4 ms·

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.
  - stanleykm 3y ago
    Is being a marxist, in your mind, just whining about stuff and being jealous of the haves?
    - ndriscoll 3y ago
      No, but I think they frequently make the mistake of assuming goods/services have globally defined values. It's possible for both the buyer and seller of something to come out ahead in a deal. The option to start their own business is right in front of them. They even have a group of like-minded individuals with complementary skills that they could form a co-op with. Since they don't do that, obviously they're getting something from being a W-2 worker. It seems to me that they're not accounting for that something when asserting that there's some surplus value they're creating but not capturing. More accurately, that "surplus value" is being traded for whatever it is they get from W-2 work (e.g. a steady buyer for their labor). IIUC Marx says roughly that laborers are beholden to capital owners because they need access to that capital to be able to perform their labor. But lots of programmers/IT people have better equipment at home than their job provides (e.g. multiple large 4k displays, powerful CPUs, plentiful RAM). Many also have hobby homelab or colocated machines that they could easily run a business off of. They don't need access to someone else's capital, but they still sell their labor. It's the same as when people say that geo pay is "fair" because of cost-of-living differences. You're buying something (e.g. living 15 minutes from the ocean in an area with year-round perfect weather and lots of things to do) with that cost of living. Otherwise--obviously--you'd go somewhere else.

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.
- stanleykm 3y ago
  Is being a marxist, in your mind, just whining about stuff and being jealous of the haves?
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    No, but I think they frequently make the mistake of assuming goods/services have globally defined values. It's possible for both the buyer and seller of something to come out ahead in a deal. The option to start their own business is right in front of them. They even have a group of like-minded individuals with complementary skills that they could form a co-op with. Since they don't do that, obviously they're getting something from being a W-2 worker. It seems to me that they're not accounting for that something when asserting that there's some surplus value they're creating but not capturing. More accurately, that "surplus value" is being traded for whatever it is they get from W-2 work (e.g. a steady buyer for their labor). IIUC Marx says roughly that laborers are beholden to capital owners because they need access to that capital to be able to perform their labor. But lots of programmers/IT people have better equipment at home than their job provides (e.g. multiple large 4k displays, powerful CPUs, plentiful RAM). Many also have hobby homelab or colocated machines that they could easily run a business off of. They don't need access to someone else's capital, but they still sell their labor. It's the same as when people say that geo pay is "fair" because of cost-of-living differences. You're buying something (e.g. living 15 minutes from the ocean in an area with year-round perfect weather and lots of things to do) with that cost of living. Otherwise--obviously--you'd go somewhere else.