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by Turskarama 1020 days ago
> A world where "Realize capital has no market value without labor to work it" is true cannot see power reset in the hands of those with capital as it asserts that capital has no value without labour, which means that labour holds all the power.

Yes and no, the capitalist needs the labour for their capital to be worth anything, but likewise the Labor needs the tools the capitalist owns to multiply the value of their labour. Since capital gives control of the state (indirectly) the state tends to also support capital which then has a monopoly on violence and can coerce labor through means that the labour itself doesn't have. Historically this has come about in the police engaging in union busting (an example of how capital is power).
1 comments
randomdata 1020 days ago
> but likewise the Labor needs the tools the capitalist owns to multiply the value of their labour

Labour doesn't need to multiply its labour, though. Labour remains valuable no matter what.

> Since capital gives control of the state (indirectly)

The state is just people. In a world where capital is worthless without labour, I assume that labour makes up the majority of the population – why would a small group of people sitting on capital that does nothing and is worthless have more power than the majority of the populace who actually bring value to the table?

> which then has a monopoly on violence

In a world where capital is worthless without labour, who, exactly, is going to enact that violence? You need labour to bring the violence...

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Turskarama 1020 days ago
> Labour remains valuable no matter what.

Maybe, but for a somewhat tortured example: if you're a programmer with domain knowledge of a specific application then your value there might be worth $150k a year. If that's taken away from you and you have to learn a new domain then your value might be only $80k per year. If even a computer to work on is taken away from you then your labor is only worth minimum wage.

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randomdata 1020 days ago
Painfully tortured, indeed, but let's try to work with it:

In this world of which we speak, if you take the labour away from the computer then the computer becomes worthless. At which point you can then you can collect the computer from the dumpster to then build yourself back up to being worth $150k per year plus the return on capital value.

Clearly labour holds the power in this world. It can completely destroy the capital owners. The inverse is not true.

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