• KurtVonnegut [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Lib - “Markets make everything cheaper, which is good.”

    Leftist - “But if there is a labor market, won’t that make labor cheaper?”

    Lib - “Yes, and that is good.”

    Leftist - “How is that good?”

    Lib - “It leads to more profits.”

    Leftist - “But why is it good to have more profits?”

    Lib - “Because a good country is when corporations make profits, and the more profits the corporations make, the gooder the country is.”

    • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Love to spend insane amounts of resources on creating a phone that has the same tech and capabilities as all the other phones, but I can’t just get access to their research and they can’t just get access to mine.
      Love to spend insane amount of time working up a cure to covid, but I can’t share my research with others and they can’t share it with me, yay this is awesome.
      Love to spend insane amount of resources working out how to make people want to buy a sugary drink and then spend even more to make them want to buy my drink specifically.
      Love to build empty houses and love to create 1.21 times more food than we need.
      Love to do all this as the world is burning and people are starving.
      Capitalism is the most efficient distribution of resources

    • wewbull@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      Kid: “Mommy, what’s a strawman?”

      Mother: “Take a look a this post here. See how they speak for both sides of the argument?”

      Kid: “Yes, they’re arguing with themselves.”

      Mother: “Exactly, and they can make their opponent say what they want.”

      Kid: “That seems like an easy way to make your argument look good”

      Mother: "Yes. It’s like fighting someone who can’t put up any resistance. They could be made of straw. A strawman. "

      Kid: “Oh, I see.”

      • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        You didn’t engage with their argument, but good try nonetheless. It’s nice to see you cling to a fallacy rather than engage in good-faith discussion of an argument clearly illustrated for you to relate to.

        • wewbull@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          There is no point in engaging with someone playing such games. They’re not going to be convinced when they’re already putting words in the opposition’s mouth.

          • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            They’re not going to be convinced

            A good faith discussion is not about convincing another, but instead about having an open exchange of information.

            They’re not going to be convinced when they’re already putting words in the opposition’s mouth.

            They’re illustrating a point which you failed to engage with. In no way did it put words in your mouth. The fact that you choose to be insulted by the way they decided to illustrate that point rather than engage with them in good faith says a lot more about you.

            To reiterate: You didn’t engage with their argument, but good try nonetheless. It’s nice to see you cling to a fallacy rather than engage in good-faith discussion of an argument clearly illustrated for you to relate to.
            Do better.

    • trailing9@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Leftist - “But if there is a labor market, won’t that make labor cheaper?”

      A third person - "Not necessarily. If the demand for labor is bigger than the supply then markets make labor more expensive.

      Leftist - " How is that possible? "

      A third person - " There are various ways. Workers could start more cooperatives or invest their savings in new companies"

      Leftist - “But why should I care about markets when it is easier to change the political system?”

      A third person - “Is it easier?”

      • Mog_Pharou [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Damn this third person never heard about the reserve army of labor, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and like all of American history showing the hollowing out of working class power. JUST INVEST YOUR NON-EXISTENT SAVINGS INTO NEW COMPANIES ITS SO EASY. And please how will your worker coop survive in this hellscape with a bourgeois state over it? It will be outcompeted and swallowed immediately by corporations who have no qualms over worker or environmental rights. This isn’t china, Huawei (a worker coop) is villified and attacked at every turn here. xigma-male You know maybe you have a point, let’s be more like China.

        • trailing9@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Does the third person argue that it is easy or does the third person only argue that it is easier than the alternatives? How easy would it be to run a revolution or just to establish a socialist party?

          What is the third person missing about the reserve army of labor? To me, it seems that reducing the reserve army of labor is their main argument.

          What the third person doesn’t mention is that there is a tendency to spend all possible income. The housing market shows that most people use reduced interest rates to increase their offer to outcompete somebody instead of sticking to their limits.

          Are skilled workers willing to share their increased income with the poor? San Francisco has huge social problems even though many workers have a huge income.

      • AkariMizunashi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        This worked (to some extent, in the small cohort of industrialized capitalist countries as a sort of class collaborationist regime mediated by unions and a relatively activist government) for around 20-30 years after WWII but that’s exactly what it is - something that will only work temporarily and for as long as it’s tolerable to capitalists, because the political system is built by and for capitalists, and as soon as they see an opening they will use the state to beat back and discipline labor (in this case the neoliberal reaction that’s continued since the 80s). Reformism is a circular dead end because politics and economics are inseparable, and political power just like economic power under capitalism is always (in the long term) gonna be stacked in favor of the people with capital - and those people aren’t gonna give up their power without a fight.

        That analysis is also looking at the whole labor market as a closed system within rich capitalist countries when the reality is that most of the breathing room that the middle class / unionized labor had during that period was built on top of capitalist super exploitation of labor in Africa, South America and Asia, and that sort of exported exploitation is always gonna be the case under a capitalist political system built around nation states.

        • trailing9@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          If the capitalists expanded their workforce to Africa, South America and Asia, and the middle class was temporary happy with consuming slightly increased wages instead of seeding competition in those countries, then they hadn’t cared about markets.

          The middle class always has the breathing room down to consuming as little as the poor. If they don’t use it to control markets, how are they going to maintain a socialist or communist system?