Exploitation

One of my friends worked at a café where the workers were doing better than the owner since they got salaries but the owner’s livelyhood was tied into the success of the café with its ups and downs.

That made me go home and sit and think. And what I found was this: it’s a number’s game. They earn just a little off of each worker. If they have many workers, they end up wealthier than any of them.

This is the second-biggest bug in market capitalism. Labor exploitation. I talk about the biggest bug (externalities of all kinds) all the time because of a bunch of reasons:

Externalities are under-discussed, whereas every egghead since Marx have taken a stab at exploitation, labor, and capital.
They ought to be easy to understand, especially for any programmer who’ve had to chase down a memory leak or a protocol extension
It doesn’t require the same value alignment to realize they’re bad, whereas worker exploitation, there it’s in the interest of the hand that’s holding the stick to say “it’s a good thing actually” and to coke up some framework on free contracts and the nightwatchman and the shrugging Atlas and to shout “earn your keep here!”
Externalities are what’s driving the Earth of the edge and it’s urgently important that society starts understanding them better, and fixing them.

But I don’t mean to neglect the issue of labor exploitation either. It’s absolutely a bug in capitalism, not a feature. Situations like this make that clear.

Last time I called it “a bug, not a feature” I got sidetracked into a long pointless semantics shoutfest with Corporal Carrot who insisted on pointing out that it is a feature, from the perspective of the owners who have set deliberately set all of this up to exploit us. Don’t get me wrong, there’s absolutely a political cleavage where some of the interests of workers vs owners collide incompatibly and while I doubt any overly teleologically-smelling theory of capital, I can still plainly see that the jerks who have happened to end up on top are gonna wanna keep clinging to that power forever, so from their point of view, this inequality is a “feature”. I’m aware of that and didn’t mean to try to obfuscate that. When I said “it’s a bug, not a feature”, I mean that it’s a bug from the perspective of a society that has, through policy and democratically elected officials, means to influence the protocol it uses to distribute tasks and resources. From this policy-making perspective it’s absolutely a bug that needs fixing. In the land of semantics you can call a security bug in an app a “feature” from the perspective of those using that bug to spy on us. Words can mean different things in different contexts. You can call it a “birthday cake” for all I care; the map of language isn’t the territory of the economic model I was trying to convey; which in turn is itself just a model and in the actual reality ya gotta case-by-case it.

Not that I’m happy about billionaire musicians either; the economics of entertainment get pretty warped in a globally connected world. Used to be the village troubadour could make a living; now she’s gotta compete with Tay-Tay and Springsteen.

I was talking to a liberal about this the other day and he was like “But Soviet was bad”. OK, so Soviet was bad. That’s not a reason to flinch from facing the world-wrecking problems of capitalism head on, to try to make the world better before it’s too late. I know the instinct is strong to try to twist everything around in our heads to not have to face these problems, to kid ourselves into thinking “it’s good actually”, that “our current society is just an accurate and optimized expression of how people prefer to live their lives within the limits of what they deserve”, but that’s why thinking and meta-thinking is so important: so we can rise above these hangups and these unshakable conclusions off of faulty premises and see the world not as a granite sculpture of blind justice, but as it really is: a tangled web of emergent systems created from interdependent processes, that we could’ve and should’ve changed before it wrecked the atmosphere. Now it might be too late but let’s try anyway.

I get that a lot of capitalism apologists think I’m wack for thinking the following: USSR and CCP are also because of capitalism. They were a reaction to the unbearable exploitation of the industrial era that ended up as just another expression of labor exploitation. They didn’t solve the problems, they just rebranded the stick.

“We take all the risks. We are entrepeneurs.”

I mean, among homeless people or people at the brink of death living day-to-day hand-to-mouth, how many of those are former huge capital owners? If the “entrepeneurs take all the risk and deserve all the rewards” meme were true, we’d expect to see half of Wall Street ending up on Skid Row.

“Why is this bad, though?”

That’s the obvious counter-argument.

“Isn’t it fine that some people make millions and others are on the edge of starvation? What basis do you have for thinking that’s wrong or bad?”

One of the core value conflicts between capitalism’s proponents and opponents is “What’s fair?”

Anti-capitalists want “From each according to ability, to each according to need”. We want to cut down on work hours, too. The right to laziness.♥︎

Capitalists want “To each what they earned”. Finders keepers, losers weepers. Their view of “earned” is a bit warped to me, given issues such as exploitation and externalities.

“You’re free, within capitalism, to organize and run co-ops instead”

Sure, and that’s what many of us are advocating for and trying to support to the best of our ability. Please join us in that.

We live in a society, in a state, in a culture; there are many levels where co-operatives are disfavored. Finding those obstacles, large and small, and making it better and easier to organize is awesome.

Big capital often opposes worker organization, for example by punishing unionization attempts. And that’s terrible.