Also, this idea that socialists are 'against work' is a huge strawman. Socialism is about owning the fruits of your own labor, rather than selling it to someone else.
Also, if you own something then that means you have the exclusive right to trade with it and sell it. If someone is preventing you from selling your labor, that means you don't own your labor. Seems pretty straightforward.
So if I work at Apple, I earn all the profit for what I produce?
Please do not tell me you actually believe in Marx's surplus value.
Surplus value really has no bearing on my economic views and Marx was quite poor at explaining it anyway, but a capitalist system does not actually allow you to own the proceeds from what you produce better than a democratic or guild system.
Elaborate on this. I cannot fathom why someone should be considered "more free" in a system where they are not allowed to exchange their labor for something.
You would be allowed to exchange your labor in a mutual system the same way you are in a capitalist one. The difference is that you are able to earn a living by relying on your own property, instead of the property owned by a handful of wealthy individuals and corporations. A farmer or a plumber who owns their own tools is also likely to commit more to their work.
The problem with capitalism is that it produces too few capitalists, not too many. Guild systems were used for many years during the Middle Ages. And guess what: you are better dressed, better fed, and better educated than all of the people who lived in that time. But you don't own anything. And under state capitalism (or state communism!), you're not going to own anything.
I'm not sure socialism is the right word for this. It sounds more like the distributism advocated by many C19-C20 Catholic economic thinkers.
Personally, I'm not really interested in the question of ownership, or why surplus value allegedly is or isn't a bullsh**t concept; I just think it's immoral on a society-wide level not to use resources to adequately feed and house as many people as possible when such resources manifestly exist.
I think a lot of people think that way. They don't care how these sort of problems came to be or how they are solved. The only thing they think about is that there is a problem that shouldn't existed, yet it does, and they don't want it to be a problem any more.
Poll
