The American dream didn't die.
That makes it sound like a natural event.
Like it was inevitable.
Here's the truth:
It was fucking murdered.
By greedy, unchecked corporations, bought and paid for politicians, and every coked-up asshole on Wall Street.
Inventions and creative work don't spontaneously turn into money. You have to either sell the rights for a lot of money or set up production and distribution channels.
Either way it takes a lot of pre-existing wealth and a partner in the position to exploit others.
Okay. If you'd like to share the details then i'll be willing to concede that invention and creative work can make one wealthy without exploitation.
@Pineywoozle The way this sounds to me is you could have chosen to become wealthy by exploiting people, but you chose to be an artist and forgo wealth.
As for your cousin—i have no idea how a VPN really works, but i understand it's not just some software. It requires significant physical infrastructure for transmitting data, the sort that could in principle get built and run without exploitation but in practice is not.
Good for you and your cousin, but i don't consider this much of a disproof.
@Pineywoozle Such is the perverse beauty of capitalism, that the exploiter can fool themselves that they're not exploitative.
We can disagree endlessly about whether “good” (according to whom?) wages are a sufficient condition for non-exploitation. But in the end, the issue seems to me a lack of consensus, rather than a lack of nuance as you have been saying.
Why would another person, making a jewelry item that is very valuable, consent to receive a wage from you rather than the full value of the jewelry item they made by their labor?
But once you’ve shared the design, that design is not longer exclusive to you. Ideas are nonrivalrous. They can be copied, shared, and distributed to every human being on earth without depriving anyone else their use.
I’m getting the impression that I wasn’t clear with my initial question, which was about why people would accept wages—a fraction of the value they generate—rather than the full value of the work they produce—which you noted is worth thousands (if you can provide enough product to satisfy jewelry store orders.
The whole “Picasso original vs copy” discussion is super interesting but doesn’t seem germane to a situation where you would be literally asking people to copy your design and then sell the resulting jewelry for lots of money.
Why is it that people accept wages rather than the full value of their labor?
Maybe the problem is with how vague I am being. Of course there is tremendous value to the creative labor you have performed in developing your techniques, creating your designs, etc.
But the monetary value of your hypothetical employees’ contribution is “all of that additional revenue” because, without them, you cannot access that additional revenue.
Employees don’t accept a fraction of the monetary value of their labor because it’s fun to get paid a fraction of the revenue they generate; they do it for some other reason.
If workers don’t create or source materials or pay to distribute the product, then who does?
It was a serious question! I’m sorry you’re done. If it’s true that you’re creating materials—presumably metals, maybe precious or semi-precious gems?—it sounds like you’re doing the sort of productive labor that a worker might do for wages, rather than for ownership of the entire collaborative effort.
In fact, it seems to me that no act of labor intrinsically confers ownership of someone else’s labor.
I’m sorry I wasn’t clear.
But the monetary value of that labor, of making copies, is “all of the additional revenue you’re currently forgoing in their absence.” Your creative labor absolutely deserves compensation too! It just doesn’t intrinsically confer ownership of the entire collaborative effort of you and all of the people working alongside you to generate that revenue together.
If one of your employees created an innovation in one of your designs that improved upon it and proved popular enough to generate even higher sales, would you hand over ownership to them? Or does it stay yours forever?
How would you calculate the relative value of their contribution?
How do you calculate their contribution, and how do you calculate the value of finding buyers, sourcing materials, etc?
You could make enough jewelry on your own to stock 1,000s of stores?
So to collect all that revenue, you could only do it through the cooperation of many people contributing their labor?
If that’s the case—if that revenue is only available when someone else labors—it seems like it’s at least as much *their* hard work, and thus not clear why any one person should be able to become wealthier than anyone else participating in that collaborative effort.
But your ability to access that additional revenue depends *entirely* on the presence or absence of their labor, right?
Ie, the value of their contribution is “all of that additional revenue” and the cost of its absence is “all of that additional revenue.” Right?
But you can’t access any of that additional revenue without their labor.
Sure—I’m not denying any of the satisfaction you derive from your jewelry making, or the satisfaction people derive from wearing hand-made jewelry.
Unfortunately, workers can eat satisfaction or intrinsic value, and so we come back to the question of how we apportion the revenue that’s generated by your hypothetical workers, or your cousin’s actual workers.
If we were to start from absolute scratch, and make no a priori assumptions, we might imagine that someone with a good idea and someone else with the labor needed to bring that good idea to fruition might start an equal partnership in which they agree to split the revenue in some free manner. But, instead, we live in a world in which the capitalist firm, with its hierarchy and its control, ensures that workers receive wages worth a fraction of the value of the revenue their labor generates.
Can you collect that revenue without their labor? Earlier, you told me that you couldn’t. It seems that these people are your “employees” rather than your partners by dint of the structure of the capitalist firm, not by some act of nature. If you wanted that revenue and needed their labor, and they wanted that revenue and wanted your designs, it seems like you might create a partnership rather than a hierarchical firm.
Now, in that partnership, maybe you’d all freely agree that your creative labor plus the labor you’re doing to find new buyers, source new materials, etc, is worth greater remuneration. Or maybe not! I’m not prejudging a free and voluntary agreement!
(Workers can’t eat intrinsic value and have no mechanism for turning intrinsic value into food. What they need to eat is *currency* they can exchange for food. I’m trying here to avoid mixing up different senses of “value”).
«Thousands»? For each hour of theirs? Seriously?
Let's say they work a week for you, 40 hours. That means you've done the equivalent of some multiple of 40 thousand hours of work throughout that same week?
That's an absurdity.
You also said «for every hour». That implies some kind of proportionality. Like every hour of their present effort multiplies the value of your past effort rather than adding to it.
I think it's very telling that you value your past effort in the thousands of hours while calling the present effort of laborers “just labor” worth only a fraction of yours.
It makes me suspect that whatever wage you had in mind would not be a “good” wage for their effort.
In my experiences, wages are paid every two weeks or every month, reflecting hours worked during that pay period, not the years before.
Your language reveals that you undervalue the contribution of your laborers relative to yours.
Having someone work for you whose contribution you undervalue is called exploitation.
Precisely the thing you said was unnecessary for building wealth.
Good luck with your enterprises, and may you continue to avoid exploiting others in pursuit of wealth.
JA Westenberg
@pineywoozle ‘s #3WordNote
Fabio G.
HeavenlyPossum
J Lou