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Comment by Convolutional | Hacker News Reader

Karl Marx said capitalists gain profit by expropriating the wealth a worker creates during surplus labor time. There is a conflict in the relation of production between the worker creating the wealth and the heir seeking to expropriate it.

Feudal pre-capitalist society did not need unemployment, but capitalist society does, if there is no reserve army of labor ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ), the workers creating wealth have more leverage to keep more of the wealth they created.

This is all happening because the rentier class is seeking to retain its rate of profit.

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That's an odd analysis. The reason there was no unemployment was because labor's bargaining power was very low. Similar to how if minimum wage and social safety nets were removed, unemployment would drop significantly.

It's also a terrible idea to pin the responsibility on the current trend, rather than the many trillions of dollars printed over the past few decades (culminating in Covid), that were mostly handed to Wall Street and friends. That was an extreme concentration of wealth, pulled directly from the edges where people are stuck transacting/saving in dollars. The reason it's not glaringly apparent is that technlogical productivity improvements compensate for it.

Interest rates existing again is better viewed as a correction from the past few decades of misallocation. I agree that the centralizers will gain on this part of the cycle, as they do with every change. But rather than condemn the current conditions (thus setting the stage for another cycle of looting), we should aim to hold them as they are and let the economy rebalance to favoring some saving rather than pure immediate consumption - especially in light of needing more environmental sustainability.

> if minimum wage and social safety nets were removed, unemployment would drop significantly.

An unsupported assertion I'd suggest. However, I think we can definitely say that removing worker protections leads to worse life outcomes for the poorest - and perhaps the richest too if we factor in rising crime due to inequality (compare US and EU). It may also reduce the size of the economy, the few remaining rich people don't need to actually spend much in aggregate (there is only so much food, furniture, foreign holidays etc they can consume).

I wasn't saying that as if it would be a good thing. Just that it would be closer to historical conditions where people were desperate to eat, and could be paid very little due to that desperation.

The times were never easier for the laptop class to get self employed and leaving the hamster wheel.

(Besides,i noticed, that on HN, where a lot of people program machines to do the work for them, profiting from the productivity gains, have an affinity to quoting Marx. I do not know why that is.)

You're greatly overstating the pipeline in education, knowledge, attention, and effort that's required to get to that point. And to stay there.

If it were easy there wouldn't be corporations.

They never said it’s easy, just that it’s easier. That’s true.

(It's almost as if it's because they're able to differentiate between a machine and a human being.)

Marx said a lot of things and almost all of them were wrong.

Included in Marx's greatest hits are

"The most capitalist countries will be the first to fall to communism" when in reality the only two major countries to fall to communism were theocratic monarchies that it would be a struggle to call capitalist.

"After the dictatorship of the proletariat the organs of the state will naturally fade away." Yet everytime the proletariat gets into power it seems that the organs of the state only strengthen.

"I shouldn't have to work other people should pay for me to continue to live." It turns out Karl never had a job, and spent most of his life mooching off of others, exactly as he accused the capitalists of doing.

In fact everything Marx said that could be evaluated against reality turned out to be wrong, so why should I trust the rest of what he said?

>"The most capitalist countries will be the first to fall to communism" when in reality the only two major countries to fall to communism were theocratic monarchies that it would be a struggle to call capitalist.

Have you seen the trends the US is moving towards?

[1]:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/20/eat-the-ric...

I think you are writing off this quote too early. Also, the US has gone though this cycle before. When things got near the breaking point the elites threw some crumbs to the rest(eg. Social Security, Medicare).

>"After the dictatorship of the proletariat the organs of the state will naturally fade away." Yet everytime the proletariat gets into power it seems that the organs of the state only strengthen.

We've never really hit this point in the west because of reasons said above.

>"I shouldn't have to work other people should pay for me to continue to live." It turns out Karl never had a job, and spent most of his life mooching off of others, exactly as he accused the capitalists of doing.

You could argue Automation is paying capitalists elites to continue to live. Just spread more of that wealth around.

Lenin also said communism would be built in the West, not Russia. Circumstances allowed power to fall into the Bolsheviks hands and he decided to take it - to the surprise of Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev etc.

The second point follows from the first.

> the heir seeking to expropriate it

Capital owners all inherited their capital, I take it?

> Feudal pre-capitalist society did not need unemployment, but capitalist society does

The high productivity of capitalist societies plus technological advances mean that people can be unemployed without starving to death. Feudal societies did not need unemployment because everyone was working to the bones.

> the workers creating wealth have more leverage to keep more of the wealth they created

I encourage everyone to negotiate as much of their share as they can. But if the underlying thesis was true and capitalists provided no value and workers all of the value, then the world's best companies would be worker cooperatives. I see no evidence that this is the case.

Capitalist societies did more to improve the lives of everyone on Earth than Marxism ever did or ever could.

Have you walked the streets of Havana? I have. Talk about oppressive... And depressing.

Please, being under economic sanctions for longer than most people on this board have been alive has done more to damage Cuba than any kind of political/economic system could have ever managed. Especially given their main industry was tourism and agriculture. The rich Americans that poured dollars into Havana, were cut off along with the supply of manufactured goods, and being a resource poor island made it hard to build an industrial base.

Compared with their more capitalist neighbors who aren't doing great either, might point you to reasons why a whole region, which includes a resource rich continent have been struggling for the past couple hundred years. I will start you off with the wikipedia page on banana republic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

Please! :) The Castro regime made the decision to seize any land from anyone with 50 acres or more. What sort of outcome did Fidel, Che, and Cienfuegos expect? Well, they expected to build thriving trade economy with the Soviets... whoops!

My point is Marxism/Socialism trades one form of oppression for another. Marxism fails to identify poor leadership as oppressive. Socialist systems are run by error prone leaders that crave power and fortune... They are the same people that run corporations under a different flag. Che was killed trying to overthrow another nation to put in Cuban friendly socialist leadership... How is that different from your banana example?

At least in capitalism we can vote with our dollars. We can spend our money on things we believe in. Not with socialism. Good luck finding choice or innovation that the state doesn't support. It literally crushes innovation.

Besides these arguments, what great things came from Marxism that we enjoy today?

I sorta think your conflating authoritarian socialism (aka communism) with democratic socialism which is as large a mistake as conflating pure democracy with corrupt representative democracy where a minority of the population is used to rubber stamp an oligarchy.

Similarly, capitalism in its purest forms is basically feudalism because the people won't have any dollars to vote with. And time and time again it seems the benevolent Henry Ford style capitalists are proven to be the minority. So, one might say that without the socialist scare in the late 1800's early 1900's which forced the hands of the capitalists all those quality of live improvements everyone likes to go on about probably wouldn't exist. We might all be working 80 hour weeks and scraping by in company hovels eating whatever gruel the company store gives us. But then again, a large portion of the US population is wildly unaware of how the bottom 30% live, while ignoring their own debt slavery. So enjoy your bread/circuses while the rich take an even larger slice of the economic pie.

edit: How about some George Carlin, RIP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyvxt1svxso

I love Carlin. Thanks

Perhaps you're changing the subject? My original post was in response to an invocation of Karl Marx, the father of Communism... as I understand it, Communism is about as authoritarian as it gets.

I mean an intermediate stage from Capitalism to Communism is called "Dictatorship of the proletariat"...

>At least in capitalism we can vote with our dollars. We can spend our money on things we believe in.

The end state of the current US capitalistic system is a rental economy where "you'll own nothing and be happy"(WEF terminology, not mine). We are seeing this in the loss of the ability to buy real estate but also in the push to move towards a subscription model for everything. Subscription cars vs ownership, subscription services vs ownership, even subscriptions for hardware such that you rent hardware for a monthly fee and "trade up" every other year. Capital has exhausted every other avenue for growth so this is what is left. Combine that with wage stagnation and inflation eating away what little value is left. How is it possible to follow your plan in the world?

The end state of socialism and communism is also "you'll own nothing and be happy". All political/economic systems suffer from corruption and abuse of power at the top. The only difference is the ability for the masses to control their own destiny. Market economies give them a little, control economies give them none.

True, yeah both extremes suck. My optimistic hope is that the US self corrects to something like what the European countries have: a flavor of Democratic Socialism. Right now its not looking good, the US is moving further to extreme capitalism with no real end in sight.

Capitalists seem to be fighting a losing battle. Birth rates will not recover until possibly once Gen Alpha comes online. Thats ~20 years from now.

And thats a big IF the elites convince millennials to bear kids en-mass(heard about people like Elon and neoliberals like Peter Zeihan pushing people to have kids?).

Frankly I don't see it happening unless millenials really start getting some more stability. Seems like the new "kids" are actually dogs/cats. Who knows? Maybe the Millenials that are inheriting their parents houses/the ones who became successful in tech early will make up the shortfall for the rest of the generation.

At the same time oldest millenials are turning ~40 now so if they haven't had kids time is running out. Clock is ticking.

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