by
CrimethInc.
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This isn't to say that wealthy children are born looking out for number one. It takes at least as much social engineering to produce entitled managers as it does to produce subservient employees. Most of this occurs subtly. For example, the curriculum for honors students includes nothing about how to grow or prepare food, make or mend clothing, or repair engines; the implication is that if these students do well, there will always be poor people to do these things for them. Thus the education that prepares them to hold power simultaneously incapacitates them when it comes to meeting their basic needs outside the economy, making any alternative appear genuinely life-threatening.
[...] Working-class mothers often have to pay half their income for low-quality child care so they can attend to rich people's kids. Thanks to the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s, more middle class women can enter the job market and pay other women to clean their houses.
truth
Capitalism produces wealth, but it produces far more poverty. There's no upper limit to how much wealth one individual can amass, but there is a lower limit to how much any one person can be pillaged--so it takes a tremendous number of poor people to produce a few billionaires.
think about this more, esp the objections that people like Paul Graham would raise & how to counter them
Some people chafe at welfare programs funded by tax dollars: why should someone else get a free ride off their hard work? They ought to ask the same question about politicians and bosses. In fact, every poor person who has ever worked for a wage has helped give the wealthy a free ride. Tax money that goes to welfare is one of the only examples of wealth flowing back down the pyramid to the class that does most of the work to create it. Welfare programs were won by decades of bitter struggle; wherever the powerful do not fear an impending uprising of the poor, they are dismantling them.
That's not to say that public assistance programs could ever be an effective solution to the ills of capitalism. [...] The only real cure for poverty is for the poor to seize resources back on their own terms.
daaaamn
This is not to say capitalist production never creates goods that would be desirable outside its logic. Our society produces a tremendous surplus beyond what we need to survive; much of this takes the form of useful tools, enjoyable luxuries, expanding knowledge of the cosmos. But these goods also function as status symbols establishing hierarchies and stratifying power--this explains designer clothing and summer houses that sit empty most of the year. They serve to make socially produced inequalities concrete.
[...] All this free content adds value to the internet itself, filling the pockets of technology magnates like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who sell the means of accessing it. So long as capitalists control the means of producing material goods, free distribution of information can actually exacerbate social divisions in their favor, eroding the middle class in the information and entertainment industries.
shit
"The only thing 'free' about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that."
chapter intro. quoting Bob Black
[...] being "ethical" is an additional selling point to increase their price. In the free market, selling price is not determined by the material costs of producing the item, but by the highest price consumers will pay. Value is not an inherent characteristic--even petroleum is only valuable inside of a certain social framework. The social construction of "sustainable" and "natural" as desirable characteristics serves to create a new immaterial value that can sell items at higher prices even during an economic downturn--utilizing consumers' good intentions to perpetuate the system that gave rise to the problems in the first place. So long as capitalism remains the law of the land, any actual benefit to chickens or Brazilian coffee harvesters can only last as long as it is profitable.
What is capital, really? Once you strip away the superstitions that make it seem like a force of nature, it's essentially a social construct that enables some people to amass power. Without the notion of private property, which is only "real" insofar as everyone abides by it, material resources couldn't function as capital. In this regard, property rights serve the same purpose that the notion of divine right of kings used to: both form the foundation of systems assigning sovereignty. Some people believe passionately in property rights even as those rights are used to strip them of any influence in society. It could be said that these people are under the spell of property.
When the "machines" were first introduced, the supervisor told us that whoever had the best efficiency rating each week would get a paid day off. It's hard to convey how profoundly this threatened our culture of solidarity. In the vines, everyone moved at more or less the same pace. The faster workers slowed down to help the slower ones with their rows, and everyone emerged almost simultaneously, their creates full of tomatoes. With the threat of being sent back to Mexico hanging in the air, the last thing anyone wanted was to draw attention to himself by standing out as faster or slower than the rest.
first-person account of picking tomatoes. very clever on the org's part and obviously horrible for the workers (unless they found a way to game it à la Stick It ... these workers tried, but management retaliated harshly)