Marxism

But we're fallen creatures.Given our inherent greed, that we should try to take into account when deciding policy, we would find people don't pay what they don't need to pay. As such the taxes would either be so low that there isn't enough money to pay for roads, military, police, schools etc and the only way to fund them would be privately - which would mean fees, subscriptions, levies, tolls, more insurance, etc. So those rich greedy people profit further by extracting even more money from the people that actually build and maintain the roads, police the streets, care for the sick, defend the nation and educate the kids.
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The poor can't afford the taxes and starve.The materials to build a clock: 50.
Labour hours to build a clock: 10 hours.
Market will pay for completed clock: 500I give you 50 of materials to build a clock, and let you use my clock building workshop. The value you have added to the materials using my workshop and your labour is 450. What is a fair way to distribute that money?In a capitalist system, the person who owns the workshop and bought the materials decides how to split the money. Because of the 'greed' problem this means they will give the clock maker the least amount of money they possibly can do while retaining their services. So he might give 50 to the clockmaker and therefore makes 400 profit.Marx simply suggested a system that got rid of the struggle between workers wanting to sell the labour for as much as they could and the factory owners who wanted to buy it as cheaply as possible. This is a struggle in favour of the factory owners, purely because the demand to work is always high, and the factory owner is incentivised to employ as few people as possible so supply is ever constrained.The system was that the people that do the work also control the means of production. They are the workers and the factory owners at the same time and they decide communally how to distribute it.The Communist manifesto calls for and to end profiting from the work of others - the exact thing people are often accusing the poor of doing 'scrounging welfare' - but an argument really can be made that people that get paid millions and millions every year are getting some of that wage because they bought labour from someone at below its true value because the person selling their labour wasn't in a position with a great deal of choice.There are many problems with pure Marxist Communism and its handling of the human social problem, especially living in a nation that doesn't do much manufacturing - but it doesn't ignore greed...it was the greed of one group of people who were exploiting another group for every penny they could that inspired it.The people they are purchasing labour from are in a bit of a bind. They need to eat but they don't own any land, and what land they have access to is not sufficient to provide a reliable food source. So in order to pay their landlords for the privilege of having a place to live, the farmers for the privilege of eating and all the other sundry essentials like water, possibly power etc. A person needs the job and can't haggle overlong for 'fair' wages because someone who is more desperate for any money at all will take your place.If this coercion is the best system you can think of - then you're welcome to live in the 19th Century as a wage earner. With minimum wages, and other healthcare options - life is a lot more reliable and comfortable. Without government intervention - the evidence shows capitalist entities will pay the workers pittance...whatever is required to keep them functioning as workers. Which is basically slave labour where the slave gets the privelage of transporting the their own maintenance costs to somebody else.Can we do better? I hope so.

I'm inclined to agree that attempting to revolutionise the economy is almost certainly doomed to failure. Stupid? Oh, I see what you did. It's not saying one shouldn't profit at all. That's stupid. It's saying that if your farmer got people to help with the business, he should pay them based on the value they added to his seeds/field/equipment/time etc by sewing, tending, and harvesting it.This is in contrast to the worker doing all the labour and the farm owner reaping all the value of their work, giving them in return the minimum they possibly can. I'm talking about fair from a Marxist point of view. Which would be related to the amount of value they added to the company's product. What I'm saying is that Marx's ideas do take greed into account. It is about the struggle that arises when the greed of the workers conflicts with the greed of the factory owner. It is about one proposed solution: make the workers also the owners. The situation I was describing was the situation that Marx was criticizing and attempting to solve.If you think it is possible to become puppets to your government - that might be true in some sense, but technically the government of America is The People, so if you feel like a puppet - blame the idiots around you!Where you went off the rails a bit there was the 'force us to agree with views we hate'. How would this work? Are you suggesting freedom of speech is being curtailed in some way? And a 'bogus idea of "giving" which is not giving'? I agree that state ownership is very probably a Bad Idea.Just observing that the current system, even with regulations and the like, works in a way which could be construed as unfair. Workers very rarely get their real value. In the present system the difference in true value and paid value is pocketed by the company, and therefore the owners of said company. I think when people put a load of work into something and realize that some amount of that work is to pay for somebody's expensive car and three month cruise rather than, to pay their bills, feed their kids or buy themselves a car that was built this decade - they do tend to get a bit bitter. Especially if it turns out that despite all the hard work they were doing the company failed and yet the people at the top still seem to end up wealthy...Who is the target of the injustice, exactly?

Marxism observes that, by your understanding of 'stealing' - the capitalists are stealing something from their empolyees and putting it to uses the employee might not have consented to (from reinvesting in the business to lining their own pockets) and seeks to rectify this theft.What you are complaining about is progressive taxes. Progressive taxes are not Marxism at all. Marx did happen to support the notion of progressive taxes - but they wouldn't be strictly necessary in a Marxist world.To quote Adam Smith, another supporter of progressive tax.

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The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

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From a Marxist point of view, the rich are 'stealing' (your definition) from the poor so Progressive Taxation is a way for the poor to 'steal' some of their money back from the rich. The rich get to keep some of their stolen money. Taking money that was stolen from you is hardly stealing - especially if you don't take nearly as much as was stolen. There are plenty of people who are busy doing this in capitalist contexts already.It is clearly the case that if the farmer is paying his staff more than the value they are generating, he will lose money because they are basically stealing from him. I appreciate a perfect balance is impossible to practically reach. That does not mean we should give up trying to make the system as fair as possible. But you agree with Marx on so many points. The reality he lived in was filled with workers earning nothing and the rich getting even richer and the poor working their arses off just to feed and clothe themselves (and failing even to do that in many events).It seems he was a fairly astute observer of reality.He suggested a system to circumvent this. He also supported the idea of the rich paying proportinally more towards communal upkeep. An idea that the vast majority of western economists (fiscally conservative or otherwise) support as far as I can tell. Violence isn't generally the best way of going about things, obviously. If it was agreed the factory owner had something that he was not entitled to (ie., he morally stole it), then isn't it moral to force the factory owner to give it back? Even if it is only legal forcing as opposed to violent force.Of course, the entire point of Marx's idea is that there is no such conflict with the factory owner since it would be communally owned by the workers. The main problem is what to with the people that presently have legal ownership? If they aren't morally entitled to something, but they are legally entitled to it what should we do? The methods involved are difficult, but I don't think the US has any policies that would be required to lay a decent grounding for a Marxist world. Quite probably - but that did happen and Marx and Engels did happen too. The problem is, that according the principles of fairness these men formulated - business owners are still not treating their workers fairly.Slaves have historically existed, and not always in the American style. It used to be a system that was morally understandable: One person needs something done, another person can do it. The first person agrees to feed and shelter the second person in exchange for doing the job how they want it done.If a slave is very well looked after, are they still a slave?Am I using hyperbole?It depends.By becoming an emplyee, a person sacrifices something that is core to them: Their labour. They give all the value of their labour to someone else, in exchange for food, shelter, and some possible luxuries. The employee gets to choose (within limits) their food and luxuries etc., but they have still given something fundamental to another entity.So ultimately - it all rests on ownership and fundamental issues of what can be said to 'belong' to another person. Some political philosophers (Such as Locke) argue that the only thing that really belongs to a person is their capacity to do things - and taking capacity for your own benefit might be construed as taking more than you deserve by profiting from the hard work of others. The only title to value anyone can lay claim to is based on labour, he would argue. Or as he said:

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Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others...
God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational, (and labour was to be his title to it not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.

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So if you take someone's property from them - that is theft, by your understanding, yes?
So Locke and Marx's views combined with yours suggest agreement with their ideas, even if you have pragmatic concerns about putting them into practice. Millions may be an exageration. The people that count are those that have the power to change the government. It turns out that the rich and the religious have significant and disproportionate influence in this regard.But that's the authors or even the followers of the Constitution's fault for setting up or blindly agreeing to a governmental style that is difficult to change except by the very people who wouldn't want to change it (ie., if you have power to influence government, why would you use that to lower your power to influence government??) Not true at all. Obviously - in the Marxist system the worker does obviously do it all and they are also the business owner. However, in the capitalist system the capitalist rarely contributes zero value. The business owner certainly deserves some money since the business owner is a worker. They work. They labour. If they don't labour, don't take any particular risks, then yes they wouldn't be doing anything that deserves financial gain. I'm aware of the kinds of disasters businesses face. I work in insurance which is about managing risks to help mitigate losses from sudden disasters like this. I appreciate there are plenty of uninsurable risks too. If we are talking about a capitalist system, then naturally a person should be compensated for accounting for risk and opportunity cost. I know someone that did, and I started working there too. I took a wage below minimum legal wage for a year, secured a big contract - made a nice percentage of the proceeds for doing that, but then left for reasons unrelated to the money. I don't hate business owners. And unless you are making money by extracting the value of the labours of other people, then you aren't under discussion here. You suggested it existed, could you give me an example?

Yes, the worker is getting paid, and yes the customer is getting a product.Capitalism as such is not stealing.However, profiting by selling something that you have no rights to is theft. The question is - who has ownership of a person's labour? I thought that you agreed that where practicable, the worker should be paid in proportion to his contribution to product and you're main concern was that it couldn't be put into practice. Marx didn't reinvent language. You wanted to talk about stealing as taking something that you don't deserve or have rights to. Marx simply had a different view over who has rights to what. Marx thought that a labourer's labour and the fruits thereof belonged to himself.Where's the abuse? What's all this to do with enemies? It bothers you that the person's wage should be related to the value they add to the product they produce? What's nasty about wanting to earn what you've earned? What mileu? Taxing the rich at a higher rate isn't Marxism. Marx agreed with it, but he agreed with the existence of tables but that doesn't make them Marxist. And I thought I'd include a quote from Adam Smith, one of the most influential voices in the formation of modern Capitalism.I don't know what you mean by 'the majority of capitalism'. There are a lot of small business trying to make a decent living and more power to them. Yes we do do it by adjusting as we go. The farmer is incentivised to pay them less than the value they add, and the farm worker has little power to change things on their own. So unions form, and conflicts occur. It takes a long time, centuries even and the wages are still flagging behind value. They have to in a capitalist system!Marx just suggested that a single workers revolution would be a quicker way to get there rather than have lots strikes, other union actions and little revolts here and there. The hatemongering is what you hate about Marxism? Heh. There is no enemies being made out of ordinary people in the economic model. I have no idea how its meant to undermine decent human feeling?I am trying to appeal to the decent human of you, Faith. Is it fair that a person that works hard, should have someone else (who was definitely part of the process, don't get me wrong) decide almost entirely unilaterally, who deserves what.I agree it's a great system in that it's largely easy to implement - but can you see that even ordinary people might be inadvertently perhaps, depriving someone of the fruits of their labour for profit.If it's a small business - this tends not to be the case. Inefficiencies reduce the value being created so that even paying staff minimum wage is a daunting prospect. If they were being paid according to Marxist principles, then the business owner might be able to pay themselves a higher wage by paying staff less wages.And herein is the killer of pure Marxism, and it's a very similar killer to pure Capitalism. How do you avoid small businesses getting priced out completely? So market regulations are added, help to small businesses offered. With things like minimum wage legislation to help prop up the labour market to reasonably comfortable levels, small businesses get hit again.When Marx was around, there was not the efficiency there is now. The science of industry and then marketing and so on, exploded. A small business in a Marxist realm could easily find everyone on crushingly low wages as the product can't be produced and sold at much of a profit because much more efficient established competitors could just price them out. Again - government regulation would be needed. What are you talking about? Court? We aren't talking about unlawful taking of something why would that work? I asked if a factory owner sold something that didn't belong to him, would it be moral to try and force him to give it back (or compensation of equal value) to it's morally right owner?What's glib about that? Discussions about ownership rights disturb you? Who do you think owns a person's labour? The person, or the person that provided the means for the labourer to labour?Why should that make you nervous?Let me put it this way. If a person works hard to set up a plumbing business and hires some plumbers and gives them the fruit of his labour (eg., tools, parts, business contacts etc) do you think that this person should be rewarded for their contribution to the increase in value of this enterprise in line with the level of efficient work they put into doing it? And my question is, assuming that you think it is, how is this a problem? What part of the ideas has become entrenched? Why are these ideas problematic?