MaëlysSteve Ballmer is set to make $1 billion a year for doing nothing | CNN Business
Shower thought: if everyone gives a % of their labour value to the government it’s called taxes and is evil communism. If everyone gives a % of their labour value to an individual it’s called capitalism and is glorious. How does that mental gymnastics work?
squid_slimeWe are capitalist working in feudalist companies
No, you are workers exploited by capitalists.
Unless you are not selling your labour and instead living on the profit derived from the workers, you are not a capitalist. You just have Stockholm syndrome.
It’s a very simple system laid out in Das Kapital and still taught in economics today (at least in the UK):
Aristocrats - people with wealth by virtue of hereditary status (usually as land owners) Capitalists - people who have wealth by virtue of having wealth (i.e. they can invest/speculate) Worker (or Proletariat) - people who have to sell their labour to capitalists or aristocrats Lumpenproletariat - an underclass that has fallen out of society and resort to the black or grey market to survive
To follow up, let’s talk about the names of the system!
Monarchy: a system where an individual has absolute control of the means of production (often, though not always, via birth).
Feudalism: a system where the a wider, though still small, group of people, control the means of production based on land ownership (often, though not always, through an aristocratic class) (fun fact: the Magna Carta changed England from a Monarchy to a feudal state, not democracy).
Capitalism: a system where those with money (i.e. capital) control the means of production. We are here.
Socialism: used interchangeably by both Marx and Lenin with communism (Lenin specifically states the “socialist” in USSR was aspirational, not literal). However, has now come to denote the “transition” period from Capitalism to communism where the workers control the means of production via what Lenin called a “vanguard party” or worker-controlled legislature
Communism: where the means of production are no longer controlled at all with no class divide, legislature, or personal property (note: personal and private property are two different things; no one wants your toothbrush) based on the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.