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"Labour Market"
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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The alternative is everyone grows their own food, builds their own houses, makes their own clothes, gathers firewood, yadda yadda.
You certainly wouldn't have the Internet in such a paradise.
That said, with all that we now have, 4 6 hour work days should be the norm.
The alternative is that when you grow food or build homes or make cloths or gather firewood, you own the real material you create plus all the surplus, which can then be used in trade.
When you're working in an industrial agricultural system, you produce orders of magnitude more food than you could ever consume. But as a tenant farmer or field hand, you barely claim enough income to buy enough to sustain yourself personally, because so much of your work product is claimed by your employer.
When you're enjoying an industrial surplus, why wouldn't you have access to a cheap and efficient means of mass communication?
You should not confuse capitalism with markets, and you should not confuse markets with working together.
Consider the family unit, it is doubtful that everyone cooks their own single serve or rotates meal duty evenly. Humans can specialise without capital.
Capital is what enables someone to have someone else cook for them, who then has to go cook their own meal. The one with capital isn't even doing anything for the cook, they are simply taking money that someone working at a widgt factory they own made and giving it to the cook. In so doing they appropriate both the widget factory worker's meal and the cooks!
you can even have market exchange without capitalism. In the above situation if we remove the capitalist the widget maker could give the cook widgets for a meal. Or even currency from selling widgets for a meal. Materially the capitalist contributes nothing, their role is entirely created by private property law.
I may have misread the end of your comment but are you implying that a market can exist without private property?
A market can exist without private property by having capital be collectively owned and continuously up for auction to the highest bidder. Basically, each holder of means of production self-assess the price at which they would be willing to turn over that capital to another party, they pay a lease payment based on a percentage of that self-assessed price, and if someone comes along willing to pay that self-assessed price, require that they turn it over to that party
Maybe I'm not getting it, bu that just sounds like capitalism with extra steps.
In what I described, the differences are:
@microblogmemes
Not implying, outright stating!
Colloquially private property means like "stuff I have exclusive or near exclusive rights to" but that's not what we mean when we talk economic systems. Something like your clothing, or that neat pot you made is personal property. Private property is a legal construct wherein someone is allowed to claim ownership over means of production, like "this field is mine, it doesn't matter if I'm using it or not, I have the legal right to control what happens there".
So an example of a market without private property might be something like:
Obvs that's simplified but it's a rough sketch of how farming used to work! you earned a right to use land by using it directly and what you grew on it was yours to do as you see fit (often a maniac with a horse and sword would take some portion first though. Because they're just better than you or whatever)
So what changes personal property to a "means of production"?
Probably start here for a general overview https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production
It's about the question who owns the product that labor produced (along with land).
Why can someone be the owner of a production line?
Have you heard of co-ops?