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Comment by saubeidl | Hacker News Reader

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There are no utopias, any time. The primary thing too many people have their consent wrongly manufactured currently is the enemy of most all people and organized multicellular life is a small cabal of extremely rich people and their helpers. That's it. (Well, and the very quiet accelerationist domestic terrorists who are dangerous and totally crazy.) Not the very rich, the middling rich, middle class, the poor, brown people, the red team, or the blue team.

A functional society needs stable, sensible, countervailing factions that do not gain too much power unilaterally or permanently. Like the 5 House seats to be stolen through unscheduled gerrymandering in Texas.

National work stoppages and unionizing need to happen. Also, worker-owned co-ops too.

There's one-size-fits-all quick fix panacea, but a multitude of efforts that must be undertaken to achieve a more desirable, comfortable objective rather than giving all of the treasure to a greedy, corrupt few while the masses lack healthcare and housing.

Absolutely. As history shows though, you can't keep that last state particularly stable, so we will always have times of equality, times of oppression/exploitation and times of killing today's flavour of nobility, ad infinitum.

> Only through class consciousness can we build a new society in which the fruits of labor are enjoyed by us all.

They've done this a few times already, and it's very violent each time.

And this isn't an inherent contradiction of capidalism. Capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others. Lower prices are good for every one. Raising everyone's wages out of proportion to the value they create only raises all the prices.

For the most part, capitalism makes people rich if they have capital to begin with and can invest this capital somewhere (i.e. have someone else do the actual productive work and then collect part of the wealth that they have produced as economic rent). That is, the "value" is in giving others access to resources that you have hoarded from them in the first place.

As for violent revolutions - very true, but notice how every time that happens in one country, the others tend to swing left economically because it's either that to placate the workers, or face the possibility of revolt. The primary beneficiaries of the Russian revolution wasn't the Russians - it was Western workers who managed to get a lot of concessions from their employers riding that wave.

Those workers generally paid with lower growth, though. Redistribution isn't much of a solution if growth is possible.

> They've done this a few times already, and it's very violent each time.

It's very violent because it gets violently repressed by capitalist forces. See the democratically elected Allende being couped by the CIA.

> Capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others.

That is straight up not true. What value do people inheriting wealth provide? What value do high frequency traders provide? What value do speculators of all sorts provide? It's a casino that's rigged for the already rich, on the back of the poor.

> It's very violent because it gets violently repressed by capitalist forces

Millions of Soviet deaths; millions of Chinese deaths; deaths from the Khmer Rouge....these are not "violent capitalist repression". Capitalism isn't a total system. It's a voluntary exchange system, where people who provide the most get the most.

> What value do people inheriting wealth provide?

That money was earned by providing value.

> What value do high frequency traders provide?

If listing a company on a stock exchange isn't valuable for companies, then they wouldn't do it. But it is. So they do.

> What value do speculators of all sorts provide?

It depends on your other examples of speculators. If you see how they make money, then you'll probably have your answer.

> Millions of Soviet deaths; millions of Chinese deaths; deaths from the Khmer Rouge

We could count the dead of capitalist imperialist oppression and come to similar conclusions, but I don't think that's a productive converation.

> It's a voluntary exchange system, where people who provide the most get the most.

That is not true. You either participate or you starve and are denied housing and health care. It is "voluntary" on paper only.

> That money was earned by providing value.

That money was earned by exploiting labor.

> If listing a company on a stock exchange isn't valuable for companies, then they wouldn't do it. But it is. So they do.

I'm not talking about profits for companies - which are the very source of the ills described in the article we're commenting on. I'm talking about value to society.

"That money was earned by exploiting labor."

Exploting labor without providing value wouldn't have earned that money.

> We could count the dead of capitalist imperialist oppression and come to similar conclusions, but I don't think that's a productive converation.

Capitalism and imperialism aren't the same thing. That's the difference. Socialism is a total system where power and money are both controlled by the state. Under capitalism, the state has power, which can take different forms, and the market has money.

And ironically, the most imperial moves recently are with Socialist countries: Russia with Ukraine, Georgia, and Crimea, and China with Taiwan etc.

> Millions of Soviet deaths; millions of Chinese deaths; deaths from the Khmer Rouge....these are not "violent capitalist repression".

How come every citation of comparative body counts in the Capitalism v Communism Olympics always seem to evade mention of:

- 3 million Indians starved under Churchill's Britain (+ countless more before that)

- 5 million dead in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos

- 1 million dead in the war of Algerian independence vs France

- 600,000 dead in the Iraq war

- the 50 million + killed under the staunchly anti-communist Third Reich

- a million dead in "anti-communist" purges in Indonesia's Sukarno

Were these not carried out directly, or directly armed and abetted by capitalist regimes?

> Capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others.

Heirs are made rich every day by being born.

That's not a feature of capitalism though, and pretty much exists regardless of system.

If heirs get money by virtue of birth and not value provision under most any system, and capitalism is among them, then capitalism isn’t a system which distributes money purely by value production.

One of the motivations that a lot of people have for working really hard is so that their children don't also have to work just as hard.

That anyone is floating the idea that "a better future for our children" is a bad thing is mentally deranged.

"A better future for some rich person's children" is not the same as "a better future for our children"

Yes it is.

Only if you lucked out in the capitalist casino.

So in your ideal scenario, rich people lose the privilege of being able to provide opportunities for their children? Purely because they are rich?

Even if you can walk it back from the edge of that cliff by saying they should have to provide for everyones' children, they can only do that by being rich...

Typical Germans and their heritage purity tests.

Of course some[0] don't earn their wealth, but their wealth was earned by someone else still providing value. They got the output for nothing, but it was still earned.

There are some people, such as Vladimir Putin, who just drain their country of its resources, enabled by the force of the state. But capitalism is about free exchange of value. So if someone gets rich; lots of other people got value.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_billionaires#20...

This is only true sometimes. You can, in many cases, create a functional monopoly and force people to pay you for their essentials. You can provide them a useful product, but deny them a better alternative that would make you less money (the old super strong drinking glass example). You can make use of the fact that value doesn’t mean “rationally determined to be of utility” to sell people things that are damaging to them for huge amounts of money. “Value provision” just means “you give me money for any reason,” and there’s a lot of shitty reasons people have to fork over their money in capitalism.

This is all tangential to the idea that "capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others".

The heir who doess not work, and who has never worked, often the same being true of their parents, and their parent's parents, is eating food grown by the labor of others and so on. There are those that work, and there is also a parasitic rentier class who does not work.

Elon Musk didn't provide anything of value. He's a grifter. He almost destroyed PayPal with inappropriate Windows-based shit. He didn't come up with Tesla, that was founded by others. Being CEO of SpaceX, a celebrity figurehead, might be his claim to fame.

I think it's fairly safe to assert that one can be a total asshole and become a billionaire as long as you're able to get others to do with work, buy your wares, and/or give you money. Maybe that has "value", but only indirectly and it's rarely or never your "special" effort alone.

> He didn't come up with Tesla,

He didn't, but I find it hard to believe that Tesla would be "worth" what it is now without him. More generally, I don't think we'd live in a world with as many electric cars without him, so that was definitely good for the world.

Like a celebrity politician, installing a CEO who has achieved celebrity infamy or fame adds hype to whatever they touch, orthogonal to if they deserve celebrity or not. But also, how many other serious EV companies were there in 2006? Basically none. So said engineers and celebrity guy got to define a category for a while. But then he jumped the shark with a double "Roman" Nazi salute and customers fled to the myriad of other competitors that since developed and arguably surpassed (like BYD super fast charging, that one can't buy in America).

> how many other serious EV companies were there in 2006? Basically none

Yeah, thats my point. I'm reasonably confident that without Musk, the answer would still be none (or at least the transformation would have been way slower).

I'm not a fan of Musk, but this notion that he's never done anything worthwhile is also clearly wrong.

Except you're making the error of erroneously conflating invention with marketing trickery. He's only done the latter, ever. He's never made anything of value himself.

I don't really care about invention in this space, as electric cars have been invented multiple times over the last century.

What matters (from a climate perspective) is getting those cars into the hands of people to reduce the pointless burning of fossil fuels. And Musk, however you may feel about him (I have not been a fan since about 2015/16) did a great job there.

Your argument is pretty analogous to saying that Jobs had nothing to do with Apple's success.

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