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.
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.