Libertarian Socialist Society Thread!

From making stuff in the past, and then allocating it efficiently.

Suppose I make hammers, and instead of selling them I rent them to other workers. This enables them to make twice as much money from their labour as before, and they give me half. I am making money from "nothing but owning", but there's nothing objectionable going on here.

Not all capital that actually exists is like this. The Duke of Westminster probably deserves to be expropriated, for example. But since the industrial revolution, most of it is. A lot of it is obscured behind multiple layers of management: for instance a lot of stock in investment banks is ultimately owned by pension funds, which is money paid in by ordinary people. But there are certainly much more clear examples involving very large sums. For instance -


- I choose the $20bn Mark Zuckerburg has made from Facebook.

I didn't say it was objectionable I was just stating how it it.

$20 bn is the monetary value of his share of the business not the value of the initial labour he put into the business in the form of Capital. Where is it? It's not much.

If all Capital was originally something that was 'made' by a worker using their labour then it an infinitesimally small part of the Capital around today.

Using the hammer example. How many hammers can a Blacksmith make in his lifetime in a subsistance (non industrialised) economy?

Clearly Capital is some sort of agglomeration of labour where the original Capitalist only contributed a tiny amount.

Yes it is. You're falling into this Marxian trap that all labour has an equal value. Zuckerberg's programming Facebook was worth far far more than some other programmer's equal time spent making a database to order for some company. Not because he worked harder or suffered more or was cleverer, but because Facebook has brought so much more happiness to other people.

It compounds on itself. In an economy with no capital (ie. naked people wandering around picking berries) there is no supply chain that enables hammers to be built at all. Then when you get them, hammers can be used to make machines, that can make more hammers, or more machines, or bigger and more productive machines.

Nothing needs to be taken from others for some to end up richer. In fact without this capital, wage labourers would be far far poorer.

Maybe not the best example then as basically Facebook is an idea rather than what we typically define as Capital, you could call it intellectual Capital.

The point is what is the value of what he did in an absolute sense? The exchange value for it would depend upon many things such as GDP, for example if he had dreamed up the idea in the middle ages it might only be worth 20 apples not $20 bn.

Capital won't compound itself unless production was completely automated.

From making stuff in the past, and then allocating it efficiently.

But since the industrial revolution, most of it is.

That is speculative and probably irrelevant.

Regarding a theory about the origin or 'real' nature of Capital you won't be able to put you hand on much capital in use today which was created by the labour-power of the Capitalist.

I was talking about an empirical fact which is that a Capitalist can profit from doing nothing but owning. True or not?

It's pretty clear all previous combinations of the latter has had little effect. The only Utopians in this thread are the capitalists who think things can go on the way they are.

Not necessarily, if you accept inequality as a given in capitalist societies, would you also accept that this inequality is a direct result by the worker/employer relationship?

Whether or not the worker is being exploited in the technical Marxist sense we can disagree on, however you don't need to be a Marxist to agree that an economy without a capitalist class, would be more egalitarian and thus more utilitarian because societies collective wealth would be more evenly distributed.

If it was the case that there were machines (capital) apriori and the capitalists just somehow managed to get control of them, then yes, there would be an argument that capitalists are exploiting workers. Because the capitalists have appropriated something they did not create.

No. Human beings are unequal, that is the cause of inequality. And if you think you can manufacture that out, then you are a fool.

Is that not the case though? Capitalism started with textiles in the UK when the guild system broke down around the time feudal lands were being enclosed. Somehow some Artisans ended up owning the machines and became the Capitalist class.

What use is inventing the steam engine in 3000 BC? That doesn't mean steam engines aren't capital or aren't "really" worth anything.

Out of interest, which UK party is most closely aligned with Libertarian Socialists? I would have said perhaps the Lib Dems would be

The fact of the matter is that capital is created by capitalists

Suppose you are a capitalist and you have some slaves (because capitalists are nasty and love owning slaves ) You could tell your workers to grow some food. This would produce consumer goods. On the other hand you could tell your workers to build a combine harvester. This would mean you could not produce food, forgoing consumer goods, but you would have produced capital goods, the combine harvester. The point is that the capitalist has forgone consumption for investment.

The important part to realise is that the capitalist has used his resources (in this case slaves) to create capital rather than consumer goods. In reality the resources he would use would be money, which would allow him to access real resources from the real world. But if he uses his purchasing power for investment, he must forgo consumption.

More likely is that it was created by someone else, and then bought by capitalists.

OK. So what? I think your examples demonstrated well enough that 'forgoing consumption' does not in itself warrant anything.

That would just be capitalists exchanging capital goods.

A "worker" who produces some capital and then sells that capital, is infact a capitalist.

The point is that the capitalist has created capital. He has not appropriated capital from somebody else.

The capitalist created the capital, thus he has a reasonable claim to what he has created.

Money is not necessarily capital.

No, they're not. Capitalists employ wage labour to labour with their capital. That's precisely what socialists mean by 'private ownership of the means of production'.

Yes. To what he has created. Why does that give him the right to what others create with that capital?

Money is not capital.

Yes they are. Capital does not have to be created using wages labour. For example, I could go out and make a spade. I would have created capital using only my own labour. And I would own capital, making a me capitalist, in the form of the spade.

What right do the workers have to all of the output using capital that somebody else created?

You misunderstand me. Here, how the capital is created is not that relevant, but how it is used. And to be a capitalist, you must employ wage labour, rather than simply possess capital. This passage from wiki outlines it pretty well:

"There are two subtle but important points to the Ownership of the Means of Production. The first being that owning the Means of Production is not the same thing as owning physical property, nor is it equal to owning money. Rather OMP refers to a cultural practice in which a few individuals within a larger corporation (or company) control and decide what is done with the entire profit created by that corporation."

Because they created all of the output. Assuming that either there is no upkeep cost, or the workers cover the upkeep cost, there is no cost to anyone else, so why should they get anything?

The Marxist argument is invalid on other grounds as well. There is, first, the confusion between the total product of all cooperating resources and the amount added to product - in economist's jargon, marginal product.

Which is worth more, an ice cream in the winter or an identical ice cream in the summer?