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Capital is itself a product of labor.
by janef0421 4y ago
Capital is itself a product of labor.
- djbebs 4y agoGreat, then surely labor will be able to pay for it.
- janef0421 4y agoLabour won't be able to pay for it, because money is a representation of social power, not value, and in our current society labourers do not hold social power. See "Debt: The first 5,000 years", or the video by second thought on the subject.
- ericd 4y agoIt’s a product of well coordinated labor. It’s much, much easier to make the wrong thing than the right thing. And the wrong thing can eat a huge amount of labor and be worth much less than nothing.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoCapital is often a product of labor plus input capital. Most startups understand this well. It's basically impossible to bootstrap something with labor alone
- janef0421 4y agoBy capital, I am referring to things that improve the efficiency of labour, such as a combine harvester.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoMe too. You can't build a combine harvester with labor alone. There's a hell of a lot of capital that went into producing one. Land, mining equipment, metal smelters, machine shops, trains and ships, and assembly facilities. It takes skilled labor too, but you can't make most things purely out of skilled labor.
- janef0421 4y agoIn that case, that capital was also created by labour.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoSure, capital can't exist without humans. My main point is not where capital first originated, but one on how more capital is generated in practice. Even a maxist analysis admits that goods are generated with labor plus the means of production. This is a very important point.