r/WorkReform • u/zzill6 đ¤ Join A Union • 3d ago
âď¸ Tax The Billionaires Marx was right.
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u/Pale_Apartment 3d ago
I have found a great quote from Adam smith as well!
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u/banananuhhh 3d ago
Another fun one is his quote about the invisible hand. Right wingers love to claim it is about profit motive magically uplifting everyone, but he was actually just talking about how the forces that existed at the time would lead capitalists specifically to support the development of domestic industry over foreign.
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u/map-hunter-1337 3d ago
i came here to say 'smith said it first' but then you'd said that first and i just, were the original thoughts themselves original, or had they been already thought, and were waiting for a suitable skull to rest?
burn it down.
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u/smeghead3825 3d ago
He was wrong! Wages are technically BELOW subsistence level! Shelter is a necessity that is quickly escaping more and more lives. Other necessities are still vaguely affordable for now though
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u/Bronzdragon 3d ago
Actually, he addresses this too. Wages will only be high enough that the working class as a whole can continue existing. There are no guarantees about individual members. This will produce a segment of people that cannot earn enough money to continue being workers (i.e. they become homeless).
Capitalism doesn't 'care' about this segment (insomuch as a system can care, of course). It only 'cares' about if there are enough people to work the factories and such.
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u/BoredNuke 3d ago
Capitalism needs this lowest class to exist and be in misery to reinforce the need for the working class to continue laboring under worse and worse conditions.
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u/Best_Cobbler_3719 3d ago
Hey, don't forget the slave- I mean prison-labor class.Â
Capitalism needs them too.Â
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u/BoredNuke 3d ago
Your right cant forget the ever increasing for profit prison/slave labor camp especially with states starting criminalize being unhoused.
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u/Goldsun100 2d ago
>It only âcaresâ about if there are enough people to work the factories and such.
Which is why there is a big anti-queer, anti-disabled, pro-natalist, anti-abortion, anti-womenâs rights and fear mongering over declining birth rates portion of this. Rather than improve material conditions that lead to people wanting to reproduce, theyâd rather just make women incubators and give men total say over what happens to a womanâs body and what happens to her vote.
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u/Careful_Trifle 3d ago
The main thing that hangs people up is the subsistence wage thing I think. Its hard to see the grand flow of this, but wages have never kept up with productivity - whoever is at the top always takes a little more than they would have taken if it were straight proportional, but your wages aren't directly reduced. They just don't grow fast enough.
But you know what does grow fast enough? Costs! Those grow above inflation in many categories. Our wages have become subsistence wages not because the wages wouldn't have been enough ten years ago, but because housing, healthcare, education, transportation, and now food and utilities go up double digit percentages year after year.
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u/ElectroBot 2d ago
I agree. If the 1% actually gave us a living wage, fulfilling jobs, less toxicity, then IMO most wouldnât care that there are mentally diseased parasites stealing everything and (slowly?) killing everyone else just for profit.
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u/Either_Payment_2867 3d ago
Wealth continues to concentrate at the top while everyone else is dealing with wage stagnation and inflation.
We need to stop believing in the falsehoods that the Red scares and Cold War anti-communist propaganda taught us.
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u/Redylittle 3d ago
I'm not happy with the status quo but life under communism is objectively worse 100% of the time.
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u/Tiny-Albatross518 3d ago
Its the semantics thats the problem.
Lets drop the labels because theres too much baggage in the nomenclature.
If by communism you mean Soviet style autocracy yeah, weâre with you no bueno.
But lets get real. Communism can be a school of thought or a label. You can stick the label on the hull of any nation. Cuba. Soviet Russia. Authoritarian China. That doesnt change the school of thought and it doesnt mean that every nation that was run by a government named âcommunistâ adheres to that school of thought.
They label what they do in the nordic countries socialism. A label again. But there on the ground they have strong democracy, legislate to limit wealth inequality and regulate industry. Labels aside thatâs the right way.
Donât get snagged on the ghost of McCarthyism or trip on the memory of Stalins purges.
Weâre talking about wealth distribution and equity.
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u/Either_Payment_2867 3d ago edited 2d ago
Universal healthcare, guaranteed housing and employment, retirement pensions, and price controls on goods is objectively worse than mass unemployment, homelessness, extreme wealth inequality, imperialism and exploitation of the working class that we have now under capitalism?
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u/ElectronicCatPanic 3d ago
I agree. The idealogy first, communist societies that were tried have been corrupted even quicker than the capitalist ones and slid into authoritarianism at lightning speed.
I wish Marx would spend more time of studying what the best rational alternative would be.
The communal ownership has its own problems. Like the commons dilemma.
I see Social Democracy as the only path forward at this time.
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u/Either_Payment_2867 3d ago edited 3d ago
Social democracy still leaves the profit motive and capitalists power intact, social democracy is a temporary concession granted when capitalism enters a crisis and its reversed when working class anger calms down and capitalist profit margins decline, thatâs how we got neoliberalism with Ronald Reagan.
Also there have been way more authoritarian capitalist governments than communist. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, Francisco Francoâs Spain, Augusto Pinochetâs Chile, Brazilâs military dictatorship, South Korea between the 1940s-1980s, Suhartoâs Indonesia. All were authoritarian capitalist governments, some of whom were supported by the U.S.
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u/ElectronicCatPanic 2d ago
Read what I posted one more time.
I didn't say capitalist societies were immune to authoritarianism. So you are arguing a straw man argument here.
Every system or society without the feedback loop is going to fail (become corrupt and become authoritarian). Look at USA, lol.
I know from the personal experience (lived in the USSR) how quick and how corrupt the society becomes when its using the abstract ideology as a guiding principle.
The communist/socialist ones have a horrible record. At least capitalist ones found some ways of getting back in track. The socialist ones were miserable to live in until eventually collapsed and scared billions of people from trying that again.
One very important point you are wrong about. The greed is too powerful to prohibit, ignore, or not use it as a motivation driver.
If you think there was no greed in the USSR you are very wrong. They have tried to go against the human nature and prohibited wealth, it resulted in unbelievable corruption and black market where the greed economy has continued to exist (fully intact), just hidden from the officials.
That led to some very very high levels of crime. Mafia flourished because there was just too much of undercover economic activities that government couldn't control due to ideological stiffness.
It is still a nightmare (30+ yeras after) in majority of the former Soviet countries.
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u/FilthyCasual2k17 2d ago
It really doesn't take a genius to realize that if a system is built around concentrating something, that eventually it will become concentrated. The crazy part is that you can spend enough money to make this controversial and debatable.
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u/HideSolidSnake 3d ago
When conservatives call you a Marxist.
"Yeah, thats right."
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u/monkeyamongmen 2d ago
I mean, the rich are also marxists. I was having this discussion with a friend last night. You can't tell me Jeff Bezos is unaware of Marx. The Rothschilds and Rockefellers are unaware of Marx. Musk and Thiel and Mike Rydin are unaware of Marx. Not only are they aware of him, at this point they are using his warning to us, as a playbook for themselves to amass wealth and power.
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u/tgt305 3d ago
The collapse of the USSR removed any live comparisons between the 2 ideologies of the Cold War. Once the USSR was gone, capitalism had nothing to hold it back from accelerating to its inevitable conclusion.
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u/Serenity-V 2d ago
Literally. Policy makers in Capitalist countries spent decades succesfully using the USSR as a bogeyman to get the rich on board with social welfare democratic, and industrial regulation policies to pacify the rest of us.
When we lost the USSR, we lost the leverage that kept our economies mixed and our states relatively responsive to the masses.
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u/Loud-Ad-2280 âď¸ Tax The Billionaires 3d ago edited 3d ago
Iâve seen liberals come up with about 10k ways to describe the dictatorship of the bourgeois.
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u/Epona44 3d ago
You should be able to read this stuff without panicking. You don't have to fear some kind of conversion. Just look at the words and try to see if there is truth in it. You don't have to agree with the pathway suggested to resolve the problems that are illuminated. Time has passed and we've learned new stuff. Just think about it.
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u/Legitimate_Shock4097 2d ago
Basically, and this is always true in all forms, once control is lost, itâs a problem for those that lose control. When power is concentrated in the hands of a fewâŚitâs always bad for everyone else unless those in control are very benevolent people. What they have shown to be is anything but benevolent. Itâs a real problem with the system, whether people want to acknowledge it or not. Those in power grab more for themselves, taking power away from those that already are disadvantaged. Leadership should be required to serve the best interests of the public or else they are not fit to leadâŚsimple as that. Instead we get class warfare and propaganda.
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u/popcorngirl000 2d ago
Marx said to get to communism, we first had to go thru capitalism and experience the detrimental effects to the point that everyone would reject capitalism. That experiment is still running.
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u/boukatouu 2d ago
He actually predicted that wealth would be concentrated at the top to the point that the workers would not even be able to support themselves and would become dependent upon society.
"And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. "
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u/thenikolaka 2d ago
Iâm not a Marx expert but other facts from his life I recall are his being exiled from his home country of Germany twice. Also being exiled from France and Belgium during his years in exile. Along the way he worked and fought for workers rights and published works to that end. In some cases he helped tangentially to make some progress, mostly through his ideas. In several cases, the victories won for workers came through uneasy partnerships with liberals, who often expediently dispensed of alliance with socialists once their own goals were met.
So the prediction from his life would be that there will typically be tensions between liberals and socialists and those must be navigated well if there is to be a lasting coalition.
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u/bigbjarne 1d ago
Not unrestricted capitalism, capitalism in general. If Marx argued that it was just about unrestricted capitalism, he would just have suggested some reforms to make capitalism better but he didn't. He suggested and argued that capitalism will be left behind and socialism will emerge.
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u/Blood_sweat_and_beer 3d ago
I remember from my college philosophy courses that a famous philosopher once said (maybe it was Marx) that capitalism leads to feudalism leads to capitalism leads to feudalism. The older I get the more I see that this is correct. Weâre currently on the downswing of capitalism, getting awfully close to feudalism.
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u/Yerrrrrskrrttt234 2d ago
Definitely not Marx. Marx famously saw the entire world in a sortâve linear motion of development. First it was like early civilizations, then feudalism, then capitalism, and he saw communism as the natural continuation, the sortâve final evolved state. This was probably one of his worst arguments, and an easy one to dismiss.
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u/Separate-Walrus- 2d ago
Not Marx. Marxâs whole thing was the idea that society moves in a certain direction every time. Looping would contradict that idea.
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u/Pierce_H_ đˇ Good Union Jobs For All 2d ago
Definitely not Marx. This is nonsense, the world has never reverted back to previous systems. Yes capitalism and feudalism rhyme. But this is because capitalism was derived from feudalism. This is why communists say that socialism is the transition period between capitalism and communism. Much like how Mercantilism manifested at the end of feudalism. Yes there are reactionaries who sometimes succeed in reinstalling monarchy like in France after Napoleon but this hasnât lasted forever anywhere.
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u/Notbob1234 2d ago
We absolutely have gone back and forth. We just give it a new name each time.
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u/Pierce_H_ đˇ Good Union Jobs For All 2d ago
The core principles of hierarchy are constant but we use different names for different systems because they areâŚwell⌠different. Comparing the modern proletariat to the serfs of feudal Europe you cannot say it was the same or that they had it better. Their relationship to production was inherently different than our modern day system of global capitalism. These systems we describe donât just disappear at the bang of a gun, itâs a slow transition. I tend to argue that feudalism started to change to capitalism in the early 17th century with the Dutch Republic and the 30 years war.
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u/QueefMaster2001 3d ago
id doesnt take Marxism to tell you that.
Resource hoarding commenced along with agriculture in 7000 BC or thereabouts
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u/ItsIllak 2d ago
Furthermore, what makes Socialism fail is that the capitalists don't go away, they just subvert it for their own desires.
Doesn't mean socialism works, but frames capitalism as the root of all economic evil, not just it's own.
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u/OneValkGhost 3d ago
He was right, but the same thing applies to Communism too. Capitalism has rules that prevent people being purged. The real problem is that the law is not being enforced.
Including taxing the rich.
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u/newaccounthomie 2d ago
Whatâs to stop the rich from creating and exploiting tax/legal loopholes?
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u/OneValkGhost 2d ago
The IRS.
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u/newaccounthomie 2d ago
Thatâs really worked great for us so farâŚ
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u/OneValkGhost 1d ago
It worked until they stopped collecting taxes from the rich and expected the poor to be able to make up the difference.
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u/newaccounthomie 1d ago
That was inevitable. Everyone has a price and our governing bodies were bought out.
I donât know what the solution is, but expecting anyone to always follow the rules in a bureaucratic representative democracy is a fools errand.
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3d ago
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u/funkyflapsack 3d ago
This is why most people, outside the anarchocapitalists in tech who basically own most wealth atm, believe in regulated capitalism. Commerce is good actually, it just has to be supervised
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u/vivalaibanez 2d ago
This is the most sensible and realistic thing in the thread (assuming you are referring to the US), but it will fall on deaf ears as it ultimately involves policy changes versus radical economic overhaul. If it doesn't involve people feeling like they are part of some sort of revolution, then it's "not good enough". It's possible to be activists for workers rights but also not repeat/re-write history.
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u/Sagatee 3d ago
This was written some 160 years ago, you "genius".
Capitalism was in it's infancy. In fact, many countries were not even full capitalist yet. Russia, for example, was an agrarian country with residual feudalism until 1918 when the Revolution started.So yeah, congratulations on your brilliant 2026 agreement with 1860s Karl Marx. Dumbass.
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u/funkyflapsack 3d ago
This doesn't change the fact that the implications of a thing - if you follow it's logical conclusion, can still be obvious
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u/cbslinger 3d ago
Marx also predicted that all legal and effective mechanisms of protest an rejoinder of grievance would be eliminated, so the peopleâs last option would be violence. This is why he was also very pro-firearm ownership, because he realized violence, or the implied threat of it, was probably the only thing that would keep capitalists in check.