|
|
|
|
|
|
by MarkMarine
1235 days ago
|
|
|
> and also be a capitalist in that same context in the sense of using your skills as bargaining power with your employer to get the best return on the capital you own This is not what being a capitalist is, in the context you're using it. Capitalist vs laborer is basically someone who doesn't work, but their money does vs someone who has to work. That's it. Gets fuzzy when you start adding a 3rd group of people in there, the people who have to work (i.e. they don't have enough capital to generate the kind of income that puts them in the don't have to work crowd) but identity with the capitalists. They see themselves as removed from "laborers" and strive to be in the capitalist class, dress like them, act like them, talk like them. Marx would call them the petite bourgeoisie. I understand what you're trying to explain, thinking about individual capital ownership or even using your skills as capital... but that just isn't what it is. Your skills only have value if you're using them. To labor and create things of value. |
|
|
Yes. That's true of everyone, including those that you are calling "capitalists". But that being true, and a person knowing that it's true and acting accordingly, are two very different things.
> Capitalist vs laborer is basically someone who doesn't work, but their money does vs someone who has to work.
If you think that Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, etc., don't work, you are egregiously mistaken. They work very, very hard. They just don't work at the same things that low level tech workers do. That's because they understand, as many, if not most, low level tech workers apparently do not, that the best use of their work--their labor, the hours they put in doing whatever it is they do--is to maximize the return on their capital. So they optimize their work towards that goal. Whereas most low level tech workers don't even think in those terms--and that is why they are at the mercy of the "capitalists" who do.
(The usual economist's term for a person who doesn't work, but "lets their money work", is "rentier", and the associated behavior--getting into a position where one can have a steady reliable income without having to work--is called "rent seeking". There is certainly an element of that in the way many rich people act, but I don't think it's the primary issue in the context of this discussion.)
The real argument for those "capitalists" being overpaid is not that they don't work, but that most of the work they are doing is not actually creating wealth; it's just transferring wealth from others to themselves. But that has nothing whatever to do with them being "capitalists" instead of "laborers" and "laborers" being underpaid. It has to do with our entire system of social incentives being screwed up because for decades now we have increasingly allowed short-term viewpoints to undermine the long-term stability of our social institutions. "Class warfare" rhetoric, in fact, is one of the ways that has been done.