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Natural Law is irrelevant. It's a philosophical view, not concrete fact. This is the Economics Forum, not the Philosophy Forum.
Natural law is the basis by which modern day society functions. Even capitalist institutions are managed at the local level.
The corporate top down structure only exists to manage output and distribution:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winterfall8324
I believe if you look at the history of socialism and capitalism in the world, and in general the history of politics since after the Neolithic period, you’ll see a great degree of control concentrated towards people who do not have the individual capacity to exert said power over the wider populace.
These powers change hands of course, the senate in Rome, the imperial family in China, feudal land lords, kings, captains of industry in the 19th century, etc.
And yet the basis of all these people’s power though relies on the same understanding of invisible control, or control through influence rather than direct force.
While many do claim these persons of power will naturally arise or are even necessary for the organization of human life I see evidence to the contrary. Most of these same functions people talk about being handled by the state or the private industry are in practice handled in the local level where these models are directly implemented.
In mutual aid: A Factor of evolution by peter Kropotkin he discusses many of the factors that natural selection functions by. Most often, both in the human and animal kingdom, these functions awarded not the strongest or smartest individuals, but the ones that excelled at cooperation. Obviously there were differences in abilities within the group and these differences created different roles for each member, but the main factor was the will to understand that mutual benefits were the only way to overcome the challenges of competing species and the environment.
In human kind, in medieval communes (which there were many), people did function out of self desire, but these desires were one of survival and prosperity to a wider extent. To accomplish this the people did agree to some level of order, but this cooperation with the heads of the commune was not one of servitude, but one of role taking. Obviously selfishness exists in all people to varying degree, but even the most selfish did not feel the need to take all power for themselves, for if that were to happen, they would suffer as well. The voluntary agreement to organize did not require some external reward, because production had direct affects. Furthermore the more that were feed, the more who could work, and the more that was produced for everyone.
Going back to power models I mentioned in my previous paragraph, while the power centers did influence the output of a society, the sole production was still handled locally. These immediate powers were the only ones that were present. A manager at a factory could have a badge on him that says he is representative of some larger company, or a guard in a town could wear the sigil of a king to visualize control by said king, but neither of these representatives were themselves the power they claimed to represent. From this we can understand that the actual power (the enforcement of will) is not being distributed down by some incredible power, but is directly being enforced by a local entity (manager, city guards, police department, etc.) who has the voluntary agreement of the actual workforce or civilian population to follow the set of parameters. It is significant to observe this distinction because then we can understand that these presumed power centers are not all that powerful themselves; if that is the case then the order they bring is not inherent to them, in fact there power is in practice nothing but voluntary (whether the subjects know it or not) agreement by the subjects to follow an agreed set of rules. Because the central powers can seem direct in their ability to exert force, this may force some level of subservience, but it is nonetheless what seems to be true.
Now, these power structures still exist. We just understand that they are not being derived from the top. If such a universal accord of structure and organization is being practiced what creates its structure if not central power? I believe, and I think there is evidence to suggest this, that the practical formation of these structures come from networking. All the separate institutions that make up a kingdom, an empire, a corporation, a republic, or anything else comes from the horizontal power sharing that all these separate institutions practice. Even if a police department in one county in the US (for example) is separate from another federal police department on the other side of the country, they both, even if through 3rd party chains or different organizations, connect and share information and operate based on some level of coordination. These intrinsic networks do build the presence of a great singular body (the state), but the input of all this power is created at each decentralized part.
The same applies with corporate structures, different work places all produce separately but they communicate and form this appearance of an individual body.
So for us to assume that each locality needs some organized force to run it, we would have to assume they derive organization from a singular force, when in actuality it is a multitude of forces. For each community, the needs are different, and as such the practice of power will be different. That being said if we were to acknowledge the purpose of checks and balances, we can find the same thing practicing in society. While each community is connected with the next into a web of communities, they are each affected, both in limitations and enhancements by the acts of the others. That would mean the resources that one would need that could affect themselves negatively would be educated and supported by the infrastructure of the others. If we were to take away the central force that redistributes the collective output of all these different networks (corporate shareholders, state leaders, etc.) then the usage of what they produce can be better acclimated to their individual circumstances. Further democratic forces and the inertia of natural law (personal property/property by usage) will help limit the power accumulation of one person. So different people can achieve different levels of control or success but they would be limited by both how much they can own due to operation limitations (one person cannot operate a huge swath of land by themselves), and they would be limited by democratic means (workers control their own labor so one person can’t trade or commodities labor with out consent, and the mass production of goods can’t be monopolized by one person or a small group of people).
Finally as to what you claimed about natural greed or ineffency; to the latter I believed I answered that question do to the reality that current day functions are controlled locally and different roles to different people are offered on the basis of mutual benefit. Both in the communes of medieval Europe and the smaller government departments across the country. I’ll also add that these forms of democratic and community checks and balances is also why the CNT in Catalonia was able to establish a successful anarcho-syndicalist state despite the fact that many of the peasant farmers and factory workers were illiterate; there own authority on the subject was not the basis of how society was run, a system of networks based Mutual Aid created different levels of management that were reliant on the masses to understand the details of every small function. To the former claim about greed, I go back to Kropotkin; when you don’t have the distribution of output controlled by some central force, you allow production to be based on the needs of the community. In such cases mutual Aid is the selfish act that requires people to need to produce enough for the community (and for themselves). The improvement over old tribal functions that allowed this in ancient times is the modern technological network and infrastructure that makes up States and large corporations remains, and the benefits the provide, from supply chains to mass production and distribution remain, only this time they are handled in different scales based on the situation and the output being distributed voluntarily by the decentralized power centers involved.
In all these cases I think this is why the corruption you see in communist countries and the greed you see in capitalist countries are more products of what is allowed to happen by the environment. If corruption or stock crashes had small outwards affects on society, then they would be much easier to fix. The reason they aren’t is that while the network is there to respond, the power output is so centralized to the needs of one source, all these different production areas are affected. We have reached a level in communication, technological advancement, and human education that the cooperative forces of the pass along with the wealth and power standards of the modern era can be combined to great affects.
But even then, a major reason why you don’t see large scale reform or discussion towards these forms of economics and politics (though they are happening) goes back to my first paragraph. All these different power models through our time, while different, allowed for practice of power beyond reason. These same forces today don’t wish to allow the true freedoms humans are capable of, because they can’t, because they know if they do they would have no reason to exist.
Good news comrades, our Chinese brothers and Sisters, rather than turning to capitalist to combat the authoritarian Xi, are turning to real communism supporting worker rights:
Don't forget the GPCR, while the great leap forward did not help further socialist/communist causes, the GPCR, for the few years it existed, brought a push for real socialism in china.
As an anarchist I salute them and hope my Comrades here will help bring similar changes.
If you want a capitalist society that has a massive worker federation sector, look no further than Argentina, a country where 20,000,000+ members of their work force work in a federation of cooperatives!
You need professional help, bro. Your ideas are idiotic and, what's worse, you can't even explain them without resorting to some of the worst word salad I've seen, trying to sound like you know what you're talking about. You clearly don't. You've never even held a job, much less understand economics and human interaction in the economy. No one cares about your BS kindergarten-level theories. Just get a job, bro. Get a job and get out of the house. You're going insane.
HAHA I agree, I love your response. What a bunch of nonsense.
Capitalism is so great because it's at heart so simple and so efficient. If I don't like what an employer is offering for pay, I can just find another job that will compensate me better. If, as an employer, I fail to offer competitive wages, my employees leave and find a better employer and either 1) I go out of business, or 2) I better start offering better wages to stay in business. I can't just decide that I want to pay my editor minimum wage, because nobody with that skill set will work for that wage, unless they're right out of college, and that low quality of work will surely convince my clients I have lost my marbles and they'll find a better production company. If I get amazingly lucky and my editor right out of college is incredibly skilled, but just willing to work for minimum wage while he gains some experience, rest assured he won't be with me for long because he'll start to figure out he's worth WAY more than what I'm paying.
I always laugh at these people talking about the owner or the top employees not deserving what they make. It's just a ridiculous concept. I started my company and do you know the only person who has ever worked for free in the 10 years that my company has been active? ME! I lost money for the first and second years, I broke even the third year, I made a little above minimum wage the fourth year, made a bit more the fifth and sixth years, the seventh year I made a good upper middle class income, and then two more garbage years somehow after that, broke even both years, and this year a solid middle class income. Meanwhile, our contractors made between $65-100/hour and our two main employee positions (we briefly had an assistant) made effective hourly rates of around $20-25/hour. So I have risked ten years of my life toward the company, having averaged a very low annual income about on par with a Wendy's employee.
If one day, three years down the road, I'm relaxing by the pool and only working 5-10 hours a week, but making $250,000/year while my employees make much less for working much harder, *I deserve it* because I took the risk to make the business in the first place! If they wanted to take the risk, they could have worked for free while I was risking my capital and then they could have split the profits with me when there were no real profits to share. So instead of making $40K per year while I broke even, my top employee could have given me $20K of her $40K so we both made the same amount of money. Somehow, though, I really don't think she would have liked that arrangement! So one day, when my labor doesn't match my pay, that's not a matter of me living off the backs of my employees, it's a matter of me having paid my dues, taken the risks you weren't willing or able to take, and the risk paying off. That's how capitalism works -- it's about risk versus reward. No risk, no reward. Low risk, low reward. High risk, high reward possible, or complete failure.
HAHA I agree, I love your response. What a bunch of nonsense.
Capitalism is so great because it's at heart so simple and so efficient. If I don't like what an employer is offering for pay, I can just find another job that will compensate me better. If, as an employer, I fail to offer competitive wages, my employees leave and find a better employer and either 1) I go out of business, or 2) I better start offering better wages to stay in business. I can't just decide that I want to pay my editor minimum wage, because nobody with that skill set will work for that wage, unless they're right out of college, and that low quality of work will surely convince my clients I have lost my marbles and they'll find a better production company. If I get amazingly lucky and my editor right out of college is incredibly skilled, but just willing to work for minimum wage while he gains some experience, rest assured he won't be with me for long because he'll start to figure out he's worth WAY more than what I'm paying.
I always laugh at these people talking about the owner or the top employees not deserving what they make. It's just a ridiculous concept. I started my company and do you know the only person who has ever worked for free in the 10 years that my company has been active? ME! I lost money for the first and second years, I broke even the third year, I made a little above minimum wage the fourth year, made a bit more the fifth and sixth years, the seventh year I made a good upper middle class income, and then two more garbage years somehow after that, broke even both years, and this year a solid middle class income. Meanwhile, our contractors made between $65-100/hour and our two main employee positions (we briefly had an assistant) made effective hourly rates of around $20-25/hour. So I have risked ten years of my life toward the company, having averaged a very low annual income about on par with a Wendy's employee.
If one day, three years down the road, I'm relaxing by the pool and only working 5-10 hours a week, but making $250,000/year while my employees make much less for working much harder, *I deserve it* because I took the risk to make the business in the first place! If they wanted to take the risk, they could have worked for free while I was risking my capital and then they could have split the profits with me when there were no real profits to share. So instead of making $40K per year while I broke even, my top employee could have given me $20K of her $40K so we both made the same amount of money. Somehow, though, I really don't think she would have liked that arrangement! So one day, when my labor doesn't match my pay, that's not a matter of me living off the backs of my employees, it's a matter of me having paid my dues, taken the risks you weren't willing or able to take, and the risk paying off. That's how capitalism works -- it's about risk versus reward. No risk, no reward. Low risk, low reward. High risk, high reward possible, or complete failure.
There is nothing simple or natural about capitalism. Your vast simplification of the process boils down to what Adam Smith wished capitalism was. In reality there are far too many external affects, state control, central currency, accumulation of capital, political-corporate power, unequal distribution of wealth, artificial demand, and profit/needs discrepancies for it to operate how you imagine on a large scale.
People like yourself and Kaz are out of your depths.
You need professional help, bro. Your ideas are idiotic and, what's worse, you can't even explain them without resorting to some of the worst word salad I've seen, trying to sound like you know what you're talking about. You clearly don't. You've never even held a job, much less understand economics and human interaction in the economy. No one cares about your BS kindergarten-level theories. Just get a job, bro. Get a job and get out of the house. You're going insane.
This is about as good a summary as can be offered here. Dude not only quotes himself as a source, he posts responses to his own posts as if this was a blog.
This is about as good a summary as can be offered here. Dude not only quotes himself as a source, he posts responses to his own posts as if this was a blog.
It's sad.
What is wrong with you, I quote that post as an explanation since I don’t want to type it all over again since I went through the logic argument already.
The problem with people like you, Kaz, and others is that despite the time I take to answer and discuss all questions, you don’t seem to want to engage.
That’s fine, but it’s also very telling of your own intellectual honesty. And I think that is really sad.
You need professional help, bro. Your ideas are idiotic and, what's worse, you can't even explain them without resorting to some of the worst word salad I've seen, trying to sound like you know what you're talking about. You clearly don't. You've never even held a job, much less understand economics and human interaction in the economy. No one cares about your BS kindergarten-level theories. Just get a job, bro. Get a job and get out of the house. You're going insane.
:thumbsup:
That poster apparently has all the time in the world to write those unintelligible love letters to communism. Seems like a less than constructive existence.
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