This is moving the goalpost. The original subject was “the richest”. You are now changing it to “there have been other filthy rich people to exist”
isn’t it supposedly just private actors with their own means for making profit?
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not precisely! it’s specifically a system in which the means of production - that is, the things required to make A Thing - are privately owned, and value is extracted for the owners of the means of production via said private ownership, irrespective of whether they are directly the ones utilising the means of production
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i’m saying “if other rich people existed, another, more wealthy people probably existed.”
this is notably not the only way of amassing power - the ruling classes in the various frameworks of production prior to the Industrial Revolution, for example, rarely directly owned means of production or extracted surplus value from wage labour, but rather exploited through other means. i am notably not saying “feudalism” here because feudalism as a system is nowhere near as universal as early Marxist theory positied
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I wish lemonade had less sugar in it
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Atlas I know
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like. think about it. if i’m exploiting you because you work in my factory for a shitty wage, that is distinctly a different way of holding power than you being a serf who works lands for me from whom i take heavy taxes and levies
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Atlas want to have an invisible conversation with each other.
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We each start a topic and assume what the other person would say and keep going from there
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lemonade can have more or less sugar in it depending on where you get it from and how much sugar you want in it, if you can control the last variable
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yes exactly I was right!
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I have a doctor appoint ment virtual soon
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ask them to get me some lemonade
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that will be 150 dollars
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i knew that bit but it was just my fundemental understanding of capitalism was a bit off
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in one system you are alienated from power over your own life through being unanchored to any of the means by which you make your living - if I deny you access to my factory, to the machines you work, you can’t get wages from me any more, so being fired is a dangerous threat to you. in another system, you are chained to those means of production - you’re tied to the land you work as a farmer
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like, you can see pretty clearly that in both cases, whether I’m an exploitative factory owner or an exploitative feudal lord, I hold power over you for the means of amassing wealth.
but in one system my power over you is held by precarity - I can shut the factory doors at any time I’d like because of the violence backing my right to do so up. so you’d better not upset me, and you’d better meet your quota. because you’re in a system where there’s workers to replace you, where the flexibility of labour allows me to use the threat of other workers in order to threaten violence against you.
in another system, labour is (FOR THE MOST PART) inflexible and non-fungible. finding replacement serfs is non-trivial, even if it is somewhat easy, so instead my primary means of threatening you as a serf farmer for me is by, well, having men with swords under my employ. you have access to the means of production - you own the farming equipment you use to farm my land. but that access is used to imprison you rather than to set you free.
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i shouldn’t drink anything fizzy upon immediately waking up in the future
my head’s spinning
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importantly this dichotomy is a vast oversimplification. but the essence of defining an economy is this - how can those in power make you do things you don’t want to do? how can you make someone work for you? and the answer is always some form of violence, of course, but the difference is the layers of abstraction between that violence and you, and the nuances of how it functions
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