@pineywoozle ‘s #3WordNote@forthy42 You can also get extremely wealthy from inventing something or writing or creating art, none of which requires exploitation. All of which are required for a healthy society. Capitalism needs regulated but it’s dishonest & simplistic to reduce it like you just did & it dilutes your legitimate argument. There are also still very real class & race barriers in every country, some worse than here, that are as exclusionary as capitalism, that also need to be overcome. @Daojoan
Fabio G.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.
@magitweeter Nope. I’ve personaly seen it done thru hard work and sacrifice. No big wealth, no exploitive distribution. Your ideas are simplistic, jingoistic BS. Selling isn’t automatically exploitive neither is production. @forthy42
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.
@magitweeter I’m an artist, I create beautiful jewelry, if my goal was wealth , there are 1,000s of stores that would purchase them thru direct contact. I choose to focus on creation rather than spending my time contacting more than I do & then having to employ workers to supply them. My cousin, worked hard, bootstrapped a company & invented some VPN software, paid his employees well to produce copies, millions of which were sold at a reasonable price. No exploitation, no wealth funding.
@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.
@magitweeter Selling a piece of jewelry I created that I would then have reproduced by a worker who is paid a good wage isn’t exploitation. It’d be me being compensated for choosing to run a production company rather than focusing the majority of my time being creative. And if you payed attention when you read what I wrote you would know that my cousin specifically made sure his product wasn’t manufactured in an exploitive way. His employees were well paid added note he now helps other creators.
HeavenlyPossumWhy 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?
@HeavenlyPossum Because they didn’t design it & the worth is in part tied to the name of the designer, based on people wanting to support creativity. People who steal designs get paid less per item even by the few people shitty enough to traffic in intellectual theft. When you factor the effort it takes them to find shitty people like themselves to sell to & the fact that tastes change & they’d have to find new designs to steal each season, they’d make less per hour spent. Thanks for playing.
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.
@HeavenlyPossum Not true. If you made an exact copy of a Picasso but were honest & put your name on it because you “did the labor” to copy it, would you expect to be able to sell it for the same price as the original which has value as part of a body of work by created by an individual. You’d soon find out that your paint by numbers isn’t equal to Picasso’s original because the majority of people understand that creativity takes work in and of itself and they want to reward it.
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?
@HeavenlyPossum My creative work even when the labor is done by others is original to me. I created the value. The value isn’t in the hammering, it’s in knowing what to hammer, who to sell it to and how to create the next piece in a body of work. The creativity is the value & that’s tied to me, and the massive amount of work I did to get to the point of creation. As I said
if they want to do all the work I do & have done to get to that point, they can receive the same compensation.
if they want to do all the work I do & have done to get to that point, they can receive the same compensation.
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.
@HeavenlyPossum They do it because their labor is a fraction of what’s required to produce stuff and they understand that. A well regulated consumer economy rewards them equitably. We need better regulation and taxation. Someone earning money shipping their product over public roads should be taxed more because they use more of the common goods to earn their money. Workers don’t create or source materials or pay to distribute the product.
If workers don’t create or source materials or pay to distribute the product, then who does?
@HeavenlyPossum Is that a serious question? The owner/creator who employed them does, which is why the owner/creator gets more of the revenue from the goods. . Enjoy the rest of your day but I’m done.
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.
@HeavenlyPossum Nice word salad. No one inferred ownership of anyone’s labor. I stated that the worker employed to make copies is compensated for THAT labor but not for the creative labor, the labor implied in getting to the point that they could create something and not for the labor required to sell the thing, none of which they did and don’t deserve compensation for.
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?
@HeavenlyPossum Personally I would make sure they were compensated relative to their contribution. But again this has nothing to do with my point.
How would you calculate the relative value of their contribution?
@HeavenlyPossum Personally I would see that hey were compensated relative to their contribution minus what it took to find buyers, source material, material costs, labor to produce it. It would be their choice to have me incorporate it into an already functioning production and distribution model at a rate we agreed on or to produce it themselves and compensate me for my labor & creativity in creating the idea they built on.
How do you calculate their contribution, and how do you calculate the value of finding buyers, sourcing materials, etc?
@HeavenlyPossum My time would be valued the same way theirs is. My creativity would be valued the same way as well. Like I said equitable. I can’t be any more plain. No one would be exploited. Not them, not me, not the people who purchase the goods.
What’s your formula for calculating the dollar value of your creativity and theirs?
@HeavenlyPossum I said in this situation I would value theirs exactly as I valued mine. Period. That’s the formula. Their work that is the same as mine is valued the same. How old you are and what if anything you have ever created?
Maybe I wasn’t being specific enough again. You said you would value their time the same as yours, their creativity the same as yours—does this mean you would share ownership with them and divide profits evenly between your collaborators, or only that you’d pay equivalent wages if you judged their contribution to be equal to yours?
I was trying to pin you down to a specific formula—how you’d calculate what percentage of all that additional revenue you’d consider yours by virtue of your past labor—precisely there is no objective process for determining wages. Wages are the product of bargaining between unequal parties; it’s an inherently political process.
@HeavenlyPossum No offense but I have answered all your questions repeatedly. I explained how many decades of study creativity takes & that creativity time doesn’t stop when you own the company you still do 80 to a hundred hours to their 40, week in week out even on vacation. You’re trying to figure out how you can make me out to be exploitive. That’s what you’re “trying to pin down” The parties aren’t unequal. You can start your own company any day you want. You can sacrifice for decades.
You’re not exploitive—you don’t, as I understand it, have employees.
@HeavenlyPossum I have in the past. It’s not how I want to spend my time. It makes money for me and them but takes away my time to be creative. I prefer the joy of creation to money. You still haven’t told me your age or what if anything you’ve created.
Earlier, you wrote
> “I explained how many decades of study creativity takes”
Surely, any worker you employ has also spent time and effort developing into a person capable of performing the tasks you assign; do those years generate some sort of bonus for the employer or does the past only assign value to you?
> “that creativity time doesn’t stop when you own the company you still do 80 to a hundred hours to their 40, week in week out even on vacation”
Sounds like good reasons for someone to earn higher wages commensurate to their larger contribution, but not to own the whole effort.
My age and accomplishments are both going to remain mysteries, because I’m not particularly interested in personalizing a conversation about ideas. Sorry!
@HeavenlyPossum I have that same time invested on top of the creative work. You could walk into my studio tomorrow with zero experience & in 20 minutes I could show you how to hit a piece of metal. That’s not you studying design for decades, paying for & attending college & traveling all over the world to study jewelry in person. Studying how to run a business, do taxes, hire etc. The owner doesn’t own the worker, they own the company that they created & continue to manage so there is a job.
The owner owns the right to collect someone else’s revenue and keep most of it. The owner owns the right to stop someone else from working productively.
I don’t know whether to be surprised or not that you’d depict your employees as nothing more than trainable animals or maybe automata.
@HeavenlyPossum It’s not their all their revenue. They collect their part of thru wages. Part of the it goes to supplies, sourcing buyers my past and present labor etc. How is taking my creative effort and not paying me productive not theft? The job of hammering an already designed & cut out earring is a job that anyone can be trained to do in 20 minutes. How would you describe that? I didn’t describe them as trainable animals. I said the job didn’t require skill.
There’s a lot to unpack here, so I’m going to try to go point by point and then go to bed.
> “It’s not their all their revenue.”
Yes it is. They generate it by their labor. You acknowledged this earlier when you noted that, hypothetically, you can’t collect any revenue from the many jewelry stores that wish to stock your jewelry by yourself, and only in cooperation with other workers. People should own the product of their own labor.
> “They collect their part of thru wages.”
Yes, wages are what’s left over after owners have taken their cut, like a feudal lord leaving his serfs a share of the crop they grew and harvested.
> “Part of the it goes to supplies, sourcing buyers my past and present labor etc.”
Nothing I’ve said would preclude workers, including you, from using the revenue they generated to pay costs.
> “How is taking my creative effort and not paying me productive not theft?”
I never once suggested you shouldn’t be remunerated for your creative labor. I said your creative labor—or any act of labor—cannot confer on you a right to own the entire collaborative effort. I’m happy to explain the distinction between you getting paid and you owning their labor, if I haven’t been clear.
(PS: you can’t steal an idea. Ideas are non-rivalrous. If you share an idea with me, you still have that idea. We both now have it! The state might issue you a private monopoly to collect rents from the sale or use of that idea, but I can’t “steal” an idea from you anymore than knowing your name would mean I “stole” it from you.
> “The job of hammering an already designed & cut out earring is a job that anyone can be trained to do in 20 minutes. How would you describe that?”
Labor.
> “I didn’t describe them as trainable animals. I said the job didn’t require skill.”
All labor is skilled labor.
@HeavenlyPossum They do own the product of their labor. Their wages are part of the total after the creator is paid for creating the design abd the means of production, ie sourcing, generating buyers and getting the goods to the buyer. The laborer is paid for his or her labor but not paid for having created it or done any of the other stuff because the haven’t done the other stuff or created it or even created a place to do the labor. Your arguments are false and sad. Let’s be done talking.
False and sad 😞
Adrian Riskin 
@HeavenlyPossum @Pineywoozle they blocked me over this same question after going straight to "what about the rapists?" after I said they couldn't get rich without courts and cops to enforce their putative intellectual property rights. This is one touchy artist!
“What about the rapists” wait until they hear about cops