One rich man means many poor men?

[RedLeaf]

Dear community,
After arguing with an convinced capitalist I got some food for thought. I claimed that the world only provides limited resources and if people take a big piece of the cake it means that there is left slightly for the rest.
The capitalist said that my assertion is wrong, because it exists a global wealth groth. He sent me a animation for proof:




its on the gapminder site --> gapminder world (you can see the groth of income per person on the x-axis)




I don't knwo how to argue now. Somehow its kind of true and somehow it must be wrong. Any ideas?

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sorry I'm not able to post links

[Bolshevik 180]

Your assertion is wrong, the capitalist, is *shock* right. The more advanced the production, the more wealth it can create. However, do not be fooled into thinking this now justifies his position, ample research into economic conditions shows that the wealth is not evenly distributed, so that, while the wealth of the capitalist might grow, often the wealth of the workers decreases. One example of this is demonstrated by the way large capital puts so many workers out of business, so while there may be a small increase in wages, there are less jobs, as new technology replaces old technology, the capitalist can afford to use less workers.

There is always a conflict of interest between profit and labour. As the capitalist grows richer, he seeks to make the cost of labour cheaper. And thus you get conflict.

[Antiochus]

You can tell this convinced Capitalist that he is empirically wrong. As if that needed mentioning. It doesn't actually matter if the global GDP per capita increases 3 fold in the next 10 years. There are still homeless people and people who starve to death all over the world, in the millions.

If we take the Earth to be a 'closed-system', then there is a barrier to the amount of usable property and services that can be created ("wealth"). But that doesn't mean anything. Humanity LONG AGO surpassed the threshold for eliminating poverty, worldwide. Poverty will never be eliminated under Capitalism because poverty is a condition of privation that exists as a byproduct of the NECESSITIES with which Capitalism is built on.

The Capitalist, for example, requires that he be able to flexibly hire and fire employees as he sees fit, in order to properly manage his capital and reinvest where needed. But firing a worker naturally creates poverty. The worker now relies on some sort of welfare program that was begrudgingly given by said Capitalist after a vicious struggle, a struggle that is, by the way, permanent. Because the Capitalist does NOT benefit from an 8 hour work-day, from paying employee healthcare, unemployment insurance and so forth. This applies to ALL areas of Capitalism. If grocery stores just started "giving away" all their surplus food, their profits would dwindle because people would take advantage of it and get 'free food'. Therefore it is far more sensible for the Capitalist to throw away perfectly good food if he cannot sell it. Or perhaps sell left-over meat to an animal pound, when 3 blocks away a family of 4 eats once a day.

[Fellow_Human]

The forces of production are unlimited; the relations of production are not.

Classes are defined not independently but through their relations to each other. There can be no masters if there are no slaves, no capitalists if there is no proletariat.

Consider the domestic servant. No matter how large that "pie" grows, there will never come a time of such great abundance that everyone can have a domestic servant of their own. This is because such a commercial relationship can only emerge in a situation where a head of household exploits another person's underprivileged position. If the servant could afford a servant of their own, they wouldn't be working as a servant. The inequality is not a coincidence or byproduct of this relationship but a very condition thereof, and thus integral thereto.

Much of the same can be said of any other employer-employee relationship.

Work has to be done by somebody. The only way that one person can afford to not work at all -- as the haute bourgeoisie can -- is by having the work done for them, by somebody else.

[contracycle]

First, the argument to growth doesn't really work in practice, because without a mechanism for distributing the rewards of growth, it will naturally flow to those who own property. You can support this simply by using charts that show the massive shift in wealth from the many to the few over the last several decades.

Second, this problem is really one of different theories of value. Your capitalist friend is assuming that wealth is defined by "stuff", and so as the economy grows, stuff gets cheaper, therefore a person even on the same wage gets "wealthier". However, this is totally different from the way that Adam Smith and later dealt with wealth; for Smith, wealth is the ability to command the labour of others.

As such, a poor worker who now has access to cheaper toys is in fact no wealthier than they were before, because they are no more able to command the labour of others than they were previously. And when your opponent then argues, as they will, that this is not what wealth really is, you can beat them about the head and shoulders with the Wealth Of Nations, and show them they disagree with their own patron saint.