Comment on Why do companies always need to grow?
hansolo@lemmy.today 3 weeks agoI understand Marx fine. He was an academic who grew up the privileged son of a lawyer, and never spent a day of his life worrying about how he was going to feed his family by working on a farm or in a factory.
His ideas about land alone being enough to be considered “means of production” are informed by 19th century feudalist-cum-post-feudaliast Europe, and the transition point between the Prussian Kingdom and a unified and nascent German state as it industrialized.
His view of industrialization is like that of Upston Sinclair: “Holy shit, WTF? This is terrible.” Trauma and secondary trauma informed by other people. But as an academic his understanding of how the economy works at the level of what was a rapidly changing factory scene. 21st century economics don’t fit 19th century ideals.
And you as a lumberjack is the perfect example. You might own a saw and live near a forest. Cut all the trees you want. Who will buy them without access? So now you need a road. But your 19th century horse cart can’t drag a 400kg log anywhere to sell it, so you now need to buy a truck and loading system. Only now too you have an actual logging setup that gets your product of raw timber to a mill for sale. Marx calls all these things the means of production, which is cute, but he assumes that the social whole is different.
The road needs to be graded and maintained, your saw oiled and sharpened, your truck maintained. Which all also needs labor to happen. As was the cries of trucking unions when the Teamsters formed, you are just part of the machine. Which means that when you get down to it and nitpick, everything and everyone is a part of the means of production of something else. There are no gaps and no bourgeoisie locking up every critical aspect of the social whole, and small businesses as the largest employer in the US mean that Marx’s theory doesn’t stand up to reality anymore. The end user and end consumer provides demand, which is as necessary as the road and truck and mill for you as a faux lumberjack. Demand is a human non-labor aspect of the social whole we all have, which is more important than the means of production. Just ask the bourgeoisie board of Blockbuster Video, or a small local newspaper.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Right. There’s so much wrong here that I won’t even bother correcting you on everything. You start off not by addressing his points but by trying to character assassinate so you wouldn’t have to address his points. Absolutely disingenuous.
Then between your ramblings you make statements that Marx would disagree with (like land alone being enough to be the means of production) or you try to disprove Marx by stating something Marx himself used as a foundation for the criticism of capitalism (like everything and everyone being a part of the means of production of something else). And finally you make apparently clear you have not read even a summary of his biggest works, Das Kapital, because you say stupid shit like this:
Das Kapital goes into great lengths specifically to prove those “non-existent” gaps exist. They existed 2 centuries ago and they still exist. And the fact that you think his criticism does not apply to small businesses is just another example of how little you actually understand what Marx wrote.
hansolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Well, I doubt we were ever going to agree, even to disagree.
I will say that Marx’s ideas have been tried and tested and have never held up to real world application. Bemoan capitalism all you like, then explain how the Holodomor happened.
Anyways, have a pleasant day.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Of course we not going to agree. The only way we could ever come to an agreement is if you acknowledge that you’re talking out of your ass and considering you haven’t gotten that memo yet I doubt you’ll ever get it.
Oh really, what ideas exactly?
I’ll bemoan capitalism all I like and I don’t need to explain how Holodomor happened because I’ll happily bemoan Holodomor as well. Just because the soviets were pieces of shit doesn’t mean I have to be team capitalism.
hansolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Well, let’s take 3 non-standard examples:
Yugoslavia nationalised industry and introduced worker self‑management after it broke away from Stalin and the USSR. Loads of collaboration with post-colonial Non-aligned Movement African nations that wanted to dabble in socialism but didn’t have a popular movement or resources or planning to back it. Taking refugee in capitalism, like China recently started to do as well, is what let thinks work for a time. Tito, however, was the only thing that held the county together, and once he was gone, the whole place collapsed slowly over a decade. There was no evidence that the “best” socialism in the region (best, as in least totally shit) was worth keeping on its own or valuable enough to try and keep.
Albania imposed strict state ownership, collectivised agriculture (the gulags are basically Woofing, yaay!), and a hard‑line Stalinist-style paranoia-fueled regime. It assigned jobs; no one not official given the job of “driver” by the state could operate a vehicle. And it fucking shows still to this day. Hoxha held the county together with fear alone because nothing of socialism was worth keeping on its own, or valuable enough to the average person to keep.
Bulgaria did a decent job replicating Soviet central planning, collectivisation, and political control. It all sucked and the Yugoslavs loved to leverage economic disparity over them because it was so fucking bleak in Bulgaria for theor entire stint as socialists. Which is part of why Bulgaria is shitting on their neighbors now about EU accession, they finally have the advantage and a grudge that survived 40 years because of socialists caused economic disparity. They happily joined the EU a generation after realizing that nothing of socialism was worth keeping on its own, or valuable enough to the average person to keep. But they have decent freeways now.
Despite three very different attempts to try socialism as a means to the end of communism, only Belgrade and it’s immediate suburbs really had a decent quality of life. Everyone else had a well-documented traumatizingly bad time.
And while I’ll happily admit that I haven’t needed a more than cursory remembrance of Marx since 2002, that literally billions of people have proven time and again that Marx’s ideas are pure fantasy, and that 19th century ideals about economies that have just stated industrialization are not needed in the 20th century any more than Adam Smith has been relevant once advertising manipulated simple supply and demand, because humans are not rational actors.