this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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Antiwork
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A community for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.
The new place for c/[email protected]
This server is no longer working, and we had to move.
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Subscribers: 2.1k
Date Created: June 21, 2023
Library copied from reddit:
The Anti-Work Library 📚
Essential Reads
Start here! These are probably the most talked-about essays on the topic.
- The Abolition of Work by Bob Black (1985) | listen
- On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2013) | listen
- In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1932) | listen
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Ok. Capital is just cars and cash.
The article you referenced explains (emphasis added)...
I think my time is better spent now supplying my capital to a local drinking establishment.
Enjoy ranting.
The act of investment is purchasing (or exchanging) capital using cash or other assets.
A business may acquire funding from investment, but in such a case the investor is trading cash for equity, bonds, or some other investment asset representing the present or future value of the company, or generated by the company. The investor is not supplying capital, but rather purchasing capital (or trading capital).
The idea that the investor is supplying capital to the company is only a metaphor.
Someone may lose money from an investment, but most capital is owned by immensely wealthy individuals, whose situation is vastly removed from that of ordinary workers, who actually do face the risk of losing their only home or their only car.
Even small businesses are owned by individuals who have chosen to become business owners in order to profit from others' work. Any risk they assume is through an attempt to enrich themselves from gains not shared with workers. By not sharing their gains with those who are working to create them, business owners, large or small, are not helping workers, but rather preventing workers from advancing.
If you chose to use your house as collateral in order for the opportunity to enrich yourself, then no one owes you any gratitude. You are not a hero. You acted in your own interests, not for helping others.
If workers provided labor, and you only paid them wages, then you profited from their labor, and prevented them from advancing by realizing the full value of their labor.
The only reason your house was at risk was because the bank hoards capital, using lending as a device to augment its own wealth.
If capital were shared by everyone, then all the problems you describe would not occur. No one would lose houses or cars, no one would be a tens of millions of times richer than anyone else, and everyone would be paid fully for their labor, without distinction of owner versus worker.
You are not understanding.
The risk is artificial.
Those who have the most wealth, the most capital, are not facing risk, compared to everyone else. Someone who has $10 billion in assets and loses $2 billions has not lost in the same way as a poor person who loses a car. The billionaire is completely insulated from the precarity faced by most of the population, because the billionaire privately controls the vast wealth of society. The losses suffered by the billionaire owe to the instability of the business and the business cycle, not to the trials of life.
Those who are most wealthy face the least risk, and in fact impose the genuine risk on everyone else.
If control over capital were shared, then no one would be precarious, nor need to use a home as collateral for a loan.
You are being incredibly dishonest.
You mentioned Elon Musk.
I simply observed that most of the capital is owned by a tiny cohort of society. Small businesses, especially businesses worth approximately the same as a house, comprise a relatively small valuation of capital (which is not the same as the number of businesses, or the number of jobs).
There is no reason why economic activity needs to be tied to someone risking becoming homeless. Such a relationship is a consequence of the system, the way that wealth is hoarded by the few and made available to the rest only under conditions that serve the private interest of the wealthy. A different system would not need to carry the same feature.
How did you prove that ownership of capital in terms of its valuation is not extremely heavily concentrated?
You only gave the statistics relating to the count of small business and jobs in them.
One business can be worth more than a thousand others.
I suggest you review statistics on wealth distribution in various countries. Learn how much wealth as a share of the total is owned by various cohorts, and investigate questions such as how many individuals own half the wealth.
Economies of scale mean that Walmart out-competes local small business general supply stores, and the corporate profits are then taken out of the community instead of being spent locally. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/walmart-effect.asp#:~:text=Walmart's%20insistence%20on%20procuring%20products,choose%20to%20sell%20through%20Walmart.
So one party having a lot of wealth absolutely impedes other parties accruing wealth.
You are being evasive and dishonest.
Indeed. The idea presented is that people are shopping regularly, and obtaining most of the goods and services, at small businesses whose owners have listed their homes as collateral, in order to contribute generously to their community.
It is a fantasy.
Neither the owners of big box retailers, or the owners of banks that are giving loans to new businesses, are "taking all the risk".
Life is good if have hoarded capital, and the reason is because everyone else depends on it to survive.
Your are being evasive and dishonest.
I am not evasive at all. You're not poor because Elon has billions. That is a tough cookie for some people to swallow.
If you want to end people like Zucker, stop using facebook. If enough people stop using it then he will lose billions.
When claims you previously made become challenged, instead of engaging the challenge, you dismiss the relevance of your own claims, by hurling meaningless and derisive assumptions.
You must feel quite strongly about your convictions, if you cannot defend them more effectively than by insultation.