[anon373839]

Certainly not with the baggage that words like "exploiting" and "extracting" carry. Capitalism is rooted in the idea of comparative advantage and gains from trade: I give you this, you give me that, and we're both better off than if we hadn't done it.

Of course, that's the lofty, textbook ideal. Plenty of capital owners actually do want to extract and exploit. To me, that's not the intent of capitalism, but rather a propensity that needs to be curtailed with strong legal/regulatory incentives.

[int_19h]

> I give you this, you give me that, and we're both better off than if we hadn't done it.

A fair deal is when both are better off by the same amount, which is not a typical situation with wage labor in capitalism. And a deal that isn't fair is an exploitative one.

Capitalism doesn't really have an "intent". It's just an economic system with unbounded private ownership of capital, hence the name. However, there are certain things that inherently follow from that notion, to wit: because the ability to extract economic rent is proportional to the amount of capital owned, all else being equal, past a certain amount of rent extracted there is a positive feedback loop. Or, simply put, large businesses - and their ultimate form, monopolies - are the natural outcome of capitalism. And since larger businesses have a higher imbalance of power wrt both their employees and their customers, it results in deals (for both products and labor) that are less and less fair - and thus more and more exploitative. Thus, capitalism is also inherently exploitative.

And you can certainly counter that by things like strong trade unions and rigorously enforced anti-trust legislation, but it's kinda like putting a motor on a boat that's rowing upstream - it helps, but why are you going in that direction in the first place?

[anon373839]

> A fair deal is when both are better off by the same amount

I wouldn't agree with that. Suppose I'm a graphic designer and Adobe Creative Cloud is essential to my work. At $60/month, Adobe is capturing far less than 50% of the total economic value the software provides me. I don't think this arrangement is unfair to Adobe. They offered that price, and I accepted it.

I think fairness is really hard to define, but is largely procedural. A deal is fair if we both understand what the deal actually is, if we're not preventing the other from pursuing other options, and a bunch of other stuff. But I don't believe a 50-50 split in the surplus is required.

> large businesses - and their ultimate form, monopolies - are the natural outcome of capitalism

Yes, laissez faire capitalism comes to that. Scale can be disincentivized, and I think society would be stronger and more prosperous if it were.

> why are you going in that direction in the first place?

What's the better alternative? I think capitalism is the least-worse economic system that anyone has proposed.

[latency-guy2]

> A fair deal is when both are better off by the same amount

Nonsense. You can't guarantee this anywhere. E.g. employees in training get paid $15/hr, the employer gets no benefit while they are in training, and the employee gets all the benefit at the cost of their own time.

Software in particular, develop a product or produce a binary once, you can run it an infinite number of times. No software developer is paid $infinity, and will never be paid $infinity.

Go ahead, price in the cost of experiment research that which produces nothing after 5 years. Failed projects? Products gets superseded by brand new inventions?

> Capitalism doesn't really have an "intent". It's just an economic system with unbounded private ownership of capital, hence the name. However, there are certain things that inherently follow from that notion, to wit: because the ability to extract economic rent is proportional to the amount of capital owned, all else being equal, past a certain amount of rent extracted there is a positive feedback loop. Or, simply put, large businesses - and their ultimate form, monopolies - are the natural outcome of capitalism. And since larger businesses have a higher imbalance of power wrt both their employees and their customers, it results in deals (for both products and labor) that are less and less fair - and thus more and more exploitative. Thus, capitalism is also inherently exploitative.

Drivel. No thank you.

You don't have a definition of "fair".

[int_19h]

We all have a definition of "fair", partly cultural and partly biological. It may not be easy to distill down to words, but we certainly know it when it see it.

[ajmurmann]

What does "exploit" mean in this context? Are we just referring to pay market price for labor as "exploit" or is this about abusive bosses?

[anon373839]

Hard to define, but I was thinking along the lines of taking advantage of the other party, perhaps through means that are (or should be) illegal. A few examples:

- Baiting a prospective employee with lies about the earning/advancement potential [illegal]

- Pressuring an employee to perform work off the clock (this is often done by setting performance standards that are unattainable without overtime work, while simultaneously "forbidding" overtime) [illegal]

- Using information you know about an employee (such as their inability to switch jobs because of personal circumstances) to low-ball their pay [not illegal, just sleazy]

- Manipulating the circumstances around incentive-based pay so that the employee performs the incentivized work but doesn't end up qualifying for the bonus [illegal, depending]

- Interfering with an employee's career growth/marketability so they won't be able to command higher pay [not illegal, just sleazy]

Edit: I suppose the theme here is seeking to capture more of the value of someone's labor in ways that undermine their ability to negotiate the best deal for themselves. It undermines the whole idea of people freely negotiating for a mutually beneficial relationship.