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Comment by ue_ | Hacker News Reader

>This "personal" capitalism is far different from the way our multinationals, governments, or even people, act today.

As a Socialist myself, I have wondered: how does capitalism become personal? Is it possible to achieve this? Let's assume for a moment that Marx was wrong about exploitation; how does wage labour, unexploitative, take the form of personal relation?

From my point of view, I was thinking that the division of labour will create an impersonal relationship, so much so that the worker will not see his own labour in the final product. How does personal capitalism fare with division of labour and automation?

I want to keep an open mind rather than to steer this ideologically, so I hope you are not put off by my differing viewpoint.

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I think the issue Marx points out isn't an "original" quality of capitalism, but rather an "eventual" (steady-state) quality of it.

AFAIK, capitalism is the idea of investment of capital. Marx's issue is that the capital pools in such a way that most people don't have it, or don't get to spend what they do have in a way that gets returns.

In an ideal situation, I am able to "spend" my "excess capital" - my excess time, skills, drives, etc - to improve my own situation. This is personal.

However, in practice, many people can't or don't do this. Maybe they're missing that drive towards self-investment. Maybe they're minimum wage and literally don't have any excess.

Marx's issue of "praxis" - that you do not own (literally or emotionally) the product of your work is an emergent, rather than inherent, quality of capitalism. So it seems reasonable that a society could exist with other factors the confound that emergent quality, so that you can have you cake (the core bits of capitalism) and everyone gets to eat it (everyone can actually take advantage of those core bits)

Have you ever worked for someone you liked? Or have you ever been offered a job or promotion because of a good personal relationship?

Most things sold in the business world are sold by personal relationships and conversation or personality.

How is capitalism, or any financial system, ever not personal?

At its core, capitalism is simply the codification of a win-win transaction between two or more parties. I work for your company, you pay me X salary.

Whereas socialism is the codification of a win-lose, non-consensual transaction. You're doing well, give me your money so I can give it to a third party, or else.

Of course there are negative externalities to worry about, contractual enforcement, etc. But those don't change the core philosophies.

The idea that market transactions are inherently impersonal was nicely outlined in David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years".

In summary, market transactions are final, in that you once a the goods exchange is complete you will have no further obligations to the other party. This property is very useful, and makes our goods exchanges very easy, but they are still inherently impersonal. There are other forms of goods exchange that do not have this property, which he discusses in the book.

Of course, market transactions being final doesn't mean that no further relationship is _possible_, but that relationship forms outside of the market system.

> At its core, capitalism is

That kind of transaction dates back to bartering, and is neither unique to capitalism nor excluded from socialism.

The way you put it also assumes that both parties are capable of negotiating the work/money trade to be advantageous to both; it seems pretty clear that Walmart and their floor workers are not in such a win-win.

> Whereas socialism is the codification of a win-lose

This is roughly equivalent to saying capitalism is the codification of exploitation, in that neither are true of their respective, functioning systems, and both are failure modes of their respective systems.

Socialism is the venture capitalism of people, at scale. Society invests in you and your situation; if you pan out, it needs a return on that investment so that it can reinvest.

Of course these are all drastic simplifications of complex systems that cannot be boiled down to soundbytes, but eh.

> How is capitalism ever not personal?

A review of the works criticizing the dominant system of the mid-19th Century industrialized West by cobtemporaries who coined the name "capitalism" to describe that system would answer that question.

> At it's core, capitalism is simply the codification of a win-win transaction between two or more parties.

No, at its core capitalism is the arrangement of government, property rights, and legal system to preferentially serve the interests of the holders of capital over others. Hence the name.

Are you saying capitalism cannot exist without government?

"Government" is simply whatever actor or set of actors possesses, between them, a monopoly on the legitimate use of force; you can't have human society without government and you can't have capitalism without society, so, sure, you trivially can't have capitalism without government.

More deeply, capitalism is not only incidentally tied to government through the necessity for society, but more deeply through the dependency on a specific model of property rights being enforced by government.

That's redistributive taxation, not socialism. Socialism is ownership of all property and business by the government. Per Marx/Engels:

"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State," "Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable. 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. "

> Socialism is ownership of all property and business by the government.

Socialism is the control of the means of production (not necessarily all property) by the public at large (Marx/Engels view of the State as the agency by which this control is exercised is not the only Socialist view, Socialism is broader than just Marxism.)

> I work for your company, you pay me X salary.

And if I don't work for your company, and I can't find other work, I starve. It's hardly win-win if one side of the transaction faces much more dire consequences if the negotiations fail.

If that's happening to you, presumably it's your fault for not winning harder?

"Objectivism" is just another name for narcissism. If you're not a winner, the narcissist's view is that you deserve whatever bad things happen to you.

Narcissism is wonderful for short-term gains, but an absolute disaster for long-term stability and growth.

Which is not a surprise because empathy is an established reality, not just in human behaviour but in animal behaviour, with straightforward evolutionary benefits.

You have to go quite a long way back down the evolutionary tree to lose empathy. If Rand and her acolytes want to live down there I suppose we can respect their choice.

But it doesn't mean it's a good choice, an intelligent decision, or one that's going to lead to better outcomes in the future.

Empathy is a trade-off, like most things:

- If you hold too much empathy for those who would destroy society, society will weaken.

- If you hold too little empathy for those who would support society, society will weaken.

Farmers don't tend to have much empathy for invasive weeds or pests growing in their crops. I believe Ayn Rand saw communists in a similar light.

Of course, that is all based on the presumption that society should continue in the first place. Feel free to replace "society" with "your family," or "your company."

>At its core, capitalism is simply the codification of a win-win transaction between two or more parties. I work for your company, you pay me X salary.

I don't think that's true; I view capitalism as a mode of production, subsisting on private ownership of the social means of production, the primacy of wage labour (this is the aspect you mentioned) but also the production of commodities (i.e exchange is to be maximised rather than the use of products) and lastly that production is for profit and accumulation of capital rather than satisfying social wants.

>Whereas socialism is the codification of a win-lose, non-consensual transaction. You're doing well, give me your money so I can give it to a third party, or else.

This is not what Socialism is about. Socialism is contrasted with capitalism not by money redistribution (in fact, no redistribution of non-social MoP produce or money occurs) but by the fact that means of production would be owned collectively by workers, and used for their benefit. The workers are also the consumers. This two-faceted benefit would seem to be a win-win in my opinion.

>non-consensual transaction.

The non-consensual part of Socialism is seizing the means of production from capitalists (either via revolution or otherwise). The non-consensual part of capitalism is the fact that people must sell their labour-power as a commodity on a market to private property owners in order to survive. Although all parties appear at face value to be participating in a system of equal and fair uncoerced exchanges, a look at the more extreme examples in our world of sweatshop labour or prostitution by necessity gives an opposite picture. These people are free to quit at any time, but have little option otherwise. They certainly can't accumulate sufficient capital to start a self-employment model of business.

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