Comment by AnimalMuppet
2 years ago
> There is no value without labor.
Plausible.
But there is very little value without tools. In fact, one could argue that all material progress has been in the form of better and better tools. One person with a combine beats 100 people with sickles.
Those tools are necessary for almost all of the value that labor produces.
So if we want those tools, in the real world we need to pay the producer of those tools. (Or make them ourselves, which is possible, but runs into division-of-labor issues.) The people who manufacture combines aren't a charity; they want to receive the value of their work too.
And unless the farmer (or custom cutter) has the money to buy the combine, then there's a third party in the situation - the capitalist, the person who provides the money to buy the tools that will give the increased productivity. That person usually isn't a charity, either. They need to get some return on their money.
But the place where I at least partly agree is this: The worker who knows how to use the tools is deserves at least part of the value provided by using the tool. The tool-maker deserves part of the value; the capitalist deserves part of the value; and the worker also deserves part of the value. (If you don't like the word "deserves", well, without all three parties, the value isn't produced, and none of the three are charities, so if we want the value, we need to give them part of the returns.)
And currently, you can make a very solid case that the worker is getting the short end of the stick. I can't buy "the worker deserves it all". No, the worker does not. But I can agree that workers deserve more than they're getting.
(In the cases where the workers either make their own tools or have the money to buy them, this argument breaks down. But in an industrialized society, that seems to be the exception, not the rule.)
> But there is very little value without tools.
Did those tools magically come into existence? Or were they made? Who made them? More workers. Where did the materials come from? More workers.
The point here is that everything we as a society do is so fundamentally interconnected that thousands of people contributed to pulling gold out of a mine, for example, both directly and through the tools that were created to make it possible then why are we concentrating the proceeds of this enterprise onto the capital owner who got a lease from the government (with the threat of violence backing it) just because they wrote a check to fund the operation?
> ... there's a third party in the situation
Yes, more products of labor.
> I can't buy "the worker deserves it all"
I don't believe you intended it this way but it reads as a false dichotomy.
I don't expect radical change in our economic system. I would be happy to see more cooperatives for housing and manufacturing (like Mondragon). This requires some class consciousness and collective action.
So much of our modern society deifies hyper-individualism. You ever wonder why that is? It's sold as "freedom" but it's really to manipulate you because there's a massive power imbalance between your employer and you. If you withhold work, most likely that employer will be fine. If that employer withholds work, you might end up homeless. The only way to counter that power imbalance is with collective action.
Modern political discourse is dominated by manufactured culture war issues. This isn't new. Post-Civil War there was fear in the South of emancipated slaves and poor white people uniting [1].
To be absolutely clear, I'm not accusing you of racism or similar. My point is to show how this is manufactured to divide workers. Even the idea of the "middle class" is intentionally divisive. Why do the interests of a white-collar (middle class) worker differ from a blue-collar (lower class) worker? Why are we making that distinction?
[1]: https://bittersoutherner.com/from-the-southern-perspective/m...