Maceta

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@Spiralhetre TL;DR on what my argument is. Even if wages *were* an ever shrinking proportion of income, you would still get an output that sold at a profit, and that income is not 'locked' into an ownership class, because there are no barriers of entry to owning capital.

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@Spiralhetre Increasing productivity boosts purchasing power for those who buy the goods produced, period. Has productivity increased most in the production of luxury goods or in the production of goods that can be mass produced? The tendency in Capitalism is towards equality in consumption.

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@Spiralhetre You are still trapped in a mental frame of a pure ownership class and a pure destitute class that does not exist, has not existed, and will not exist in any conceivable future.

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@Spiralhetre Automation is undertaken only to the extent that it increases productivity, it is congenial to increased purchasing power. And the claim that there are no expanding industrial frontiers is wholly made up.

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@Spiralhetre Mass automation scales to the degree that mass production scales, mass production is production for the masses and is undertaken by publicly traded firms. That is how the market distributes the gains of automation.

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@Spiralhetre This 'structural crisis' argument applies as well to the 19th century and 20th century. Work has become increasingly automated and people have become increasingly less destitute as a result. Precisely because productivity gains do get disseminated into the broader economy.

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@Spiralhetre You *think* that this cannot happen because you believe that 'wage earner' equals 'destitute earning just as much for subsistence', but that reality exists only in Marxist theory. You and I are both probably wage earners that own stock and earn way above our bare subsistence.

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@Spiralhetre With whatever wages they earn from companies that have not fully automated their production, and with dividends from companies that have fully automated their production.

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@secondbyfarce @burnthalies @splitzerr1 @Azawariah0 Sorry for not feeling the need to clarify 'time period of human civilization' because, obviously, everything we are discussing falls within that context.

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@Spiralhetre Are you just going to pretend that the largest firms - that produce the largest amount of goods with the largest stocks of capital - are not publicly traded?

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@Spiralhetre Naturally, a post-scarcity economy would be precisely the opposite of an economy where people are 'deprived of the means to survive'. It would be one of guaranteed survival.

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@Spiralhetre That is, that capital is scarce because the goods it produces are scarce and, as long as there is scarcity, there is always ways in which capital can expand.

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@neojedjdp Surely, in a *market* economy, if my business *firm* is profitable - it sells a good at a certain *price* in a manner that makes me earn a *profit*, I have increased my purchasing power. Conversely, if I am making *losses*, I have reduced it.

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@Spiralhetre You *think* it has, because you are using some kind of Keynesian reasoning to imply that capital needs labor in its role as consumer as opposed to its role as producer. But an economy without wage earners that still buys it's surplus at a profit is perfectly viable.

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@Spiralhetre I'm just trying to get you to understand that 'capital eradicating labor' just means 'increased productivity reduces the need to work' and has no implied contradiction.

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@secondbyfarce @burnthalies @splitzerr1 @Azawariah0 Surely whenever I cook a pizza for my friends or buy a toy for my nephew I do so because it is something that makes me happy. Isn't Graeber arguing against a strawman of the homo-economicus?

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@secondbyfarce @burnthalies @splitzerr1 @Azawariah0 I suppose that what is pointless is thinking that pulling the debate to a point where human life did not exist says anything about a debate concerning human life.

[Maceta @Maceta394]

@secondbyfarce @burnthalies @splitzerr1 @Azawariah0 Doesn't that book just show that many primitive societies worked without money? I don't see how that is relevant to my case.