Comment by Hytosys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hytosys | Hacker News Reader

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OP is looking at people who direct and sustain a capitalist enterprise's internal processes. These people (managers, HR) are hired by the capitalists to optimize internally for profit. The only warm & fuzzy side-effects that these positions provide are the ones that don't get in the way of capital increasing.

It's not even about these individuals being evil or not. I'm sure most of them are torn to pieces (before they become numb) when they make decisions against the wellbeing of the workforce. The point is that the managers would not be in these positions if they could not fulfill these roles — they would be replaced. These positions self-select for "evil."

The people who optimize externally for profit focus not on squeezing the workforce, they focus on squeezing the public. These are the lawyers, the salespeople, the accountants, the marketers, the compliance experts. There's no point debating the evilness of the individuals, but their roles are necessarily evil. These roles tend to grow more and more evil as the capitalist enterprise grows. The enemy here, then, is capital, not these poor workers who fill necessary capitalist roles.

It's a good thing that states and state-owned enterprises always optimize for the well-being of their citizens and customers - after all, that's what they're supposed to do! It never happens that, being largely unaccountable, people working for the state and its enterprises act to maximize their own well-being and minimize their own effort at the expense of the citizens and customers.

This is why the enemy is capital, not human nature. All you need is employ people in properly-named organizations with properly stated lofty goals (the constitution of Stalin-era USSR is a good source of inspiration), and none of their bad traits will ever rear their ugly heads!

So towards the end of your post, I began to get the impression the tongue was somewhere in the cheek. But up to that point I was thinking there was some good insight there. The dichotomy of business vs the state. The roles of each: A business to make money; the state to look after her citizens, and the ongoing struggle for dominance between each - firmly skewered by the citation of the USSR, where "it was tried before". Poor businesses fail, whereas a poorly run state will limp along, but at the end of the day it is the businesses that fail into the state, and if a business is badly run it is the state (and her constituents) that have to pick up the pieces.

You got that "cheek" impression towards the end, and it was the USSR bit that did it? Meaning that the first paragraph, states always caring for their citizens, sounds sensible? Now that scares the shit out of me.

what can I say, your post was poorly written.

The State is not the only alternative to capital. Another is individuals.

Corporations (and the State) are mostly useless now that we have software. We're just in transition while we finish building AIs that usefully model the means of production and the body of available contracts.

An individual with a powerful AI partner that can do those two things is no more powerful inside a corporation than out. The AI makes the collaborative structures of public space just as reliable as the collaborative structures within a corporation, so the entire value of the corporation to the worker disappears.

AI is a factor of production, therefore it is a capital good.

The rest is delusional science fiction. "Ethereum contracts will magically grant every individual land, labor and capital goods for self-sufficient production." No.

The enemy here, then, is capital, not these poor workers who fill necessary capitalist roles.

I'm not sure how factors of production (including durable capital goods) can possibly be an "enemy" of anything.

That said, your idea that capitalists act as crude profit maximizers is an oversimplification. In fact, most firms don't do any calculation of prices based on marginal revenues and marginal costs. Instead, they usually administer a markup price based more on internal accounting practices and then do not strongly deviate from the markup, choosing to downsize production when profits are low instead of upsetting the stable price signal they've chosen even if it would be more profitable to do otherwise.

Marketing is often an enemy of markets and more a factor of destruction than of production: functioning markets require informed consumers making rational choices about what to buy; marketing is most often concerned with creating misinformed consumers and convincing them to make irrational choices about what to buy.

>I'm not sure how factors of production (including durable capital goods) can possibly be an "enemy" of anything.

I'm a Marxist. So in the aforementioned sense, capital is only wealth that grows over time through the process of exchange. I am referring to the process, not the assets.

As I mentioned before, I am not interested in analyzing the behaviors of individual employers. I am interested in analyzing the behaviors of the classes. You may call this oversimplification, but I call it cutting through the bullshit.

Do you accept the labor theory of value and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall? If so, then any economic argument you make will be on false premises.

Firms and markup prices are not at all individual employer behaviors. They're industry-wide behaviors that practically define mixed economies and thus, by your own definition, capital (though I think yours is overly vague).

I haven't yet read the last volume of Capital, so I am unprepared to take on the line of discussion in regards to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

Nonetheless, I fail to see how the simple arguments I initially made are affected by this diversion, and I fail to see how your analysis of price-setting mechanisms refutes the profit motive.

I don't deny the profit motive.

I deny a) the normative claim of there being some form of malevolence in it, b) the idea that it's the only thing firms maximize for when in fact we clearly observe that firms will sacrifice some profit for both internal equilibrium and sending out consistent signals to consumers and c) that a profit motive will not exist in a hypothetical socialist or communist society.

Whether it's the manorialist collecting rent on land or the bartering farmer balancing their supply of wheat traded to remain at a surplus while keeping a stock of other consumer goods they've bought, there's always a profit motive. The manorialist profits either from use of a land title or the use of land as a factor of production. The farmer profits by having their supply of goods be at a state where the marginal product of each good provides increasing returns for satisfying their ends. In other words, the farmer profits from having a heterogeneous stock over a homogeneous stock because they can use the former to obtain further goods to diversify their portfolio, or trade so as to improve the serviceableness and efficiency of their factors for growing wheat.

I think your point a) about there not being malevolence involved is quite important, and not repeated enough. If you have a world organised around private property and exclusion from what you need, people have no choice but to look at each other as means to their own ends.

Regarding c), I believe a communist would say that in a state-less and money-less society, it is not possible to appropriate wealth in the abstract (there are no means to do it). So it's not the motivation for profit that is abolished, it's the possibility of profit itself.

a) To this end I agree that my simplification is too emotional.

b) I typically regard such actions as means to sustain profit, but I won't deny the exceptions to this rule.

c) I scrutinize the definition of profit here, but I won't disagree with what I believe to be your sentiment.

You go on to describe the feudal and individual capitalist (I think?) modes of production, which helps to define profit, but this is otherwise divergent from (c). In the communist mode of production, "profit" serves the community (ideally global), not the individual. I'm wondering what your profit analysis of the communist mode of production is.

I presume the communist mode of production is one in a stateless, money-less society where factors of production are cooperatively owned by workers and where the production process is based on some definition of "use" rather than "profit". Profit would be the surplus employed by workers to create more use value. Goods would be traded "in kind" as is without a lubricant of exchange like money.

The canonical argument against this is "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth". There's generally been two ways socialist thinkers have tried to get around this: a) calculation in kind, which essentially reverts us back to unscalable barter where there is no reliable unit of account, and b) the Lange model of a Central Planning Board, which immediately brings all the issues of public choice, bureaucracy and "state capitalism" as you derided it earlier.

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