Is he right his?

>>3046973
the worker can be a capitalist

Yes and no. There is "surplus value" in any voluntary economic exchange. But that's a good thing, not a bad thing.

>>3046973
No. Capitalists are rich because they organize a large amount of labor at once and channel it towards a larger productive endeavor, assuming the risk if the venture fails. Marx literally never thought past the act of priducing the abstract good itself because he never actually worked.

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Both the employer and the employee are capitalists.

>>3046981
>voluntary
>hey peasants you can work for us if you want
>if u dont u starve to death though

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>>3046995

>>3046995
That's retarded. You have to work no matter what if you want to eat. Food doesn't just come out of the sky. If you want to go live on a farm and work 18 hours a day for some bread and an egg then nobody's stopping you. If you want to start your own company nobody's stopping you there either.

>>3046995
>>if u dont u starve to death though

If that's true (it's not), then the capitalist is literally saving the worker's life.

>>3047007

You're right anon, why is this such a difficult concept to grasp?

>>3047134
Because communism has always been and will always be about depriving those with more. It was never about uplifting those with less. The set of satisfactory world states to the communist are all those in which their chosen targets have specifically less than them. It doesn't matter if the subject is lifted up or the target is brought down. It only matters that in the end, A towers over B and lives in a fabtastic Utopia, while B pays the price for his hubris.

>>3046995
Capitalism
>work or starve
Communism
>work and starve

>>3046973
Both the short and the long answers are yes. You've just got to decide whether you find a problem with that. And to answer that question, the primary questions you've got to answer are:

>Is it right for somebody to be paid more than the value of what they produce themselves? (Being a founder, simply owning stock or appreciating assets, etc. on one end, and
seniority, maternity leave, etc. on the other.)
>If it is right, then where does this money come from, if not from others who labor? Is it right for them to be paid less than the value of what they produce? (And is this different from theft?)

These answers will be personal. They're not economic questions, they're moral questions. So, they MUST be personal. And if you answer that it's right for some to be paid more than the value of what they create, and others to be paid less than the value of what they create, then you're a capitalist. If you answer that it's not right, then you're a communist.

All that other stuff about what is or is not an economic fact, what can or cannot be done, etc. are just people trying to convince you one way or the other. At the root of it, it's a moral question.

>>3047562
Value is subjective you dumb motherfucker.

>>3047583
Sure, if you're talking about individual things to individual people. I may value a specific brand of fast food burger more than you do depending on all different kinds of factors. But if you accept that the GDP is not an imaginary number, then it's at least a zero-sum game. Basically, everything has SOME value, even if from person to person or moment to moment we disagree on what that number is, and even if the real value is humanly unknowable. So the questions still remain.

>>3047777
No. There is no value inseparable from human observation. Value springs forth from human intentions and human action. Gold coins are worthless without anyone to spend them.

>>3047803
*separable

>>3047803
Alright, we agree on that. There is no value without humans existing and judging. But humans do exist and do judge, and there is no possible situation in which we all unanimously decide to think of everything as without value, so practically, we can assume that things of value do exist in this world. You see how that part isn't really up for discussion?

And if we can assume that valuable things do exist in this world, and we assume that we can own these valuable things, then there must be some distribution of these valuable things among us. It simply MUST be true that there is some distribution of these valuable things among us.

We could just leave it be right there, but we don't. We worry about what's the "fair" distribution of these valuable things. And so, we're left with some ideology that guides us in how to determine what's fair. One ideology is capitalism, another is communism. There are others. But these two are popular today.

Do you see how bringing up that value is subjective or that value does not exist without human input is not really relevant to the discussion?