garrettauthor:

quinndolyns:

people seem to have trouble understanding why i’m an anti-capitalist, so i’m going to try and put it into simple, real-life terms.

i work at a restaurant. i make $12 an hour, plus tips. minimum wage where i live is relatively high for my country – the national minimum wage is $7.25/hr, and has not been raised since 2009. before taxes, working full time, my yearly income is about $22,000 a year. ($25,000 if you count tips)

at my job, we sell various dishes, with an average price of about $10-$15. we get printouts every week detailing how much money we made that week; in one week, our restaurant makes about $30,000. (one of our other locations actually makes this much on a daily basis!)

i’m not going to go into details, but after the costs of production

(payroll for employees, rent for the building, maintenance, and wholesale food purchasing) are accounted for, the restaurant makes an estimated profit of $20,000 per week.

this profit goes directly to the owner, who does not work at this location. the owner of my restaurant has actually been on vacation for a few months, but still profits from the restaurant, because they own it. i have met the owner exactly twice in my year of working here.

to put this into perspective, the owner of this restaurant earns in 2 days what they pay me in one year. and that’s just from this single location – the owner has several other restaurants, all of which make more money than the one i work at. this ends up resulting in the owner having an estimated net worth of tens of millions of dollars, even after accounting for the payroll for every single worker in their employ.

now, i have to ask you: does the owner of my restaurant deserve this income? did they earn it? did their labor result in this value being created?

the naive answer would be “yes”; the owner purchased the location and arranged for the raw ingredients to be delivered, did they not?

the actual answer is “no”. the owner may have used their initial capital to start the location, but the profit is a result of my labor, and the labor of my co-workers.

the owner purchases rice at a very low bulk price of about 25 cents a pound. i cook the rice, and within a few minutes, that pound of rice is suddenly worth about $30. the owner did not create this value, i did. the owner simply provided the initial capital investment required to start the process.

what needs to be understood here is that capitalists do not create value. they use the labor of their employees to create value, and then take the excess profit and keep it.

what needs to be understood is that capitalists accrue income by already HAVING money. the owner of my restaurant was only able to get this far because they started off, from the very beginning, with enough money to purchase a building, purchase food in bulk, and hire hundreds of employees.

that is to say: the rich get richer, and they do so by exploiting the labor of the poor.

the owner of my restaurant could afford to triple the income of every single person in their employee if they felt like it, but this would mean that they were generating less profit for themselves, so they do not.

the owner of my restaurant pays me the current minimum wage of my area, because to them, i am not a person. i am an investment. i am an asset. i am a means to create more money. 

when you are paid minimum wage, the message your boss is sending you is this: “legally, if i could pay you less, i would.”

every capitalist on the planet exploits their workers for their own gain. every capitalist, even the small business owners, forces people to stay in poverty so that the capitalist can profit.

Yep.

mostlyvoidpartiallysmog:

dvandom:

pinkcheesegreenghost:

rtrixie:

The way I see it, America will eventually have the choice between forgiving student debt or facing the massive destabilization caused by an entire generation being unable to build any wealth.

By destabilization I mean that the millennial generation will eventually become aware of the fact that they will be enslaved by their student debt for most of, if not their entire lives.

Many in this generation still had parents that were able to save and contribute financially to their children’s college education, but that’s also going to be a thing of the past when everyone has their own debt burden to carry well into adulthood – meaning the problem will become unimaginably worse for the next generation.

Once people realize this, you’ve got a social powder keg unheard of since the social question poised by the industrial revolution.

The entire student loan system is little more than a scheme meant to extract every last bit of present and future wealth from society’s youngest members, and the longer it continues, the uglier its inevitable end is going to be.

and so many millennials are choosing not to get married, or have kids because of all the debts they owe. 

its having much more severe consequences than people want to admit.

PLUS!

One of the main critiques of socialism is that without the incentive to excel, no one will do their best job, and the system will fall apart as unmotivated people do worse and worse work.  If you get the same housing and food and medical care whether you do good work or crappy work, why try?

But end-stage capitalism has the same problem, only without the guarantee of food and shelter.  If you’re going to drown in debt your entire life and never be able to afford a house regardless of whether you work hard or don’t work hard, what incentive is there to slave away for your corporate masters?  

We’re currently coasting on societally-imprinted work ethic and the myth that with hard work comes success.  But as time goes by and it becomes more and more obvious that your hard work only enriches the oligarchs and you’ll never see a dime of that?  Well before the powderkeg ignites we’ll see productivity drop through the basement because no one believes that being productive is worth the effort.  

“If you’re going to drown in debt your entire life and never be able to
afford a house regardless of whether you work hard or don’t work hard,
what incentive is there to slave away for your corporate masters?”

God, I think about this almost every fucking day.