this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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Except the rich, right? But they are a different species, of course. Not at all the same human beings you see when you look at the noble proletarian!
All people want nice things while not having to work or think hard. All people are pretty okay having others do the work for them. This is not a unique feature of the rich which will vanish from humanity if we wave a magic wand and vaporize the upper class.
I was being ironic. The rich definitely aren’t a different species. They are just another window on human nature.
We can abstract money until it’s meaningless and then say “see, it doesn’t do anything.”
But even if you regress everything to a basic barter economy, capital still matters. You want to gather 40 workers for a year to create an irrigation canal? Well someone has to be prepared to feed them for a year, THIS year, before the canal can benefit any crops. Otherwise they’re going to fuck off back to their own arid fields and scratch out another year.
So you see, the village can’t get a new canal without the labor of the workers, but you can’t get the labor of the workers without some ready capital. Theres absolutely nothing abstract about it. Capital matters.
What we all get mad about is that the guy with the capital then OWNs the canal and charges high prices for the water. And the way to solve that is by collectively bargaining for some worker ownership at the start. People like yourself get lost hating the guy with the capital and convincing yourself he doesn’t matter. He does. You just need to negotiate for a better shake.
That has been hard to do historically because there’s always some jackass who comes along and says “I’m starving, and I can dig ditches, just feed me while I do it.”
If a village needed something done, then they could figure it out collectively, you don't need business to get things accomplished.
Literally in that above example, I'm pretty sure they're just going to redistribute their efforts. There will still be people growing crops and they'll share with the people working on the irrigation canal, knowing it's for their own benefit.
It’s not the only way things can ever get done under any circumstances. But for the guy to say you can remove it and get the same result is BS. And if we’re being real, capital drives some things that collective village action never could, like advances in medicine. And capital drives things on a scale that collective village action never does. Everyone thinks there isn’t enough housing but most of what we have was built with capital, not village collectivism. And we need more, the village needs something done, so where’s that village collectivism? Fact is a village can erect shantytowns in rural India but it can’t out in sewage lines and pour foundations for a new housing project.
See that's funny because when the street my ancestral is on was being built out, that's literally what happened. The folks building the houses got together and did the sewage lines for the street. This was way before my time, but that's what my grandpa told me, anyway.
Also this was the 1980s in what was then a soviet republic, so obviously everyone built their own houses, there was no construction company to hire, people were lucky enough to be allocated plots they could build on in the first place.
Cool example. I did think twice before saying a community can’t build a bridge or dam, because I’m sure it has happened. Apparently sewers as well. I’d love to know more, like what they did for equipment and engineers, not to mention sanitation during the project.
I do think that people mustering the wherewithal to provide themselves with essential services in a failing state does say something larger here about the capitalism topic though. In the capitalist US of the 1980s, people didn’t have to band together to provide their own sewers.
It’s cool that these folks did. Does that really show that capital has no benefit? I still don’t think so.
Capital is just a motivator for people not otherwise invested in the project, really. These projects can be done without capital if enough people agree they're beneficial.
Now, people's skillsets differ so maybe a village's folks aren't enough to take on a project they desperately need - but even then, you don't need capital to persuade someone from another village to join in and help. You could exchange labor of a different skillset (you help me build X, I help you with Y), etc.
As for equipment - they dug it with shovels, literally. It's not a long street, roundabout 10 houses on either side. Engineering - no idea, but I'm assuming there was a project already, but nobody to do the physical work.
You were right there - it depends. If a beaver can build a dam, so can a community. A community probably won't build the Hoover Dam, though - unless the community is hundreds of thousands of people (that can allocate several thousand to designing and building the thing). Same for bridges. In my country the leftover DIY mentality from the harder times in history is so strong, if you have a stream running through your property and you need a bridge over it, you build it yourself, or get your family or friends together to do it together. Usually that would mean pedestrian bridges of course. BUT I've also driven my car over wooden bridges that looked like they were built by the very small local community and felt very sturdy. That would be to go to the parking lot of a nature trail of course, not something on a public highway lol
You cannot simply just change society at will. Unless you want to burn it all down, it has to be done incrementally.
But people still do try to work towards collectivism, such as socialism and such, look at the NYC mayoral race for example.
Just because our system is what is now doesn't mean it has to remain, things can change for the better.
I agree with all that. I just speak out in these dumb threads where people say things like “you can literally just remove the capitalist from the picture and nothing changes.” Capitalism needs to be reformed, not discarded, and it certainly doesn’t need to be misunderstood completely (as some others here seem to be doing).
My dad did his MBA dissertation on places that have no liquidity markets and it’s very ugly when there is no capital to grease the gears. He then spent 30 years approving small business loans for a bank. So I guess you could say that I have a proud family tradition of valuing capital. But the world keeps minting teenagers who think the world would somehow just keep going without it.
Don’t correct my vocabulary. Saying the rich are a different species is irony, not hyperbole. Anyway, you haven’t made any points that stand here.
5 minutes earlier:
So you never said it doesn’t do anything. Just that it can be removed from the picture with no result. (?!)
Goodnight to this conversation.
CAUGHT IN THE ACT
Hey look everybody - here’s doomcanoe clearly trying to use a separate sock puppet account to chime in and make it sound like someone supports his side of this argument. But OOPS he forgot to actually sign out and back in and posted it under his doomcanoe account! You can see right here his deleted comment, once he realized his mistake. It’s still cached in my inbox though.
Nice try, sir. Now I know where all the downvotes came from overnight. This is SERIOUS weaksauce. And you still don’t know the difference between hyperbole and irony!!!
Pff. Your refutation is there in black and white, and not just from me. The fact that you won’t recognize it doesn’t change anything.
You willfully missed the memo, but this was /thread.
You keep moving the goalposts. First you say your points stand unless we disprove them (as if that’s the way it works). Now we have to prove this new statement you -and no one else - have said, that money is the only way something gets created.
Really, just stop struggling. You made the point that capital can be removed with no effect, and that’s just plain bullshit. The rest is you dancing around trying to shift the goalposts.