this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
736 points (97.3% liked)
Memes
45911 readers
1035 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
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
Capitalists own assets for a living and extract labor value in the form of profit. In this case, the intellectual property.
Laborers actually do the work to create the product.
You do not need someone else to own the art for it to be created. You do need labor for it to be created. Hope that clears it up for ya.
Except laborers are also capitalists. I'm a laborer, and trust me when I say there's plenty of people here on Lemmy who think I'm a dirty fucking useless capitalist because I need to spend money to survive, or chose to purchase a luxury, or offset my labor by requesting compensation in money form from another person.
90,000 different definitions here on Lemmy of what people think capitalism is and what a capitalist is, I'm weary at this point from all the disparate ideas of what this notion even is. It's ludicrous. It doesn't matter to people what it ACTUALLY MEANS becuase its become a sudonym for people hatred of money in general (which I share).
So no, you don't get to have a world where somebody drew a comic for fun and profited off of it, but that's somehow NOT capitalism, then somehow when Netflix making a live show, is 100% different and suddenly capitalism. It's fucking stupid to even suggest. They are both capitalists. Even if the artist is not the IP holder, they have been a cog in the system which holds the IP regardless and as such are constituent.
You just don't have class consciousness my friend and some of the terminology associated. That's fair, it's not always easy and it's also purposely obscured from you.
It's easiest to think about people in two classes. Workers and Owners. There's a bit of gray area, but it's a very useful distinction. How do you make most of your money; owning property/factories/ip, or selling your labor for a wage?
Profit is not the same thing as "making money". It's explicitly the extra money made by the capitalist after material and labor is paid. You pay 3 dollars of labor and 2 dollars of materials to make 6 dollars of revenue, you have made 1 dollar of profit. Arguably that dollar of value was made by the worker, but extracted by the capitalist.
Obviously the workers don't do it for free, but the capitalist still isn't making the art. **The workers do. You aren't a capitalist. You have false solidarity with your masters.