Says who? The only "requirement of capitalism" is that individuals are allowed to have ownership rights. Outside of a few niche organizations that benefit from economic distress, I think you will find a general S&P 500 consensus that low employment is a good thing for their stock prices.
> There's generally a target of 5% unemployment, which means capitalism has built-in waste.
That's because, in a free society, we have discovered that it's better to get people new and better jobs than be shackled to a milling machine from childhood.
If unemployment did not exist, the capitalist class would have no power to make workers work harder using the threat of losing their jobs. Of course, very high unemployment is not good for capitalism, nobody was arguing this. But very low unemployment below some threshold is also bad. Marx explained this, but if you do not believe him, capitalists themselves and their theorists say exactly the same thing, but with more gentle and less direct words: https://www.investopedia.com/insights/downside-low-unemploym...
That may be true, but that is not a condition of capitalism. Like the parent said, capitalism only speaks to ownership rights.
Realize capital has no market value without labor to work it. This goes for real estate too, which workers require to rest themselves just in time to return to work to turn a profit for those that control capital.
How so?
There could be 0% unemployment and anyone could find another job easily, but the other job could pay less, or have less flexibility, or be in a less convenient location, so you still prefer the job you have now.
Suppose unemployment is low because prices are high, so no one can afford to go without a job and will take jobs under unfavorable terms in order to make rent.
Technically, 0% unemployment would mean that you can't take another job, as you transitioning into another job would create frictional unemployment, which would mean that the unemployment rate would not be 0%.
In practice, somewhere around 3% is usually considered full employment. The 3% are those in the process of changing jobs.
High unemployment creates conditions favorable for the owners. It creates leverage for the owners to coerce the workers into accepting lower wages. A scenario where the state offered full employment as a competitive labor market to the private sector would force the private owners to raise their wages. Then they would have to deal with how they want to approach their profit situation. They'd probably just raise prices of their products. But in the end, the owner is making the decision on what the prices would be. Not the employees.
One could consider labor shortage good and healthy for capitalism itself, since it increases worker wages and thus builds political support for the capitalist system.
I’m not happy about that.
They would have to offer higher wages and not just "industry average", like we saw during the pandemic. Then the planned economy folks decided that was the exact moment the free money faucet had to be cut off.
Then I would pick activities that bring most value to my life. Often they still would be "commercial" activities.
People may work hard for a number of reasons of which unemployment is only one - more money, a promotion, personal interest in the outcome (e.g. scientist), personal work ethic, you like this job more than other jobs (job preference due to management, coworkers, location, job type).
Once again Marxism oversimplifies the world and ignores a lot of nuance.
Perhaps you see this as an oversimplification because you are looking too near home in a biased position. The number of countries considered "rich" and "developed" is a minority. Capitalism is a global system.
This seems to envision that nobody can find new kinds of useful work or otherwise work for themselves, which is odd when you're on a site where most of the people work in jobs that did not exist if we turned the clock back just a few decades and quite a few people are their own bosses.
What is the capitalist class in this case? In a perfect world this would be done by beatings and imprisonment, right?
> Of course, very high unemployment is not good for capitalism, nobody was arguing this.
It's not good in socialist or communist countries either. Or is that a uniquely capitalist problem?
> But very low unemployment below some threshold is also bad. Marx explained this, but if you do not believe him, capitalists themselves and their theorists say exactly the same thing.
Yes, that's what we're all agreeing on. It's not saying "Marx said it's bad, thus he was right about everything"
What is the substance of your post? What are you trying to say? Because it sounds like you're agreeing with capitalism but under the guise of supporting Marx
That's not quite complete. To have capitalism, you also need labor to leverage capital. Capitalism requires the ability to extract money from the labor of other people.
If every company was worker owned, you could still have a market economy and private property, but it wouldn't be capitalism anymore.
That's not correct. If every company was worker owned as long as the goods and services produced are traded on the open market as an exchange of value, that would still be capitalism. If "worker-owned" actually means government owned, however, then you're correct. Capitalism requires private ownership of the means of production.
No. We had "exchange of goods on an open market" long before we had capitalism.
Again, says who?
Depending on your definition of capitalism, corporate charters pre-date capitalism! Corporate charters were rights granted by governments to pursue economic activity. What we define as the introduction of "capitalism" was the granting of individuals without nobility the rights to corporate charters.
Today, a corporation is still a government defined-entitity for the purpose of generating economic activity.
As you say, it had nothing to do with capitalism.
And non-capitalist corporations are still very much a thing. Labor unions are usually corporations.
Capitalism only arises in the 18th century as a distinct market model.
We had private property and market economies long before we had capitalism.
This was extremely powerful @legitster. For some reason this cleared up economic theory to me. These threads get lost in worker rights, but, that has nothing to do with capital. Capital is about ownership rights. You should be allowed to own things and means to your own production. Socialism is about taking these rights away, the debate is which.
401k, HSAs etc are the stranglehold on US politics.
