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Commentaryism - Exploitation


A chinwag in a comment thread on Youtube died when I talked about econ. Let's just be clear here; I am not some kind of ultimate authority on economics, and it could be that either someone else will respond to my points in future, that the same guys I was talking to will, or that they have simply chosen not to respond to me because what I'm saying is so stupid.

The convrsation started off as a discussion of Mondragon, a big-ass workers' co-op, which then turns into Peter Miller and Sokami Mashibe trading blows including some big-ass comments!

The full text of the intersting bit of the conversation is below. Where I have subsequently annotated sections the annotations are highlighted in yellow.

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Peter Miller
Sep 30, 2015

mondragon = capitalism

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WhiskeyWhiskers
Sep 30, 2015+

+Peter Miller
That's kind of the point though isn't it? If a major worker's cooperative is viable economically, is compatible with capitalism and allows more freedom for workers, why aren't anarcho-capitalists spruiking worker's coops as a better structure for capitalist business?

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Peter Miller
Sep 30, 2015

+WhiskeyWhiskers i'm saying it IS capitalism. there is no difference between mondragon and any other capitalist company.

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WhiskeyWhiskers
Sep 30, 2015

+Peter Miller Yeah it's a capitalist worker's cooperative. I don't think anyone here is arguing anarchists themselves should be in favour of a mondragon style cooperative. But it's still better than the traditional capitalist business structure.

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Peter Miller
Sep 30, 2015

+WhiskeyWhiskers its no different. it has wage labor, private ownership of the means of production and operates in a market economy. these are all the requirements for a business to be called capitalist.

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WhiskeyWhiskers
Sep 30, 2015

+Peter Miller Yes it's capitalist. I'm not disputing that at all. Perhaps a better example would be something like Valve's 'horizontal' corporate structure, it has all the economic exploitation of a capitalist business, but there is more autonomy in the worker's decision making. Wouldn't you agree that's still better than the traditional corporate structure?

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Peter Miller
Sep 30, 2015




+WhiskeyWhiskers cool. the video implies otherwise. you also asked why ancaps would not be spruiking the cooperative business model vs the capitalist business model - there's your answer - there's no difference and therefore nothing to spruik.

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WhiskeyWhiskers
Sep 30, 2015

+Peter Miller "you also asked why ancaps would not be spruiking the cooperative business model vs the capitalist business model"
No I asked why they would be spruiking one capitalist business model over the other, which (I might be wrong, but) is also what is being asked in the video. The differences are not ones we would consider to change it from a capitalist business to an anti-capitalist business, but there are differences, even letting workers vote on certain decisions is a step up from the currently dominant system.

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Peter Miller
Sep 30, 2015

+WhiskeyWhiskers to my knowledge ancaps don't pick winners. they just say that in the absence of government privilege the market would select the better model. if that's the cooperative capitalist model then so be it. anarchyball made a blunder in assuming no government in the present day (ie falsely assuming a free market where there is none) - most ancaps make that mistake, but i'm sure they would agree with what i have written here.

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WhiskeyWhiskers
Sep 30, 2015

+Peter Miller But then taking that to its logical conclusion the (post-state) market could choose recreating a state over a system of competing private defence contractors. No? They're clearly happy to choose some winners.

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Peter Miller
Sep 30, 2015

+WhiskeyWhiskers ancaps are against markets that violated the nap. choosing a cooperative vs a boss-worker setup does not violate the nap.

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Sokami Mashibe
Sep 30, 2015+

+Peter Miller


"its no different. it has wage labor,"


wage labor describes a situation by which a group of owners pays a group of people a wage that represents less than what the proceeds of their labor is actually worth, whenever these proceeds are generated in the market.

Your labour is worth what supply and demand say it's worth. That will determine what the other party in a labour market pays you - how easy or difficult it is to get what you're offering from somebody else - unless some outside force intervenes. Absent the state there will be no ubiquitous outside force. The end.

They do this so that they may exploit most of the proceeds of their labor as the proceeds are generated in the markets. hence capitalist profits are literally the direct result of exploitation of peoples labor. In a cooperative, The workers decide collectively how the proceeds of labor should be divided up, so that exploitation is eliminated. They may factor in things like quality of work, Skill level required, danger of task, etcetera. however in a capitalist setting, the capitalist literally seeks to maximize how much they get exploit of the workers.




"private ownership of the means of production"


No individual or even group of people lay claim to ownership over a cooperative. Whoever is working at it becomes a "member" of the cooperatives, and the members control the cooperative in common, VIA democracy. In the capitalist system, a very tiny group of people and wealthy stock holders will take claim to the means of production. When virtually all major means of production is controlled by a small class of people, this means that the workers have to subjugate themselves to the capitalist in order to earn a remotely decent living. This capitalist system is automatically massively rigged in favor of those that control the means of production.




"and operates in a market economy. these are all the requirements for a business to be called capitalist."


The only reason a cooperative has to operate in the markets is because its surrounded by capitalism. Cooperatives already cooperate together internally, however cooperatives are forced to compete with capitalist institutions just in order to keep their living. This means that the workers in current cooperatives literally have to exploit themselves out of the proceeds of their own labor just to be able to "Stay competitive". Of course if they were not surrounded by capitalism, then they would not have to exploit themselves or rely on a market based system.

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ssssssssss
Sep 30, 2015

+Peter Miller Anarcho-Syndicalists are "capitalists" just not propetarians

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Sokami Mashibe
Sep 30, 2015

+ssssssssss Syndicalist are not anywhere close to being pro-capitalist, they are against all the basic characteristics of capitalism and favor a system where workers control the means of production and coordinate it democratically.

by the way a "pro capitalist" doesn't mean being a "capitalist", in order to be a capitalist, you must have control of large scale means of production and derive your wealth off of the backs of workers.

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ssssssssss
Sep 30, 2015

+Sokami Mashibe Yah and I'd consider that capitalism without hierarchy and co-owned

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Sokami Mashibe
Sep 30, 2015

+ssssssssss And i'd consider your theory of what defines capitalism as being extremely inaccurate, and leaving out the biggest parts of what actually defines it.

My current suspicion is that you are probably using a really simplistic definition so that you can get out of actually trying to justify the other characteristics of capitalism that are an integral part of it.

Socialism is by definition where the workers control the means of production

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BadMouseProductions
Sep 30, 2015

+WhiskeyWhiskers I was unfamiliar with Valve's corporate structure, I'll look it up.

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Peter Miller
Sep 30, 2015

+Sokami Mashibe https://libcom.org/library/myth-mondragon-cooperatives-politics-working-class-life-basque-town

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BadMouseProductions
Sep 30, 2015

+Peter Miller hmm very interesting, I'll bare that in mind. However this is a single point that I made that doesn't really discredit everything I said, and the fact that it comes from an Anarchist website tells me that they would still support worker coops over a business, just that Mondragon is becoming part of a bigger corporate agenda.

. .

Lol, An-coms are known for never being satisfied, its either Anarchism or bust.

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Sokami Mashibe
Sep 30, 2015

+Peter Miller my post was addressing Worker cooperatives in general, and I do think that there are better examples of cooperatives than Mondragon, such as the Italian or Argentinian cooperatives. Mondragon however is a good quick example to use for people who think that there is absolutely no alternative to capitalism. Since i did not know what perspective you were coming from, and I am still not quite sure, I simply gave a general explanation of cooperatives. I would however like to argue that while Mondragon isn't entirely the ideal form of cooperative I would advocate, I still wouldn't call it capitalist, and would argue it is still way better than traditional capitalist structures.

You also need to understand that you linked to a site whos name literally stands for "libertarian communism", that book you linked to is writing from an anarchist communist perspective, and from what I gathered in my quick scanning of it, it appears to be arguing that Mondragon doesn't go far enough in creating good conditions for the working class.

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Peter Miller
Sep 30, 2015

+BadMouseProductions i agreed with a lot of what you said (i "liked" your video). then again i also agreed with a lot of what anarchyball said too :p

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Peter Miller
Sep 30, 2015

+Sokami Mashibe >You also need to understand that you linked to a site whos name literally stands for "libertarian communism"

i know. that's why i linked it - it can't be so easily dismissed offhand if its on an ancom website.

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Sokami Mashibe
Sep 30, 2015

+Peter Miller The book you linked to relies on workers perspectives. I'm curious how much of the book you have read.

Edit:

"Second, the analysis of cooperatives and class in Mondragon has important broader implications about contemporary class patterns. By looking at the ideology of cooperativism in its larger political and social context at different times, Kasmir raises important questions for class analysis elsewhere."

She is relying on class analysis.

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Peter Miller
Sep 30, 2015

+Sokami Mashibe >>private ownership of the means of production

>No individual or even group of people lay claim to ownership over a cooperative. Whoever is working at it becomes a "member" of the cooperatives, and the members control the cooperative in common, VIA democracy.

that's still private property. for example kropotkin describes mutualism (which is basically how mondragon is structured)as private property in chaper 13 of "the conquest of bread":

"It is also easily understood why Proudhon took up the idea later on. In his Mutualist system he tried to make Capital less offensive, notwithstanding the retaining of private property, which he detested from the bottom of his heart, but which he believed to be necessary to guarantee individuals against the State"

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BadMouseProductions
Sep 30, 2015

+Peter Miller What would that be (That you agreed with Anarchyball on) I'm sure I can clear up some shtuff.

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Sokami Mashibe
Sep 30, 2015

+Peter Miller I want confirmation that you're not just looking up a bunch of titles whos titles conforms with your particular view on the matter and if you have actually read the book in significant depth. and if you have not read it, how would you know for certain if it is in line with your views especially considering what site its on and what perspective its being written from?


I judge a book by how accurate its content is, not what site its on

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Sokami Mashibe
Sep 30, 2015

+Peter Miller "that's still private property. for example kropotkin describes mutualism (which is basically how mondragon is structured)as private property in chapter 13 of "the conquest of bread":"


For one, I want to make it very clear I am not a mutualist. The way I view cooperatives is as a stepping stone to the eventual creation of full socialism and then communism.


Secondly, Cooperatives aren't in themselves part of mutualist ideology, though mutualist usually advocate them. Considering that Cooperatives, and mondragon for that matter adopt a policy of open-membership to join, and that all members control the cooperatives in common, then the property is no longer held privately by capitalist, but held collectively by the workers. The workers then control every aspect of the workplace and democratically make decisions about it. If a workplace is controlled collectively by the workers that labor in it, its simply not "private property".


lastly, anarchist communist use a different, reformatted conception of property. When socialist say they want to abolish "property" what they mean is that they want to abolished the specific conception of property that the capitalist use: the notion that one can claim ownership over vast swaths of land or entire factories and such. This conception of property came straight out of feudalism and even further back evolved from ancient roman slavery. The ruling class created a conception of property that benefited them. at first they claimed that by "law" that they can own slaves and thus own the fruits of the slaves labor. later on, this conception evolved during the feudal era to the notion that the lords of the land could own all the land, and thus all the serfs labor from that land. now in capitalism, the notion has further evolved to include literally anything that is productive on the large-scale. now when workers go to work, all their labor is owned by the capitalist, who then receive a wage that represents only a tiny fraction of the proceeds of their labor. This conception of property is extremely arbitrary and not backed by anything, but most of all its exploitative.


Property would be reformatted to something based on use and occupancy, and contribution. a person can only farm so much land, and there are only so many houses. everything is in limited supply. So it would be legitimate that if you can use it, or have earned it through your contributions, then its yours for the time being, until you stop using it or upon death. If there very little arable land, it would probably make more sense to just have a gigantic farm. If there are way too few houses around for a local population, then as an emergency people will have to crowd into houses. 'personal property' is a much more legitimate conception of property based on concrete needs, and peoples personal contributions. This alternative conception of property is not based on the concept that one can just Simply own huge amounts of productive property that they themselves have no use for. It aims at eliminating the notion that a ruling class or individual can block off the major means of production (through "laws" or "ownership" no less) from those that need to access it to create a living for themselves just so that they can become a leech on the working class.

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Peter Miller
Oct 1, 2015

+Sokami Mashibe >I want confirmation that you're not just looking up a bunch of titles whos titles conforms with your particular view on the matter and if you have actually read the book in significant depth. and if you have not read it, how would you know for certain if it is in line with your views especially considering what site its on and what perspective its being written from?

i'm not sure why you would care what i think about the book. the book can speak for itself. but as it happens i have read the conquest of bread in detail- here are my notes https://docs.google.com/document/d/12pJecrArMPY3OrWQGSK0uEX-WEq7aut58udBfVF1pRo/edit?usp=sharing

the quote i shared was from an entire chapter where kropotkin discusses wage labor in a socialist setting.

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Peter Miller
Oct 1, 2015

+BadMouseProductions >What would that be (That you agreed with Anarchyball on) I'm sure I can clear up some shtuff.

i will listen to it again and write you a list. will do it in another thread under this video as its all stuff that's unrelated mondragon.

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Peter Miller
Oct 1, 2015

+BadMouseProductions i was going to write a long list, but i listened through the video and i agree with just about all of it except for what he says about minimum wage. also i think his insults were pretty bigoted so i don't agree with them.

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Matthew John Hayden
Oct 2, 2015

+Sokami Mashibe "derive your wealth off of the backs of workers."

Does that include customers? They're the ones choosing to buy the stuff, after all...

Presumably, since I chose to buy this laptop, I patronised the exploitation of the labourers who made it. I am an exploiter. And when those workers drink tea in the break room they're exploiting everybody who was involved in getting the tea into that room. And so on...

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WhiskeyWhiskers
Oct 3, 2015

+Matthew John Hayden
You made an incorrect presumption. There's a difference between patronising the exploitation of workers in a system where exploitation is ubiquitous and actually extracting wealth from workers.

So no, you're not an exploiter for buying a laptop and no those workers drinking tea are not exploiters.

The fact you think it's possible to boycott businesses until they change the entire economic system shows how ridiculous ancap conceptions of dissent are.

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Matthew John Hayden
Oct 3, 2015

And you believe what you said in your first paragraph?

Cos all economics since the marginal revolution would beg to differ. But I'm not wasting my time explaining marginal utility, value scales, time preference & interest rates here as it'll take a dozen or more paragraphs of text...

Tell you what - show me the exploitation (Marxism) or wage slavery (19th Century Smithian-Ridardian-Marxian objective value economics) in action and demonstrate the agency whereby certain humans are acting to rob others. I double dare you!

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WhiskeyWhiskers
Oct 3, 2015

+Matthew John Hayden The exploitation need not be conceptualised using the labour theory of value.
http://www.ccpr.ucla.edu/publications/conference-proceedings/CP-05-077.pdf

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Sokami Mashibe
Oct 3, 2015

+Matthew John Hayden The labor theory of value is not a theory of objective value or even how much workers should be paid or how things should be priced, These are all right wing misrepresentations of the theory.

The Crux of the whole theory describes in detail How a capitalist will take whatever labor the workers produce, sell it in the market and no matter what it sells for, whatever the capitalist takes from the resulting proceeds and does not give back to the workers is exploitation.

Precisely my description, and relying on events objectively taking place in the external world, not internal value scales; therefore this is an objective theory...

This is because the capitalist is literally deriving their wealth by selling the product of other peoples labor in the market and then taking most of the proceeds of it. Even taking a tiny portion of the proceeds of the workers labor is exploitation, because the would still be deriving their wealth on other peoples labor. Therefore alternatively the workers themselves should decide how to distribute the proceeds or products of their collective labor rather than a capitalist stealing the vast majority of it.

Glad the guy gets that quantities are irrelevant in determining whether the gap between total revenue and wages in exploitative, because to this dinosaur any gap is exploitative!

TL;DR its a theory that describes objectively the process by which exploitation occurs.

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Matthew John Hayden
Oct 3, 2015

What?

I'm in a time loop. I am actually trapped in some time loop and I've been transported back to the 1860's.

All economics, regardless of this or that wing, friendliness or unfriendliness to free markets, has left objective value theories behind (theories that value is intrinsic to things or to work)courtesy of the marginal revolution.

Tell you what - here's Eugen von Bohm Bawerk challenging all of the objective/intrinsic value theories in turn and confirming the subjective theory (your choice of how much to value the possible means and ends available is the only source of economic value) cos I'm tired of talking to people who belong in the 19th Century. Lessee if you can get your head around concepts like roundaboutness, and time preference of both labourers & entrepreneurs. Love you, learn economics, then I might take you seriously;

Summary;
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/BohmBawerk.html

The actual works themselves;
https://mises.org/library/nature-and-origin-subjective-value

https://mises.org/library/value-cost-and-marginal-utility-0

https://mises.org/library/interest-exploitation

In case you wanna read the two books that deal with this matter;
https://mises.org/library/positive-theory-capital
https://mises.org/library/recent-literature-interest

Lemmee guess - the very name Mises Institute instantly puts you off. I've read Das Kapital, The Conquest of Bread, et al... extend me and mine the same courtesy.

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WhiskeyWhiskers
Oct 3, 2015

+Matthew John Hayden Yes, and they all deal with the labour theory of value. The point is that even if we reject the labour theory of value and instead view it in terms of marginal product, workers are still exploited.

Hodgson, G. (1980). A theory of exploitation without the labor theory of value. Science and Society, 44(3), 257. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1297040339?accountid=12001

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Matthew John Hayden
Oct 4, 2015+

What follows may be irrelevant if you're describing this 'exploitation' as just a property of human interaction and not some kind of problem (rape, murder, war and genocide are problems) so please forgive the tone if it seems a bit dismissive. Institutional economics, while it impresses me a damned sight more than classical (incl. Marxist) econ, leaves out several parts of the human story altogether.

If I misunderstood you I'm sorry. But, here I go anyway...



You're saying upfront that the difference between the price at sale of any good or service and the wages of the workers is robbery?

How? Where? When? Define the mechanism of injury! I'm asking you because that paper is not public.

What the hell is the 'fair share' supposed to be? I ask because financiers stumped up their own capital at their own risk, entrepreneurs implemented the resource allocation plan for whatever business we care to look at, and non-entrepreneur workers joined with the entrepreneurs in employing capital to produce whatever it was that was to be produced.

Once this has been done, and revenue starts coming in, the financiers and entrepreneurs can enjoy some new income of their own.

What about before the revenue comes in? I know for a fact that the institutional school of economics (like pretty much all the others, including all the neo-classical and new-classical schools) takes no account of time, uncertainty and risk in analysing business enterprises - certainly not in The New Industrial State (which I am thumbing through again right now for fact-checking purposes).

The workers took no such risk. They just took wage-paying jobs which would pay a fixed amount every month because their time preference is sufficiently high that they'd rather be paid that way than wait for the business to become profitable.

And that raises another problem. Profit = net income (income net of all expenses) and paying labourers requires expense of the finite financial resources of the business. Is profit supposed to be zero each month as workers are paid 100% of income not expended on other costs?

It's just that that would leave nothing over for re-investment in the business, or subsequent investment in other promising businesses by the investors.

And that those processes are the root cause of every lasting fall in real prices since 1500... and thus in every improvement in access to survival, safety, comfort and leisure in our day-to-day lives.

Most social democrats and most democratic socialists have no truck with the existence of wage labour since the alternative requires banning any trade in fixed monthly payments of money for fixed monthly payments of labour. That's batshit crazy.

While Thorstein Veblen & John Kenneth Galbraith fascinate me, neither man offers anything approaching the insights into the origins and consequences of the activity called capitalism like Joseph Alois Schumpeter. This latter man employed a hybrid Austrian/Institutional approach, and to date has given the most elegant description of capitalism ever in the phrase 'creative destruction'. But his analysis of the process is basically fusing Bohm-Bawerk and Veblen.

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Matthew John Hayden
10:21 PM

"http://www.ccpr.ucla.edu/publications/conference-proceedings/CP-05-077.pdf"

No offence, but this is a gigantic circular argument assuming exploitation exists at the beginning and then using the rate of profit itself to confirm the initial hypothesis.

For such a correct rate of pay to exist means their work has an objective value and so these institutionalists (that's a guess re this paper) are sneaking objective value theory in through the back door. No dice.

The only thing that determines how readily a worker sells their labour to a particular firm and not another, or a particular firm sells their money in wages to a particular labourer and not another is how easy it is to get rid of that employer/employee.

For some reason the paper's authors completely ignored this basic fact of everyday life...

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