I understand that the libertarian perspective says it is OK to let your offspring starve to death (Thank you, Mises, for clearing that up for us!), but I don't think that system of thinking is a valid or useful way to arrange society.
(Neither, it seems, does any society on earth, since no one has ever attempted such a thing.)
I think we're all obligated to one another, and slavery is something quite different from that.
I also don't like the libertarian attempt at redefining common words to make ordinary things sound baaaaad, like "taxation is theft!!" (it isn't) or "taking care of others is slavery!!" (it isn't). I think that's a cheap rhetorical trick, and doesn't get us any farther in any kind of discussion.
So you think adults should be treated like children? Very telling.
Your thinking is fallacious, though. If you bring children into the world, you are of course responsible for providing for them. But you are also responsible for helping them become self-sufficient. Perhaps you think children should be coddled by their parents for the rest of their lives?
> I understand that the libertarian perspective says it is OK to let your offspring starve to death
Who said anything about libertarianism? A bit of a non sequitur, wouldn't you say. And I don't think you understand libertarianism anyways. If you do, then I sure as hell don't agree with it.
> I think we're all obligated to one another, and slavery is something quite different from that.
I think we should help one another, but I don't think we should be forced to help one another. Big difference.
> I also don't like the libertarian attempt at redefining common words to make ordinary things sound baaaaad, like "taxation is theft!!" (it isn't) or "taking care of others is slavery!!" (it isn't). I think that's a cheap rhetorical trick, and doesn't get us any farther in any kind of discussion.
Again with the libertarianism. I'll indulge you because you seem to want to fight against a perceived ideology. How is taxation not theft exactly? How is forcing people to take care of others not slaver, exactly? It's not a rhetorical trick, these are objective facts.
I'm not, which is why I'm not okay with Capitalism. Being forced to sell your labour in order to avoid poverty, destitution or death or, in the case of the modern welfare state, the degrading feeling of having to live a poor life from charity of the State is one of the ultimate forms of slavery.
The idea that Capitalism promotes human value is ridiculous. Within the capitalist mode of production, human labour-time is like any other quantity; the spinning loom, the silk, etc. Sugar is bought by the kilogram, human labour-time by the hour. Human labour-time is another commodity within capitalism, and like every other commodity in Capitalism, it is maximised for exchange-value over use-value.
Market interactions, at least within Capitalism, have the quality of being fetishised, so that rather than seeing the obscured web of interactions between people, we merely see prices and figures. If anything is dehumanising, I'd say that working to make things you don't want (usually causing alienation) is the most dehumanising of them all.
Capitalism is perfectly fine with you detaching yourself from the system and surviving off the land.
> The idea that Capitalism promotes human value is ridiculous.
Capitalism helps us quantify human productivity. That's about it. Humans have transcendent value. Capitalism defends everyone's right not to be forced into slavery by threat of force. There are no other systems that can make that claim.
You can't, a billionaire already bought that land.
My struggle is not my own, it is of the whole working class and those who are exploited and left in destitution by the capitalist system. Effectively saying 'move somewhere else' rarely works and is a very crude way of saying 'fuck off' to someone who raises legitimate problems in the world in which most people live. For any semblance of a life to benefit from the past work of humanity, going and living in a forest is not sufficient, unless you are fine with living like an ascetic, barely having your needs met. Most people would find this disagreeable, and many people cannot afford to do it.
The land is owned by the state (operating via bourgeois democracy) and if not private property owners. I see these as one and the same organ of proprietorship, staking claim based in false premises and contradicting with the principles of justice and equality (Proudhon's 'What is Property?' is interesting on this topic, as well as Kropotkin's 'The Conquest of Bread' and many of Marx and Engels' works.)
>Capitalism defends everyone's right not to be forced into slavery by threat of force.
This is laughably false. What is so degrading about slavery is not the fact that there is no pay, but that one is forced to perform a particular task at risk of destitution or starvation. In the same way, one class oppresses another, the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. It is no defence of any right at all to be forced in such a way. If there is no government, there is still the unjustified authority of one class over another, which is problematic in my opinion.
It's also worth noting that because labour-time is a commodity, the owner of the business will pay for that commodity for what it costs at minimum, in order to get the best deal, that is, enough to sustain firstly continued availability of labour-time and secondly to sustain the replenishing of the source of labour-time (i.e a family). Just as the slave owner would house his slaves, your boss in capitalism gives you some freedom to choose where you work and how to spend some of your time.
It's said that one of the most damaging aspects of capitalism is not the time on the clock for the boss, but rather the 'maintenance' (just as a machine is maintained) of the worker in his leisure time, eating time and sleeping time. It is always on the clock, in different forms. Your life is merely a running cost for the boss, no more.
>There are no other systems that can make that claim.
Social anarchism can, unlike "anarcho"-capitalism, which perpetuates a system of unjustified authority. Why should the boss be paid so much for labour he didn't perform? For taking a 'risk'? How is that quantified? For giving the employees the wonderful privilege of being exploited? There is no justification for it.
Capitalism does not quantify human productivity, if by that you mean that those who work the hardest are rewarded the most. This is clearly false, and can be seen in sweatshops; you have no reason to believe it is any different in a cushy office job in SV or London. Socially Necessary Labour Time can make some kind of approximation of the relative amount of productivity within a market, but as to why that should be ascribed as a measure of human worth, I don't think it ought to be.
Why is it that libertarians take such pride in 'No God, no masters' but openly defend the 'right' of a boss to exploit his workers and encourage the damaging psychological phenomenon of alienation?
I say: down with the state and down with private property.
You might be missing my point here. I am saying that at one point humans were all living off the land and under no form of government. They did that for millions of years, and successfully I might add. It was only within the last few thousand years that we started to form complex societies and governments. The alternative to society and government has always been anarchy (every man for himself). I would argue that the very small tribes we lived in for most of human history were socialist, and you and I would probably find some common ground on believing that to be the ideal structure in which to live. But once the tribes grow past a certain point socialism no longer remains viable. The interesting thing about the capitalist system is that it's somewhat of a fractal; the larger system is laissez faire but the corporations within it all operate internally as rough approximations to socialism. The real question is what form of governance is most inline with our human nature. I think we are socialist on a small scale and capitalist on a large scale.
> This is laughably false. What is so degrading about slavery is not the fact that there is no pay, but that one is forced to perform a particular task at risk of destitution or starvation.
We are all forced by nature to perform tasks in order to survive. This is the default state of our being. Society has made it somewhat more comfortable to survive, but the simple fact that we must struggle against nature in order to survive remains. All the bickering we're doing about forms of government is simply a debate about who should be responsible for doing the work that had to be done with or without formal societies.
> Just as the slave owner would house his slaves, your boss in capitalism gives you some freedom to choose where you work and how to spend some of your time.
There's one key point you're glossing over – capitalism gives you the freedom not to work. No slave was ever given that choice.
> Why should the boss be paid so much for labour he didn't perform? For taking a 'risk'? How is that quantified?
Yes, because they're taking a 'risk'. There are many ways of quantifying risk. Interest, for one. Past performance, for another. Usually people who scoff at the significance of risk are those who haven't taken any themselves.
> For giving the employees the wonderful privilege of being exploited? There is no justification for it.
Are employees not exploiting the capitalist? It's a two-way street. Employees collect all their pay and walk away unscathed if their company fails. The capitalist loses their entire investment if the company fails. We're all "exploiting" each other all the time. People who value security and stability over financial gain and autonomy work as employees. People who value financial gain and autonomy over security and stability become entrepreneurs. You fall into the same trap Marx did in believing that all people care about is money. It's a gross oversimplification of human nature.
> Capitalism does not quantify human productivity, if by that you mean that those who work the hardest are rewarded the most.
No, those who work the smartest are rewarded the most.
> Socially Necessary Labour Time can make some kind of approximation of the relative amount of productivity within a market, but as to why that should be ascribed as a measure of human worth, I don't think it ought to be.
It's a measure of a human's worth in terms of their productivity, but not in terms of their value as a human. Human life has equal and transcendent value in the U.S. and that has nothing to do with their financial worth or productivity. Marx was the one who was obsessed with defining everyone in terms of their economic outputs and needs.
> Why is it that libertarians take such pride in 'No God, no masters' but openly defend the 'right' of a boss to exploit his workers and encourage the damaging psychological phenomenon of alienation?
I don't know, perhaps you should ask one? Again, you talk about bosses "exploiting" workers without recognizing that workers also "exploit" bosses. Exploitation is a two-way street. Everyone is responsible for making sure they aren't exploited and that they don't do any exploiting of their own. Because it's impossible to quantify or measure exploitation (they tried this to horrifying effect in communist Russia), it must fall to the individual to make that determination.
> I say: down with the state and down with private property.
Well, good luck with that. The only way that's happening is through violence. Maybe you're a fan of violence, in which case, thank God we have a military to keep people like you from engaging in it. But if not, I'm not sure how you're ever going to accomplish this goal. The communist experiment has been tried. It doesn't work.
And no one, anywhere, is talking about enslaving people.
By taxing capital instead of income. Or by taxing value added, or by taxing sales or profits, or maybe something esoteric like a robot tax.
If the productive portion simply stopped working, or only worked enough to barely survive themselves, the nonproductive portion of the population would perish unless they enslaved the productive portion and forced them to produce surpluses.
I mean, there's no provable source for the value of a human. Nothing in nature you can point to and say "that's it, that's why a human has value".
I say, and my politics reflect this, that all people have intrinsic value. They're born with it, they have it til they die. Because of that, they should have access to food, shelter, medical care. No matter how much work they do or how much stuff they make.
Other people say a person is only as valuable as how much they work. (and I respond, screw that, it leads to a lot of suffering!)