4 ms·

Pretty galling that we have one of the most prominent capitalist cheerleaders out here telling us we need more friends and money when they have such an outsized

Pretty galling that we have one of the most prominent capitalist cheerleaders out here telling us we need more friends and money when they have such an outsized influence on the reasons we have neither.

patrickmcnamara 3y ago
Could you explain what you mean?
- wharvle 3y ago
  I'd suppose it's a reference to rich people having far more influence on public and economic policy than the working class, and those policies in turn having a substantial effect both on how people interact and who has money, especially when examined over a decades-long time horizon.
  - theGnuMe 3y ago
    True but the tools and approach is all there. Just have to community build and develop a super PAC.
- stanleykm 3y ago
  I’ll do my best but I wont pretend to be the best person to talk about this. The world we inhabit (and by we I mean most of us who are workers and make a living by selling our labor) isn’t really for us. We are cogs in the machine that is essentially propping up the lifestyle of the capitalist class. The world is for them. Those of us here on Hacker News are closer to being human than say a Janitor and our status affords us more luxuries but we are still just machines even if some of us might become human. To mitigate the risk of the workers taking too much power there has been a lot of effort spent atomizing workers and smashing unions over the years. Combine that with social media that seems to have the (probably unintentional) side effect of making us all hate each other we dont tend to have many friends these days. Money is more obviously just stolen from us by the capital owning class. Directly through government intervention and wage theft, and more subtly through what Marx calls surplus value.
  - its_ethan 3y ago
    Surplus value is an essential piece to any of this actually working - if you don't have surplus value, there's no signal to inform on where our collective energy/ resources should be focused. If there's a lot of surplus value in building a chair, that's a sign that we need more chairs. If you can't generate surplus value with the 7th coffee shop in the same city block, that's a sign there's too many coffee shops. Any system that aims to remove surplus value removes this signal, which leaves you with a centrally controlled economy/system - and those tend to not only never work (at basically any scale) but tend to make everyone's life worse and worse over time and/or fail catastrophically. Also, for what it's worth, I think you might be projecting on to some assumptions you have about janitorial work.
    - stanleykm 3y ago
      Surplus value can continue to exist but as it is today it goes directly to the capitalist class via stock buybacks and dividends, rather than back to the workers.
    - calf 3y ago
      There is no actual argument that distributed greediness via profit signaling leads to the right social system, either. At best you have a heuristic, just like how many algorithms are heuristics. You can't argue heuristics as if they are the absolute truth.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    One thing I can never understand about people who work in tech complaining about Marxist labor exploitation: why don't you start your own business? I've had multiple coworkers who are into this leftist stuff, and I know they have orders of magnitude more money than it takes to buy the capital equipment needed to run the exact business they work for, given that they've been making a tech salary for years and computers are incredibly cheap. By their own estimate, they have the skills and understanding necessary to create the product themselves. So why don't they do it? My intuition is that the missing "surplus value" exists within the answer to that question.
zer00eyz 3y ago
Im sick of the "capitalism sucks" undercurrent here. 1. Show me the system proven to be "better". The one you're willing to live under. Take your time I'll wait. 2. Even in capitalism you have choice. Go work for a union shop. Go work for a collective ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation ). If you dont like those, start your own company. I feel like this article is targeting a generation... Its message is mixed, but the conclusion is spot on. You need money, friends, and a thick skin/patience (and all that is hard work, on top of your job).
- foobiekr 3y ago
  How will we ever find something that sucks less if we aren't honest about the downsides of our current model of capitalism? I don't need to show you something proven to be better to ask that question unless you have some kind of creationist-like belief that all systems have been discovered and tried.
  - zer00eyz 3y ago
    >> we aren't honest about the downsides of our current model of capitalism? 1930's United fruit. I dont think we're gonna argue that they were "good" but their impact was bad in the face of weak governments. In the US we have our 3 branches. We also have Adams 4th branch (jury nullification). There is the 4th estate / first amendment. And then there is corporations. Corporations having some influence on government is good but the US is leaning into too much territory, and Europe too little. Change isn't hard in the US, it's motivating people out of apathy to get it done that is hard. Shockingly most capitalist countries have it easy. There is a famous story about a grocery store and how it killed the USSR: https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When-Boris-Yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-Clear-5759129.php https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When... If you want change it isn't about "honest about the suck" its about motivating me and everyone else to buy into something enough to put down the phone and get off the couch and make that change happen.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Flaws in the current system are still flaws regardless of if there's an alternative on the table. Capitalism does suck but it's not even the system we've got - we've got this weird mix of free and un-free markets that we live under that resembles capitalism on a good day, but more closely resembles anarchy a lot of the time because there aren't government regulations and when there are, there's regulatory capture so the powers that be do what they want and the rest of us just line in their world. We're allowed to complain about the shortcomings of the system we live under and as humans we find connection by finding commonalities with others, even though we may not have a solution for any of the problems. You might be unable to have problems you can't fix, but everyone else has to live with them.

patrickmcnamara 3y ago

Could you explain what you mean?

wharvle 3y ago
I'd suppose it's a reference to rich people having far more influence on public and economic policy than the working class, and those policies in turn having a substantial effect both on how people interact and who has money, especially when examined over a decades-long time horizon.
- theGnuMe 3y ago
  True but the tools and approach is all there. Just have to community build and develop a super PAC.
stanleykm 3y ago
I’ll do my best but I wont pretend to be the best person to talk about this. The world we inhabit (and by we I mean most of us who are workers and make a living by selling our labor) isn’t really for us. We are cogs in the machine that is essentially propping up the lifestyle of the capitalist class. The world is for them. Those of us here on Hacker News are closer to being human than say a Janitor and our status affords us more luxuries but we are still just machines even if some of us might become human. To mitigate the risk of the workers taking too much power there has been a lot of effort spent atomizing workers and smashing unions over the years. Combine that with social media that seems to have the (probably unintentional) side effect of making us all hate each other we dont tend to have many friends these days. Money is more obviously just stolen from us by the capital owning class. Directly through government intervention and wage theft, and more subtly through what Marx calls surplus value.
- its_ethan 3y ago
  Surplus value is an essential piece to any of this actually working - if you don't have surplus value, there's no signal to inform on where our collective energy/ resources should be focused. If there's a lot of surplus value in building a chair, that's a sign that we need more chairs. If you can't generate surplus value with the 7th coffee shop in the same city block, that's a sign there's too many coffee shops. Any system that aims to remove surplus value removes this signal, which leaves you with a centrally controlled economy/system - and those tend to not only never work (at basically any scale) but tend to make everyone's life worse and worse over time and/or fail catastrophically. Also, for what it's worth, I think you might be projecting on to some assumptions you have about janitorial work.
  - stanleykm 3y ago
    Surplus value can continue to exist but as it is today it goes directly to the capitalist class via stock buybacks and dividends, rather than back to the workers.
  - calf 3y ago
    There is no actual argument that distributed greediness via profit signaling leads to the right social system, either. At best you have a heuristic, just like how many algorithms are heuristics. You can't argue heuristics as if they are the absolute truth.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  One thing I can never understand about people who work in tech complaining about Marxist labor exploitation: why don't you start your own business? I've had multiple coworkers who are into this leftist stuff, and I know they have orders of magnitude more money than it takes to buy the capital equipment needed to run the exact business they work for, given that they've been making a tech salary for years and computers are incredibly cheap. By their own estimate, they have the skills and understanding necessary to create the product themselves. So why don't they do it? My intuition is that the missing "surplus value" exists within the answer to that question.

zer00eyz 3y ago

Im sick of the "capitalism sucks" undercurrent here. 1. Show me the system proven to be "better". The one you're willing to live under. Take your time I'll wait. 2. Even in capitalism you have choice. Go work for a union shop. Go work for a collective ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation ). If you dont like those, start your own company. I feel like this article is targeting a generation... Its message is mixed, but the conclusion is spot on. You need money, friends, and a thick skin/patience (and all that is hard work, on top of your job).

foobiekr 3y ago
How will we ever find something that sucks less if we aren't honest about the downsides of our current model of capitalism? I don't need to show you something proven to be better to ask that question unless you have some kind of creationist-like belief that all systems have been discovered and tried.
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  >> we aren't honest about the downsides of our current model of capitalism? 1930's United fruit. I dont think we're gonna argue that they were "good" but their impact was bad in the face of weak governments. In the US we have our 3 branches. We also have Adams 4th branch (jury nullification). There is the 4th estate / first amendment. And then there is corporations. Corporations having some influence on government is good but the US is leaning into too much territory, and Europe too little. Change isn't hard in the US, it's motivating people out of apathy to get it done that is hard. Shockingly most capitalist countries have it easy. There is a famous story about a grocery store and how it killed the USSR: https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When-Boris-Yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-Clear-5759129.php https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When... If you want change it isn't about "honest about the suck" its about motivating me and everyone else to buy into something enough to put down the phone and get off the couch and make that change happen.
fragmede 3y ago
Flaws in the current system are still flaws regardless of if there's an alternative on the table. Capitalism does suck but it's not even the system we've got - we've got this weird mix of free and un-free markets that we live under that resembles capitalism on a good day, but more closely resembles anarchy a lot of the time because there aren't government regulations and when there are, there's regulatory capture so the powers that be do what they want and the rest of us just line in their world. We're allowed to complain about the shortcomings of the system we live under and as humans we find connection by finding commonalities with others, even though we may not have a solution for any of the problems. You might be unable to have problems you can't fix, but everyone else has to live with them.