What use is there of shareholders, lenders, ceos, and finaciers?
Why are they absolute when it comes to shutting down production, manipulating the MOP, and calling the shots?
What is the empirical evidence of their genius or their ability that… If they were too disappear; the whole of society would be left confused, blind, and inert?
I know we all say the truth that they really are just useless parasites. But genuinely more and more; the capitalist class is looking just as vestigial as royalty and aristocrats.
What is the point of them? Cause there MUST BE at least some material benefit to them at least a little… Right?
The only thing I can think of is that boards of directors seeves as a working model of what a high ranking vanguard may look like with all the trappings of material conditions and proletarian class based ideogly being the motive of success instead of profits.
Why does anyone tolerate this arraingment?
There is plenty of material benefit. To themselves. For the proletariat they do nothing but impose their will of how they want things to work. I think a worker elected board of directors could be a useful way to direct production in a post capitalist system, with better motivations than make numbers go up. They are a vestige of lords who lost some power but didn’t want to mix with normal people
I know people retreat to saying that because these people took on a great financial risk and what not, they deserve to own the MOP.
But that doesnt answer my question. If we ignore WHO DESERVES TO BE RICH; then what precisely makes them the keystones of our society. More than engineers. More than sanitation. More than farmers. More than ANYONE WHO ACTUALLY WORKS.
Some might say that they’re thr best leaders… But that isnt true. We can name off any kind of managers, politicians, and heads of state that are just as good as being leaders or what have you.
Honestly… It’s starting to be as convincing as the divine right of kings.
You’re absolutely right. The myth of capitalist meritocracy is nothing more than a modern re-interpretation of the divine right of kings.
A socialist society only has need of private capitalists insofar as they can serve as an interface to the capitalist world through which capital and technology can be attracted and which can be used to accelerate the development of productive forces. This is what China has done while at the same time keeping them on a tight leash, disciplining them as needed and making it clear that the vanguard of the proletariat holds all the power. And once they have served their purpose they will be discarded.
Also, we should make the distinction between the parasites / exploiters (capitalists / shareholders, and people who get pieces of workers surplus value while doing no work themselves), and managers.
Managers, very similar to people like transportation workers, may not produce surplus value themselves, but are still absolutely vital to the production process. Technically they are paid out of the surplus value created by the direct producers, but production wouldn’t take place without them, and better management can mean more efficient production.
Management is surely an important function, but capitalism, especially in the last 50 years, has corrupted management in an effort to divide and conquer the working class. There are far too many terrible managers that live off the largesse of surplus value and who have the primary function of disrupting worker solidarity and not contributing anything net positive to production. I cannot wait for contemporary management to be replaced with a newer form of management after the revolution.
Yeah management is needed but nowadays at least 75% of them (90%+ of the higher wage ones) are total labour aristocrats who are paid off to exploit workers the max with no care for their interests or even immediate well being. At least where I live, in the imperial core, half the management positions could disappear tomorrow and things would be just as efficient. They don’t really do shit except act as unreasonable tyrants, often being power hungry nuts. Not as bad as cops or anything, but that element is definitely present.
Beyond listing good world leaders that are better than CEOs/leaders of industry, We can also list off names of bourgeoisie CEOs and Board of Directors that sucked ass and ruined the lives of their workers (and if dumb enough, they destroy their own wealth too, but Karma is a B-word so it doesn’t work that way very often)
If they were to disappear; the whole of society would be left confused, blind, and inert?
With this sentence I see why you are confused. You are imagining an impossible scenario, this is a utopian way of thinking. The ruling class will never vanish, because it needs to be repressed out of existence and rendered useless progressively under the dictatorship of the proletariat!
History advances slowly, reform of the whole system of production will take time because workers cannot rethink the whole system overnight. The morning after the bourgeois state is overthrown, people in the world will still go to work in their privately owned entreprises right? If the whole system is still untouched, they will need money, because we didn’t yet push an alternative, and this money will still be in the hands of the shareholders. Imagine how long it would be to replace the current currency system, when the previous is rooted so deep in every facet of everyone’s life. If the government make it illegal to be a shareholder overnight, imagine the confusion of every company that will just not know how to get the ressources, how to pay salaries and stuff. It takes time.
So yeah basically the capitalists are still here because things take time to change and they made themselves essential in the current system of production
imagine the confusion of every company that will just not know how to get the ressources, how to pay salaries and stuff
This stuff is almost always just done by lower manager, logistics, payroll, hr, etc
But yes even then, in a hypothetical system, deleting the shareholders would lead to system facing severe system dysruption without additional modifications and changes to the system as a whole. But no one would make such a suggestion, nor would one be even feasible, and should this hypothetical “shareholders deletion” shouldn’t be considered as a realistic take on revolutionary theory
*Sprinkle in a little Marxist economics and lenin’s imperialism * But of course shareholding needs to be heavily reformed (this is a major avenue of wealth transfer from the proletariat to the bourgeoisie and also for monopolistic control over the means of production) and eventually completely abolished
This stuff is almost always just done by lower manager, logistics, payroll, hr, etc
My sentence must have been ambiguous, I was stressing the importance of the existing currency in supply chains. To take a simple example: a factory uses steel to make products, if they don’t have the money influx because shareholders are brutally forbidden they could be in a situation where the steel market is still here but they don’t have access to the monetary ressources that allow them to purchase from the steel market. To transition to socialism would mean organising a system of distribution of primary ressources that is not a market, I can imagine how complex it will be. And then we would have to organise every step of every supply chain of every industry. It’s a mind boggling problem, I’m confident we could make it eventually but only decades after the establishment of multiple socialist revolutions across the world
Well if you are the dipshit Chud I used to work with you’d say they are the ones who take all the risk because these idiots actually believe that without them there would never be innovation or business growth and if the business fails they will loose all the investment. People are so heavily indoctrinated into this propaganda that they don’t even think of the hundreds of employees that, in the event of business failure, would be fired first. They think the shareholders and owners would just eat these losses and not, you know, fire the workforce and sell off all the assets they can in order to recover their losses.
I asked this idiot, two scenarios. One, all the shareholders and owners of the company we worked for (pharmaceuticals) disappeared would the business immediately be done for? And in typical idiot Chud fashion he said yes, as if it was a no brainer. I said "really? Would all our products stop being made? Would all of the companies that we produce for suddenly not need the products? Would our contracts disappear and all the people that need our medicines simply stop needing them? Would all the workers just stop coming to work? Would all the lines stop running? Of course he just stood there with a confused look as his whole ideology started to crack apart.
I then asked him what would happen if every single worker for the company disappeared. How would the shareholders and owners keep the business running. Who would do something as simple as screen and hire new employees? Who would train them? Who would do… Any labor? Who would fill orders or even speak to the clients? He sort of just mumbled off and said he needed to get back to work. Course it didn’t change anything he kept on just being a Chud with dumb as shit takes but it did feel good to bruise his ego pretty good.
Key takeaway is, people are just so indoctrinated into thinking this is the only way to do things. That shareholders and CEOs are necessary. They simply can’t think any other way.
There is plenty of material benefit. To themselves. For the proletariat they do nothing but impose their will of how they want things to work. I think a worker elected board of directors could be a useful way to direct production in a post capitalist system, with better motivations than make numbers go up. They are a vestige of lords who lost some power but didn’t want to mix with normal people
As coderade said, there is plenty of motivation and benefit, just to themselves and their own class interests.
I can’t really provide a great answer to the middle questions as my answer would pretty much be the same as what you already acknowledged; they’re parasites that have simply been born into wealth or manipulated it for such a long period of time/luckily enough to become the lords they are.
Why I think people tolerate this arrangement:
Lack of education on the topic - I think that many relatively privileged individuals (such as the middle class or petty bourgeois) have never been motivated to study the inequalities and atrocities our system produces due to their material conditions being good enough. What is there to contest when the system works for you? On the other hand, material conditions being poor enough can also be a factor in not finding education on the topic. Focusing on working all the time and where your next meal will come from is much more important to a desperate person than reading theory or spending time analyzing why things the way they are. This is not to say they are stupid or can’t understand it, they simply don’t have the permission to under capitalism.
Propaganda - While I don’t subscribe to the notion that propaganda is the sole reason people fall for capitalism, I would be insane to deny its influence. The constant cultural push that we live in a meritocracy, that those who have wealth earned it fair and square, that you too have a chance to make it one day, etc. (all nonsense of course), sucks in a good deal of the public and occupies our minds even subconsciously if we’re not careful.
That is all I’ve got. I could be missing the mark entirely, let me know what you guys think
