The central idea of capitalism is the extraction of surplus value via property relations and wage labor.
Voluntary exchange is not capitalism. Voluntary exchange has existed since the dawn of society. Capitalism is a form of production that developed with the industrial revolution. I can't tell if you've fallen for or are employing a sleazy equivocation.
To assert the existence of surplus value, one must also declare the baseline. For Marxists, the baseline is the “labor-value.”
That the labor theory of value is entirely bunk is trivial to see. If you present to a buyer two indistinguishable instances of the same good but describe how one was meticulously hand-crafted by skilled artisans and the other produced by machines in a factory, in the prospective buyer’s view the former is no more valuable than the latter. Value is imputed by the end consumer who is willing to pay only so much for a pair of shoes, a hat, a computer, a book, an automobile, a house, whatever. Marxists object that this is “commodity-fetishism,” but their many syllables fail to camouflage their deep confusion.
Even employers — rather than exploitative expropriators — are sellers of goods or services but buyers of labor, one of many factors of production. Consumers set prices with their willingness to buy. Producers seek to meet this demand at a profit. (Running a break-even operation is a bad model: at best you end up back where you started and otherwise book red ink.) To take profit, they must produce at a cost below what the consumer will pay, the prevailing price. Raw materials must be bought ahead of time. Employees expect regular paychecks. The employer must risk all of these costs by paying up front for a chance of turning a profit in the end.
Employees likewise are sellers of labor, a role that Marxists fail to recognize or else they’d have to slap expropriator labels all around. Employees shop their skills to find the buyer who values them most highly. When a better offer comes along, we usually congratulate the person for finding a better situation even though it is the same worker now supposedly “extracting” more value. The downside is sellers compete against one another. When the value proposition grows too rich, we buyers start shopping elsewhere. “Cheap labor” is nothing nefarious; everyone is looking for a better deal. Sellers of goods, services, and labor must all continue to improve their offerings.
From top to bottom, this is a network built on voluntary exchange with no extraction or exploitation. The ruthless player is the fickle consumer whose tastes, demands, foibles, and sense of urgently are always changing. There’s also Mother Nature, sometimes gentle and sometimes furious. We live in a world of scarcity with the future uncertain. Where will tomorrow’s dinner come from? How will parents pay for their kids’ college years down the road? How will I pay the light bill next month? Capitalism’s aforementioned complex network of voluntary exchanges — “the market,” for short — is a search process for how best to allocate what we have now in order to obtain what we need and want tomorrow.
Yours is a very shallow reading of Marx. A common, but nonetheless shallow reading. The only thing I can really do is refer [0], sections 5 and 6 starting on page 35 as an answer to such an interpretation.
> From top to bottom, this is a network built on voluntary exchange with no extraction or exploitation.
I mean, this is just preposterous. Are we going to ignore how capitalism developed with enclosure, forcible transformation of the commons into private property, and colonialism? Do you really want to make the claim that, say the Dutch East India Company's involvement in India was based on voluntary exchange with no extraction or exploitation? Or how about today, when the computers we use to write these messages rely on conflict minerals? Give me a break. Your analysis is ridiculous at face value. My only question is how you could type that out with a straight face.
No, the central idea of capitalism is the re-investment of the surplus produced, rather than consumption of the surplus, no matter where the surplus came from. The surplus can come from one's own labor, or from a sole proprietorship.
I can tell that you've fallen for Marxist rhetoric.
I've always found this idea that capitalism was "invented" to be so strange.
e.g. When an ancient king had land, and let poor people work the land in exchange for a part of their production, what would you call that? Sure sounds like, "the extraction of surplus value via property relations and wage labor" to me.
Same story if the lord has a mill and charges people to use it. Or a bridge and charges people to cross it. Technology was worse, so there weren't as many physical forms of capital, but it definitely existed.
Some people seem to have this need to see capitalism as this invention created by bad people. Because to admit now natural and organic it is would be to admit how much enforcement and violence their ideology really demands in order to obtain the real world.
I didn't use the word invention, I used the word development. There was no connotation about naturalness in what I said. Neither did I make a moral judgment on the development of private property. So, why are you imposing on my words an argument that I wasn't making?
> e.g. When an ancient king had land, and let poor people work the land in exchange for a part of their production, what would you call that? Sure sounds like, "the extraction of surplus value via property relations and wage labor" to me.
Ok, if you want me to be more precise, private property relations, which are very different from feudal property relations. In fact, since property is a legal construct, this aspect of the development of capitalism could be called an invention, and the idea that capitalist forms of property are particularly ""natural and organic"" compared to other forms is quite suspect-- at least without any argument provided for it. As a foot note, one of the processes that developed private property was Enclosure [0] which was by no means nonviolent.
But I'm not going to try to be as precise and rigorous as a history textbook in Internet comments I compose in between compiles. Feel free to believe that capitalism is natural and organic, or read a history book. Idk.
> When an ancient king had land, and let poor people work the land in exchange for a part of their production, what would you call that? Sure sounds like, "the extraction of surplus value via property relations and wage labor" to me.
There is an extent to which it is true (well, the first part, not wage labor!), but it's a different set of property realtions than the ones which are the defining feature of capitalism.
> Same story if the lord has a mill and charges people to use it. Or a bridge and charges people to cross it. Technology was worse, so there weren't as many physical forms of capital, but it definitely existed.
Feudalism is also a system by which value is extracted by property relationships; a different set than capitalism, and (while some quantity of wage labor may exist within feudalism) not one where wage labor plays a central role.
Capitalism replaced the system of property relations underlying feudalism with a different set.
> Some people seem to have this need to see capitalism as this invention created by bad people.
Traditionally, that's not even how the socialist critics that first identified it viewed it; it wasn't “an invention created by bad people”, but the state resulting from a number of related changes to the model of property driven by a combination of opportunity created by physical and other social technologies and self-interested people seeking their own gain. (This isn't inherently bad, the same people saw socialism the same way, though they saw the class driving and benefiting the preservation of capitalism against further change as narrow and inherently narrowing with the continuance of capitalism.)
I'm not really sure, then, what people you are referring to, since neither capitalism's defenders nor it's main critics hold the view you are attacking.
If it is asymmetric, the superficially apparent mutual gain may be illusory, because—while many people think for moral or aesthetic reasons that this should not be the case—there is enormous empirical evidence that the actual experience of utility related to material position is very strongly driven by relative material position, which is often far more significant than absolute material position.
But is that empirical evidence talking about peoples' overall position, or their position with respect to one particular exchange?
That is, it can be true that I feel rich or poor by comparing myself to others, not based on my absolute wealth. It can also be true that I look at any individual transaction and decide whether to make it or not based on whether it makes me better off in absolute terms.
> But is that empirical evidence talking about peoples' overall position, or their position with respect to one particular exchange?
It's about overall position, but the outcome of every particular exchange is a change to overall position; now, if the asymmetry in exchanges were essentially random, this wouldn't matter, but when you have a system with distinguishable classes, and there is a clear relationship between class role and which side of the asymmetry of exchange you tend to fall on across exchanges—say “capital” having the greater gain and “labor” the lesser—then you can end up with a situation where the pattern of exchange, each seemingly mutually beneficial but asymmetrically so, ends up producing more disutility from increasing inequality on one side than utility from absolute gain.
> So you're saying that it would be better if everyone was poorer individually, as long as they were more equally poor?
No, it's not at all that simple; there's both disutility associated with inequality and utility associated with absolute material position; how those net out is more complex than either “everyone getting more is better regardless of distribution” or “more equality is better regardless of how much per everyone gets”.
>So you're saying that it would be better if everyone was poorer individually, as long as they were more equally poor?
Why are you creating this either/or? Are you proposing that if we don't allow people like Gates and the Kochs to hoard billions of dollars that everyone will be poorer individually?
Voluntary exchange is not capitalism. Voluntary exchange has existed since the dawn of society. Capitalism is a form of production that developed with the industrial revolution. I can't tell if you've fallen for or are employing a sleazy equivocation.