matrix”, or “money in order to live in capitalism”.
If that ‘proxy system’ was a measure of value you could easily exchange for goods and services, it would also be money. People invent money in every society because it just makes sense. Even in societies where they try to abolish money, money is instantly re-invented using some other measure because it is so damn useful for trade.
Sure, but like I alread said, money isn’t inherently bad. It has served as a practical answer to the inefficiencies of pure barter. It streamlined exchange, reduced friction, and in many cases distributed power more evenly than a sprawling barter web ever could. In that sense, money was a clever and fair solution for its time.
But whether or not money has created new problems, whether it’s outlived its usefulness, or whether a better system would come from reform or replacement, all of that is a separate debate. The central point remains: money is not essential to creation.
Building a phone requires knowledge, resources, labor, and coordination. Remove any of those and the phone can’t exist. Remove money, and the process still goes on, it may look different in how people access or exchange those inputs, but the act of creation itself doesn’t depend on capital. That’s the key distinction: the difference between a finished phone and someone tinkering with sticks isn’t money, it’s the tangible elements of production.
So sure, people want to be paid. But let’s be clear: they don’t inherently want money
Except the rich, right? But they are a different species, of course. Not at all the same human beings you see when you look at the noble proletarian!
All people want nice things while not having to work or think hard. All people are pretty okay having others do the work for them. This is not a unique feature of the rich which will vanish from humanity if we wave a magic wand and vaporize the upper class.
That’s quite a leap. The wealthy aren’t some separate species with different desires, they want the same fundamental things as everyone else. I never implied anything about “the rich”, and regardless my point isn’t about them. It’s that capital itself is non-essential.
Yes, there’s a bigger discussion to be had about human nature, whether people create out of an inherent drive or simply to secure comfort, and how different incentive systems shape that. But none of those discussions lead to the conclusion that a capital-based economy is the only system in which people would create.
I was being ironic. The rich definitely aren’t a different species. They are just another window on human nature.
We can abstract money until it’s meaningless and then say “see, it doesn’t do anything.”
But even if you regress everything to a basic barter economy, capital still matters. You want to gather 40 workers for a year to create an irrigation canal? Well someone has to be prepared to feed them for a year, THIS year, before the canal can benefit any crops. Otherwise they’re going to fuck off back to their own arid fields and scratch out another year.
So you see, the village can’t get a new canal without the labor of the workers, but you can’t get the labor of the workers without some ready capital. Theres absolutely nothing abstract about it. Capital matters.
What we all get mad about is that the guy with the capital then OWNs the canal and charges high prices for the water. And the way to solve that is by collectively bargaining for some worker ownership at the start. People like yourself get lost hating the guy with the capital and convincing yourself he doesn’t matter. He does. You just need to negotiate for a better shake.
That has been hard to do historically because there’s always some jackass who comes along and says “I’m starving, and I can dig ditches, just feed me while I do it.”
Literally in that above example, I’m pretty sure they’re just going to redistribute their efforts. There will still be people growing crops and they’ll share with the people working on the irrigation canal, knowing it’s for their own benefit.
It’s not the only way things can ever get done under any circumstances. But for the guy to say you can remove it and get the same result is BS. And if we’re being real, capital drives some things that collective village action never could, like advances in medicine. And capital drives things on a scale that collective village action never does. Everyone thinks there isn’t enough housing but most of what we have was built with capital, not village collectivism. And we need more, the village needs something done, so where’s that village collectivism? Fact is a village can erect shantytowns in rural India but it can’t out in sewage lines and pour foundations for a new housing project.
Fact is a village can erect shantytowns in rural India but it can’t out in sewage lines and pour foundations for a new housing project.
See that’s funny because when the street my ancestral is on was being built out, that’s literally what happened. The folks building the houses got together and did the sewage lines for the street. This was way before my time, but that’s what my grandpa told me, anyway.
Also this was the 1980s in what was then a soviet republic, so obviously everyone built their own houses, there was no construction company to hire, people were lucky enough to be allocated plots they could build on in the first place.
Cool example. I did think twice before saying a community can’t build a bridge or dam, because I’m sure it has happened. Apparently sewers as well. I’d love to know more, like what they did for equipment and engineers, not to mention sanitation during the project.
I do think that people mustering the wherewithal to provide themselves with essential services in a failing state does say something larger here about the capitalism topic though. In the capitalist US of the 1980s, people didn’t have to band together to provide their own sewers.
It’s cool that these folks did. Does that really show that capital has no benefit? I still don’t think so.
I agree with all that. I just speak out in these dumb threads where people say things like “you can literally just remove the capitalist from the picture and nothing changes.” Capitalism needs to be reformed, not discarded, and it certainly doesn’t need to be misunderstood completely (as some others here seem to be doing).
My dad did his MBA dissertation on places that have no liquidity markets and it’s very ugly when there is no capital to grease the gears. He then spent 30 years approving small business loans for a bank. So I guess you could say that I have a proud family tradition of valuing capital. But the world keeps minting teenagers who think the world would somehow just keep going without it.
I can’t tell if you’re trolling, arguing in bad faith, or just not reading carefully.
I never said I “hate the guy with the capital,” nor did I claim money “doesn’t do anything.” Its role in organizing labor and distributing resources is obvious.
What I said is that money isn’t essential. In your canal example, what’s actually required are laborers, food, and tools. Incentives can be monetary, collective need, shared access to resources, the sheer fun of it, or even coercion (though that last one is obviously undesirable).
The point stands: a canal, or a phone, can be built through many incentive systems that don’t rely on capital. What other element can be removed before the outcome is no longer the same?
p.s. You were not being ironic. You were being hyperbolic.
Hey look everybody - here’s doomcanoe clearly trying to use a separate sock puppet account to chime in and make it sound like someone supports his side of this argument. But OOPS he forgot to actually sign out and back in and posted it under his doomcanoe account! You can see right here his deleted comment, once he realized his mistake. It’s still cached in my inbox though.
Nice try, sir. Now I know where all the downvotes came from overnight. This is SERIOUS weaksauce. And you still don’t know the difference between hyperbole and irony!!!
You are free to use words incorrectly if you so choose.
And seeing as you were unable to refute the point that “money is not an essential element to the creation process”, I would say the point does indeed stand. But perhaps your usage of “point that stands” is just another example of your “alternate vocabulary”.
If you include ‘food’, ‘shelter’, ‘transportation’ in ‘commodity production’, then yes, people want things like food, shelter, and transportation. People like being paid for their work.
These things should not be directly associated with work
Of course rewarding people for work is good in some sense in every economic system, just putting it in the sense of being paid just makes it very stuck in that sort of capitalist mindset.
The only reason people have to be paid for their work is because the capitalist system requires it for those workers to survive.
Can you perhaps go back over this and explain what these words actually mean? I actually want to understand what you mean better. Because money is not identical to capitalism. And workers need to be paid for their work because they need to eat to survive. What is it that capitalism specifically is requiring here? I’ve seen one or two replies that are like “sure yeah people want to be paid but that’s capitalism’s fault too” and I genuinely don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Compensating someone for their work is a very basic concept not necessarily tied to capitalism. Even in the natural world there is very little labor that is not focused on some reward outcome. There is even compensation between species in symbiotic relationships. Compensation doesn’t seem like some weird forced artificial thing to me at all. It’s primal.
You were rewarded in some way. You got the thing you made, or if it was a gift to someone, you enhanced your relationship with that person.
If a person gets no reward of any kind for their work, they stop doing that work. As they should.
Money and capitalism come into the picture when you want to motivate people to make something they won’t necessarily get to keep or use themselves, which they cannot then give as a gift, which does not give them the pleasure of artistic expression.
So yeah people can make things without money in the limited cases where there’s another form of reward. But modern societies are scaled way past people just making the things that they themselves receive immediate benefit from. You get economies from scale by mass production, and no one needs 10,000 k kitchen knives.
People want to be paid for their labor, and with no capital you aren’t paying them. You just fell flat on your first purchase order for the first component.
You:
Me:
How awkward, you must have missed me making that exact point…
So sure, people want to be paid. But let’s be clear: they don’t inherently want money, they want to survive, create, and ideally thrive in the society they inhabit. Capital is just the tool we happen to use right now, it’s not essential to the concept of creation.
People created long before money existed, and they still create today without a paycheck attached. Remove capital from the picture, and as long as the work has value to those involved, it still gets made.
The real kicker? Capital often corrupts the process, pushing people to maximize profit instead of maximizing quality or true value.
Before capitalism they still used capital. Barter systems are still capital based.
Equal exchange and cohabitation hunter gather groups are still capital based.
Capital is just time. That’s all it is. What ways you quantify that is meaningless and pointless and every system is just a different way to quantify time. Capitalism uses currency debt as a trade standard for time. But it’s still just time.
We compound it and trade cast quantities of other people’s time around this devaluing the individuals. Communism instead removes the ability to do so and tries to make it so each person’s time can only be traded by them. So the only way to get cast quantities of time is by working together.
Even in a post commodity environment capital will still be the way trade with others. It would just be in time.
Money existed long before modern systems, too. Bartering an exchange of goods for other goods sucks ass. It was almost immediately swapped out for some form of money in basically every society in history. (And to be clear, ‘money’ doesn’t just mean a coin or bill, it was often a standard, easy to exchange good the society agreed upon, such as a grain or a precious metal.)
Let me ask you, if you work for a company that makes washers (the things one pairs with bolts), and your employer offered to pay you every paycheck completely in washers, would you find that acceptable? Or would you demand something easier to work with, would you demand your services be rewarded with money instead?
I bet you don’t get paid in fucking washers, you demand payment in money.
I’m not saying that capital, as a universal equivalent or barter substitute, is inherently a bad solution to the problem of trade. What I am saying is that capital is not inherently essential. It’s an imagined system, useful yes, but replaceable in countless ways.
Think about it: Sure, I wouldn’t want more washers than I have use for, but I don’t inherently want money either. What I want are the things money represents. If money disappeared tomorrow and some other proxy system took its place, I’d want that instead.
And when it comes to creation, say building a phone for example, money contributes nothing to the actual process. You need materials, knowledge, labor, and coordination. The only truly non-essential element is money. It’s as you said, simply a replacement for bartering.
If you disagree with my actual point, I’d love to hear the argument. But I can’t keep arguing with your point that we “need the Matrix in order to live in the Matrix”, or “money in order to live in capitalism”.
If that ‘proxy system’ was a measure of value you could easily exchange for goods and services, it would also be money. People invent money in every society because it just makes sense. Even in societies where they try to abolish money, money is instantly re-invented using some other measure because it is so damn useful for trade.
Sure, but like I alread said, money isn’t inherently bad. It has served as a practical answer to the inefficiencies of pure barter. It streamlined exchange, reduced friction, and in many cases distributed power more evenly than a sprawling barter web ever could. In that sense, money was a clever and fair solution for its time.
But whether or not money has created new problems, whether it’s outlived its usefulness, or whether a better system would come from reform or replacement, all of that is a separate debate. The central point remains: money is not essential to creation.
Building a phone requires knowledge, resources, labor, and coordination. Remove any of those and the phone can’t exist. Remove money, and the process still goes on, it may look different in how people access or exchange those inputs, but the act of creation itself doesn’t depend on capital. That’s the key distinction: the difference between a finished phone and someone tinkering with sticks isn’t money, it’s the tangible elements of production.
Except the rich, right? But they are a different species, of course. Not at all the same human beings you see when you look at the noble proletarian!
All people want nice things while not having to work or think hard. All people are pretty okay having others do the work for them. This is not a unique feature of the rich which will vanish from humanity if we wave a magic wand and vaporize the upper class.
That’s quite a leap. The wealthy aren’t some separate species with different desires, they want the same fundamental things as everyone else. I never implied anything about “the rich”, and regardless my point isn’t about them. It’s that capital itself is non-essential.
Yes, there’s a bigger discussion to be had about human nature, whether people create out of an inherent drive or simply to secure comfort, and how different incentive systems shape that. But none of those discussions lead to the conclusion that a capital-based economy is the only system in which people would create.
I was being ironic. The rich definitely aren’t a different species. They are just another window on human nature.
We can abstract money until it’s meaningless and then say “see, it doesn’t do anything.”
But even if you regress everything to a basic barter economy, capital still matters. You want to gather 40 workers for a year to create an irrigation canal? Well someone has to be prepared to feed them for a year, THIS year, before the canal can benefit any crops. Otherwise they’re going to fuck off back to their own arid fields and scratch out another year.
So you see, the village can’t get a new canal without the labor of the workers, but you can’t get the labor of the workers without some ready capital. Theres absolutely nothing abstract about it. Capital matters.
What we all get mad about is that the guy with the capital then OWNs the canal and charges high prices for the water. And the way to solve that is by collectively bargaining for some worker ownership at the start. People like yourself get lost hating the guy with the capital and convincing yourself he doesn’t matter. He does. You just need to negotiate for a better shake.
That has been hard to do historically because there’s always some jackass who comes along and says “I’m starving, and I can dig ditches, just feed me while I do it.”
If a village needed something done, then they could figure it out collectively, you don’t need business to get things accomplished.
Literally in that above example, I’m pretty sure they’re just going to redistribute their efforts. There will still be people growing crops and they’ll share with the people working on the irrigation canal, knowing it’s for their own benefit.
It’s not the only way things can ever get done under any circumstances. But for the guy to say you can remove it and get the same result is BS. And if we’re being real, capital drives some things that collective village action never could, like advances in medicine. And capital drives things on a scale that collective village action never does. Everyone thinks there isn’t enough housing but most of what we have was built with capital, not village collectivism. And we need more, the village needs something done, so where’s that village collectivism? Fact is a village can erect shantytowns in rural India but it can’t out in sewage lines and pour foundations for a new housing project.
See that’s funny because when the street my ancestral is on was being built out, that’s literally what happened. The folks building the houses got together and did the sewage lines for the street. This was way before my time, but that’s what my grandpa told me, anyway.
Also this was the 1980s in what was then a soviet republic, so obviously everyone built their own houses, there was no construction company to hire, people were lucky enough to be allocated plots they could build on in the first place.
Cool example. I did think twice before saying a community can’t build a bridge or dam, because I’m sure it has happened. Apparently sewers as well. I’d love to know more, like what they did for equipment and engineers, not to mention sanitation during the project.
I do think that people mustering the wherewithal to provide themselves with essential services in a failing state does say something larger here about the capitalism topic though. In the capitalist US of the 1980s, people didn’t have to band together to provide their own sewers.
It’s cool that these folks did. Does that really show that capital has no benefit? I still don’t think so.
You cannot simply just change society at will. Unless you want to burn it all down, it has to be done incrementally.
But people still do try to work towards collectivism, such as socialism and such, look at the NYC mayoral race for example.
Just because our system is what is now doesn’t mean it has to remain, things can change for the better.
I agree with all that. I just speak out in these dumb threads where people say things like “you can literally just remove the capitalist from the picture and nothing changes.” Capitalism needs to be reformed, not discarded, and it certainly doesn’t need to be misunderstood completely (as some others here seem to be doing).
My dad did his MBA dissertation on places that have no liquidity markets and it’s very ugly when there is no capital to grease the gears. He then spent 30 years approving small business loans for a bank. So I guess you could say that I have a proud family tradition of valuing capital. But the world keeps minting teenagers who think the world would somehow just keep going without it.
I can’t tell if you’re trolling, arguing in bad faith, or just not reading carefully.
I never said I “hate the guy with the capital,” nor did I claim money “doesn’t do anything.” Its role in organizing labor and distributing resources is obvious.
What I said is that money isn’t essential. In your canal example, what’s actually required are laborers, food, and tools. Incentives can be monetary, collective need, shared access to resources, the sheer fun of it, or even coercion (though that last one is obviously undesirable).
The point stands: a canal, or a phone, can be built through many incentive systems that don’t rely on capital. What other element can be removed before the outcome is no longer the same?
p.s. You were not being ironic. You were being hyperbolic.
Don’t correct my vocabulary. Saying the rich are a different species is irony, not hyperbole. Anyway, you haven’t made any points that stand here.
5 minutes earlier:
So you never said it doesn’t do anything. Just that it can be removed from the picture with no result. (?!)
Goodnight to this conversation.
CAUGHT IN THE ACT
Hey look everybody - here’s doomcanoe clearly trying to use a separate sock puppet account to chime in and make it sound like someone supports his side of this argument. But OOPS he forgot to actually sign out and back in and posted it under his doomcanoe account! You can see right here his deleted comment, once he realized his mistake. It’s still cached in my inbox though.
Nice try, sir. Now I know where all the downvotes came from overnight. This is SERIOUS weaksauce. And you still don’t know the difference between hyperbole and irony!!!
You are free to use words incorrectly if you so choose.
And seeing as you were unable to refute the point that “money is not an essential element to the creation process”, I would say the point does indeed stand. But perhaps your usage of “point that stands” is just another example of your “alternate vocabulary”.
Eitherway, have a good one.
Pff. Your refutation is there in black and white, and not just from me. The fact that you won’t recognize it doesn’t change anything.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Naw, people like being paid for their work.
Having food is nice, having a home is nice, having a car is nice, having a vacation is nice.
People like being paid for their work.
deleted by creator
People don’t like getting paid, they like to get things with the money.
In a decommodified economy you would not need this.
If you go straight to giving people the end things, the payment is the food, home, car, vacation, etc. People like being paid for their work.
You are still thinking of it in terms of commodity production
If you include ‘food’, ‘shelter’, ‘transportation’ in ‘commodity production’, then yes, people want things like food, shelter, and transportation. People like being paid for their work.
These things should not be directly associated with work
Of course rewarding people for work is good in some sense in every economic system, just putting it in the sense of being paid just makes it very stuck in that sort of capitalist mindset.
Other economic systems can exist.
Unfortunately for humanity, food, shelter, and transportation doesn’t place itself in front of you. People have to work to make/gather those things.
I would also love to live in a place where nobody had to work in order for shelter to exist. But, someone has to work to build the home.
I would love to live in a place where nobody had to work for food to exist. But someone has to grow and gather the food.
I would love to live in a place where nobody had to work for cars/trains to exist, but someone has to work to build the car.
And in those systems, people will still be working for food, shelter, transportation. People like being paid for their work.
We shouldn’t confuse the use of currency with the capitalist system.
In a decommodified economy, any sort of “currency” would not even be money in the modern sense of the word.
Describe this “decommodified economy” if you could. What does that mean to you?
An economy where goods are not produced to be sold at a market.
For example a communist society (classless and moneyless) would be one such system.
Can you perhaps go back over this and explain what these words actually mean? I actually want to understand what you mean better. Because money is not identical to capitalism. And workers need to be paid for their work because they need to eat to survive. What is it that capitalism specifically is requiring here? I’ve seen one or two replies that are like “sure yeah people want to be paid but that’s capitalism’s fault too” and I genuinely don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Compensating someone for their work is a very basic concept not necessarily tied to capitalism. Even in the natural world there is very little labor that is not focused on some reward outcome. There is even compensation between species in symbiotic relationships. Compensation doesn’t seem like some weird forced artificial thing to me at all. It’s primal.
I have made things with my hands for which I was not paid. I even gathered the materials. I am bad at capitalism.
You were rewarded in some way. You got the thing you made, or if it was a gift to someone, you enhanced your relationship with that person.
If a person gets no reward of any kind for their work, they stop doing that work. As they should.
Money and capitalism come into the picture when you want to motivate people to make something they won’t necessarily get to keep or use themselves, which they cannot then give as a gift, which does not give them the pleasure of artistic expression.
So yeah people can make things without money in the limited cases where there’s another form of reward. But modern societies are scaled way past people just making the things that they themselves receive immediate benefit from. You get economies from scale by mass production, and no one needs 10,000 k kitchen knives.