this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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What the capitalists did was pay all the workers right after they did the work, even though the phones wouldn’t actually be sold for some time after that. Capitalists bring capital. Money. It takes money to get things started.
I completely agree that the rewards are all disproportionate. The people who put up the capital shouldn’t get all the rewards. But it’s just dumb to claim that they play no role at all. If that’s true, walk out of your house and make a phone you designed yourself out of sticks you find on the ground.
The only thing you can remove from the process and still get the same result is capital...
And while I get that capital does "play a role", at least insofar as incentive predicated on people's ability to function in the capitalistic society we currently inhabit goes, to imply that somehow without it people would be left to trying to "design a phone out of sticks on the ground" is extremely disingenuous.
You can't get the same product tho. And it's not the only thing.
The actual man power is only a fraction of what went into it.
Connections, property, minerals, education and many many other aspects went into it.
To design it with out capital you would need to find people who with out capital educated themselves
With out capital find individuals who have the minerals and resources
Lastly you need a way to connect all these people after you have found them
None of this requires actual money to do in theory, but now you need to find a way to justify to these people to provide their fancy rocks and knowledge into a project that doesn't actually benefit them unless a pre existing system that relied on capital existed to push development to the current state.
The fundamental flaw that gets over looked is different economic systems push towards different advancements in technology.
So to argue that a different system would be better suited is just a fallacy. You don't get capitalist products and goods in a communist system.
A system that optimizes for the worker would produce goods and services that improve the workers existence for example.
You might get some over lap but the implementation would also be so wildly different. Hell for example in a theoretical non corrupt communist system LLMs and AI systems would be lauded as amazing by everyone.
They are the ideal improvement of a system that shares resources to stream line and reduce the burden and quality of life of the working class. Since everyone would equally benifit from them and it would drive the hobbies artist out of a job but instead freeing them to make more personal art instead of art for the community.
No, you can get a better product. Capitalism is designed to focus wealth and that means that all companies that get big enough will, eventually, turn towards the “increase shareholder value at all costs” path. Apple was actually doing really well with how they did things until Tim Cook was in charge and then, when capital became more important than the actual product things started to go south. I have Apple products and they’re still very good, but they aren’t the same company that they used to be at all.
Capitalism is all about the distribution of wealth and putting it at the center of every decision. There are plenty of other ways to have a world very similar to what we have now without that poisonous way of think permeating everything we do and buy. There are more options than unfettered capitalism and Soviet-style communism.
People want to be paid for their labor, and with no capital you aren't paying them. You just fell flat on your first purchase order for the first component.
You:
Me:
How awkward, you must have missed me making that exact point...
So sure, people want to be paid. But let’s be clear: they don’t inherently want money, they want to survive, create, and ideally thrive in the society they inhabit. Capital is just the tool we happen to use right now, it’s not essential to the concept of creation.
People created long before money existed, and they still create today without a paycheck attached. Remove capital from the picture, and as long as the work has value to those involved, it still gets made.
The real kicker? Capital often corrupts the process, pushing people to maximize profit instead of maximizing quality or true value.
Before capitalism they still used capital. Barter systems are still capital based.
Equal exchange and cohabitation hunter gather groups are still capital based.
Capital is just time. That's all it is. What ways you quantify that is meaningless and pointless and every system is just a different way to quantify time. Capitalism uses currency debt as a trade standard for time. But it's still just time.
We compound it and trade cast quantities of other people's time around this devaluing the individuals. Communism instead removes the ability to do so and tries to make it so each person's time can only be traded by them. So the only way to get cast quantities of time is by working together.
Even in a post commodity environment capital will still be the way trade with others. It would just be in time.
Naw, people like being paid for their work.
Having food is nice, having a home is nice, having a car is nice, having a vacation is nice.
People like being paid for their work.
People don't like getting paid, they like to get things with the money.
In a decommodified economy you would not need this.
If you go straight to giving people the end things, the payment is the food, home, car, vacation, etc. People like being paid for their work.
You are still thinking of it in terms of commodity production
If you include 'food', 'shelter', 'transportation' in 'commodity production', then yes, people want things like food, shelter, and transportation. People like being paid for their work.
These things should not be directly associated with work
Of course rewarding people for work is good in some sense in every economic system, just putting it in the sense of being paid just makes it very stuck in that sort of capitalist mindset.
Other economic systems can exist.
Unfortunately for humanity, food, shelter, and transportation doesn't place itself in front of you. People have to work to make/gather those things.
I would also love to live in a place where nobody had to work in order for shelter to exist. But, someone has to work to build the home.
I would love to live in a place where nobody had to work for food to exist. But someone has to grow and gather the food.
I would love to live in a place where nobody had to work for cars/trains to exist, but someone has to work to build the car.
And in those systems, people will still be working for food, shelter, transportation. People like being paid for their work.
We shouldn’t confuse the use of currency with the capitalist system.
In a decommodified economy, any sort of "currency" would not even be money in the modern sense of the word.
Describe this “decommodified economy” if you could. What does that mean to you?
An economy where goods are not produced to be sold at a market.
For example a communist society (classless and moneyless) would be one such system.
Can you perhaps go back over this and explain what these words actually mean? I actually want to understand what you mean better. Because money is not identical to capitalism. And workers need to be paid for their work because they need to eat to survive. What is it that capitalism specifically is requiring here? I’ve seen one or two replies that are like “sure yeah people want to be paid but that’s capitalism’s fault too” and I genuinely don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Compensating someone for their work is a very basic concept not necessarily tied to capitalism. Even in the natural world there is very little labor that is not focused on some reward outcome. There is even compensation between species in symbiotic relationships. Compensation doesn’t seem like some weird forced artificial thing to me at all. It’s primal.
I have made things with my hands for which I was not paid. I even gathered the materials. I am bad at capitalism.
You were rewarded in some way. You got the thing you made, or if it was a gift to someone, you enhanced your relationship with that person.
If a person gets no reward of any kind for their work, they stop doing that work. As they should.
Money and capitalism come into the picture when you want to motivate people to make something they won’t necessarily get to keep or use themselves, which they cannot then give as a gift, which does not give them the pleasure of artistic expression.
So yeah people can make things without money in the limited cases where there’s another form of reward. But modern societies are scaled way past people just making the things that they themselves receive immediate benefit from. You get economies from scale by mass production, and no one needs 10,000 k kitchen knives.
Where did that capital come from?
The same place the fed and skilled laborers came from: the proceeds of previous enterprises.
It only "takes money to get things started" because our economy is organized that way.
How else are you going to get 200 people together to assemble phones for a week?
A much higher financial incentive because they'd actually be the ones profiting from the sale of the phones. There are organizational structures other than corporations.
I was once asked to join a startup, and after a few chats I was ready to talk turkey. Then they sprung it on me that since there was no revenue yet, no one was making a wage. But my equity in the company would be correspondingly high.
I couldn’t do it. I had bills to pay. I was stunned that they thought I could do this, and I slowly realized that everyone else there was an ex-Googler and basically rich already.
So you see, I’ve been in the exact position you suggest your workers will jump at, and it does. not. work. People need to pay rent this month and can’t wait through a months long production chain and months long sales cycle all of which is full of risk. They need to get paid, for sure, not maybe, and now.
I’m not in here touting the glory of capitalism as if it’s a wonderful system. But I’m also not spouting pure fantasy bullshit about alternatives we can just switch to easy-peasy, because that’s a bunch of half-baked idealistic crap.
Yeah I mean I know it doesn't work under this economic system, but that's kind of the point I was making
I have heard this several times throughout this thread that sure, capital is necessary in this system, but that’s just an artifact imposed by this system. Under another system you wouldn’t need it.
I’m still waiting to hear any system where startup costs are not a factor and people can work on a thing that does nothing to meet their short term needs.
Are we talking about a utopia where all human needs have already been eliminated by magical technology so we can simply wander where we will and work on enriching projects that strike our fancy?
To keep it focused: show me a system where you can get 200 people together to assemble phones with no capital at the outset.