this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Leftism
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The comic assumes that you could ONLY be the laborer. It’s ignoring the fact that no one is stopping you from making/buying something and selling it for a profit.
I’m a bench jeweler and I know plenty of other craftspeople who make a whole-ass living off selling shit they made for more than labor/materials cost. The fact that an employer will take advantage of you isn’t a failing of capitalism, it’s a facet of human greed that will permeate any economic/political system.
Making things or selling things is not capitalism. Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production; things like factories, tools, intellectual property, etc.
On the point of greed, I disagree that it's just simply "human nature". However, even if it was, why should we have an economic system that prioritizes greed?
Capitalism is the ideology that defends capital as the main desirable quality in society.
Greed is a consequence of the desire for ownership, which is part of human nature.
Capitalism is the exaltation of that greed... and no, we should not have any system that blindly defends a single aspect of life.
Life is full of nuance, no single aspect should rule it all; sometimes ownership is good (like my pants), sometimes sharing is good (like riding on a bus), sometimes defending a life is good (like preventing a murder), sometimes ending a life is good (like euthanasia)... and so on.
Just a bit of pendantry as a treat, I think that greed is a consequence of people seeking to meet their needs. In a system that requires obtaining money to obtain needs that are not simply provided, it causes precarity. This precarious position is a threat to existence. Our instincts fear of this precarity, and this instinctual fear manifests as greed to make sure our needs will always be met. This isn't to say that greed is imaginary or a product of capitalism, it is human nature. But I think that nature is influenced by nurture, and vice versa.
Agreed. I'd only add that until we switch to a full post-scarcity world, a system that does the opposite, that tries to eliminate all private ownership, also causes that same fear of precarity, which also leads to greed.
As long as scarcity exists, a system trying to minimize greed requires a tough balance between providing enough to meet basic needs, but at the same time not stifling people's sense of safety derived from ownership.
Anticapitalist critique of private ownership isn't about private ownership of pants it's about private/centralized ownership of the means of production. This is a critical distinction, as many models still want a free market which doesn't work without private property.