this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
1154 points (98.2% liked)
Memes
51785 readers
1336 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The utility of being able to borrow a use-value rather than needing to own it is a real thing, the form under capitalism is the problem, and is where exploitation and usury comes in. Better to have public transit, bikes included, at non-profit rates or even subsized to be free at point of service.
sure, however ownership still has a place in that public/borrowed goods typically have usage restrictions that make sense for the health of the device but limit its utility. such as using an SUV/truck to do yardwork or repurposing a bike as an elliptical.
Sure, renting vs owning is fully accomodated by public and personal ownership. Private usury is a drain on social wealth.
tf is "social wealth"?
The overall wealth in society. Usury produces absolutely nothing of value, and purely exists as a legal means to serve as a drain on resources. Landlords are such an egregious example of usury that they have been near universally hated for as long as they've existed, even by liberals.
Theoretically loans are just a form of gambling on individuals repaying the principle (or on making more off whatever you needed the loan for than the cost + interest) and the interest is just an obtuse way of giving the house an edge. Therefore similar to gambling I believe it provides entertainment value, which is rarely calculated accurately.
No, when I speak of value, I don't mean some abstract level of personal enjoyment or utility that is unique from person to person. I mean value as represented by raw materials and an average hour of labor in an industry. Trying to abstract away usury as "entertainment" is such a silly justification for a parasitic system that purely exists for individuals to leach off the labor of others.
it provides short term capital to purchase tools to make more goods, such as a loan to get a tractor so you can harvest/plant hundreds of times more crops as you would by hand. the interest is (in theory) covering the risk of default. also entertainment is the justification for child actors and artists existing.
You're again confusing use-value with value proper. Loans have utility, but no value. Usury is a drain on resources. "Risk" has absolutely nothing to do with value except for the fact that values are normalized around their social averages. Entertainment is entirely different from loans, and further is just like any other commodity, the value of which is regulated around the socially necessary labor time and raw materials that goes into its creation and not some abstract utility.
Here's a good basic summary of what I'm talking about.
that theory seems fundamentally flawed as it would only work in the long term and makes no accommodations for the short term with technological innovation we live in now
In what way?
preventing people from being able to take large (few tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars) risks in hopes of refinulous profit (trillions in profits from not needing as many workers)
Risk has no bearing on value. Technological progression lowers the necessary working time to replace the means of subsistence for workers, which wages are regulated towards, meaning a greater ratio of the working day can be used on surplus value extraction. Ie, if machine A can create 100 widgets per hour per worker, and a worker needs 300 widgets per day worth of value to survive, then the working day of 8 hours has 5 hours surplus labor. If machine B ups that to 300 widgets per hour, then that becomes 1 hour of necessary labor and 7 surplus, increasing profit. Risk has no bearing, nor utility.
All of this can be handled publicly, without a need for profit.
risk is economically relevant, a 10% chance of $100 dollars or a 100% chance of $10 do not have the same use-value to everyone. Why not instead just force companies to pay asymptoticly more taxes for profit?
Nothing needs to have the same use-value across all of society. What's important is that use-values are produced, and sold for their exchange-value on average. There's no reason to retain the profit motive or capitalism in general as a system. You should read the article I linked. Risk creates no value.
I never said risk creates value, I mentioned that removal of risk creates value. profit is the only way I'm aware of that let's me amass a horde of anything of value as such any system that doesn't allow profit is a failure.
Removal of risk facilitates the creation of value, but isn't value itself. If, for example, it takes 100 dollars of constant capital and 20 dollars of variable to produce 100 widgets, with 10 dollars worth of raw materials being expected waste, reducing that to 0 results in 90 constant and 20 variable, which isn't creation of value itself but an improvement in the productivity of capital.
Profit through capitalist production, ie exploitation of labor, is stolen value. You can work to improve your material conditions in systems that aren't driven by profit, selling your labor-power is how the vast majority of people pay for their subsistence, but this isn't "profit," but wages.
Again, read the article.
In what manner? You've done absolutely nothing to justify the existence of landlords, or private property in general, except hinting at the idea that you yourself may be a business owner or landlord and thus benefit from the system. Why should the majority of society slave away for a system that inherently exploits them, when there are better and more equitable alternatives like socialism?
You haven't read the article nor have you made an attempt to understand what I'm saying.
The overwhelming majority of supply chains are productive, there is no value without labor and/or natural resources. Overproduction is an inherent fact of capitalism, and reducing laborers both reduces surplus value extraction and reduces the potential for profit by reducing the number of customers. Capitalism brutally killing off the reserve army of labor is a way to keep workers desparate and willing to work for as little as possible, it isn't a way to curb overproduction.
You really don't know what you're talking about or trying to critique.