What does capitalism actually reward?
(midwest.social)
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
SocialismGreed.
It rewards greed above all else. The desire to hoard and take more than you need. And only through your greed for yourself will be able to overcome the others in your life that hold you back from what you desire. It isolates and it rewards you for holding yourself separate from others.
It rewards greed.
Even the groups of people and their asaociated characteristics in this meme is an example of how capitalism colonizes.
capitalism rewards owning things. if you own a thing that makes money you can do no work and be rich
And greed, manipulation, ethical and moral flexibility
No, it really only does have one metric - returns to the current holders of capital. Everything else falls aside.
I have a group of friends who I have known since I was a kid. This is useful in that, while it’s of course anecdotal, I can say that it’s a sample of people who all knew each other before any of us were capable of earning money.
Within this group, there is zero correlation between intelligence or work ethic and wealth/income. My wealthiest friend inherited his family business. My second wealthiest friend married into money. These two are among the least hard working and intelligent friends I have. Meanwhile the smartest friend I have - the one who almost aced his SAT - is doing ok but not like he’s swimming in money (community college professor - which honestly is a pretty great gig, he was smart enough to recognize that). Another truly brilliant friend of mine is doing research in a field he is passionate about but he’s definitely not the highest earner in our group.
Admittedly none of us are extremely hard workers, but I know tons of workers - especially some undocumented folks, who work way harder than I can even imagine, and they are of course making very little.
I'm very intelligent, and fairly hard working, but I also have the power of empathy and compassion for others. That drastically limits my earning potential. Even more so since I want to make a large scale positive difference in the world.
All the best ways to get rich are exploitative: of employees, of customers, of society as a whole, of the planet.
Of my childhood friend group, I am the second smartest, and the poorest at the moment (aside from the ones that are in prison), the smartest is the wealthiest among us, but only because she was smart enough to utilize her intelligence into a degree and a higher GS grade in a government job. None of us are wealthy, but she's doing the best. Buying a home, and can pay her bills, and has about 200 bucks per paycheck to put into savings. We all came from very economically disadvantaged backgrounds, but she had the advantage of both of her parents being in the military, so while we lived in the same neighborhood, she lived in a much nicer home, whereas the rest of us lived on roads her parents told her never to walk down.
I am currently attempting to follow the path she did, just 15 years later.
Selfishness. Capitalism rewards and reinforces selfishness. As others pointed out, making more money than what you've worked for requires that you start out with more money and the more money you started out with, the more you are rewarded with more. And remember that money, the thing we agree socially has universal value, is essentially frozen labor (labor being the source of value). It is only feasible through money to accumulate others' labor. An accumulation of money that you didn't work for (i.e. capital) is stolen labor. Capitalism rewards the hoarding of stolen labor, with the more labor you hoard the more you are rewarded with. Capitalism fundamentally, definitionally, requires the exploitation of others and once again, the more exploitation you do, the more exploitation you are able to do and the more value you possess. That is the epitome of selfishness.
A great deal of evil flows from this, including the pathological individualism that infects the deepest aspects of a capitalist society, it is the system reproducing itself.
Capitalism rewards capital.
Money. It rewards money.
Those who have money are the only ones deserving of getting money.
It's why the old nobility liked the system and molded it to their needs.
Nothing makes money more then money
It's kind of in the name...
The best way to make a fuckton of money is to start with a shitload of money. Crony capitalism (and all capitalism devolves into crony capitalism) is rigged in favor of those with the most capital to wield its influence over others.
Cronies predate capitalism by millenia. There's no devolving happening. It's not like you can make a capitalism that has no cronies and then it devolves. The cronies are the people who made the capitalism in the first place
True, I should clarify I meant devolving from their imaginary capitalist ideal, which they fantasize as a libertarian utopia based on pure merit.
Capitalism is the most efficient way to distribute resources (to the 1%).
it mostly rewards luck and having money
And psychopathy
This is a critical aspect.
The utter disregard for everyone and everything for the sake of making more money is the second most valuable asset of a capitalist.
The first is obviously capital.
I think it rewards being an asshole.
I find arguments like these so difficult because the thing that deserves rewarding constantly changes.
It rewards hard work! Well okay maybe billionaires don't work thousands of times more than the average person, But it rewards people took the risk and got the reward. Well Okay maybe people shouldn't be rewarded for luck, But it rewards the people who had the mindset to never give up when things get tough! Well Okay maybe homeless people did have much tougher lives, But it rewards people who studied the system and learned to work within it! Stop questioning the system your just jealous you don't understand it as well as they do!
I find arguments like these so difficult because the thing that deserves rewarding constantly changes.
In reality it doesn’t actually change, and it’s not a matter of who/what is deserving. What changes is the capitalists’ lies they use to cover up the truth.
This is real good entry level agitprop
The compounding returns of a capitalist economy reward iterative investments in new productive capital. That's fine. Good even. At least, according to Marx. If your goal is to approach a post-scarcity economy, you need a period of growth in productive capacity and distribution.
Because we use currency as a token of exchange, and capital improvements require currency to implement, we incentivize a virtuous cycle of re-investment in token-accruing capital as we operate a capitalist system.
The flaws in the system begin to stand out when the process of cycling currency into capital investment fails to value anything without a price-tag attached to it. Go back to the 1970s/80s and you'll see the neoliberal economists struggling with this paradox of post-Bretton Woods economic modeling. Economic growth has material limits, but our fiat currency system does not. Negative externalities don't have a built in short-term economic cost, so investors and administrators don't recognize the accumulating socio-economic friction until a fire breaks out.
But OP's premise is all wrong. The skill, the creative talent, and the labor that capitalism rewards is all bound up in the rapid recirculation of currency through capital. Neurosurgeons, muralists, and janitors aren't missing out because capitalism fails to reward them. They're missing out because they have no vehicle to rapidly compound the returns on their initial efforts.
Even then, there are tools for compounding efforts that all three of these professions can and do exploit. Education is one example. A skilled neurosurgeon can profit more handsomely as a mentor or professor than as a pure surgeon. An art school will generate more professional art than any single artist. And management is another. A veteran service worker who can efficiently direct the efforts of a large number of peers will control more productive forces than if they were hands-on at a single job site. A doctor who operates a clinic full of juniors or a sculptor or prodigious author with a team underneath her will yield far more work product than they could alone.
The compounding returns of a capitalist economy reward iterative investments in new productive capital. That’s fine. Good even. At least, according to Marx. If your goal is to approach a post-scarcity economy, you need a period of growth in productive capacity and distribution.
Marx described the good and the bad of it, at a time when capitalism was reaching its late/monopoly/imperial stage, and he largely correctly predicted what late-stage capitalism would look like. Lenin further developed these theories while living under capitalism’s highest stage.
Western Marxists saw China’s “opening up” as an abandonment of Communism/socialism. Ultras fear the scroll. They don’t understand that, in order to get to the end-goal, you need to leverage the good parts of capitalism—while keeping the capitalists on a short leash—in order to quickly develop the productive forces, especially when the imperialist states are trying to crush you.
It rewards all of those if they are applied close to the money. Hanging art for sale where millionaires go, working hard handling their money or business, being a surgeon working for them, not the poor. But make no mistake, you will not be equal to them. They just don’t want to be eye to eye with poor people.
Socialism rewards these things even less. Socialism rewards those who are lucky enough to work for a profitable company or those loyal enough to work for the government.
How does that make any sense? How does running a worker-owned society based on fulfilling needs over profits translate?
Congratulations on being less coherent than a chat bot.
Nothing I said is hard to understand I'm sorry socialist education has failed you. Maybe if your parents get a job in the government you can get an education instead of being put in a ~~youth labor camp~~ rural school.
It is basically techno feudalism. Late stage capitalism is techno feudalism.
Late stage capitalism is imperialism. "Technofeudalism" isn't really a thing, workers still work for wages under capitalists that control the state.
capitalism values the machines (capital) that increase productivity.
precise value predictions
It rewards people with the skill and talent and who work very hard to not work very hard at all.
Edit: /s
hey everybody, we've got a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire on our hands
Um, my bad a bad joke. I was trying to do the inverse of each statement and to imply that it rewards talentless unskilled people who put no value to society.
lol Poe's law
Oops yup that's what happened. Sometimes you forget the '/s' and the internet reminds you
Linus Torvalds: Maked Linux and become absurdly rich Taylor Swift, Eminem, Michael Jackson, The Rolling Stones: all artist that become absurdly rich too
Just the cluster B people
on one hand, yes: people with strong Cluster B personality disorder tendencies (well, narcissistic and anti-social at least) tend to float to the top in capitalist societies. On the other hand no, because these diagnoses are harmful for us poors, and can be used to deny necessary care. Borderline personality disorder is an especially common misdiagnosis for autistic women, and the drugs they pump all of us bpds with do more harm than good and therapists specializing in dialectical behavior therapy are few and far between. In my case I got overmedicated and undertherapized, and eventually just dumped and told to get a job. (/rant).
