Comment by ChadNauseam
2 years ago
Quoting the GP tweet to the one you linked:
> You still occasionally hear people saying that founders don't deserve to be rich, because their employees created all the value. But the falsity of this claim becomes increasingly obvious as automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees.
Do you disagree with this, or just disagree that it’s in contradiction to Marx?
To start with, "don't deserve [...] because employees created all the value" is a straw man. Lots of other value Out There that they exploit that comes from other places than their employees' labor but also isn't "created" by the founder. Also lots of reasons people shouldn't be rich, whether or not they are founders and whether or not they "created" value.
Disagree that this is even the question. The role of "founder" is mostly tangential to the discussion - rather it's the "owner" that Marxists would argue don't deserve their wealth (and if it's the same person, you have to separate the roles in your head - the 'founder' role produce some irreplaceable value, while the 'owner' role is easily replaced.)
The fact that automation makes your firm exponentially more productive over time doesn't contradict Marx at all. That's just a premise he borrows from classical economics to then argue why that leads to bad stuff, in his view. It seems like maybe PG is taking issue with the labor theory of value or something? In which case... /shrug, that's ok, get in line with the rest of us?
What's really happening here though is PG isn't familiar with the discourse whatsoever, so he makes a weird scattered argument and smugly attributes some strawman opinion to Marxists, then gets mad at the reaction. Trying to make sense of it as if he knows what he's talking about just kinda leads to insanity.
e: I'm also not claiming to have some deep knowledge of Marxism at all... I've read like 1 or 2 chapters of Capital. It's just that, like I said above, you just have to have basic familiarity to realize PG speaks from his ass.