Mastodawn

HeavenlyPossum 10h ago

Capitalism is a system in which some people, called capitalists, own the power to permit or deny other people permission to labor productively.

You’ve probably encountered a version of this definition that goes something like “private ownership of the means of production.” And that version isn’t bad, but it makes it seem like the thing that really matters is “the means of production,” the stuff we use to make more stuff. But what really matters in capitalism is that power to grant or withhold permission to others to labor productively.

Capitalism is, at its heart, not about stuff. It’s about social relationships and it’s about *sabotage*.

1/

HeavenlyPossum 10h ago

Capitalism is unique among exploitive economic systems in that its exploitation is purely economic.

In most other exploitive systems, exploitation is extra-economic. This means that exploiters possess some legal rights to take directly from their subordinates through the direct threat of violence. Enslavers might possess the legal right to torture of murder enslaved people to force them to labor; feudal lords might possess the right to demand rents, labor service, and fees directly from their tenants.

But capitalists possess no formal, legal right to directly threaten their subordinates in order to exploit them. Instead, capitalists use purely a economic means, and that is *sabotage*.

2/

clara "parasocialist" sparks 8h ago

We have economist Thorstein Veblen to thank for his insight into the social relationship at the heart of capitalism.

Veblen understood that there were two sides to capitalist economic production, which he named “industry” and “business.” The goal of industry, the workers actually making things, is to quickly and efficiently meet the needs of the public. The goal of business, the capitalists who own industry, is to generate profits. Business generates profits, Veblen realized, by interfering with industry—a process he labeled “industrial sabotage.”

People who have their needs quickly and efficiently met don’t have much of a reason to keep buying things, or to pay high prices for the things they want. So business—capitalists—need to make sure people do not have their needs quickly and efficiently met.

3/

HeavenlyPossum 9h ago

This plays out in all sorts of ways that you’ve probably encountered in your daily life. Sometimes, capitalists sell products that are deliberately intended to wear out quickly and require frequent replacement, a tactic known as “planned obsolescence.” Sometimes, a product is deliberately made worse in order to sell the same product at multiple price points, a tactic known as “product crippling.” Sometimes, capitalists deliberately destroy useable products they failed to sell at their desired price rather than allowing them to be sold at a cheaper price.

I just came across this Bloomberg article today about capitalists attempting to offload their investments in solar power production in Spain because they accidentally made solar power too abundant. They did too good a job; there’s simply too much cheap, clean electricity. People’s needs are being met. They can’t turn a profit.

https://archive.is/uzAwG

4/

HeavenlyPossum 9h ago

The most pervasive and important form of sabotage, though, is unemployment.

Human beings need to eat. When left to our own devices, we tend to feed ourselves through our own labor, usually in voluntary cooperation with other people. We hunt, gather, fish, farm, or, more likely these days, labor to meet the needs of people who do produce food in return for the food they produce.

But we can only feed ourselves when we either have unimpeded access to the means of laboring productively, or when we have *permission* from people who own access to those means.

When we don’t have either unimpeded access or permission from owners, we die—not because we lack the capability to labor productively, but because we’re prevented from doing so.

5/

HeavenlyPossum 9h ago

Most of us do not have unimpeded access to the means of laboring productively. This is because virtually everything in the world that could be used productively is already owned by someone else—a capitalist. Farmland, forests, mines, factories, and all the classical industrial “means of production,” but also everything from the schools in which we might learn how to labor to the very ideas about how to labor in particular ways, hidden being intellectual property claims.

And, of course, the production of money and credit, the process by which we might pool our resources together if we were free to do so.

So instead of laboring freely, we must gain permission from owners. Without that permission, we die—from hunger, or disease, or starvation. Or we live miserable lives of enforced precarity on the margins of society. In short, we are *sabotaged,* prevented from laboring and living as we might choose.

6/

HeavenlyPossum 9h ago

Medieval peasants might labor all year to produce a harvest and then turn over a share of it, each autumn, to their feudal lord as “rent.”

Workers under capitalism do much the same, working to generate incomes from customers. But instead of keeping that income and paying a share as rent—which would make the process obvious—those workers don’t collect any of that income. Instead, the capitalist owner collects all of it and then doles some back out as wages, making it appear as if the workers’ income comes from the capitalist.

But the end result is the same: workers labor productively, generate something of value, and pay a share of it to an owner in return for permission to remain alive a bit longer. Capitalism just relies on a titanic bait-and-switch to hide these rent payments.

7/

HeavenlyPossum 9h ago

Building on Veblen’s work, economists Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan set out to discover whether there is an optimal rate of sabotage in capitalism that maximizes capitalist profits.

If capitalists gave every worker permission to labor, then workers would have little incentive to turn over their revenues in return for a fraction back as wages. But if capitalists gave no worker permission to labor, then there would be no economic activity to extract rents from. So, capitalists must aim for an ideal unemployment rate that puts some fear into workers while still maximizing productive output.

And that’s just what Bichler and Nitzan found! In the US, at least, an unemployment rate of around 6-7% corresponds to capitalists capturing their highest share of national income:

https://bnarchives.net/id/eprint/760/

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HeavenlyPossum 9h ago

Sometimes, capitalists just tell us this explicitly and verbatim. Back in 2023, an Australian capitalist advocated for a higher unemployment rate—he wanted it to grow from 3.7% to something closer to 6%—to humble workers whom he believed had grown too arrogant and demanding in their relationships with capitalists.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66803279

We don’t even need those fancy graphs by Bichler and Nitzan! Sometimes capitalists just come right out and say it! The point of unemployment is to discipline workers. It is to *sabotage* their ability to labor productively so that other workers can see how unpleasant it is to be denied permission to labor productively. In this way, those workers will be more obedient and more willing to pay their rents.

9/

Tim Gurner apologises over call for more unemployment to fix worker attitudes

Tim Gurner backtracks over his call for "pain in the economy" to remind people they are lucky to have jobs.

BBC News

HeavenlyPossum 9h ago

This is what I mean when I say that capitalism is a system in which some people own the power to permit or deny others to labor productively.

Individual capitalists are often abusive, but they rarely own the formal right to directly extract wealth from subordinates, the way feudal lords did. Instead, they must exploit through purely economic means alone—their ownership of property (physical, financial, intellectual, and whatever) that allows them to allow or deny others to labor productively.

While any one capitalist might not have that much power over you, they do, as a class, effectively own your life.

I’ll close with this passage from Friedrich Engels, who was problematic for all sorts of reasons I won’t get into here but did summarize this particular dynamic really well:

“The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class. For him the matter is unchanged at bottom, and if this semblance of liberty necessarily gives him some real freedom on the one hand, it entails on the other the disadvantage that no one guarantees him a subsistence, he is in danger of being repudiated at any moment by his master, the bourgeoisie, and left to die of starvation, if the bourgeoisie ceases to have an interest in his employment, his existence.”

10/end

Tall Dave 7h ago

@HeavenlyPossum

The other con is the idea that anybody could start a business and become a capitalist.

If only it was that easy when you aren't rich already.

HeavenlyPossum 7h ago

Exactly.

If you don’t already own capital, then you still have to pay rents to capitalists until you can (hopefully) save up enough to buy ownership of someone else’s labor.

Grumble 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇱7h ago

@HeavenlyPossum

As much as capitalism requires exploitative capitalists, it also requires meek, compliant workers.

To get humble compliance, bosses can either pay us a fair wage for our time and labor, or they can try to humble me and abuse me.

All too often, stupid, or greedy, or pathologic bosses choose the latter instead of the former. And no one kicks their ass and/or quits on the spot. It makes me sad.

We need UBI because we need dignity.

HeavenlyPossum 7h ago

There’s no such thing as a “fair wage” under capitalism. Workers pay rents to capitalists compliantly because capitalists will starve them if those workers do not submit.

Grumble 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇱7h ago

@HeavenlyPossum

"fair" is a subjective word. I guess I meant, "a wage that's enough to keep me from walking away". Pay is to compensate for your time and labor, which are finite, and to compensate you for submitting to the authority of someone else.

Workers could repay their bosses with lumps and bruises if they wanted to. That doesn't pay the rent, but thrashing your boss once a month might make the other 29 days of low pay more tolerable.

Given how workers are sometimes treated, assaults seem rather usual, IMHO.

My point is not that capitalists are not assholes - they mostly are. My point is that workers often seem pretty damn meek about standing up for themselves.

HeavenlyPossum 7h ago

What would happen to a worker who beat their boss (who is likely just another worker)?

Grumble 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇱7h ago

@HeavenlyPossum

Oh, the chain of command utterly forbids and cannot tolerate workers being violent in the workplace. If anyone gets violent, they are fired and a mark is applied to their PERMANENT RECORD.

I do not advocate actual violence. I advocate sabre rattling violence so that the wise capitalists stop being such assholes.

I notice that few politicians talk about North Korea and regime change there much anymore. I think that's likely because North Korea has nukes and delivery vehicles.

No one is actually nuking cites, though. But the threat is clear, and so North Korea is not fucked with as much as, say, Iran.

Strikes, sabotage, and violence are all potential actions that modern capitalists seem to think are impossible today. I'd like them to rethink that position and act accordingly.

zapradon 4h ago

@grumble209 @HeavenlyPossum
Heh, they also don't want to direct attention to North Korea, because it, like other communist states, is advancing so rapidly that it's embarrassing the capitaiist class and they don't dare attack it because, as you pointed out, they have nukes. :)

Melissa B 4h ago

@HeavenlyPossum Great thread, thank you. My thoughts on this stuff are much fuzzier than yours, but I will try to articulate something I notice - capitalism only wants us working *for it.* All the "dignity of work" and "nobody wants to work anymore" rhetoric only applies to the work people do for/within the system. Work that happens outside of that - e.g. things like cooking a meal from scratch, growing some of your own food, or even walking/cycling to get somewhere instead of driving - is presented as a bad kind of work, and the antidote for it, helpfully provided for you by the system, is "convenience." Capitalism effectively tells people "Give all your labor and time to us, and we will sell you "labor-saving devices" and "convenience foods" in compensation."

I dunno, since capitalism started being a thing, productivity has never been higher. We're producing more products and extracting more resources faster than any point in history, and it shows no sign of slowing down. So it feels a little... "off" to say that capitalists are stopping workers from being productive. You're undeniably correct; I just think there might be a better way of framing it that doesn't give labor implicit value.

Capitalists do, after all, unemploy the "workers" (people) who are not productive.

zapradon 4h ago

@cy @HeavenlyPossum
Productivity is *much* higher in communist states. "High" for capitalists is a lot lower. So is development. That's why they blow so much money on trying to suppress them.

Productivity isn't a good thing, is what I'm saying. Sometimes it's good to relax, and be unproductive. No reason to convert the entire planet into paperclips.

GhostOnTheHalfShell 6h ago

@HeavenlyPossum

Oh yes, that guy who is instantly unlikable.

They are so confident at this stage that they say the quiet part out loud more and more.

Casey Ydenberg 6h ago

@HeavenlyPossum He also has a fucking stupid haircut.

@HeavenlyPossum Every central bank that uses inflation targets to set monetary policy is doing this by default. A large share of the blame for this ugly consensus falls to a particularly nasty, racist far-right politician from #AotearoaNZ named Don Brash, who introduced it as a package of neoliberal reforms in the '90s.

We're profoundly sorry for unleashing his broken economic thinking on the rest of the industrialised world. We still have to contend with his reckons here from time to time, not to mention the long-term damage he and his counterparts did (and continue to do) to our country and society.

@HeavenlyPossum Which is why the share market usually reacts positively to an increase in unemployment. The more desperate drones out there, the less the owners can pay them and the more profit they can make as a result.

zapradon 4h ago

@HeavenlyPossum What is more, as more wealth accrues to the wealthy and away from the rest of us, the need to produce is falling. If you can't sell more widgets, you just raise your prices and sell less widgets. We just can't afford capitalism anymore.

Poloniousmonk 9h ago

@HeavenlyPossum

Interesting thought experiment: do it the other way around.

Imagine a town that needs a school. I, the local rich guy, pay $1mil/yr for permission to open a school. I build a school building and seek teachers.

50 teachers each pay me $40k/yr for permission to teach in my school. Now I get $2mil back on $1mil + construction costs.

1500 students pay $5k each to attend school. Each teacher has 30 students and gets $150k on a $40k investment, leaving $110k for classroom supplies and living expenses.

HeavenlyPossum 9h ago

What?

Poloniousmonk 9h ago

@HeavenlyPossum

??

I don't follow your "what?"

??

You were deconstructing capitalism. I thought it a fun place to throw in an example of a different way to work the system. I'm not advocating for this or anything. It's just unusual. This is capitalism turned on its head. I thought you might enjoy the brainteasing aspect of it. No matter. Sorry if I somehow offended.

Edit: Jeez, sorry if I broke your train of thought. I was enjoying this thread. Sorry for dropping a log over those tracks. Please continue :)

RyeNCode 🇨🇦7h ago

@Uair @HeavenlyPossum
This reminds me of some of the co-op, collective and artist/craftsperson, salon communal market spaces in our town.
Usually they are "owned" by one (or small incorporation) entrepreneur. They themselves usually have a seed stall, or the major portion of the floor space while vendors negotiate for floor/shelf space.
A portion of the sales of their products/services goes to their "rent" and handling the transactions.
Since there are several in town of various kinds, I'm inclined to believe that in at least those various industries and this location, it works well.
Kinda like a local install brick & mortar Etsy.

Yes, private schools are a thing. Where does each student get the $5k to pay for it? Someone along the line is paying for it, and it ain't the local rich guy who owns the building.

Also he didn't build a school building. He hired construction workers to build it.

That (I think) is what's being talked about here. The construction workers weren't free to build a school, until the guy who owned it allowed them to, similarly the teachers weren't allowed to teach, and the students weren't allowed to study. The local rich guy decides who gets to do any of that.

zapradon 3h ago

@Uair @HeavenlyPossum
After shelling out $100k or more for their teaching degrees, they really can't afford to rent your classrooms. lol

bloomtime!7h ago

@HeavenlyPossum yeah I think the part where this has changed in the last couple of decades is the decrease in value of what is being produced. Not just that the stuff is cheap (or in fact the labor itself is the demeaning of other aspects of life ie advertising, AI), but the increase in bullshit jobs, where sometimes the value is purely the status you give the employer by appearing to work for them, or similar factors. So the labor itself is shown to be less meaningful to the laborer and the system becomes more transparently broken.

HeavenlyPossum 7h ago

@thesquirrelfish

I suspect this is because of market consolidation by an increasingly small number of super-wealthy capitalists, making it harder for other capitalists to enter markets and collect rents off production.

That’s why, I think, there’s such explosive growth in the scam economy, from crypto and NFTs to prediction markets to straight-up scamming.

bloomtime!7h ago

@HeavenlyPossum yes, although I think that is part of the ROI on capital/investment is breaking down. As money accumulates in fewer hands there are fewer people to get money from and they need fewer products. So if you are trying to use money to make money, you have to convince a few people with a lot of money that you have something of value.
So the industry has to convince rich investors and decision makers more than doing anything. Crypto and NFTs obviously but marketing/advertising, buying politicians, AI, SaaS, tech companies with decades long runways before profitability, rocketry, finance innovations/scams and a lot of similar industries are in there. Someone recently asked me how much something in that list was worth, and I said, well it's like old art - it's worth what someone is willing to pay for it, but the valuation no longer has any basis but what rich investors want it to be.

@HeavenlyPossum I was just reading about Google making search worse, because people were getting answers too quickly. Meaning they couldn't push as many ads at them. So they intentionally hide the good stuff to keep you on longer.

HeavenlyPossum 8h ago

@agreeable_landfall

Excellent example of product crippling.