Labour markets != Capitalism. I suspect Varoufakis would be more amenable to labour markets regulated so that labour without ownership is not legal, which would not be capitalism.

There is no reason for the government to decide for you what your job is. Even the USSR since the 60s didn't have such a system. You would have to work for a set amount of years for a set job if you wanted to get an advanced education. After that, you were able to go look for available jobs and choose which one you wanted. Which is just a price-controlled labour market.

I doubt very much that the market socialist Varoufakis would want a more restrictive labour market than that of the USSR, so your accusation really seems to be a strawman.

> I suspect Varoufakis would be more amenable to labour markets regulated so that labour without ownership is not legal, which would not be capitalism

He pretty much stated it in one of his answers: he'd want to get rid of tradable shares and replace ownership with 1 job = 1 share. The same open job market that's used today can remain in place, just with labor - not capital - owning the shares.

The problem with this is businesses require capital and you can’t expect labour to be able to provide it. A system that compensates the investment in business with nothing at all won’t get that investment in business. If we’re trying to use something akin to the current job market we have to ask how companies are created within it. The best answer I can come up with is some sort of dystopian form of government picked winners where tax money replaced investment capital.

> The best answer I can come up with is some sort of dystopian form of government picked winners where tax money replaced investment capital

if you squint a bit, that's what has been happening in the past 4 or so years considering the the amount of money the feds pumped into money markets that filtered through venture capital funds. This is one of Yanis' postulation: that businesses that require capital don't have to rely on profits, and can instead benefit from money printing; and I'll put up Uber as exhibit A.

You can have the government act as venture capital if that is truly necessary. Otherwise labour does provide capital through the surplus, and loans can fill in the blanks.

Labour can potentially provide some capital but the mechanism by which it has to do so in the socialist system would be the wildly impractical an equal amount from each labourer. Anything that causes investment to break one worker, one share for the ownership structure of the business is not allowed. This means if some workers have enough capital to invest they aren't going to do so since it doesn't give them any practical returns. Only if all workers can agree on what to invest and all workers can and will do so will the required ownership structure work with investment from workers.

Price-controlled labour market implies that price is actually a mechanism which is complicated to do if you’re operating on something akin to “from each according to ability and to each according to need”.

Whatever system you use needs to somehow resolve the issue that 53% of the youth population wants to be a social media influencer yet far fewer than 1% of jobs are that. Permitting price gets you this but it seems to be a very weak form of socialism if you adopt a system in which some people will make millions and others will make peanuts.

>if you’re operating on something akin to “from each according to ability and to each according to need”.

Well nobody is saying that this possible short of a post-scarcity society. The Soviets themselves were certainly not making the claim that was how they were operating, simply that it was their goal and they were getting closer to it.

> Whatever system you use needs to somehow resolve the issue that 53% of the youth population wants to be a social media influencer yet far fewer than 1% of jobs are that. Permitting price gets you this but it seems to be a very weak form of socialism if you adopt a system in which some people will make millions and others will make peanuts.

The basic issue Marx-inspired people have with capitalism (I think Marxist is far too strong of a term) isn't necessarily with the fact that income inequality exists. Marx did write about how perfect egalitarianism is not a realistic nor desirable goal, and I don't think Varoufakis disagrees.

The issue that is seen with capitalism is rather the unfair social relations that capital forms against which society is inevitably structured, which leads to people making billions simply from being an owner, and having debilitating control over society.

As far as people making hundreds of thousands or even in the low millions because their work is particularly necessary to society's needs and few other people can fulfill those needs, there is nothing necessarily wrong with that. As long they don't get undue control and get to set up biased relations that are then independent of their ongoing contribution to society, I don't think this is a weak form of socialism at all, it would actually be a much stronger form of socialism than most that have been successful, and I think that this is also the kind of socialism Varoufakis would prefer. Short of a post-scarcity society in any case, I don't think any reasonable socialist, Marxist, or Communist has hopes for anything better.

As far as the people making peanuts, if it is because what their productive output is not useful to society and they can't adapt to produce anything useful, we can use redistribution and de-commodify necessities in order to make it so that at least richer people do not have too problematic a power differential. And of course, we should strive to make opportunities as absolutely equal as possible.

But what I'm trying to get at is that really socialists are fine with some degree of inequality if it simply comes from differences in productivity. The issue is not from the distribution of resources, but really the process of production and its impact on society.

Of course, from each according to his ability to each according to his need is on a spectrum. The more our abilities increase relative to our needs, the closer we can get to the ideal.

My how the goalposts have moved. Millionaires are the new proletariat. Socialism needs to borrow almost all of capitalism from capitalism. Fairly soon socialists will be advocating for (partial) investor ownership of the means of production because once you accept price mechanisms in labour markets you have almost no good alternatives for new business formation.

No goalposts have been moved. The proletariat has never been defined by income level, rather simply if they sell their labour without owning capital. A vanishingly small percentage of the proletariat has been a millionaire or equivalent basically forever.

Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, nothing more, nothing less. If someone really is able to produce 20x more than their peers, there's nothing wrong with them have a before tax income of 20x more.

If you have rights to personal property and profit from labor then you have Capitalism.

You don't have a right to personal property though, because you can't use your property to make a profit from someone else's labour, which is the difference with capitalism.