Upvotes on an anti-capitalist comment on HN?!? Why I never....
To all the 'gracious employers': we are sick of working for pennies while you peddle psychobabble to get us to work harder. The problem is our exploitation. The end.
I am not an anti-capitalist. In fact, I work in a prop trading firm, and Atlas Shrugged is always in my library for a yearly reminder on the direction this world is going.
And I _still_ think this article is a terrible advice. In capitalism, capital is the prime resource, to be gathered and kept. Being an employee is a good start, but I doubt it is a good lifelong strategy.
I guess there are people out there who really believe the individualism in Atlas Shrugged is a model for society? My interpretation is that's darkly satirical humor.
Okay Ayn was a genius, but I think she had a sense of humor too. At least that is the way I would like to think of it.
As a former employer who didn't pay very much, or at least not as much as I would have like to have paid, I'll just offer this... the employees who got paid the most were the ones who realized the company itself was trying to become more efficient & bring in more money, and the company didn't always know how to do that without employee input. It's incredibly hard to build a business. Employees who get that, and can help grow it, are invaluable. Any sane employer will do whatever it takes to keep an employee who makes the company for profitable.
I'm not sure if this comment is anti-capitalist. Actually the comment is very capitalist.
In capitalism, we should not be glorifying working and generating profit for your employers (in socialist countries that was the state - but the same shit.).
I really don't understand how anyone that is sound of mind can be anti-capitalist. Maybe critical of capitalism I can understand but being "anti-capitalist" after looking at history probably indicates that you have some developmental issues.
After this comment, I'm wondering if your username is a reference to Milton Friedman.
Firstly, I'm curious how expressing an anti-capitalist sentiment differs from being critical of capitalism.
Secondly, I'd like to propose a few reasons why a person of sound mind might be anti-capitalist:
* There are several well known cases where market forces, in isolation, cannot solve a problem. This already leads one away from several forms of "pure" capitalism. Once you move away from pure capitalism though, you create new problems that require more complexity to solve (regulatory capture perhaps being one of the bigger ones).
* If you look at the post-industrial-revolution capitalistic societies, there is a massive underclass that was substantially made materially worse-off (yes, a generation or two later, society as a whole ends up in a generally better position, but it was accomplished by grinding up and spitting out cheap labor that typically did not directly benefit from it.
* There are some very serious environmental problems currently facing us, most notably global warming. Companies
that were profitable by externalizing the costs of these quire rationally found that the best way to maximize their profits was to muddy the scientific waters sufficiently to significantly delay any attempts at addressing these problems (which would certainly involve some way of preventing them from externalizing their costs).
There's probably a lot more that I'm not thinking of right now. I would suggest finding friends who are anti-capitalist and listening to their reasons, not with an eye to shutdown their response, but just to get a sense of differing views.
Even someone who agrees that the natural experiment of the 20th century proved capitalism is superior to communism (which is in itself debatable due to the low sample size and several confounding differences between the powers involved), might feel that some other non-capitalist form of economy could be superior.
No one is wholly anything. To express an anti-capitalist sentiment does not make one _an_ anti-capitalist, merely critical of capitalism.
To jump from parts to wholes exclusively in the case of capitalism/history — from "critical of capitalism" to "developmental issues" — probably indicates that you have some developmental issues.
Nah, no it doesn't. It implies that you're circumspect of introspection into the very reasonable path from being "critical of capitalism" to more being concerned about the negative externalities in free markets than, for example, armchair rocket-science or whatever hobby you engage with in the ample free time afforded to you as a member of the coddled petit bourgeois while still managing to ride a high horse around the subject of anti-capitalism.
You do not, of course, see why anyone would be critical of a system that has given YOU so much, but of course to dismiss the active cynic of capitalism is to exclude yourself from your own liberation.
Had YOU been there, you would not have been redeemed.
I'm not going to lie to you, I didn't read your comment because it became apparent it was mostly rambling 4 sentences in. I'm also not interested in arguing semantics.
Clearly he is saying that people that don't understand what the word capitalism is associate it with every instance of greed they see. For example, working hard for long hours has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism but for some reason people here seem to be saying capitalism is evil because of it?
Fundamentally a capitalist accrues profit: it the difference between the wages and expenditure needed to produce a product. Either en masse or per unit, a capitalist maximizes this difference, of which the worker sees none.
Capitalism is greed: it is the accumulation of what you are not morally owed.
So what happens when you fight exploitation successfully, and every employee now costs their employer 3x more than the employee's salary to pay for better health insurance, EI, etc? I don't see why it makes sense to keep any jobs in North America if employers can avoid it.
"Don't ask what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
To all the 'gracious employers': we are sick of working for pennies while you peddle psychobabble to get us to work harder. The problem is our exploitation. The end.