this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
288 points (98.3% liked)
US News
364 readers
1 users here now
News from within the empire - From a leftist perspective
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Hardly perfection, if it was perfection I was at it would be the complete and unequivocal destruction of the Dictatorship of Capital and Liberation of Workers, in such that they get the full value kf their labor and no longer must beg for scraps, for without the laboror nothing would get done. But I understand that right now it is impractical to do with our level of class contiousness, so my compromise is $33.33 minimum wage or greater,
And it tracks roughly with the levels of production done. If we are doing more work for the Capitalist the Capitalist must pay.
Even assuming that hourly rate did track roughly with the production of the least skilled labor, why would anyone pay that? That’s the employer guaranteeing payment to at best break even, without accounting for any other costs or risks incurred by the employer.
It's the law, son. It makes people do stuff. With guns.
But there’s no law that requires hiring anyone in the first place. I’m 100% for raising the minimum wage. I’m for raising it to at least a living wage. But the math does not work if the wage paid by the employer = the price charged to the purchaser. At that point, the employer’s best case scenario is $0 profit, and unless the work is performed, sold, and paid for immediately, a loss on every single transaction. No one has any incentive to employ anyone at that rate.
I have no idea whether $33.33 per hour is the actual productivity rate of the least skilled worker. I tried Googling it but the closest I could find is that the average American worker grossed $29.76 per hour, not the value of their work output. I also see a Bureau of Labor Statistics report that says the average worker creates $57.54 worth of goods and services per hour. But I don’t see the $33.33 figure in admittedly half ass searching.
Regardless of what the figure is, there must be some spread between work output and take home pay or no one has any incentive to hire anyone else.
The profit should equal exactly the minimum wage, no more and no less. In fact it should not even be called "profit", just the wage of the administration. Doesn't matter if a profession is "skilled" or "unskilled", people should be paid to live not to value their skills above others. No reason an MD should be paid more or less than a janitor and we wouldn't be able to live without either of them. The pandemic showed clear as day how much work is "essential" and badly paid compared to "inessential" and "skilled".
It's not even like employers themselves are particularly skilled anyways. Now if you believe that some people inherently deserve a worse life due to their profession, you can just say it.
Dont forget with raising that minimum wage to meet profit, we are also going to take the means of production.
Ok, I've read all this. And it's ridiculous, no one will open a business if they make $0. Raise the minimum to something livable like $20 and let them make a few million, probably with hard caps over something like $10+ million profit. They won capitalism, congrats, the rest goes back into the company/taxes. It shouldn't meet exactly the productivity, just better than what we have now.
This idea is fine if you literally just want to survive, but your perfect world would have nothing of joy in it.
lmao lost lib came over here to defend millionaires. So long as there exists people personally tied to property profiting "a few million", they'll have very little to lose to overturn or bypass those "hard caps" to make a few billions. There's no "winning capitalism" if you can still influence politics to unlock more capitalism to win more. People should open businesses to serve their community, not to rule them.
I very much don't support billionaires, but I just don't understand how you'd expect to have anything entertainment-wise in a minimum wage=exact productivity. Microsoft isn't making Xbox from the goodness in their heart.
What would we spend our $33 on? Just our house and food? I'd much rather $20 and be able to go to the movies or restaurants.
If something has genuine entertainment value, why wouldn't people create it because they want to be entertained, or to entertain others? Without needing to worry about money to survive, lots of people would pursue arts, literaly just producing "entertainment" for others.
I don't understand how you get the idea that without profit motive nobody would be creative, or life would turn gray and bland. Restaurants would be just as popular or more popular: people would take more risks and try new things because they aren't afraid of failing and potentially ruining their lives. Similarly with movies: most junk produced now is just the same playbook because it is guaranteed massive profit; there's little creativity involved.
There would maybe be a tiny fraction of the entertainment we have now, how would people get enough capital to START the businesses? If min wage is $30, they would have to be instantly profitable or they would run or of money paying employees and shutdown. Movies could never be funded, even a $1 mill movie would take someone saving up for 33k hours of work.
The only thing that could really exist in a full communist society is one person businesses and not even that really. Historically full communism hasn't resulted in a cultural boom like you expect, the USSR was a shit hole and people just worked and bought food - there wasn't anything else to do.
We just need a mix, good working conditions, with good quality of life. I'd rather enjoy myself for slightly less money than do nothing with slightly more.
Huh, somebody tell Mosfilm that they didn't exist. They'll be surprised. Speaking from one's ass is generally considered rude. Next you're gonna tell us they didn't go to space or develop cool linear programming algorithms or other advanced research. Never change, Redditor.
Indeed. One of the best films ever produced, Come and See from 1985, was produced by Mosfilm. There's seemingly some confusion where expensive must mean quality, and it can't be quality unless it's expensive. That's utter nonsense: the highest grossing movies are bullshit propaganda Marvel movies that have no lasting value; and some of the best and most lasting films, such as Come and See, made "only" $21M at the box office and so would be considered a flop.
Profit motive in entertainment kills creativity, because creativity (as risk) is potentially costly, and not guaranteed money. Profit motive finds a profitable "script" (see the Marvel franchise) and just prints it in a thousand different fonts and calls it a thousand successful films.
One of the last Yankee movies I've watched was "Marriage Story" and even though it was a bit on the expensive side due to the cast and I didn't even love it, it did shine a huge light on "why don't I like Yankee movies" when everything I was used to coming out of that is just Transformers-level. There's a reason that little games like Undertale and Minecraft are so much more beloved than big budget hype-garbage like Cyberpunk. Capitalism ruins art, that's why artists hate it.
God I miss when Minecraft was a small game, Microsoft stuffed it full of greedy DLC and made Bedrock version (which was designed to be the "faster" Minecraft ) so slow from the bloat that the Switch version is damn near unplayable now
I have never moved on from version 1.5.2 ever since my favourite modder from the "Better Than Wolves" mod decided to stay in that version. Some 8 years later when I finally got coerced into playing the 1.15 it just felt like the game completely stagnated both technically and artistically and was just adding fluff to maintain engagement. It used to run on my old 32 bit Pentium with 4GB RAM like a breeze, but oh wow, bees! The Nether update was fun I guess, but I've seen better mods in like 2014.
I refuse to run the bedrock edition on the simple principle that it's not moddable and doesn't run on Linux and at that point it's the opposite of why I even bought the game back in the day. Every Microsoft decision with it since buying Mojang, from bankrupting Telltale to keeping two parallel minecraft main versions, to whatever the hell was Minecraft Dungeons/Legends, is a great case study in enshitification by itself. If I get triggered enough I may even do a write-up on it in the weekend lol.
Looks like a tiny fraction to me, on a tiny scale. Most expensive soviet film was War and Peace (1967) which cost 8 mill rubbles or $75 million in today's currency. And that's with top earners in the USSR earning around 500-1000 rubbles a month, most around 100-300/month. Most movies could not be made in a society where there is zero extra money and wages are so high, investors wouldn't invest and there wouldn't be any startup capital.
I'd still rather a mix of capitalism and socialism with good production value.
Your claim was that there was no entertainment. I showed you a page that shows around 10-20 national films per year in the 20th century. That's a lot of film. Now you're deflecting to say that the films are bad because their budget is low. First you're gonna have to show that expensive movies are automatically good given how shit every Marvel movie since Iron Man 1 has been, specially compared with the lower budget stuff like Jessica Jones. Then you're gonna have to show movies from the time of War and Piece in the USA that are actually so "superior" on quality and and budget.
You seem to still be insisting on "investors" as though they are necessary. Once a movie has sold well it can finance the following movies by itself without being tied down to some disconnected rich AMPTP CEO who won't pay his writers and actors. "Most movies" actually have very small budgets, for obvious reasons and you'll hardly find movies that cost hundreds of millions in film festivals. The vast majority of art is actually cheaply produced even in capitalism, just look at deviantart, steam, itch, youtube.
Why do you want to be your society to still be ruled by investors? You do know that if they can have 10% of the economy they'll try to get 20%, right? How many 2008s and 2020s do you need to learn?
I also drink my water with oil. Soap blends it very well.
You cannot mix Capitalism and Socialism, they are fundamentally incompatible
Literally every fully communist society has been a shit hole throughout history. It simply doesn't equate to good living conditions. It's why there have been so many revolutions in communist countries, it gives people nothing of value apart from literally not dying, and even then, not really.
What does work is the Scandinavian approach with a mix of capitalism so we have things we can enjoy and spend our money on, with strong social aspects so the wealth gap isn't as much of a problem.
You forgot to pull the source from your ass along with that claim. Jesus mate, if you're gonna make bold uninformed statements like that you can just go do it on Reddit where we'd get banned for correcting you. Tell me what a shithole Cuba is when you can't get treatment for diabetes in the USA, or can't pay for university in Europe because you're a foreigner. Or how the USSR was so terrible when they were recognised as such pioneers in film that the USA had to ban their films. Or China eradicating poverty and homelessness. What did those countries not have that your Norseboys have, considering the clear interference of capitalist nations in both of them?
Also what an strange obsession to treat the survival of people as somehow inferior to your entertainment. Are you really willing to trade away the survival of poor people, including all the migrants and asylum seekers not covered in norseland, as well as the wellbeing of the workers to produce things you like both there and abroad, just so you can watch yet another 300k budget Marvel movie? Even if you were correct that communist countries only focus on survival (you're not), how would that be worse than having tens of thousands of homeless people just because the renters don't find it profitable.
Read a book before spouting nonsense and calling countries "shit holes". Have you no consideration for your fellow human?
It is not true that communist societies have been shit holes throughout history. Socialist states also have higher approval ratings by their own people, who say that their governments better serve their needs and desires.
One trap you're falling in to is comparing the internal conditions of a socialist country to the internal conditions of completely unrelated (often capitalist) countries. The reason this is a trap is because the correct analysis compares the timeline of the conditions within the country. Put another way: you need to compare how much a socialist framework improved the lives of the citizens of the country from how they were before. If you compare the lives of people in a country that has only had its people out of poverty for a decade, compared to one that has had most of its people out of poverty for a century, you're going to come to faulty conclusions. If you compare citizens across countries at a fixed point in time, you're bound to discount (as you have) the massive improvements in quailty of life socialist projects have brought. Socialist projects have brought more people out of poverty, in a shorter amount of time, than any system before or since. Another aspect of this "trap" is that you're comparing modern living standards in capitalist countries to historic living standards in socialist countries. They didn't have iPhones in the USSR, but that doesn't mean they were worse off, it just means that the iPhone wasn't around then.
Another trap you're falling in to is comparing those at the top in capitalist countries, with the everyday person in a socialist country. If you look at the lives of the top 1% in a capitalist country, and compare that to a generic life in a socialist country, you'd (falsely) conclude that the capitalist country offers a better life. What you're failing to account for is the massive inequality, and the lives of the people at the bottom of the capitalist hierarchy. You can't comend a system that lets the bottom 95% do so poorly that they look bad even by "socialist" standards, just because the top 5% is doing better than the "socialist" standards. I'd rather a society in which 100% of people are provided for and have their needs met, but can't own private planes, several yachts, a dozen houses, and a handful of lawmakers, than one in which you can have those luxuries but only if you're one of a select few, at the expense of the rest of the people.
You're also just fabricating the notion that there was "nothing to do" or that there was "nothing of value apart from not dying". Free time was abundant; economic scarcity didn't prevent people from seeking out entertainment; there was a stronger social fabric because there was not a strictly upheld hierarchy; there were opportunities to pursue arts and education (and not just to make your employer able to extract more value from you).
One significant thing you're ignoring, and this I really do think is quite significant, is the trajectory of a capitalist and a socialist system. In a socialist system, you're starting from a low point and successively making improvements to people's lives; there may be temporary stagnation but there shouldn't be regression and, if that did happen, it would not be permanent. On the other hand, in a capitalist system, people's lives are not improving: the trajectory of a capitalist system is increased inequality, increased poverty, increased death due to poor care and starvation, etc. Extrapolating out each system to the future shows that only one is stable and caters to the needs and desires of its people, and the other is doomed to implode on itself.
There is no such thing as a mix, as Capitalism and Communism are fundimentaly incompatable with each other, Scandinavia is Capitalist, or to put it in more blunt terms "Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism"-J. Stalin. You can even see the social safety net sliding now that the Communist block has faided and so the capitalists have less to fear about their workers seeing how good they can have it.
You're capitalist but so ignorant about capitalism that you aren't even familiar with co-ops and partnerships.
Take ten seconds to think about this one. You honestly think people just toiled away at work, went to the store, then... just stared at a wall in their mud hut? You honestly think there wasn't any literature, or theater, or TV, or movies, or music? No one played sports or went to school?
From what I've read of theory (and from what AES states have done in the past), the state funds entertainment and cultural development. There was a lot of film that came out of the USSR for example that was funded by the Ministry of Culture I believe. There is a full acknowledgement of people's desire for entertainment and culture as part of the definition of living a good life, and when the government's true desire is to improve the lives of its people, it must allocate resources to cultural development[^1].
It's also worth noting that while movies and the like are indeed rather costly, a large portion of the cost of blockbuster movies comes from the disgusting sums paid to the few stars at the top of the call sheet. These costs would disappear and producing such media would automatically be a less costly endeavor than it is now.
[^1]: I'm going to paste some of my notes from Roland Boer's Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners: At the Nineteenth Congress of the CPC in 2017, Xi Jinping pointed out that while socialism with Chinese characteristics has made major developments, a new principal contradiction emerged 'between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people's ever-growing needs for a better life'. In terms of the people's needs, these move from material and cultural needs to the need for a better life, which encapsulates material, cultural, political, public, and environmental life. Attention has been paid specifically to resolving this contradiction.
Microsoft is a great example because they continuously do dumb shit that puts their workers at risk specifically because the owners are so stinking rich that they'll never face the consequences themselves. They just bought Activision-Blizzard for almost 4 billion dollars (money none of us will ever have) to get the IP of repetitive but profitable games such as CoD and Diablo. Meanwhile their workers get terrible working conditions are run by a serial abuser and in some cases have even been driven to suicide. From most developers I've seen they specifically produce games because they like making games, and yet the existence of millionaire (billionaire in this case) CEOs makes the lives of the developers we both like worse.
As you've said, you'd like $20 to be able to go to the movies and restaurants. But before that both you and the workers of those need to pay the rent, and none of the billionaire profit is going to the people actually making the games you like. That is why making the profit be zero is important, so all resources can be put into both your life as a worker and those of the workers who make shit you like, and not to buy some submarine for Bobby Kotick (unless... 🥺 ). Similarly Bob Iger's riches do nothing to help Disney make Avengers 32: Never-Ending War. Microsoft doesn't do shit, the workers do, and to make Microsoft's execs get more actively detracts from what those workers get.
G*mers, man...
In the current system you're right, but only because to make $0 you yourself won't be able to survive.
To suggest that profit motive must exist to want to start a business though is not valid. Think of all the big name "inventors" of the past couple centuries: yes they were being paid enough to live, but what motivated their invention and discovery was genuine passion for knowledge and invention. I'd start a business that made $0 if I was producing a product I thought was cool and meaningful. In fact, not being tied to a profit motive would let me experiment with more unusual ideas for goods and services.
If you pay people enough to survive and entertain themselves, it doesn't magically turn everyone into a braindead consumer (ironically, that's what the current system does). If you pay people enough to not have to worry about survival, they can be creative and explore the landscape of ideas, leading to novel discovery and inventions.
If there were caps on profits of 10m, then minimum wage could sure be more than 20 bucks friendo.
Sure, I haven't done the exact calculations, it just means I'd rather have slightly less than the exact cost of production if it means we could actually spend our new wages on stuff we enjoy.
Idk how you expect companies we enjoy to exist if there is no point in owning/investing in a company.
Why do we need privately owned companies or investors, what do they contribute?
… I don’t expect companies like the ones that control our planet to continue to exist. I really wish they were impossible tbh. Like we all agreed they were as bad for the planet, like worse than nuclear weapons, and just collectively agreed to ‘never again’ y’know.
So not being exploited is devoid of joy, but being exploited has joy, can you please explain this thought more, where I come from exploitation is not joyful
Not at all what I said/meant. We just wouldn't have anything non-essential to spend our new found money on if wages = 100% of the revenue.
You couldn't feasibly fund a movie(33k hours of work to earn $1mill which makes for an awful movie with today's wages, it would either have to be a 1 person movie or way more startup capital to pay these massive wages), or open a restaurant, you'd be out of money long before you get enough traction, only thing that could be created is one person side project type things like.
I just don't understand how your 100% communist society would work, who would have enough money to start businesses if they was no extra money? The problem with society right now is that there's TOO much extra money, not extra money existing at all.
What I want is the workers (colectivly) to own the means of production, and then to get the entirety of the value of their labor. My issue is not with "extra money" as you put it, but that the capitalists have stolen the money from the backs of the workers. I also would not call any money extra money so long as even a single person is starving, or does not have clean water, or is without a home, or cannot get basic medical care, or any pther basic need. I think these are a little more important than movies
I haven't watched it yet, but Solaris is widely regarded as a great movie. I don't see why you insist that some specific guy needs to get boatloads of money in order to finance a movie that is made solely by the people not getting those boatloads of money. If they make Solaris 1 and it generates a lot of money, why should somebody who is not the workers get all that money?
They could then easily make Solaris 2 earning the wages from the sales of Solaris 1 and if its great it just keeps going. If all people have comfortable lives they won't need some wealthy Prometheus to descend from Olympus with fiery cash. 33 dollars an hour amounts to some 1.3k dollars per week. At that rate people will be able to work less for their shitty day jobs and afford to work on their artistic endeavours. Don't you or any of your colleagues have any artistic interest that you can't pursue just due to lack of resources and time? Imagine working half the amount and being able to contribute to projects you actually care about with your leftover time and money.
It is one of my absolute favorite films. It is an extremely slow burn and very long, but thoroughly enjoyable. It touches on a lot of realy important themes and does so thoughtfully. I highly suggest everyone watch it if they have the chance.
One of the absolute best films ever made, and indeed in my top 3 I've ever seen, is also a Soviet film produced in 1985 by Mosfilm (who produced Solaris), called Come and See.
it's on my ever-growing movie backburner and I'll possibly watch it this month. I'm not much of a movie guy but everything I've seen from the USSR and even the DDR so far has at least been an interesting experience. The same can't be said for much from AMPTP studios.
I just realized we stumbled into lemmygrad
Out of curiosity, where did you think you where, and what finally made you notice? I am genuinely curious.
I just saw US News as the community name in hot. I favor materially increasing the minimum wage and enjoy meaningful discussion about economic issues, so I jumped into the thread.
Then I noticed how unanimous and fervent the comments were in opposing any profit driven enterprise at all. I thought this is a surprisingly skewed group for discussion of American minimum wage. I looked at the instance and finally realized I had accidentally intruded.
Thank you so much!
If they do not hire anyone, no work gets done. They have to hire about the same amount of people as already employed, as no capitalist trying to maximize profit is going to pay you more they they think they can get away with, and they will not operate with more workers than they need. They need us, we do not need them
If by skilled labor you mean all labor that is more than being a CEO, then yes, the idea of skilled and unskilled labor is a myth to devide the working class and should be disreguarded.
Second in what universe should we, labor, care about capital or how they feel, they steal from us, they steal our suplus value, they rob the best years of our lives, and in the US, they activly argue aganst us getting basic government survices, they are not our friends. Risk does not cause value, me standing near a fire does not create value, labor creates value. And they would pay it because they need labor, Capital needs labor, labor does not need capital.