#labor vs capital

[thoughtportal]

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#tiktok #Adam Conover #collective action #union workers #labor unions #unions #protest #labor vs capital #labor rights #capital vs labor #labor movements #labor movement #workers rights #workers vs capital #workers #writers strike

[aberration13]

Lots of people like to parrot that line about how business owners take all the risk and I think they get a pass on it way too often.

Biggest risk an owner takes would in its worst case scenario be equal to the risk the average laborer takes every day by working for someone who could at the drop of a hat remove your source of income by firing you and significantly less risky than the occupational threats to health a significant portion of the working class are subjected to as terms of their employment.

Meanwhile the payout of being a business owner is much higher and scales up effectively infinitely meanwhile the worker gets only whatever they can convince the owner to pay them and tends to stagnate.

Business owners take a miniscule portion of the risk by comparison and reap all the benefits, which of course makes perfect sense if you understand that those benefits come from the labor of the people who work under them, and as a result they are the ones capitalists offload all the risk onto as well.

And the kicker? If the company goes out of business and the owner loses his investment, what do you think happens to the workers? They're just fine and keep working at an empty building? They lose either way. They lose if they get fired and they lose if the owner fails.

Literally double the risk and none of the reward.

#capitalism #late stage capitalism #anti capitalism #capitalist hell #capitalist realism #capitalist greed #my stuff #my post #labor vs capital #labor and employment #unionize #corpora

[deathlin]

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[mentor97]

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[horizon-verizon]

You should ABSOLUTELY read Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay on anti-fantasy, “Why are Americans afraid of dragons ?”. It is such a brilliant and insightful piece.

https://w3.ric.edu/faculty/rpotter/temp/waaaod.pdf

“They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.”

I remember reading this some time ago, maybe in a college class? Reread it, and yeah in the U.S., with capitalism but not only here, people (mostly & often men) derive their sense of being from their ability to make a profit from something and deny the fantastical, and it doesn't have to even be an activity to be worth something that will give you identity. Houses, stocks, other properties, anything you can objectify and sell, or make an object and sell. Let me say patriarchal capitalism, in fact.

And yeah, it has its roots in Puritanism, which while that religious group developed as an offshoot response to the Catholic Church's spiritual hegemony--and got their idea of "pleasure=sin" because it does not have a purpose (any sex that wasn't performed for reproduction was "sodomy")--did not even try to reincorporate pre-Catholic English rituals or fairytale creatures for fear of oneself showing that you were not part of the pre-birth assignments of salvation or damnation. The fear of showing that you were damned and for the Devil instead of losing oneself to being aware of their connection to God even in the moments of prayer themselves. Thus the perpetual searching for signs of God's favor or anger.

The Following is a Long Diatribe about American Masculinity (But Honestly, A Lot will cover Men of Various Patriarchies) So if You don't Care or Want to See This, OK

(And Before it's "Not All Men!", this is about the Nature of the Practicing Man and his Masculinity; if none of this has ever determined a man's psyche and sense of self, it should be no bother)

Even though this essay was written in 1974, much of it rings true, especially after thinking/watching others talk about that recent Twitter post about men resenting their girlfriends for not breaking up with them after they purposely try to get them to break up with them with emotionally abusive behavior AND discussing mental load in domestic labor. Basically, men do that to their partners because they:

do not want to be accountable for "ruining" a relationship and being the "bad" guy (feels very fundamentalist Christian and no-fault divorcy...Joe Jonas?)

and if they could "allow" a woman to lead forward & dictate their domestic actions they themselves would not have to engage in that labor while profiting off of that labor -> low effort, high reward

To be a man is to make money, or to control money, yes?

All the while, they will never be okay with actually being alone with their own thoughts because they cannot bash their partners or anyone who offers them affection and care to assuage the pain they are not able to nor willing to try to express to those around them...even other men for fear of being humiliated for showing "useless" and "girly" emotions because they cannot "control" and "use" said emotions or compulsions to propel them into an ideal state of "focus" (NoNut November) and stability that never lasts long and is thus frustrating. There is a compulsion to get into a vague mind-state of "stability", almost as if putting a halt to the busy-busy of necessary life, but simultaneously holding life by the reins and directing it to their own desires...which they ignore once they seem too "much", or complicated.

Instead of developing better critical thinking skills or how to empathize with others and communicate apart from how to dictate and dominate for the sake of "taking" rewards for little-as-possible labor, they may fantasize about mimicking some male celeb or embodying the image of this hypermasculine "winner" at capitalism, signaled through wealth. When together, they either ignore or scoff at thoughts that were not told to them (from childhood) on "how to be a man", which they take as the official moral and phenomenological guidebook on how to perform or think of certain tasks and how to perceive certain things. And in those same get-togethers, many just go along with what their male peers say about the world around them and parrot it more often than the reverse so they can reaffirm those things and that they are performing stoic masculinity well.

Add in family trauma from fathers themselves experiencing this and alienating themselves from families (abuse and neglect as in domestic violence or never coming around to see them and pick them up for visitation) and you have a very resentful man-child who wants to be an ideal and to finally justify his own reckless pursuit of being an ideal/ideal man. The recipe for that, to them, is also, to have a penis, and then bring others "in" sexually.

This goes into another reason why men get very resentful of their partners and women in general: in lieu of what they think is "doing a lot" of mental and physical labor, they believe all a woman needs to do to be financially or emotionally set is to get someone, i.e. a man, to take care of them financially. So to see women they call "golddiggers" receive gifts and money and things they actually want to have without having a job or having that as their main source of income (impossible for most of the population) is indicative of the monolithic Woman--all women. AND because men race to reserve women or their domestic, reproductive, and sexual activities for themselves so they can prove their superiority and successful masculinity, women are more in--excuse my French--"high demand" within the patriarchal sexual dynamics. It does not matter to them that women experience a lot of sexual violence and reject or try to divert them because of the fear and/or true threat of violence and they do not link that violence to the man's need to own women. Because to deny is to justify objectifying the woman/target. So men, by default, have very low standards for a potential female "partner's" personality, as her role is economic and male-group validating above everything else.

If women could have this and I can't, all women must be "luckier" than me, so I hate her. And why should I have to provide for a woman to have sexual control over her or get her interested in me when any other guy could do better than me?

Meanwhile, they don't even get how:

anger is an emotion, and it just builds until it lashes out at the right conceived inconvenience

their preoccupancy with work-work-rewardness "proving" their masculinity directly contradicts its own purpose when they wax remorse over "all" women having the ability to gain rewards without "work" (which is it, you want eternal "rest" or eternal work? AND it is men with accumulated generational wealth or men who have no business willingly spending money they do not have)

And finally, because they perceive that they are close to that stoic-everyman-topman-ideal, that their manhood grants them proximity to it--and thus superiority over women to it--they can always replace their current partner once they do not "love" them anymore OR they look to the "upgraded" trophy woman who makes them look better to other men...until they get intimidated or resentful of that woman's success, wealth which he covets.

Man is inherently self-sabotaging and justifying it.

#u.s. society #not asoiaf #patriarchy #fiction vs reality #fantasy fiction #mini rant #capitalism #consumerism #labor in capitalism #male consumers

[hellyeahheroes]

The Meaning of Anti-Work by Andrewism

#thought provoking #anti-work #work vs labor #work culture #cult of work #evils of capitalism #298/365

[phree-izi]

#freedom #harmonic vibes #earth girl #individual #beauty #life #scorpio #introvert #infp #laboring vs leisure #capitalism

[dykekakashi]

i hate my reading capital class like i don't think anti-intellectualism is the way to go but i was just sitting there for three hours meanwhile people were incoherently dropping words in the middle of sentences so to me it all sounds like "the logic in the structure of the surplus means of expropriation" and then ?????????

#i'm also weirded out bt how common the comprisons btwn slavery and wage system are in capital #and all these white people are sitting there like yea this is normal #first of all half of you have never done wage work #secondly. i think there is a difference between selling your labor power vs being sold as property #but that is just me #like sb tried to explain it to me as well the slave is bought for their potential labor power like no!!!!! #the slave is bought as property ?? #i hate the analogy but u don't buy a donkey for its potential labor power and slaveowners did NOT see their slaves as human

[void-tiger]

Okay. Hear me out:

Dream of the Endless in That Squashy Hooded, Pocketed, Zipup (with a squashy star zipper pull, only black not blue) Robe in a more gremlin exaggerated version of Garfield vs Morning’s pose.

With the hem trailing behind. While barefoot. And Matthew perching on Dream’s head and peering down at Dream’s face through an absolutely magnificent fringe of bedhead. because Matthew’s the only one who dares get close

#dream of the endless #morpheus sandman #and his mug’s in need of cocoa or tea refills #I have the headcanon that Dream has a Vendetta against coffee #with how it’s been coopted by Late Stage Capitalism for 7.5+ (and often No Set Schedules) work shifts + Crunch Culture #mortals NEED their sleep! they NEED to spend about 1/3 of their lives sleeping for their mental and physical health! #c’mon y’all. Dream vs Coffee/highly concentrated caffeine #hell. he prolly Despises Caffeine since like. what do y’all think was in those Forced March stimulent pills #he was prolly hoping he wouldn’t have to see waking stimulents again once he escaped #aaaand nOPE!! they’re still there. and widely used #only instead of humans harming themselves to keep him caged #they’re forced to harm themselves to keep from entering the dreaming so they can still Maybe eat or pay rent #(dream accidentally getting involved with demolishing Late Stage Capitalism anyone??) #[checks old sociology history videos and how it developed as a result of Industrialization and Capitalism] #soooo…what if Dream Accidentally inspired that field + unions and labor laws #because Humans NEED Rest

[tmmyhug]

rant incoming abt something i’ve observed for a while

i (american) feel like we need better traditions. so many young and queer people in my experience are completely disillusioned with most of our (western) holidays either because they’re related to religion and that’s awkward for many people or because they’ve become Capitalism Lite or both. it’s hard to really enjoy a holiday when it’s overshadowed by the uncomfortable truths behind all of it.

like, christmas is nice because you get time off but it’s a constant reminder that we live in an extremely christian society that chafes at even the idea of other religions trying to exist (happy holidays vs merry christmas drama). non-christian religious holidays get like zero acknowledgement from wider society. no time off work or school, no decor in stores, etc. thanksgiving is nice bc you get to eat good food, but it’s based on colonial bs. valentine’s day is nice in theory but also an inescapable reminder that our society sees you as sad and lonely if you’re not in a relationship and if you’re not willing to spend lots of money on a partner. then theres smaller ones like labor day which is important but hard to enjoy when you’re reminded of how hard we have to fight for even an inch of appreciation or rest for workers in the us. most of the other minor holidays are subsumed by neverending consumerism and advertisement, such as mothers/father’s day.

and tell me if i’m just projecting here. but there are so few actual holidays that we can enjoy that i think it accelerates the homogenization of the seasons w global warming and the isolation and lack of community everyone is struggling with.

this is part of my theory as to why halloween is so incredibly popular with gen z - it’s doesn’t come with religious or historical baggage, doesn’t force people to spend time with families they don’t like or shame people for not fitting into nuclear family structures, isn’t based largely around buying gifts/spending money, and is an important marker in the season of fall. also this is part of why i think we latch on to stupid little anniversaries ie. neil banging out the tunes. it’s lighthearted and silly and is a grounding landmark for the passage of time and it brings us together to have fun.

all this to say we should really promote more holidays that are just. for fun. or for the passage of time. summer solstice. moon landing day. new years does fall into this category. pi day. star wars day. april fools. i really feel like we should be emphasizing and celebrating these unofficial holidays!! bringing people together and hanging out w friends or going out somewhere specific or making specific foods or something. just a regular tradition that we can rely on. yk? it’s so important

#hopefully this makes sense #vees train of thought

[thoughtportal]

#tweet #tweets #twitter #pixar #workers rights #workers vs capital #workers #labor vs capital #labor rights #labor #capitalism is a scam #toy story #toy story 2

[illnessfaker]

y'know what i don't see talked about a whole lot in the midst of discussion around age gaps and child exploitation, and the fact that yes, children or minors otherwise should have supportive adults in their lives outside of their family or people with authority over them (because the family an authority figures are the primary sites for child abuse)?

the fact that you can 100% have very inappropriate boundaries with a child or someone underage that are purely emotional/mental vs. just concerning ourselves with the sexual or physical (though there are plenty of sexually inappropriate boundaries that don't look like typical sexual abuse due to their purely mental or emotional nature.)

like, the fact that "i had to talk some 30 year-old 'friend' of mine online out of a suicidal episode when i was 12" (and often times this comes with an implication that they barely had the capacity to manage their own mental problems at the time, were actively being abused at home, were actively self-harming, etc.) appears to be such a common anecdote is disturbing.

if you ask me the whole "children aren't your therapists" thing isn't exclusive to parent-child relationships. it's the responsibility of grown, emotionally-capable adults (not all adults are emotionally-capable, which isn't a moral judgement - if you don't feel you're emotionally equipped to support children then i'd rather you not go against that feeling i think, and simply not everyone is going to have the faculties to do that kind of thing even with self-work) to provide a sense of emotional and physical safety to children in their community rather and not the other way around. this is why it's also important to work on cultivating a sense of community and mutual support among adult peers vs. the individualistic capitalism-driven mentality of "fuck you, i got mine" and people who look at human connection as a transactional thing where your friend asking you to help move furniture for them or something is "demanding too much labor" which apparently seems to be a thing (that isn't to say there aren't situations where an exploitative imbalance is actually present, including in an emotional sense.)

in other words, when thinking about not further traumatizing and disenfranchising children more than they already are, then you can't just think about things purely in terms of the sexual or physical. idk if that's somehow controversial to say but if it is that's kinda concerning lol.

#op #child welfare

[racefortheironthrone]

Hello, I’ve a part asoiaf part medieval history question. So despite the strict gender roles, we know that women (at least noble women) can enjoy some “male” activities like horse riding and some kinds of hunting (Cat says Arya can have a hunting hawk). Are there any other “male” activities women can partake too without being judged about it, or even encouraged to do so (both in Westeros and real world)?

So as medievalists and historians of gender have pointed out, ASOIAF is far more restrictive for women than actual medieval Europe. I'm actually going to leave aside the situation of noblewoman for a second, because the vast majority of women were not nobles and their experience of gender would be radically different.

What counted as "male activities" for example would vary enormously by location (rural vs. urban) and thus occupation (farmer vs. artisan). Among the peasantry, while men tended to work in the fields and concentrated on cereal-crop production and women tended to do the manifold work of maintaining the home, the reality is that the irregular nature of agricultural labor meant that in times of high demand (especially spring sowing and autumn harvest) it was a matter of survival for every single member of the household to work in the fields. So women absolutely knew how to work a plow, and swing a scythe.

As for the urban worker, while there was also a high degree of gender segregation by occupation and guilds could often be quite misogynistic when it came to trying to masculinize trades (especially those involving higher rates of capital investment), it was also true that the entire household was expected to contribute their labor, so that wives, daughters, collateral female relatives, and female servants picked up the trade alongside their male counterpart. Moreover, as biased towards men as guilds could be, they were even more committed to the principle that guild businesses were family businesses, and so in situations where a master artisan had only daughters or died childless or died with underage heirs, it was absolutely routine for guilds to admit daughters and widows as guild members, indeed usually at the rank of master, all so that the business could remain in the same family. This is why medievalists can point to so many examples of women who worked in skilled trades, often at a high level.

That's what I think GRRM's portrait of medieval society is missing: an entire world of women in business, working elbow-to-elbow with men to make a living.

As for noblewomen, part of the difficulty is that a big part of being a noble was not doing stuff - not working for a living, chiefly - and instead engaging in leisure activities as much as possible. And women were very much a part of those activities (indeed, for many of them the point was to mingle with eligible people of the opposite gender), whether that's feasting, dancing, hunting, hawking, theater and other entertainments, fireworks, tourneys and jousts, etc.

However, women were also engaged in the main "occupations" of the nobility - estate management and politics - way more than GRRM really takes note of. To begin with, as even GRRM acknowledges to some extent, the lady of the house was expected to take an active role in running the house, which meant managing servants, keeping track of accounts payable and receivable, making sure the supplies arrive on time and in the right quality and quantity, keeping an eye on maintenance and repairs (with the help of servants, natch), etc.

Given that even the manor houses of the nobility were units of economic production, the lady of the house would also be responsible for oversight of how the house was doing with its pigs, goats, chickens and pigeons and geese, bees (because beeswax and honey were really important commodities), sheep, and so on, and what kind of figures they were pulling down at the mill and the weir, and so forth.

As medievalists have known for a long time, this list of duties got even longer whenever the lord of the house was away at war or on business, when the lady would be expected to pick up all his work too - which means making sure the rents and taxes get paid, deciding which fields to distribute manpower to and when, dealing with legal disputes in the manorial court, and so on. And if the war came home, the lady of the house was expected to lead the defense of the castle and there are many, many examples of noblewomen who had to organize sieges that lasted months and even years.

However, we also have to consider the impact of inheritance by birth and the inherent randomness of sex at birth - as much as they tried to avoid it, plenty of noble houses ended up with female heirs or in the hands of widows. Most of the time in most countries, women could and did inherit (or at the very least their male children and relatives could inherit through them) titles and fiefdoms, and while their husbands would often take on overlordship de jure uxoris, unmarried women and widows very much exercised their authority as the Lady or Baroness or Countess or whatever, and history is also full of women who were extremely influential in medieval politics and backed up their influence by any means necessary.

#history #medieval history #feudalism #history of gender #westerosi feudalism #westerosi gender roles #asoiaf #asoiaf meta #race for the iron throne #historical analysis

[txttletale]

Hi! So, i'm going through Capital, great little obscure book sad that it never got any wide-reaching support (/s), have a couple questions so far though if you wouldn't mind giving some time to answer them:

What does Marx mean when he talks about 'unskilled labor' in relation to 'skilled labor'? Doesn't the vast majority of labor, even things like factory work, require training to do and especially to become good/efficient at? In the passage where he mentioned it he also mentions that (some, not all) unskilled labor, in sufficient quantities, can equal skilled labor but like. this doesn't really make any sense if its just, say, factory work vs idfk tailoring or something. So i'm a bit confused. Or is he talking about what i just mentioned where when you start out doing something you're unskilled but gradually become better at it as you do it more and more?

Who the hell is Ricardo?

factory work requires training to do, sure, but it's an order of magnitude less training than it took to learn to do those jobs before the introduction of the factories--on the level of, say, a few weeks (at absolute maximum) of training, done alongside actual work, before being fully able to work in a furniture factory, as opposed to the actual years of apprenticeship it historically took to become a carpenter. being unskilled doesn't mean that nobody can be good at a job, but it does mean, essentially, that you could grab any random person off the street and have them doing it within a week.

this distinction isn't there to be moralized about but to concretely analyze the different economic positions of these jobs--if your job is unskilled, you are going to be paid worse and have less secure employment, because you are easy to replace and the number of people looking to replace you are also competing against you to work for the lowest wages, driving your wages down. you're also paid less because the cost of reproducing your labour (the core determiner of the 'base price' of wages) is much lower. when an e.g. surgeon gets paid highly, their employer (whether the state or a capitalist) is essentially paying them more to retroactively pay for their extensive years of training.

this distinction is at its most clear when it comes to the concept of deskilling, which is crucial to marx's understanding of the industrial revolution -- with the introduction of machinery, years and years of learning how to do something by hand could be replaced with weeks of learning how to operate a machine. this deskilled huge sections of the economy and proletarianized the artisans and manufacturers who formerly did that work by making them dependent on the machines owned by factory workers. deskilling is the mechanism by which advancements in productive technology paradoxically make the jobs of those working in those fields more precarious and onerous even as the task itself becomes much easier, so it's pretty important to understand for an understanding of historical materialism.

david ricardo was a 19th century economist who advanced the ideas first laid forward by adam smith re: the labour theory of value and was the first to postulate (although without addressing the signficant political implications of this!) that real wages had an inverse relationship to real profits. marx draws heavily on his ideas but is also critical of them. capital is subtitled 'a critique of political economy' -- ricardo is a key figure in the field of political economy that he's critiquing.

#ask #yurinullification

[bitchesgetriches]

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[utilitycaster]

@notstinglesstoo replied to your post “The thing is, and I haven't gotten a chance to...”:

I saw someone not long ago say cr has always felt like a product to them vs D20 feeling organic and I protected my peace but I did want to ask them if they were brain dead

​Oh man I wanted to address this at length because I feel this. My posts have been centered, again, specifically on published journalists picking Daggerheart aprt critically and applauding themselves for doing so despite it being within a couple of hours of its release and therefore any analysis is necessarily going to be based on at best, a skim, when they just as frequently will claim D20 seasons/Kollok are flawless works of genius based on only a partial read, but man D20's got a fandom problem too. (and all of the following comes with the caveat of "I really enjoy D20, and Dropout, and while we're at it WBN and NADDPod which both are half D20 Intrepid Heroes cast, and think Brennan is a particularly brilliant GM, and also it's obvious that the D20 and CR casts are on great terms, and wish the fandom for D20 were more welcoming and enjoyable because I feel it wasn't like this when I first started watching, as a CR fan, in late 2019 and has since curdled into something really weird and bad.")

The first point is the obvious one: technically speaking these are both products. These are performers doing an art form; it is also a portion of how they make their money with which they can buy goods and services. Believing that art is inauthentic when the artist gets paid and acknowledges that is a thing that happens is a fucking libertarian position at best. Like cool, you think only people who are independently wealthy by other means can make art, because it's not real labor, my kid could paint that, etc etc.

The second point is also pretty obvious. I have pushed back pretty hard on the "uwu CR is just watching friends! it's like we're in their living room" mentality among the fandom, which has decreased, thankfully, but like...it did in fact start organically as a private home game, and they decided, when invited, to make it A Show For An Audience. D20 was created on purpose as a show for an audience. This doesn't make it bad or fake - reread the previous paragraph - but in terms of "this is an group of people who really played D&D in this world together even before the cameras were rolling," Critical Role literally is that, and D20 is not.

I think beyond that...my biggest issues with the D20 fandom are first, the level of discourse is abominable. The tag is almost always just shrieking praise and the most surface-level readings possible. I keep bringing up the "Capitalism is the BBEG" mug but it genuinely sums up so much of how I feel; people who want their existing beliefs fed to them as surface-level no-nuance takes. I mean capitalism is fucking terrible but I do not need every work I watch to have a character turn to the camera and say "capitalism is bad" to enjoy myself, and indeed it makes it harder due to the lack of subtlety and grace. For all D20 fans complain about how unhealthily parasocial CR fans can be (and some can be), I find that a lot of the most unhealthily parasocial "how dare they BETRAY my TRUST by having a ship I don't like or not speaking up about every single societal ill" ex-CR fans move over to D20 and then pull the exact same shit; it simply doesn't get called out. Every time D20 fans are like "we don't want to become the CR fandom" it's like "your toxic positivity and unhealthy parasocial behavior exceeds the HEIGHT of what I've seen in CR; the main difference is that CR started in 2015 when D&D was still shaking off the raging bigot dudebros and so in the early days it acquired more of those fans, whereas by the time D20 came around the landscape of who played D&D and watched Actual Play had shifted wildly, and you need to judge September 2018 D20 fans in parallel to September 2018 CR fans, not September 2015 CR fans."

I also feel, and I alluded to this in the post about journalism, and other people have said this better than I have, but the pedestal people have put D20 on does feel like a single...not even misstep, but just, difficult choice that doesn't capitulate to the loudest fans will bring a good chunk of that fandom crashing to the ground. And that includes the journalists. For all the fans of CR can still be obsessed with the cast to an unhealthy degree? The cast and company have put up pretty strong boundaries and have not budged. D20 hasn't, and I think the second they do - and I think it will be for their benefit as a company and a channel - a big chunk of their most vitriolic CR-hating portion of the fandom will viciously turn on them.

#notstinglesstoo #nonrebloggable bc god it's hell week for me i know i've been shooting off opinions bc that is how i blow off steam #but like. i can't have this break containment i got shit to do