Do you think the capitalistic system is going to just pay people fairly out of the goodness of the hearts of the ruling class?
How can people be paid the value of their labor while still generating profit? Profit is, by definition, the extraction of surplus labor value. Under capitalism, inherently and definitionally, no member of the working class is ever paid fairly.
No, never even implied that. But in any system we need something that can be exchanged for labor in carrying quantities so we can give more to the people who do the shittiest jobs. Whatever system you come up with, it’s not going to work without money.
If a medium of exchange for labor is indeed necessary, I’d say it should be measured in labor hours. We live finite lives, measured in minutes. A minute of your life is worth as much as a minute of mine, wouldn’t you say?
I would have no inherent problem with a system that tokenizes labor hours in some way. The problem is private ownership of the means of production and profit itself.
Untill you realize that there are a lot of kinds of work and solutions them into three groups is nooit fair to a lot of them either. You can keep cutting it up in smaller equivalents, but in the end what you’ll have is basically money.
That’s fine if you believe that. I don’t really believe that we need money, but as long as the means of production remain socialized, private profit remains impossible, unjustifiable heirarchies are dismantled, and decisions are made through direct democracy and consensus decision making, there’s a solid basis for a functioning anarchist society.
ubi, competitive wages, strict caps on profits. there is lots of ways to mitigate capitalism. but basically no way to completely remove it at this point in time.
And all of those reforms will be resisted and then removed by the ruling elite, who control politicians and the media through capitalism. Reform is just short term harm reduction. I agree we are just at the start of our journey to abolish capitalism, but we need to reach our destination, or we will be cursed to forever live through cycles of fascism rising and falling inevitably again and again.
Don’t you think there is some way we could structure society to counteract that without creating an underclass of wage slavery?
Yes, paying more for the shitty jobs.
Do you think the capitalistic system is going to just pay people fairly out of the goodness of the hearts of the ruling class?
How can people be paid the value of their labor while still generating profit? Profit is, by definition, the extraction of surplus labor value. Under capitalism, inherently and definitionally, no member of the working class is ever paid fairly.
No, never even implied that. But in any system we need something that can be exchanged for labor in carrying quantities so we can give more to the people who do the shittiest jobs. Whatever system you come up with, it’s not going to work without money.
If a medium of exchange for labor is indeed necessary, I’d say it should be measured in labor hours. We live finite lives, measured in minutes. A minute of your life is worth as much as a minute of mine, wouldn’t you say?
I would have no inherent problem with a system that tokenizes labor hours in some way. The problem is private ownership of the means of production and profit itself.
The problem with labour hours is that it doesn’t compensate for more (or less) hard or unpleasant work.
Yes, that’s true, I suppose a time-and-a-half system or similar could be used for dangerous or unpleasant work. Good point!
Untill you realize that there are a lot of kinds of work and solutions them into three groups is nooit fair to a lot of them either. You can keep cutting it up in smaller equivalents, but in the end what you’ll have is basically money.
That’s fine if you believe that. I don’t really believe that we need money, but as long as the means of production remain socialized, private profit remains impossible, unjustifiable heirarchies are dismantled, and decisions are made through direct democracy and consensus decision making, there’s a solid basis for a functioning anarchist society.
ubi, competitive wages, strict caps on profits. there is lots of ways to mitigate capitalism. but basically no way to completely remove it at this point in time.
And all of those reforms will be resisted and then removed by the ruling elite, who control politicians and the media through capitalism. Reform is just short term harm reduction. I agree we are just at the start of our journey to abolish capitalism, but we need to reach our destination, or we will be cursed to forever live through cycles of fascism rising and falling inevitably again and again.