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.
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”).
JA Westenberg
@pineywoozle ‘s #3WordNote
Fabio G.
HeavenlyPossum