PeterZ wrote:
Capital is simply stored wealth. Capitalism is simply the protection and use of privately owned stored wealth. The only difference between concentrated privately owned wealth (oligarchs) and concentrated publically owned wealth (Socialists) are who owns the stored wealth.
The important element in the formation of the middle class is a free market and laws supporting voluntary exchange. When either government or the uber rich can force people to engage in economic activity, there isn't voluntary exchange and whoever owns the wealth(government or private) will be the only ones to prosper. Socialism is far less effecient than a free market that enshrines voluntary exchange. So labor unrest will be best addressed by encouraging free markets and voluntary exchange.
Nah. The question is much more fundamental. The question is, basically, "what part of person's labor could be taken away and for what reason?"
The capitalism in pure, basic form, basically assumed that "any part of person's labor could be taken away if it works." That's the reason of slavery, after all; as long as it worked fine to left peoples with bare minimum, it was perfectly fine to do that. And main problem of capitalism (even now) that it never could provide sufficient explanation
why exactly the workers need a capitalist.The opposite is simple; capitalist without workers means nothing. He could not exist without them. But why exactly workers need capitalist? To "organize everything right?" But by early XX century, most capitalists did not participate themselves in everyday works of their enterprises, relying the direct control over factories and establishments to the hired directors. Why exactly workers could not hire directors themselves, to do the work?
Or the capitalist have his rights because he put his efforts into the creation of said enterprises? But again, workers who build his factory, and engineers who designed it clearly put a lot more efforts into it then capitalist himself. And money also aren't clear answer, because the money were quite often borrowed from banks to create some factory; so the whole "sacred property right" go from just the fact that capitalist persuaded manager to lend him money? And even if we agree that capitalist who build factory have some rights to took away part of his workers labor as a compensation for his (very non-defined) efforts, why should the same right belong to someone who inherited said factory or brought it - i.e. without putting any real efforts in its creation?
That was the question that quite worried early XX-century workers. Up until World War I they were just worried, but World War I make them angry. Because, essentially, the enormous efforts, whole nation wealth and horrific amount of lives were put into useless war that
was supposed to benefit only elite, and essentially did not benefit even them. After which it became obvious that unrestricted capitalism is prone to murdering idiocy, and could waste enormous resources for essentially nothing. And that made capitalists worried, because Russian Revolution clearly demonstrated: it is POSSIBLE to get rid of capitalists, and the world would NOT end. Yes, the socialism might not be as effective, but it worked fine.
Which clearly demonstrated, that there ARE lower limit of "how much of person's work could be taken away". Go below that limit, and it would became simpler for workers to took over & shot capitalists. Of course, capitalists tried to circumvent that, but the result was the birth of fascism, and after World War II, even the most staunch anti-communists were forced to admit that there ARE things much, MUCH worse than communists. So "there are limits to exploitation and those limits are NOT determined only by the capitalists" became the Capitalism Rule No.1 For Survival.
Which is, actually, inevitable, because so-called "middle class" was born as an attempt of capitalistic countries to counter the more radical solutions to the social inequality problems. You could not get to modern, rational capitalism without firstly kicking the overwhelming greed out of capitalists with the good ol' hammer & sickle.
