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> Capitalism will make people stop working and be less productive? If anything we worry about the opposite problem. Well, unemployment is kind of a requirement

> Capitalism will make people stop working and be less productive? If anything we worry about the opposite problem. Well, unemployment is kind of a requirement of capitalism. You can't have the labor force calling the shots, it eats into profits. From the article: > There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. He's being generous here, it's not just that an "army of the unemployed" almost always exists, it's a goal. Captains of industry in the current low-unemployment environment have been saying the quiet part out loud, that we need to increase unemployment. There's generally a target of 5% unemployment, which means capitalism has built-in waste.

drekipus 3y ago
It's not waste unless you think of humans as little units of work, like a resource to be mined. People complaining about a problem doesn't mean it is a problem. I want cheaper milk, I complain about the price of milk, but the price is probably correct and that's for me to grumble about. "Captains of industry" want a pool of unemployed people they can pick from. If the pool is dried then that's fine. It's not a sign that capitalism has failed.
- anyonecancode 3y ago
  I think the implicit argument here is that "capitalism" means "rule by those who own capital." Hence a lack of unemployed people, which would hurt the captains of industry, _would_ be a failure under that definition of "capitalism." If by "capitalism" we merely mean things like a market economy with property rights, then the question would be what to call a system that has this but where workers, rather than captains of industry, have more power? Whatever we want to call _that_ system, it doesn't currently exist, and we've seen that any moves in that direction are very strongly resisted (c.f. return to office policies driven by captains of industry freaking out).
  - esarbe 3y ago
    Property rights and a market economy are not sufficient for capitalism. For capitalism you also need to leverage the work of others for your own profit, i.e. wage labor. Syndicalism, for example, also allows for private property and a market economy. It's not capitalism, though. Worker exploitation is a core principle of capitalism.
    - drekipus 3y ago
      > Worker exploitation is a core principle of capitalism you can choose not to work. you just have to figure out how to get food and shelter on your own though. you can go into the woods, hunt and fish, and build your own shelter. as long as you're not breaking laws, you'll be fine. If work was owed to the state (or syndicate), then you have no choice (by being part of the state) - so which one is slavery and exploitation?
      - jamilton 3y ago
        >as long as you're not breaking laws, you'll be fine. My expectation is that this would most likely be nearly impossible without money and therefore work, because you can't live on land you don't have the rights to. From a quick search, you can legally camp in national parks in the same spot for up to 2 weeks before you have to move at least 25 miles. And of course, there are legal restrictions on hunting and fishing that (I expect) would be make feeding yourself impractical. But that's besides the point. It's still exploitation even if other options are merely much more difficult/annoying/painful and not impossible.
        drekipus 3y ago
        > It's still exploitation even if other options are merely much more difficult what wouldn't be exploitation, in your estimation? what is the meaning of the word? is me, telling my kids to take out the trash, exploitation? am I being exploited when i feed my kids and put them to bed?
        3y ago
legitster 3y ago
> Well, unemployment is kind of a requirement of capitalism. Says who? The only "requirement of capitalism" is that individuals are allowed to have ownership rights. Outside of a few niche organizations that benefit from economic distress, I think you will find a general S&P 500 consensus that low employment is a good thing for their stock prices. > There's generally a target of 5% unemployment, which means capitalism has built-in waste. That's because, in a free society, we have discovered that it's better to get people new and better jobs than be shackled to a milling machine from childhood.
- kmkemp 3y ago
  Generally speaking, low unemployment leads to the Fed raising rates, the anticipation of which, hurts stock prices.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    And the US politics would be better off if politicians didn't need to worry about their decisions causing the stock markets, and with it people's pensions or healthcare, to tumble. 401k, HSAs etc are the stranglehold on US politics.
- thiagoharry 3y ago
  > Says who? The only "requirement of capitalism" is that individuals are allowed to have ownership rights. Outside of a few niche organizations that benefit from economic distress, I think you will find a general S&P 500 consensus that low employment is a good thing for their stock prices. If unemployment did not exist, the capitalist class would have no power to make workers work harder using the threat of losing their jobs. Of course, very high unemployment is not good for capitalism, nobody was arguing this. But very low unemployment below some threshold is also bad. Marx explained this, but if you do not believe him, capitalists themselves and their theorists say exactly the same thing, but with more gentle and less direct words: https://www.investopedia.com/insights/downside-low-unemployment/ https://www.investopedia.com/insights/downside-low-unemploym...
  - 3y ago
marcosdumay 3y ago
> unemployment is kind of a requirement of capitalism If you decide to define "capitalism" as cronyism, yeah, the things cronists demand are requirements.
- wredue 3y ago
  Do you have an example of capitalism that isn’t cronyism? Even regulated capitalism is clearly cronyism.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    That really depends on how you define "capitalism".
enkid 3y ago
Every system has built in waste. If you have no waste, you have no slack room, which means when a system faces a crisis.
- fineIllregister 3y ago
  Labor doesn't operate like that. If we wake up one day and suddenly need a ton of labor, we don't need idle worker. We can reassign active labor, like in World War II. Also, it's weird to casually call people becoming homeless and starving and dying due to lack of work "slack". I'm sure the people desperate for money see that as a crisis more important than whatever abstract system crisis you are imagining.
  - Theodores 3y ago
    The 60's were an era of labour shortage in the UK. Recently some British towns had a labour shortage, such as Reading. This means that garbage collection jobs pay well, which is a good thing for those that want to work and be home in time to collect the kids. A labour market should have people dropping out for having babies, going to education, sickness, looking after elders of the family, going on adventures and self improvement, for example people that want to write their own app/book.
    - fineIllregister 3y ago
      People who are not actively looking for work are not included in employment numbers (at least in the US). People voluntarily taking time away from working are not the reserve army of labor that our policies create to suppress worker power.
      - Theodores 3y ago
        Fair point, although I found in the discussion that zero percent unemployment was considered bad, whereas, as I see it, there are always people dropping in and out of the labour market. My point was that not everyone works all the time.
brightball 3y ago
Economics always win. If the labor supply increases, new enterprises will be able to hire and grow. This will shrink the labor supply and increase the price of labor. The only time there are massive shifts are when some sizeable factor creates a disruption. Sometimes that’s technology advancement. Other times it’s a policy change due to government intervention. The area where I live used to be the textile capital of the world until a policy change shifted all of it overseas and gutted the entire area. And now that same area is thriving after years of being destitute. Old mills converted to fancy apartments. Old train tracks used to ship product converted to bike trails. Thriving tech community. It ebbs and flows. But nobody making centralized decisions would have made the choices that led to it.
- Retric 3y ago
  Economics doesn’t guarantee absolute efficiency just a reasonable approximation of efficiency. Moderate unemployment is one such inefficiency, but so is misallocated labor. A worker moving to a higher paying job is hypothetically a more optimal allocation of resources because they can only be paid more if they are creating more value. However, the real world is messy and therefore the price signaling around pay isn’t perfect just as stock pricing isn’t perfect either… The bizarre thing is in practice capitalism works so well despite these issues even before you consider government intervention, monopolies, incentives misalignment etc. However at some point it’s less about the system than the people operating it.
  - pydry 3y ago
    >The bizarre thing is in practice capitalism works so well Does it? It's exacerbating environmental destruction, it creates all manner of bullshit jobs that are an epic waste of human potential and it has created a massive underclass who can't even afford the roof over their head. I dont think this economic system will be looked upon fondly in 500 years any more than we're impressed with the divine right of kings.
    - fallingknife 3y ago
      Compare with the USSR where there was minimal environmental destruction, no bullshit bureaucratic jobs, and of course, no poor people.
losvedir 3y ago
I think worth noting 5% unemployment doesn't necessarily mean an "army of the unemployed", by which I take you to mean a sliver of downtrodden persistently unemployed people. It's a metric taken by sampling the population and asking if they're looking for a job at that moment. It could equally be every worker looking for a job 2.5 weeks out of the year. It's obviously somewhere in between those extremes but picks up a lot of the latter as seasonal workers shifting to where there's demand.
- thescriptkiddie 3y ago
  Engels' concept of the reserve army of labor does not refer to a specific group of persistently unemployed people, but to the idea that there must always be some significant number of people who are unemployed. In other words, a statistical unemployment rate of 0% is not possible under capitalism. This is simply because if there was 0% unemployment, it would be impossible for businesses to hire anyone without poaching from another business. According to the law of supply and demand this would result in wages rising rapidly and without bound, much as the price of bread does during a famine, until it was impossible for businesses to make any profit.
  - jlawson 3y ago
    The only system that can ever have literally 0% unemployment is slavery. If humans have choice, some will always choose to quit their jobs on any given day. So the situation you're describing is nonsensical; it's incoherent to try to extrapolate what it would mean because the premises are incoherent.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - pydry 3y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment This explains it better. Milton Friedman's "natural rate" of unemployment is basically "the rate capitalists are gunning for" in an attempt to suppress wages. Quite a bit below full.
lobocinza 3y ago
If you're worried about unemployment you should be against minimum wages.
roguas 3y ago
> Well, unemployment is kind of a requirement of capitalism. You can't have the labor force calling the shots, it eats into profits. This is internally conflicting. Profits is the required thing it seems - not unemployment.

drekipus 3y ago

It's not waste unless you think of humans as little units of work, like a resource to be mined. People complaining about a problem doesn't mean it is a problem. I want cheaper milk, I complain about the price of milk, but the price is probably correct and that's for me to grumble about. "Captains of industry" want a pool of unemployed people they can pick from. If the pool is dried then that's fine. It's not a sign that capitalism has failed.

anyonecancode 3y ago
I think the implicit argument here is that "capitalism" means "rule by those who own capital." Hence a lack of unemployed people, which would hurt the captains of industry, _would_ be a failure under that definition of "capitalism." If by "capitalism" we merely mean things like a market economy with property rights, then the question would be what to call a system that has this but where workers, rather than captains of industry, have more power? Whatever we want to call _that_ system, it doesn't currently exist, and we've seen that any moves in that direction are very strongly resisted (c.f. return to office policies driven by captains of industry freaking out).
- esarbe 3y ago
  Property rights and a market economy are not sufficient for capitalism. For capitalism you also need to leverage the work of others for your own profit, i.e. wage labor. Syndicalism, for example, also allows for private property and a market economy. It's not capitalism, though. Worker exploitation is a core principle of capitalism.
  - drekipus 3y ago
    > Worker exploitation is a core principle of capitalism you can choose not to work. you just have to figure out how to get food and shelter on your own though. you can go into the woods, hunt and fish, and build your own shelter. as long as you're not breaking laws, you'll be fine. If work was owed to the state (or syndicate), then you have no choice (by being part of the state) - so which one is slavery and exploitation?
    - jamilton 3y ago
      >as long as you're not breaking laws, you'll be fine. My expectation is that this would most likely be nearly impossible without money and therefore work, because you can't live on land you don't have the rights to. From a quick search, you can legally camp in national parks in the same spot for up to 2 weeks before you have to move at least 25 miles. And of course, there are legal restrictions on hunting and fishing that (I expect) would be make feeding yourself impractical. But that's besides the point. It's still exploitation even if other options are merely much more difficult/annoying/painful and not impossible.
      - drekipus 3y ago
        > It's still exploitation even if other options are merely much more difficult what wouldn't be exploitation, in your estimation? what is the meaning of the word? is me, telling my kids to take out the trash, exploitation? am I being exploited when i feed my kids and put them to bed?
        3y ago

legitster 3y ago

> Well, unemployment is kind of a requirement of capitalism. Says who? The only "requirement of capitalism" is that individuals are allowed to have ownership rights. Outside of a few niche organizations that benefit from economic distress, I think you will find a general S&P 500 consensus that low employment is a good thing for their stock prices. > There's generally a target of 5% unemployment, which means capitalism has built-in waste. That's because, in a free society, we have discovered that it's better to get people new and better jobs than be shackled to a milling machine from childhood.

kmkemp 3y ago
Generally speaking, low unemployment leads to the Fed raising rates, the anticipation of which, hurts stock prices.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  And the US politics would be better off if politicians didn't need to worry about their decisions causing the stock markets, and with it people's pensions or healthcare, to tumble. 401k, HSAs etc are the stranglehold on US politics.
thiagoharry 3y ago
> Says who? The only "requirement of capitalism" is that individuals are allowed to have ownership rights. Outside of a few niche organizations that benefit from economic distress, I think you will find a general S&P 500 consensus that low employment is a good thing for their stock prices. If unemployment did not exist, the capitalist class would have no power to make workers work harder using the threat of losing their jobs. Of course, very high unemployment is not good for capitalism, nobody was arguing this. But very low unemployment below some threshold is also bad. Marx explained this, but if you do not believe him, capitalists themselves and their theorists say exactly the same thing, but with more gentle and less direct words: https://www.investopedia.com/insights/downside-low-unemployment/ https://www.investopedia.com/insights/downside-low-unemploym...
- 3y ago

marcosdumay 3y ago

> unemployment is kind of a requirement of capitalism If you decide to define "capitalism" as cronyism, yeah, the things cronists demand are requirements.

wredue 3y ago
Do you have an example of capitalism that isn’t cronyism? Even regulated capitalism is clearly cronyism.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  That really depends on how you define "capitalism".

enkid 3y ago

Every system has built in waste. If you have no waste, you have no slack room, which means when a system faces a crisis.

fineIllregister 3y ago
Labor doesn't operate like that. If we wake up one day and suddenly need a ton of labor, we don't need idle worker. We can reassign active labor, like in World War II. Also, it's weird to casually call people becoming homeless and starving and dying due to lack of work "slack". I'm sure the people desperate for money see that as a crisis more important than whatever abstract system crisis you are imagining.
- Theodores 3y ago
  The 60's were an era of labour shortage in the UK. Recently some British towns had a labour shortage, such as Reading. This means that garbage collection jobs pay well, which is a good thing for those that want to work and be home in time to collect the kids. A labour market should have people dropping out for having babies, going to education, sickness, looking after elders of the family, going on adventures and self improvement, for example people that want to write their own app/book.
  - fineIllregister 3y ago
    People who are not actively looking for work are not included in employment numbers (at least in the US). People voluntarily taking time away from working are not the reserve army of labor that our policies create to suppress worker power.
    - Theodores 3y ago
      Fair point, although I found in the discussion that zero percent unemployment was considered bad, whereas, as I see it, there are always people dropping in and out of the labour market. My point was that not everyone works all the time.

brightball 3y ago

Economics always win. If the labor supply increases, new enterprises will be able to hire and grow. This will shrink the labor supply and increase the price of labor. The only time there are massive shifts are when some sizeable factor creates a disruption. Sometimes that’s technology advancement. Other times it’s a policy change due to government intervention. The area where I live used to be the textile capital of the world until a policy change shifted all of it overseas and gutted the entire area. And now that same area is thriving after years of being destitute. Old mills converted to fancy apartments. Old train tracks used to ship product converted to bike trails. Thriving tech community. It ebbs and flows. But nobody making centralized decisions would have made the choices that led to it.

Retric 3y ago
Economics doesn’t guarantee absolute efficiency just a reasonable approximation of efficiency. Moderate unemployment is one such inefficiency, but so is misallocated labor. A worker moving to a higher paying job is hypothetically a more optimal allocation of resources because they can only be paid more if they are creating more value. However, the real world is messy and therefore the price signaling around pay isn’t perfect just as stock pricing isn’t perfect either… The bizarre thing is in practice capitalism works so well despite these issues even before you consider government intervention, monopolies, incentives misalignment etc. However at some point it’s less about the system than the people operating it.
- pydry 3y ago
  >The bizarre thing is in practice capitalism works so well Does it? It's exacerbating environmental destruction, it creates all manner of bullshit jobs that are an epic waste of human potential and it has created a massive underclass who can't even afford the roof over their head. I dont think this economic system will be looked upon fondly in 500 years any more than we're impressed with the divine right of kings.
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    Compare with the USSR where there was minimal environmental destruction, no bullshit bureaucratic jobs, and of course, no poor people.

losvedir 3y ago

I think worth noting 5% unemployment doesn't necessarily mean an "army of the unemployed", by which I take you to mean a sliver of downtrodden persistently unemployed people. It's a metric taken by sampling the population and asking if they're looking for a job at that moment. It could equally be every worker looking for a job 2.5 weeks out of the year. It's obviously somewhere in between those extremes but picks up a lot of the latter as seasonal workers shifting to where there's demand.

thescriptkiddie 3y ago
Engels' concept of the reserve army of labor does not refer to a specific group of persistently unemployed people, but to the idea that there must always be some significant number of people who are unemployed. In other words, a statistical unemployment rate of 0% is not possible under capitalism. This is simply because if there was 0% unemployment, it would be impossible for businesses to hire anyone without poaching from another business. According to the law of supply and demand this would result in wages rising rapidly and without bound, much as the price of bread does during a famine, until it was impossible for businesses to make any profit.
- jlawson 3y ago
  The only system that can ever have literally 0% unemployment is slavery. If humans have choice, some will always choose to quit their jobs on any given day. So the situation you're describing is nonsensical; it's incoherent to try to extrapolate what it would mean because the premises are incoherent.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - pydry 3y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment This explains it better. Milton Friedman's "natural rate" of unemployment is basically "the rate capitalists are gunning for" in an attempt to suppress wages. Quite a bit below full.

lobocinza 3y ago

If you're worried about unemployment you should be against minimum wages.

roguas 3y ago

> Well, unemployment is kind of a requirement of capitalism. You can't have the labor force calling the shots, it eats into profits. This is internally conflicting. Profits is the required thing it seems - not unemployment.