> The pursuit of captial accumulation is always dependent on the exploitation of someone's labour / time somewhere.
So what's wrong here? Are not capitalists exploiting the labour and time of others to accumulate capital? It's self-evident that they do.
Maybe you think that you can send just send the top 50 capitalists to the planet Mars and out comes a terraformed planet? Simply by their immense power of innovation?
>>Are not capitalists exploiting the labour and time of others to accumulate capital?
They are not in any way exploiting the labor and time of others, at least not in any meaningful sense of the word 'exploit', where it connotes an immoral act that causes harm. They are trading resources for that labor and time, by making an offer that the worker is happy to take over all others. Your moral framework is totally incoherent, as it would imply that an offer that a worker is happy to receive, is an act of authoritarianism toward that worker.
> They are not in any way exploiting the labor and time of others, at least not in any meaningful sense of the word 'exploit',
I think some very clearly are. Obviously there's level degrees here. But on the systematic level it's clearly that Capitalism depends on other people being a means to an end of other, wealthier, people. That due to their property, and others lack thereof, can indirectly force people to labour for their benefit. Thus exploiting them due to the unequal distribution of property/capital in a society that require it to survive.
> They are trading resources for that labor and time, by making an offer that the worker is happy to take over all others
That's not a "happy trade". It's a concession due to worse alternatives because the system people find themselves in offer no other alternatives for millions upon millions of people. That's not freedom.
> Your moral framework is totally incoherent, as it would imply that an offer that a worker is happy to receive, is an act of authoritarianism toward that worker.
No, it's not. People pick the less worse option all the time under authoritarian structures.
You're consistently shallow in your thinking and not bothering to dive a few steps deeper and ask simple questions like why people would accept a 19th century mining job or their modern equivalents? Were those mining jobs "happy trades"?
You have not substantiated this absurd claim in any way.
>>But on the systematic level it's clearly that Capitalism depends on other people being a means to an end of other, wealthier, people.
There is absolutely no dependence on there being wealth inequality, let alone on the employer being wealthier than the employee, for a free market economy to operate. A wealthy doctor can be hired by a poor hotdog stand owner for example.
>>It's a concession due to worse alternatives because the system people find themselves in offer no other alternatives for millions upon millions of people. That's not freedom.
Like I said, people having bad options doesn't make the situation "authoritarian". This is an extremely loaded term, and when you use it you are accusing someone of repressing others, and that someone according to your crude socialist narrative is ANY ONE who has been successful.
You are not being careful in how you use the term, to ensure it actually applies. You're doing sloppy mental gymnastics, where you equate any negativity, or situation of disempowerment, with "authoritarian" circumstances, and then making a leap from this premise, to accusing employers of being the oppressors. It's just sloppy, careless leaps of logic.
Like I said, people needing to pick one of the several difficult options available to them, in order to earn enough to eat is, as Frédéric Bastiat wrote 170 years, the nature of reality, that exists with or without authoritarianism:
"Man recoils from trouble, from suffering; and yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others. Such a course of conduct prevents the trouble and the satisfaction from preserving their natural proportion, and causes all the trouble to become the lot of one set of persons, and all the satisfaction that of another. This is the origin of slavery and of plunder, whatever its form may be - whether that of wars, imposition, violence, restrictions, frauds, etc. - monstrous abuses, but consistent with the thought which has given them birth. Oppressors should be detested and resisted - they can hardly be called absurd."
Moreover, someone wealthier offering a higher wage than the other options available to a person, and a person consequently choosing to work for them, is not authoritarianism.
>>No, it's not. People pick the less worse option all the time under authoritarian structures.
Yes, it is. It's not just that people pick less worse options in the free market structure. It's that the person providing the "less worse option" is not doing anything to worsen the other options available to the person they are making their offer to. In an authoritarian structure, the authoritarian actor is using violence, or the threats of it, to deprive the oppressed party of other options.
>>You're consistently shallow in your thinking and not bothering to dive a few steps deeper and ask simple questions like why people would accept a 19th century mining job or their modern equivalents? Were those mining jobs "happy trades"?
Your questions are irrelevant. You're being sloppy with definitions, and the inflammatory accusations you make based on those definitions. No, what the employer does, in offering a job, is not authoritarian, and it's irresponsible for you to not consider the harm to an innocent party that is done when you make a wrongful accusation, and critically analyze the validity of the accusation, before you make it.
You're not fact-checking and trying to be objective. You're not being responsible toward other people when you make these types of crude blanket accusations without due diligence.
> You're not fact-checking and trying to be objective
What fact-checking have I missed? In what way do you even begin to imagine that this discussion can be objective?
> or a free market economy to operate
I wrote Capitalism, not a "free-market economy" which is a entirely theoretical concept that can never exist in practice. Only Capitalism and its concentration and wealth and power can actually exists.
> Like I said, people having bad options doesn't make the situation "authoritarian"
The CEO of the company is the authoritarian ruler of that company, that's pretty obvious? Yes, if you're privileged, you may be able to switch to another authoritarian instead. If you want to use another word for that relationship, I'm fine with it, the word isn't the important point here. But it's lack of freedom and democracy in the economic sphere and thus under Capitalism.
> according to your crude socialist narrative is ANY ONE who has been successful
That doesn't sound very objective.
> Like I said, people needing to pick one of the several difficult options available to them, in order to earn enough to eat is, as Frédéric Bastiat wrote 170 years, the nature of reality, that exists with or without authoritarianism:
No, it's not "the nature of reality". Other societies throughout human history didn't require selling your freedom most of your life. So that's objectively false. These are systematic conditions intentionally created by humans to the primary benefit of a subset of them.
> It's that the person providing the "less worse option" is not doing anything to worsen the other options available to the person they are making their offer to.
But they are? If they support the concentration of wealth and capital into the few, making it exclusive use to them, forces others to accept their offer.
> and it's irresponsible for you to not consider the harm to an innocent party that is done when you make a wrongful accusation, and critically analyze the validity of the accusation, before you make it.
What? What are the harm, innocent party, wrongful accusation supposed to be here?
Like checking to see if the word 'authoritarian' applies to employers. Your logic supporting such an absurd notion is based on lazy leaps and non-existent critical analysis, showing a general sloppiness and irresponsibility in your proclivity to make accusations.
>>I wrote Capitalism, not a "free-market economy" which is a entirely theoretical concept that can never exist in practice.
This is just a pedantic, bad faith argument. Capitalism is synonymous with a free market economy in most contexts that these terms are used, and we can still comment on systems even if they don't exist in an absolutist form.
>>Only Capitalism and its concentration and wealth and power can actually exists.
No, capitalism is synomous with free markets, and concentration of wealth is totally orthogonal to a free market economy.
And as for ideologies, capitalism doesn't exist. What socialist ideologues refer to as capitalism is nothing more than people having a right to own what they produce and acquire in trade in trade, and to do with what they own as they wish.
This propaganda is intended to depict human liberty as unnatural, and socialist repression as the natural order of things. It's extreme deception motivated by a delusional utopianist fantasy.
>>The CEO of the company is the authoritarian ruler of that company, that's pretty obvious?
One more time, since you didn't read it last time:
Authoritarianism implies non-consensual interactions. People being forced by nature to work in order to feed themselves is not 'non-consensual' in any legal or social sense, and the people offering them jobs in this environment are not authoritarians as a result.
A top-down hierarchical structure also does not define authoritarianism. What's authoritarian is the state preventing people from trading their labor for income, to enforce the incoherent moral principles of socialist ideology.
>>No, it's not "the nature of reality". Other societies throughout human history didn't require selling your freedom most of your life. So that's objectively false. These are systematic conditions intentionally created by humans to the primary benefit of a subset of them
No, working for pay, or to raise crop to eat, is not selling one's freedom. That's a inflammatory characterization of doing what one must to survive and in no way involves an oppressive abrogation of freedom.
And economic history shows people being responsible for themselves, and being unable to pillage others, is in the clear interest of humanity at large, with societies that enshrined these principles of liberty and rejected those lies, like socialism, that rationalize tyranny, seeing the fastest reduction in poverty.
As for your mental gymnastics to try to discredit a free society, with your reference to "systematic conditions" that you imply could allow one to not have to work to eat, oh yes, Bastiat addressed that too:
"He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others. Such a course of conduct prevents the trouble and the satisfaction from preserving their natural proportion, and causes all the trouble to become the lot of one set of persons, and all the satisfaction that of another. This is the origin of slavery and of plunder, whatever its form may be - whether that of wars, imposition, violence, restrictions, frauds, etc. - monstrous abuses, but consistent with the thought which has given them birth. Oppressors should be detested and resisted - they can hardly be called absurd.
The oppressor no longer acts directly and with his own powers upon his victim. The Tyrant is still present, but there is an intermediate person between them, which is the Government. We all therefore, put in our claim, under some pretext or other, and apply to Government. We say to it "I should like to take a part of the possessions of others. But this would be dangerous. Could you not facilitate the thing for me? By this means shall I gain my end with an easy conscience, for the law will have acted for me, and I shall have all the advantages of plunder, without its risk or its disgrace."
>>But they are? If they support the concentration of wealth and capital into the few, making it exclusive use to them, forces others to accept their offer.
You have provided no evidence that someone offering a job, in order to create a productive enterprise that will enrich both themselves and the consumer, is harming the worker by making other options worse for them.
This is just the zero sum fallacy that assumes one business' profit is another's loss, that centuries of economic history disproves and basic economics invalidates.
>>What? What are the harm, innocent party, wrongful accusation supposed to be here?
I explained very clearly, your disingenuous obtuseness notwithstanding. You're accusing employers of being oppressors based on the flimsiest of logic.
> Like checking to see if the word 'authoritarian' applies to employers
Have you never heard someone calling their boss "authoritarian"? I used it as a description of an unfree, undemocratic, top-down system that's used in our economic sphere under capitalism, if you don't like that one, pick something else that describes that. The specific word used is not what's important here.
> Capitalism is synonymous with a free market economy in most contexts that these terms are used.
> No, capitalism is synomous with free markets, and concentration of wealth is totally orthogonal to a free market economy.
No, it's not. That's just historical revisionism. It's a system based on exclusive ownership of property etc. Societies have traded stuff throughout history without Capitalism and its institution of private-property rights etc.
> People being forced by nature to work in order to feed themselves is not 'non-consensual' in any legal or social sense
Well, it is already illegal for children and legality is still not a guide for morality. It's definitely in a social sense, which I have already explained.
Also, I've already explained - you even quoted it - that it's not "forced by nature" like some natural law. It's man made. Proven by the fact that societies through history didn't have capitalist wage labour and did just fine wrt food.
> This propaganda is intended to depict human liberty as unnatural, and socialist repression as the natural order of things.
> It's extreme deception motivated by a delusional utopianist fantasy.
> to enforce the incoherent moral principles of socialist ideology.
> Objective reality deems socialism a crude ideological narrative.
> like socialism, that rationalize tyranny,
> As for your mental gymnastics to try to discredit a free society
More of your non-emotional objectiveness I see.
> You have provided no evidence that someone offering a job
Well, of course it's not the the act itself of offering a job, it's supporting and perpetuating the system - Capitalism - that sets up those conditions in the first place. Why do you have such a hard time of keeping this on a systemic level?
> You're accusing employers of being oppressors based on the flimsiest of logic
I'm discussing this as a systemic issue, not an individual. That should be obvious by now. And some employers certainly are oppressors, but the edge is towards the capitalist-class, not the local shopkeeper or whatever.
>>Have you never heard someone calling their boss "authoritarian"?
That is a figurative use of the term, and this kind of hyperbolic and even misleading use of language in informal dialogue is common. That doesn't mean you can describe anything top-down as authoritarian in formal terms. In any serious discussion, such a definition would be completely rejected as overly broad.
>>The specific word used is not what's important here.
Given the specific word use makes a particular claim, that is the basis for your other claims, it's extremely important.
Authoritarian means non-consensual. Free market interactions are by definition consensual, as deemed by a jury of citizens.
>>No, it's not. That's just historical revisionism.
No, this is just your projection. You're engaging in historical revisionism. The standard use of the term 'capitalism' is synomous with free markets.
>>Well, it is already illegal for children and legality is still not a guide for morality.
Courts deem children to not have the ability to provide consent, which is unlike adults, so your example shows nothing. As for "legality is still not a guide for morality", in this case, the law is moral, since it says only consensual contracts are valid, with random samplings of citizens, formed as juries, making the determination.
>>It's definitely in a social sense, which I have already explained.
No, the social sense of "non-consensual" is someone threatening someone else with violence to deprive them of other options. It is not "people being required to work in order to acquire resources to feed themselves".
>>Also, I've already explained - you even quoted it - that it's not "forced by nature" like some natural law. It's man made. Proven by the fact that societies through history didn't have capitalist wage labour and did just fine wrt food.
That's a totally absurd claim: there were no societies that didn't have free markets / capitalism / work-for-wages and did "just fine wrt food".
>>More of your non-emotional objectiveness I see.
That you see no need to get emotional about socialist tyranny shows the lack of conscience behind your crude ideologically motivated position.
>>Well, of course it's not the the act itself of offering a job, it's supporting and perpetuating the system - Capitalism - that sets up those conditions in the first place.
I've already addressed this fallacious argument. I'll post it again:
As for your mental gymnastics to try to discredit a free society, with your reference to "systematic conditions" that you imply could allow one to not have to work to eat, oh yes, Bastiat addressed that too:
"He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others. Such a course of conduct prevents the trouble and the satisfaction from preserving their natural proportion, and causes all the trouble to become the lot of one set of persons, and all the satisfaction that of another. This is the origin of slavery and of plunder, whatever its form may be - whether that of wars, imposition, violence, restrictions, frauds, etc. - monstrous abuses, but consistent with the thought which has given them birth. Oppressors should be detested and resisted - they can hardly be called absurd.
The oppressor no longer acts directly and with his own powers upon his victim. The Tyrant is still present, but there is an intermediate person between them, which is the Government. We all therefore, put in our claim, under some pretext or other, and apply to Government. We say to it "I should like to take a part of the possessions of others. But this would be dangerous. Could you not facilitate the thing for me? By this means shall I gain my end with an easy conscience, for the law will have acted for me, and I shall have all the advantages of plunder, without its risk or its disgrace."
>>I'm discussing this as a systemic issue, not an individual.
You were earlier implying any one employing someone is an oppressor. That you don't take responsibility for this shows a general recklessness toward politics.
> Given the specific word use makes a particular claim, that is the basis for your other claims, it's extremely important.
No, but it's always nice to focus on semantics if you got little else to say.
> No, this is just your projection. You're engaging in historical revisionism. The standard use of the term 'capitalism' is synomous with free markets.
Are you really suggesting that a system of private property rights is not a fundamental part of 'Capitalism'? And that it's historical revisionism to claim that?
> formed as juries
What jury? Do you think this issue would be treated by a jury if reported? Even if it would be in-front of a jury, a jury is supposed to follow the law, it's not acting in an objective vacuum. That's ridiculous.
> Courts deem children to not have the ability to provide consent, which is unlike adults, so your example shows nothing.
Yeah, and that's obviously a subjective interpretation? The same can easily be said about adults forced to work by the conditions put in place by the system they live in. Currently under capitalism it isn't seen as non-consensual, since that clearly wouldn't work, but maybe it will be seen as obviously so in 100 years?
> That's a totally absurd claim: there were no societies that didn't have free markets / capitalism / work-for-wages and did "just fine wrt food".
What's absurd about historical societies not having capitalist wage-labor and did fine without it? No societies? Haha, that's so ridiculously obvious historical revisionism it's entertaining.
>That you see no need to get emotional about socialist tyranny shows the lack of conscience behind your crude ideologically motivated position.
I'm not sure what socialist tyranny I have promoted in this thread?
> oh yes, Bastiat addressed that too:
What part of that quote more specifically do you feel addresses some point? It's mostly low signal-to-noise gibberish.
> You were earlier implying any one employing someone is an oppressor
Yes, and that was regarding trivial semantics that doesn't remove the core of this discussion namely the non-free nature of capitalism.
Why not?
> And Marxist dogma calling profit exploitation isn't?
Well, I guess some might be, but not all. Furthermore all critic of exploitation driven on by the profit incentive is not Marxist.
> Absolute poverty means extreme toil. As the economy develops, wages rise and jobs become less strenuous
No. They are still not synonymous. That's just a textbook example of goalpost shifting.