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.
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.
Money existed long before modern systems, too. Bartering an exchange of goods for other goods sucks ass. It was almost immediately swapped out for some form of money in basically every society in history. (And to be clear, 'money' doesn't just mean a coin or bill, it was often a standard, easy to exchange good the society agreed upon, such as a grain or a precious metal.)
Let me ask you, if you work for a company that makes washers (the things one pairs with bolts), and your employer offered to pay you every paycheck completely in washers, would you find that acceptable? Or would you demand something easier to work with, would you demand your services be rewarded with money instead?
I bet you don't get paid in fucking washers, you demand payment in money.
I’m not saying that capital, as a universal equivalent or barter substitute, is inherently a bad solution to the problem of trade. What I am saying is that capital is not inherently essential. It’s an imagined system, useful yes, but replaceable in countless ways.
Think about it: Sure, I wouldn't want more washers than I have use for, but I don’t inherently want money either. What I want are the things money represents. If money disappeared tomorrow and some other proxy system took its place, I’d want that instead.
And when it comes to creation, say building a phone for example, money contributes nothing to the actual process. You need materials, knowledge, labor, and coordination. The only truly non-essential element is money. It's as you said, simply a replacement for bartering.
If you disagree with my actual point, I’d love to hear the argument. But I can’t keep arguing with your point that we "need the Matrix in order to live in the Matrix", or "money in order to live in capitalism".
If that 'proxy system' was a measure of value you could easily exchange for goods and services, it would also be money. People invent money in every society because it just makes sense. Even in societies where they try to abolish money, money is instantly re-invented using some other measure because it is so damn useful for trade.
Sure, but like I alread said, money isn’t inherently bad. It has served as a practical answer to the inefficiencies of pure barter. It streamlined exchange, reduced friction, and in many cases distributed power more evenly than a sprawling barter web ever could. In that sense, money was a clever and fair solution for its time.
But whether or not money has created new problems, whether it’s outlived its usefulness, or whether a better system would come from reform or replacement, all of that is a separate debate. The central point remains: money is not essential to creation.
Building a phone requires knowledge, resources, labor, and coordination. Remove any of those and the phone can’t exist. Remove money, and the process still goes on, it may look different in how people access or exchange those inputs, but the act of creation itself doesn’t depend on capital. That’s the key distinction: the difference between a finished phone and someone tinkering with sticks isn’t money, it’s the tangible elements of production.
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.
That’s quite a leap. The wealthy aren’t some separate species with different desires, they want the same fundamental things as everyone else. I never implied anything about "the rich", and regardless my point isn’t about them. It’s that capital itself is non-essential.
Yes, there’s a bigger discussion to be had about human nature, whether people create out of an inherent drive or simply to secure comfort, and how different incentive systems shape that. But none of those discussions lead to the conclusion that a capital-based economy is the only system in which people would create.
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.
I can’t tell if you’re trolling, arguing in bad faith, or just not reading carefully.
I never said I “hate the guy with the capital,” nor did I claim money “doesn’t do anything.” Its role in organizing labor and distributing resources is obvious.
What I said is that money isn’t essential. In your canal example, what’s actually required are laborers, food, and tools. Incentives can be monetary, collective need, shared access to resources, the sheer fun of it, or even coercion (though that last one is obviously undesirable).
The point stands: a canal, or a phone, can be built through many incentive systems that don’t rely on capital. What other element can be removed before the outcome is no longer the same?
p.s. You were not being ironic. You were being hyperbolic.
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!!!
You are free to use words incorrectly if you so choose.
And seeing as you were unable to refute the point that "money is not an essential element to the creation process", I would say the point does indeed stand. But perhaps your usage of "point that stands" is just another example of your "alternate vocabulary".
Eitherway, have a good one.
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.
Alright, then show me the proof. Quote the line where you, or anyone, demonstrated that money is an essential element for something to be created. Just one example where a sufficently motivated person or group in a moneyless society couldn't create something without money.
Because it’s not a phone, and it’s not a canal. So what exactly have I missed where money itself is the magic ingredient? How many dollar bills does it take to make a meal? Not to pay someone for it. Literally, how many do you have to chew and swallow to survive?
edit: oh, and to anwswer your edit that I missed,
Not quite "no result". But money is the only part of the current process to create a phone that can be removed and still have the same phone. Given the same manufacturing process, the same components, and the same labor, with an entierly different incentive system, you would get the same phone.
Does that mean we would have built the same device? Obviously not, the incentive system had an impact, for better or worse, on the decisions made to make the phone the way it is. But if we went post scarcity tomorrow, and money was abolished, would we sudddnly be unable to make the same phone?
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.
Oh Jiminy Christmas, you really are dense.
I literally acknowledged in my first comment that payment in the form of capital is a perfectly fine incentive under the current system. So no, those quotes don’t “refute my point.” And nowhere in that thread did anyone refute my actual point.
So my point, that capital isn’t essential to creation, still stands. You even admitted as much to other commenters when you said:
So yes, exactly. Thank you for proving my argument for me.
And yes, if you wanted to refute me, you’d have to prove money is the only way something gets created. Otherwise, it’s not essential. Basic logic.
Did you have to refute it? Nope, I sure as hell didn't say you did. You could’ve let it stand, ignored it, or even agreed. Instead, you went with:
Followed by:
So which is it? Did you actually refute me, or are you just bluffing because you’ve got nothing?
And nice try with the strawman, but I never said capital can be “removed with no effect.” I said it can be removed while still being possible to get the same outcome. We would obviously have to change how we managed the distribution of goods, and decide if there even was an incentive to continue creating the specific "thing". (And if I can't correct your misusage of "irony", you sure as hell don't get to tell me what I meant. None of this "rules for thee, not for me" BS you're trying to pull.)
I have even repeatedly clarified as much when you asked if it could be removed with "no result":
At this point, it’s clear, you’re not debating, you’re just nursing a chip on your shoulder and lashing out at anyone who questions your golden cow.
Have a good one. (<-That was ironic)