Rich make Jobs.

[Imposter Marxist]

Hello, I was listening to some of my favorite Dead Kennedys song, and in the related videos I saw... It was a parody of "Kill the poor" called, "Tax the Rich", and it was godawful.
:thumbdown:

I started by making a joke (Sort of), and then, as you can see, it erupted into a debate. Im not quite sure how to counter his points here. (Im usually really good at that kind of stuff!)



"Rich people invest for a living, and employ people. Without them, there are no jobs for us.

More recently, they tried applying your philosophy in Zimbabwe...it did NOT work out for them.

I challenge you to show any instance where "the community" can do it better and more efficiently than self-interested investors. And are you going to comment on how your philosophy was put to use in Zimbabwe, with disastrous results, or are you just going to pretend it's not there? Face facts...socialism fails every time it's tried."

[the last donut of the night]

Tell the debater this:

How can the rich be rich without us? Who works in their factories? Who cleans up their houses? Who dies in their wars? Who suffers every day so that they may have a comfortable living?

Seriously, what a fucking snob.

[ZeroNowhere]

This old question of whether the capitalist contributes productive work is an important question to discuss, because most people get this wrong.

Here's how I would explain it.

Consider several activities, and judge whether each activity contributes, either directly or indirectly, to producing goods or services.

How about building a ship? Yes. How about manufacturing the cargo that gets loaded onto the ship. Yes. How about loading and unloading the ship? Yes. Navigating and steering the ship? Yes. Repairing the ship? Yes.

But how about this -- suppose I were to claim that I'M THE LEGAL OWNER OF THE OCEAN, and suppose that I have an armed force to back up my assertion. Under certain conditions, I would be willing to give others permission to put their ships on "my" ocean. Therefore, according to me and my friends, my granting of permission "makes all shipping possible." In doing this, am I performing a task that contribute either directly or indirectly to production? No! Since it's not genuinely necessary to have that restrictive ownership in the first place, therefore my conditional willingness to grant others permission isn't a productive act or a contribution of useful labor. Even if I were to put in thousands of hours at the office, my role would still be socially unnecessary.

That is exactly the role of capitalists. We seem to "need" their capital investments only because it's already a given, an institutional form, that nothing may be produced without their capital investments. That fact of private ownership is itself artificial, and therefore the owner's "long day at the office" is not productive.
Tbh, debating on video sites is generally not worth the bother, you generally just get, due to space restrictions and the kind of people who tend to comment there, arguments which are not at all elaborated on, such as the Zimbabwe one there, not much use of sources, and really it tends to come down to rhetoric.

[Chambered Word]

"Rich people invest for a living, and employ people. Without them, there are no jobs for us.

If there were no capitalists, there wouldn't be surplus value extracted from the fruits of workers' labour, and we could just reinvest the profits made by the workers. The rich only employ people because they need labourers to make them rich while they do no useful work. They're thieves.


More recently, they tried applying your philosophy in Zimbabwe...it did NOT work out for them.

I challenge you to show any instance where "the community" can do it better and more efficiently than self-interested investors. And are you going to comment on how your philosophy was put to use in Zimbabwe, with disastrous results, or are you just going to pretend it's not there? Face facts...socialism fails every time it's tried."

Of course, this moron can ignore the massive mismanagement of the economy by Mugabe that had nothing to do with socialism whatsoever and the fact that Mugabe is/was a dictator, which would make Zimbabwe state capitalist at best.

There are examples of the community doing things better. Maybe he/she should read a book for once instead of tuning into Fox News. :rolleyes:

[NecroCommie]

If job creation happens because of the rich, how can there exist countless of bossless "richless" factories, workplaces and communes? The sheer existence of communal volunteer work proofs these points invalid.

[Nwoye]

well capitalists hold capital, and capital is necessary for production... so yeah capitalists make jobs. That doesn't mean they're good people, or that them making massive amounts of money and taking control of the state is justifiable, but it is sorta true. I mean, that's how capitalism works.

[cmdrdeathguts]

Your opponent secretly relies on a fact he doesn't explicitly acknowledge - the world, all of it, has already been reshaped according to the needs of capitalism. this process can never be complete, because capitalism is unstable - but capitalism can happily cope with a global division of labour that sees financial institutions concentrated in only a few of the richest countries, while turning others into enormous factories and still others into enormous farms. The 'glue' that holds all this together is the world market, the relations between the various states in the world (with the US as top dog, of course), and sundry 'transnational' agencies - corporations, IMF and so on - that invariably operate in the interests of the most powerful countries.

In this situation, there are two consequences:

1. Firstly, that the long post quoted by ZeroNowhere is effectively true - the capitalist organisation of production has made itself 'necessary' by fiddling with the ways people can economically interact with each other. Private property is no more or less 'natural' than common property - in a situation where private property is generalised, it is always (outside of periods of crisis) going to be easier to keep that rather than changing things around. It is just that life under the rule of capital is basically intolerable for the vast majority in the world, who suffer exploitation, starvation and oppression because of it.

2. Socialism in one country is impossible. Britain, where I'm from, for example, is a net importer of food. If we had a socialist revolution in Britain and Britain alone, we would be cut off from the capitalists and would starve. That, in the end, is the 'failure' of 'socialism' where it has been 'tried' - the Soviet Union's isolation turned it into a gory horror-show, and when the other so-called socialist countries arose after the War, they were simply subordinate clone states that in most cases barely went through any kind of revolutionary process at all. We do not argue for this kind of socialist 'experiment' (at least outside of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist left), because it only leads to disaster. We argue for socialism as a global system to replace another global system - capitalism. your interlocutor will never be able to say that socialism has failed until we have tried it on that scale - that is the socialist hypothesis, not that some country nationalising the economy automatically = the liberation of that particular people.

Finally, needs make jobs - not the rich. A rich man can pay a few workers to produce things that nobody wants - but that will fail in weeks, and socialists are concerned in any case with work that needs to be done. What 'the rich', i.e. capitalism, does produce almost uniquely is unemployment and under-employment - it is in the interests of capitalism that a large section of workers be out of work, in order to depress wages through aggravating labour market competition, and also that a job is done by as few people as possible. For socialists, it is better that e.g. the millions of people out of work in Britain come into employment, so that we can all work say three day weeks instead of five. We produce jobs, and better, less stressed out and more fulfilling ones - they produce unemployment, and leave the rest of us in endless drudgery.

[JazzRemington]

As noted above, capitalist employ capital to draw in workers. So they DO create jobs; however, this is misleading and sort of shallow. Where does capital come from? Workers make it. So, if anything, workers create jobs by creating capital that is used by capitalists to create jobs. So what if the capitalists is the one actually EMPLOYING the capital to create the jobs? If workers didn't make it, he wouldn't have anything to employ to begin with.

[Dr Mindbender]

"Rich people invest for a living, and employ people. Without them, there are no jobs for us."

Total strawman. Its probably been said already, but rich people only give the illusion that they are creating the jobs, because they happen to own the MOP.

Even if the MOP were nationalised the jobs would still be there plus some, because thered be no cutbacks motivated by the profit factor.

[NecroCommie]

well capitalists hold capital, and capital is necessary for production... so yeah capitalists make jobs. That doesn't mean they're good people, or that them making massive amounts of money and taking control of the state is justifiable, but it is sorta true. I mean, that's how capitalism works.
Perhaps, but since capitalism is not a force of nature it is more than healthy to look into more reasonable options. If we forget this in a debate the bystanders will get the impression that you are giving up.

[Imposter Marxist]

Man, I love you guys. Thanks, ill see what he has to say to some of this.

[Agnapostate]

Your little friend doesn't seem to know the difference between labor necessitated through physical realities and labor "necessitated" because of the social paradigm in place. Without workers, crops cannot be planted and harvested, various machinery cannot be assembled, and mass production, in short, halts. Capitalists' abundance of financial "capital" does absolutely nothing to resume this process in the absence of workers. In contrast, capitalists are necessary only if their private control over productive resources is regarded as legitimate. And considering the support in the empirical literature (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2524912) for the premise that workers' ownership and democratic management is more efficient than the hierarchical organization of the orthodox capitalist firm, there's substantial reason to regard capitalists' private ownership of productive resources not only as ethically objectionable, but as profoundly inefficient.

[Nwoye]

Perhaps, but since capitalism is not a force of nature it is more than healthy to look into more reasonable options. If we forget this in a debate the bystanders will get the impression that you are giving up.
certainly.

[Sogdian]

Rich people invest for a living, and employ people. Without them, there are no jobs for us. These are the words of a good and loyal slave! Anyway, here's an extract from Capital (vol.1 ch.7 part 2) which I think somewhat relevant to the topic and certainly worth thinking about


...
He now gets obstinate. “Can the labourer,” he asks, “merely with his arms and legs, produce commodities out of nothing? Did I not supply him with the materials, by means of which, and in which alone, his labour could be embodied? And as the greater part of society consists of such ne’er-do-wells, have I not rendered society incalculable service by my instruments of production, my cotton and my spindle, and not only society, but the labourer also, whom in addition I have provided with the necessaries of life? And am I to be allowed nothing in return for all this service?” Well, but has not the labourer rendered him the equivalent service of changing his cotton and spindle into yarn? Moreover, there is here no question of service. A service is nothing more than the useful effect of a use-value, be it of a commodity, or be it of labour. But here we are dealing with exchange-value. The capitalist paid to the labourer a value of 3 shillings, and the labourer gave him back an exact equivalent in the value of 3 shillings, added by him to the cotton: he gave him value for value. Our friend, up to this time so purse-proud, suddenly assumes the modest demeanour of his own workman, and exclaims: "Have I myself not worked? Have I not performed the labour of superintendence and of overlooking the spinner? And does not this labour, too, create value?"
...
Yet for all that he withdraws 3 shillings more from circulation than he originally threw into it. This metamorphosis, this conversion of money into capital, takes place both within the sphere of circulation and also outside it; within the circulation, because conditioned by the purchase of the labour-power in the market; outside the circulation, because what is done within it is only a stepping-stone to the production of surplus-value, a process which is entirely confined to the sphere of production. Thus “tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles.” [“Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” – Voltaire, Candide]
By turning his money into commodities that serve as the material elements of a new product, and as factors in the labour-process, by incorporating living labour with their dead substance, the capitalist at the same time converts value, i.e., past, materialised, and dead labour into capital, into value big with value, a live monster that is fruitful and multiplies.
...

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm#S2

[Red Commissar]

http://img.moronail.net/img/8/5/1085.jpg

[StalinFanboy]

Use as much dense rhetoric and theory as you can. It's the only way to deal with people on youtube.