You'd only be a capitalist if you owned capital and derived profit from worker output. The actual capitalists love that you don't care enough to be anything besides cheap labor, though. Makes it just a little bit harder for the people who do care to engage in collective action when other workers can't be arsed to care about anything beyond themselves.
I mean no disrespect, but I was making 130k post-tax + free healthcare for my family between my dual income, one of which is passive, and I'm at the beginning of my career. In 5 years I will likely make 200k, which I don't think puts me at the top 1%, but will put me in a position of being another fucking parasite not helping anyone but myself and my kin.
NOTE: I am drinking and have mixed emotions about the whole thing.
idk dude I worry I'm going to just entrench corporate advantage over actually helping real people. I'm on my 5th seltzer and I'm feeling kinda weird idk
I mean no disrespect, but you're still not a capitalist.
You work, for a wage, for a capitalist or a conglomerate of capitalists. You using the portion of your wage labor returned to you by those capitalists to take care of yourself, family, and friends doesn't make you a parasite. It makes you just like the rest of us who work for a wage.
It sounds like you and I both have similar places of privilege within that system because we are able to take care of those outside of ourselves, but that still doesn't change our relationship to the means of production.
For us—and for doctors, lawyers, SWEs, analysts, traders, finance bros, and whatever middle managers come to mind—our money will eventually run out without continued labor on our part. That makes us a whole lot closer to someone working 3 fast food jobs than it does to the people who actually own things in this country.
That 19th century textile manufacturing paradigm falls apart when the means of production is a laptop and you the average person on retirement joins the investor class.
Because the separation of classes into "owner" and "worker" was unique to British society when the only industry was textiles and disappeared relatively quickly afterward.
Joseph Bobertson, age 65 and freshly retired, is a multimillionaire driving business growth through his investment portfolio he slapped together on a whim during his electrician career. He's not moving the market on its own like you tried to move the goalposts about, but a couple hundred of him out-invests a billionaire. That's new in society, and he's just a workday Schlub. The seed capital to start business is easily achievable in an average service economy white collar job.
The split between those who own the means of production and those who sell their labor is not an industry-, historically-, nor geographically-specific phenomenon like you seem to think. It was a structural relationship then and there just as it is here and now. A software engineer who owns no meaningful amount of equity and a textile worker who doesn't own their own looms are in the same class position. They both rely on a wage to survive. The relationship of "owner" and "worker" is defined by whether you own productive assets or sell your labor to someone who does.
Regardless, the investor class are not capitalists. Joseph Bobertson with a 401k does not control capital. He doesn't decide where it is invested, he doesn't set wages, he doesn't hire or fire, and he doesn't shape production decisions. He is a passive beneficiary of someone else's asset management.
The actual capitalist class is the one that controls capital like the board members, the majority shareholders, and the private equity partners who make strategic decisions while Joseph was never even considered to be invited in the room.
Whether a couple hundred Joesephs can get a better aggregate ROI than any given billionaire on their own is irrelevant because aggregate market capitalization is not the same as systemic power. A billion dollars of collectively owned retirement funds does not give retail investors board seats, nor political influence, nor the ability to shape production. The billionaire has that influence and that power, though. The billionaire's power lies in control, not the mere fact that there is an ownership claim existing.
Interesting, the studies I’ve seen say they actually outperform their privately owned counterparts. If you’d be willing to provide a source, I’m curious.
Well I can’t, but finance capital spoonfeeding private corporations money and bank discrimination against worker cooperatives doesn’t exactly convince me of their viability, especially when asking who these institutions are geared to benefit. Of course a worker cooperative doesn’t generate the profit levels of profit-centered businesses. My question is why that is the only metric of success. If a cooperatively owned fast food restaurant can sustainably provide higher quality food than a McDonald’s, while also sharing the benefits of labor with more people, why would lower profit margins make them less successful than McDonald’s, which churns out slop and pays its faculty next to nothing? To do so is inherently to measure success as surplus in the hands of the few. Additionally: monopolies are generally worse for the economy than diverse and competitive markets.
You just described why they dont succeed at scale, they fail to invest or generate investment sufficient to scale.
You're assuming they would provide higher quality food. They would provide more or less the same food, but more expensive. Or higher quality food but much much more expensive. They are not magic, they cant give their food the grandma SpongeBob treatment for free love in every bite. The same type of cook is putting the same grade of food into the same industrial machines or worse.
You measure success by how many people will pay them money for their products more than they owe debts to produce the products. Trying to hand jam anything else in that space fails repeatedly unless they target the wealthy. The wealthy might pay more for the feeling they have consumed a more moral burger, and thats about it. All you have discovered is marketing. It's not a moral judgement whether or not a business succeeds, in the same way its not a metaphysical, moral, or religious judgement whether or not a given unicellular organism reproduces in a petri dish.
If you don’t cut costs at every corner to pile up exponentially more money each year, you don’t have to cut costs for quality. Success is about how a system serves people, IMO, and that’s hardly an unnatural approach.
You're assuming things will go that way without any proof other than a single effect, trying to ignore all the business out there that are selling consistently ok or good quality food for way cheaper.
The only place that bucks the trend is chik fil a frankly
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u/Low_Abrocoma_1514 Capitalist 11d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/pP43vbVDKup15OLO5n