Hacker News Reader

Comment by FredPret | Hacker News Reader

1) I doubt you're actually working class, even if you're working for money

2) Capitalism is a decentralized system of allocating resources. By working and investing (even if just owning a retirement plan), you are taking part in it all. You may now collect your monocle and top hat.

3) Getting paid some fraction between 0 and 1 of the value you create is a fact of nature for all actors in the system. The company has to create more value for its customers than they pay for it, otherwise nobody would bother buying.

4) The system itself creates vast amounts of wealth and progress, for the entire society. You wouldn't have a good job and a good computer if it wasn't for all that extra value.

5) Don't confuse capitalists with capitalism. The people may behave badly, but the system is resilient - that's why it's been working well for centuries, through thick and thin.

View on HN

> it's been working well for centuries,

It depends on one's definition of _working well_. The neoliberal economic school would wholeheartedly agree. But the disproportionate distribution of gains since the early 1980's says otherwise. Of course, that's a values-laden discussion that's probably not a great fit for HN. If the system works immeasurably well for the 0.1% and dreadfully for the bottom 20% such that on average the GDP trend is positive, is the system working well? The system has been resilient, but I'm afraid I'd don't know what the corrective forces are any longer, given the dysfunctional state of the political enterprise in much of the world.

Here's my argument in favor of the system working well:

The quality of life for 99.99% of the population has increased more in the last 100 years than it did in the first 10,000 years of the human civilization. For a graphic example consider Charles Dickens *, he documented how people lived in the 19th century and it reads absolutely horrifying and unthinkable today.

Yes the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are improving their lot. However the poor's quality of life went up tremendously - housing, sanitation, hygiene, calories/nutrients, medical care, workplace safety, transportation, life expectancy, education, you name it. There is simply more wealth to go around today. Is the wealth distribution just? We can debate that **. Is the capitalist system improving lives across the board? Most certainly yes.

* or Friedrich Engels

** personally I would avoid this frame completely, but hey

Capitalism is a mode of production in which production is motivated by profit derived from the private ownership of the means of production. Those that own the means of production (factories, companies, etc.) perform no labour, but get paid from the difference between the value produced by those that do work and the value generated by that labour. This difference is called profit.

I own no significant means of production. The vast majority of my income comes from selling my labour power for a fraction of the value it generates. Thus I am working class, generating profits for capitalists.

Wealth and progress is generated by labour. I wouldn't have a good job and a computer if the forces of production hadn't been advanced so far. This advancement does happen under capitalism, but not exclusively. Worse, the mode of production can inhibit further advancement, like feudalism was inhibiting industrial advancement.

Capitalism fails all the time, it does it so often it's called the business cycle. Sometimes is fails catastrophically, like the Great Depression or 2008. It's being kept just barely functional by those that benefit from it; most of us don't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com