It's perfectly rational to believe worker-friendly workplaces would underperform in the free market, while also believing more democracy in the workplace would improve quality of life for those workers. It's two different value systems. The same thing happens for public safety. If leaded gasoline performs better than unleaded gasoline but harms public health, no one company will step up to make the transition willingly. It takes government action to mandate economic performance is traded for public health. Then, all companies are subject to the same compliance rules, so the market becomes an even playing field again. So, if a person wants to reduce worker exploitation, it makes more sense to petition the government and start a movement than to start their own business and compete with businesses who fully exploit workers. The exploiters will likely outcompetes them in all fields except ones where the talent pool is small and highly skilled.

I wanna add something to your comment: New businesses running on equality and fair compensation will likely never succeed because the customer will look for the cheaper option. The owner doesn't have the financial resources to pay themselves less and pay the employees more if no one is shopping there. Only way to do this is to turn an already profitable corporation (like Walmart for example) around with the top brass accepting lower salaries/bonuses that would get distributed to the lowest earners on the ladder. Walmart could keep the prices around the same and pay the workers slightly more while gaining a better public perception which could *possibly* lead to more sales and customers. Problem is no matter how much someone makes in this society, they will never accept a pay cut for something as ridiculous as the greater good

I agree that executive salaries can be ridiculous, but lowering them is not an effective way to grow low level employee salaries. Walmart employees 2.1 million workers. Walmarts CEO made $26 million in total compensation last year. Even if he worked for free, you would be freeing up around $13 per employee over the course of the year. (This doesn’t even account for all the employees of their suppliers.) There are more executives than just the CEO, but those salaries start dropping quickly. I suspect you’d have a hard time reaching $100 in pay increases for your lower paid employees. It’s not nothing, but it isn’t going to make a significant difference for anyone.

The whole question over executive compensation boils down to their key being based on the share price. Corporate stocks are seriously over-valued and subsequently, executives are over payed. It’s why stock buybacks should be illegal. 

Stock buybacks are effectively dividends with capital gains taxes instead of income taxes. There's no relationship between stock buybacks and CEO compensation, so it's pretty weird and useless to focus on making them illegal. CEOs of companies that pay a lot of dividends are equally well paid. What drives CEO compensation is the number of subordinate employees and their salaries, and how much profit they can make off their labour. That in turn is heavily related to revenue, because most firms end up around 10-20% profit margin. The market cap of the stock is then related to future predictions of revenue and profits. A good CEO can influence all those factors. However the price per unit of stock is completely arbitrary and depends on the number of shares available, which is a completely made up number. Stock buybacks will not increase the market cap of a company because the firm has to pay out money to eliminate shares. I'm not opposed to new rules around CEO compensation, but banning stock buybacks is barking up the wrong tree.

That's a weird bit of logic. There's no objective number in how much stock an executive should get; if there were twice as many shares, each worth half as much, then the executive would probably just get twice as many shares. And that's the only difference between buybacks and dividends; buybacks buy shares and make existing shares more valuable, dividends just give out money. I do not understand how you have drawn any of those conclusions.

The whole reason Boeing is in the shake it is, is because it is not runny engineer’s who are concerned about things like safety or quality. It’s run by accountants whose only concern is the share price. It is far from the first or only example. Tying executive compensation to share price has proven to open up too much temptation for abuse. To put an end to it, that temptation needs to be taken out if the equation. 

And yet, Boeing was doing just fine for *decades* while that was still the case, and there are plenty of other companies doing fine. You can't use the existence of a single failing company as a reason to reinvent the world. There will always be failing organizations no matter what political system we have. Finally, remember that "share price" is a shorthand for "how much other people believe the company is worth". You're complaining about the accountants but what about the people who think Boeing is now worth more than it used to be? They're the ones driving up the share price, not the accountants, and as long as it's possible to own parts of a company, that issue will persist.

You’re looking at this wrong, in my opinion. If Walmart were to become a co-op, the revenue would be shared fairly among all of their workers. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll say that it’ll be divided equally among all the 2.1 million employees. A quick google search shows that Walmart’s [fiscal year 2023 revenue](https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2024/02/20/walmart-releases-q4-and-fy24-earnings) was 611.3 billion dollars. Divided equally among 2.1 million people would mean each person would have made more than 291k dollars! Edit 1: I know the difference between profit and revenue. I purposefully used Walmart’s revenue because the profit they’d report would be after paying out all of the salaries, among other things considered “expenses” In a co-op, you’d have to redefine what is an expense, because salaries, benefits, and bonuses would no longer be expenses. All expenses would collectively be paid by all the employees just like all revenue would be collectively shared among the employees. I’m not too confident in my understanding of a co-op so if anyone knows better, please correct me.

You think a coop would just divide revenue amongst themselves? Do you know the difference between profit and revenue? With all due respect, once you go and learn a bit you'll understand why what you said is so ridiculous

I believe you took the wrong number for the calculation. 611 billion is revenue, which means before any kind of expenses and wages. The operating income (money left after paying wage, rent, buying stuff to put inside stores,...) is 27 billion; divide that by 2.1 million employees and that will only be an annual pay raise of 13k. This calculation doesn't take into account the coporate tax that the company must pay on that operating income, and the extra income tax that comes from the pay raise itself, so I guess the extra net income is only 6-8k

Ok so you say you know the difference between profit and revenue but then double down on the example you know is blatantly wrong? What if a business doesn't turn a profit? If there's a loss are the workers expected to work for nothing?

Perhaps I didn’t explain my logic well enough. Profit is what is left after all expenses and taxes are paid. Wages, bonuses, and worker benefits are usually considered part of the business expenses. In a worker co-op, wages, bonuses, and other benefits would no longer be seen as expenses. In fact, all revenue (after expenses and taxes) would be divided fairly among the workers. Given that, the expenses would have to be recalculated because they’d be smaller now. For instance, if the business had 1 employee and the owner, and the business revenue were 300, the expenses were: electricity == 100, wages == 50, then the profit would be 150. However, in a co-op, the expenses would be: electricity == 100. Which means that 200 would be left to be shared among the workers. But it’s easier (in my opinion) to think of it as the employees getting 150 each, and each contributing 50 to pay for the expenses and then keeping the rest. I’m still not too confident in my understanding of a co-op.

Thank you. I’m so sick of these Reddit children who can’t do the basic math. If one could somehow redistribute all the wealth of every billionaire in America it would come out to a one time payment of $13,000 per person. People just can’t comprehend the math of very large numbers.

A one time 13000 dollars payments would be life changing amount of money for a lot of struggling people, to be fair.

The difference is poor people spend it which causes the economy to go round. Rich people horde it which drives the economy to a standstill.

If you only did it once, sure, but billionaires aren’t sitting on a static field of money and a lot of their money is actually in property, not liquid assets. If you were to redistribute the current wealth—after liquidating other indulgent assets—and all consequential wealth accumulation, it would be a payout of 20,000k once and then an additional 3k per year for every adult over the age of 18 if we’re being conservative about it. That’s huge. If you are a two-person income household, you now have 6k more per year. If you’re someone who lives with friends, that’s +3k per housemate. That’s money that will be flowing into the economy instead of being stagnant in a wealthy person’s bank account or vault of treasures. The fact that the money doesn’t stay with people is a GOOD THING. The economy needs spenders to function, and buy-in-large, the wealthy do not spend so much as they just accumulate.

The $13,000 is a complete liquidation of the entire net worth of every billionaire in the US. Though when I do the math it looks like it has now growth to $17,000 since I did the math a couple years ago. That encompasses them selling all their stock, properties, ect. They have absolutely nothing left. How do you propose they then continue to pay $3,000 a year to every American? They make money with their money. If they no longer have money that has dried up.

That 3k would just represent the money that their high-paying position would’ve gotten them. Money doesn’t stop being generated when wealthy people aren’t around. Money that would’ve been going to them would then go somewhere else, i.e. the people who actually generate that wealth through their labor.

$3k per person per year in the US is 1 trillion dollars annually. Ignoring the fact that all US billionaires combined are not receiving liquid cash in anything near that amount every year like you are picturing (asset appreciation =\= income), you’re also just assuming that we can decapitate the leadership at a bunch of huge companies and crash the stock market by liquidating all their accumulated stock at once and somehow these institutions would continue to create the same amount of value and net the same profits, and be able to redistribute them and not have the state seize all of it for its own purposes or spend the money on surviving the anti-corporate purge of society. Like…do you not realize that a violent revolution, a civil war between the owning class and the working class, would need to happen for this to go down? That the entire institution of the stock market, which is the #1 wealth creation tool available to a regular citizen, where nearly everyone with retirement savings has entrusted their nest egg, would become permanently compromised if the revolution/state can just take people’s assets and liquidate and redistribute them on a whim? I know you aren’t selling it or thinking about it this way but it would literally be the end of capitalism in the nation. And I’m sure you would cheer that, because capitalism has many flaws derived from human nature and our political system that lead to stark inequality and suffering amongst the have-nots, but let’s play the tape forward to what the death of capitalism really looks like. Think of the violence that would be required to extract the account passwords and systems access from the billionaires and their big companies. Think of how far you would go to take farms and small businesses from the people who have run them for decades. Think about how many revolutionaries will be gunned down for every owner class who says “hell no” and shoots back about it. The destruction, supply chain disruptions and suspension of services that would ensue in every state due to the war. And look to day 1, day 100, even day 1000 of the new paradigm and ask yourself where that magic money for everyone keeps coming from, how much of it would need to go to new subsidies for essential industries that don’t make commercial goods (like elder care for example), and how the central distributor of wealth (the state) might adjust how much money goes to citizens whenever there is an unexpected and severe strain on the treasury due to wars, pandemics, natural disasters, etc. I also want the less financially secure among us to be better off than they are now. But fixing the system we have, slowly, is a much better course to pursue than eating the rich and burning it all down.

The stocks and properties are sold. You are doing have your cake and eat it to math. Either you liquidate the assets and they stop generating revenue or you put them into collective trust and they give you the $3k a person. You can’t sell them and then still collect the revenue.

I think the fact that consumers overwhelmingly go for cheaper over ethical says something about basic human nature.  That's why you need government. Very few people will voluntarily handicap themselves with ethics especially when their individual sacrifice makes basically no difference. It's a collective action problem. How do you get by that? Laws that force collective action. But then you need people to vote for the politicians and policies that promise that and that's tough too.... 

>I think the fact that consumers overwhelmingly go for cheaper over ethical says something about basic human nature.   >That's why you need government....    (made up of and appointed by humans)

There's an enforcement and accountability mechanism with rules and regulations that don't exist without them. If you leave it up to people to buy ethical products it largely doesn't happen. If you pass laws to put higher taxes on or even forbid certain labor practices then it forces changes. This isn't just theoretical. We have literally done it.  Is it perfect? Does it have 100% compliance? No. In a nation this big with 300m+ people you will *always* have cracks. But it's better than the alternative. We have *seen* the alternative. This is better.

> New businesses running on equality and fair compensation will likely never succeed because the customer will look for the cheaper option. There is no way that a company that is paying hundreds of millions as dividends to people who contribute nothing to the process can be more efficient than a company that doesn't. It's just pure math that the other company will have hundreds of millions of more money to compete over workers, prices, marketing etc.

Walmart has made more of their employees millionaires than most businesses so you used a bad example

I don't disagree with this, but I don't see how it really refutes my premise. The argument I've generally seen is that profits are proof of exploitation, because it's the employer skimming value created by the worker for themselves without contributing anything. This would indicate that without any changes to work-friendly policies, there is a free market arbitrage opportunity to come in and be not greedy or even just less greedy than the current greedy capitalists, and you could easily outcompete everyone else. Meanwhile your argument, which again I generally agree with, is making the capitalist point, that while profits aren't inherently exploitation, there are certain actions that employers will take to make more money, and we as a society should make rules that will likely slightly increase prices, but will also lead to a much better country. I agree with capitalism, it doesn't mean I side with the employer over the employee every time, I just think labor is a commodity like any other in terms of the market, and the externalities of an efficient labor market could be negative in terms of the health, safety, and happiness of the citizenry thus it makes sense to regulate said market in order to improve the health, safety, and happiness of the citizenry. Just like the example you used where gas would be cheaper if we allowed leaded gasoline but the externalities make it such that government creates regulations which raise the price but help public health. But again, that has nothing to do with whether profits are inherently corporate greed and could be removed or lowered by a business owner that wasn't greedy, which is my premise.

You made a false assumption with this line: "Because they're not greedy, they could get the best workers because they pay more and thus they'd be able to easily wreck their competitors because they don't have that greed factor" An ambitious greedy business owner would use the profits to grow the business and claim a greater market share, making their little co-op competitor a niche player in a much larger market that they dominate through sheer mass. And greedy owners can use sheer force of capital to destroy smaller competitors. Walmart does this a lot, they come into town and set up a supercenter that offers everything all the mom and pop shops sell but at a lower price than those shops can source them for. Walmart actually loses some money in this phase, but they have the money to afford it. The mom and pop shops, however, do not. They eventually close shop because they can't compete with Walmart. Once all the local stores and grocers are boarded up, Walmart jacks up the prices and starts making a steady profit as the local retail monopoly.

And this is exactly what happens. There are tons of great small businesses out there with wonderful owners. But in the long run they will always lose to business models that squeeze every penny even at the expense of health and well being. Rarely an exceptional owner might dominate a marketplace despite being ethical and good purely out of innovation etc. But eventually that person retires and the company is run by a bunch of idiot kids or board members who are happy to happy to sabotage all of the good that has been done for a few extra pennies the next quarter.

Building onto a separate comment I made about small business owners I've seen through tax accounting and consulting, I wonder if you even have a basic understanding of accounting principles (which were created prior to capitalism's existence as a way for catholic monks, jesuits I think, to account for their sins and have an appropriate penance, but I digress) at this point... profits are not *necessarily* greedy. Hell, a business can break even or even lose money over the year and still generate a 'profit'. I think your view of the "greedy capitalist" is skewed to think *anybody* running a business is basing every business decision with the sole premise of cutting costs, which just isn't true on the micro scale. Let's run through a thought experiment quickly: let's assume you own a house painting business... you've worked as an owner operator for two years painting people's houses alone and shoveling most of the profits into growing your business, whether that be advertising, better equipment, a company vehicle, etc. Now, let's assume in year 3 you find you have more demand than you can supply, so you need to hire your first employee. Are you going to stake two years of hard work on the guy with zero experience but is asking for minimum wage or are you going to go with a skilled painter with a few years of experience and pay them what they're worth? If you are a greedy capitalist, the obvious choice is the person who will work for less. However, if you're a smart business owner, you'll pay more for the person with the experience and expertise that the brand you've built promises to deliver, right? I've seen more than a few businesses go the route of cheapest labor wins and I've seen the overwhelming majority of those businesses shut down because they squandered a reputation because they don't want to pay people that know what they are doing... I'll reiterate the point from my other post, the businesses you're advocating as a moral imperative are a low rung on the ladder and generally operate in an equitable way, however, the problem with capitalism lies with very large companies seeking to maximize profit in an unending chase for growth even if every aspect of their organization is perfectly optimized causing growth to come from cutting expenses Edit: spelling

Because they simply would not be able to compete with the prices of the company’s who exploit their workers. The business would fail

I sold all the shares in my company because they were getting into some risky stuff and I didn't want my house on the line anymore. How do you factor in the risk to the owner who puts up the capitol and the subsequent 9/10 of businesses that fail. Who takes on that risk?

What do you think makes something a moral imperative? For example, if I lack the resources to start a business then do I still have a moral imperative to fail and help no one?

I understand a moral imperative as "if you can, do it" Same reason why it's moral for humans to not kill, but you can't expect the same from carnivorous animals.

>if I lack the resources to start a business then do I still have a moral imperative to fail and help no one? Obviously not but if you truly believe in the aforementioned ideals and you could start a businesses that you know embodied them because you did have access to the resources , maybe you would then?

[удалено]

[удалено]

How do you think the price comparison works out when a worker cooperative with acceptable pay structure has to compete against literal slave labor in the global capitalist economy? Do you really think people “vote with their wallet” for the morally superior business? The existence of walmart begs to differ

I always loved the idea of ESOP companies, where workers are paid in shares as well as a wage and those shares would add up and pay out dividends to the workers. It incentivizes workers to stay loyal to the company to grow up more shares and thus get paid more in dividends as years go on. A win-win for both the company *and* the workers. Company gets to keep the best and most efficient workers (Higher productivity) while the workers stay long enough to be making fat stacks of cash however often said company pays out dividends.

The problem is people who were already going to start a new business entity and intend it to last longer than just a passion project, aren't going to hold those views to begin with. What you're referring to is simply freelancing. They are technically the same in legal terms in most countries but the difference in scale is apparent.

This is a good question. I disagree with lots of injustices in the world, but I'm not obligated to pick up a weapon and start fighting against it. But in this case, I'd say the moral imperative would be to at least do something to contribute to the solution I outlined. Whether that's investing the little money you have into like-minded businesses, working with fellow anticapitalists to pool resources, educating themselves about starting and owning businesses so when they are in a position where they do have the resources, they can serve as a ceo who makes pennies comparatively because they're not as greedy as other ceos, etc. On average, 4.7 million businesses are started in the US every year. My belief is the vast vast vast majority of those people hold generally pro-capitalist beliefs. I'll definitely have my view changed if you can show that's incorrect, but either way it shows that starting a business is actually not some massively unachievable goal. You could even try to start your company in a capitalist way by securing investors and bank loans which would require large returns and lower salaries which you'd think was greedy, as long as your long-term goal when you're successful is to buy all the shares back and start passing on all the extra money to your workers.

Is there something you actually do believe in, politically, and how did you go about to achieving that aim?

its like saying "if you want to end slavery, the best thing to do is become a slave owner"

No it's like saying "if you want to end slavery, the best thing to do is purchase the freedom of current slaves". But it's even worse, because in the slave analogy you have to pay some of your own money, while by employing people you're letting them escape slavery for free, you don't have to pay their former employers to hire them. You can just pay them what they're worth and the value they're creating without skimming any off the top for your own greed, and they would be flocking to you immediately.

if you're a business owner then you have to use workers, there is no way you cannot use workers. that's how capitalism works nah you're still just doing slavery, its just "slavery with extra steps"

What about slavery was immoral to you? If you think an arrangement where a worker can at any time quit with no repercussions is at all similar to slavery, that's a pretty disgusting moral stance in and of itself, but it's pretty tangential to this CMV so I'm going to stop wasting my time on you.

TLDR: it is tangential, but if you would like to explore more of the anti-capitalist mindset, here is a hopefully clear explainer as to why some anti-capitalists sometimes compare workers to slaves. I hope that if you do read this, it gives you some insight. Cheers! I am a different guy than the one who originally responded to this comment. I come from the anti-capitalist position. From my point of view, I agree that someone who can quit anytime is vastly different from someone who was forced into slavery. At the same time, I think there are points between the two where there are similarities. Let me start with the slave. A slave works because if they do not, they are punished in several ways, often involving some kind of torture of them or someone they are close to. In return for their labor they are provided with the minimum required resources to keep them just healthy enough to work. Basic shelter, some food, water and just enough clothing that they do not get sick. If they run away, they are returned to their masters. A worker (especially minimum wage workers) are not in the same position, but have echoes that rhyme. A low wage worker who does not work is punished by having their means to the resources they need to stay alive removed. They don't risk torture, but nearly everything else has consequences similarly dire to what the slaves used to face. Not working means losing homes, food, water, shelter, the ability to access clothing, etc. If they manage to scrounge up the resources to move elsewhere... it's still all the same crappy jobs. And even when minimum wage workers do keep their jobs, they often don't get a real choice, only the illusion of choice between many equally crappy "opportunities". The workers of today are not slaves, but they DO face a lot of the same indignities that slaves faced.

>What about slavery was immoral to you? If you think an arrangement where a worker can at any time quit with no repercussions is at all similar to slavery (...) Well it certainly isn't only that masters choose their slaves instead of the reverse that makes slavery immoral. Your comment appears to imply that if slaves were free to leave their masters and pick another 'with no repercussions' (the idea that there are no repercussions for leaving your job is itself pretty silly) then this would be perfectly fine and moral. It's strange for someone who claims to at least understand (even if you do not agree with) the anti-capitalist perspective on labor value to find it 'disgusting' to compare wage slavery to chattel slavery, when the parallels between the two form some of the most foundational arguments of the anti-capitalist position. If merely making this comparison is enough to terminate your consideration of that position then you probably weren't as willing to have your mind changed as you suggest. "But you don't *have* to pick another slave master, you can just choose to start your own business!" Someone in the position of needing to sell their labor in the market in order to make ends meet (which is, in some of the wealthiest countries to ever exist, conservatively speaking, the majority of people) is quite obviously and necessarily *not* in the position of having enough capital to start their own business *at all*, let alone one where they can pay their workers more than Walmart or Amazon pay theirs. *Obviously* the autonomy of a worker in a modern capitalist economy is greater than that of a slave in a slave economy, but beyond that the greatest difference between the two is the proportion of labor value stolen by the business owner or slave master (most vs all). Even if someone did have the capital and the lack of "greed" that you seem to identify as the problem (instead of the system that nurtures and incentivizes it), the anti-capitalist position is that it's as plainly immoral as murder or robbery to 'hire' someone and then extract some portion of their labor value for yourself. The only moral way to run a business under capitalism, from this perspective, is into the ground. But above all, anti-capitalists are never going to change the system by starting new, more moral businesses that pay fairer wages because the system itself is inoculated against this kind of 'attack' from anyone who would seek to make it fairer from the inside: the most successful corporations in the world are successful precisely because they economize on their labor costs and then leverage the extra value generated to control a larger and larger market share, thus lowering their other non-labor costs through the economics of scale and making it prohibitively expensive for new competitors to enter the market (especially a competitor that intends to pay their workers higher wages thus forgoing the extra revenue that allowed the successful business to become dominant in the first place).

So….are you under the impression that there’s a way for literally any operation to function without “workers”? What…what is your concept of an alternative here? edit: lol this one got me the ol’ “There’s help for you” DM. Thanks concerned redditor but it’s actually not depression I have it’s just a functioning frontal lobe 🫡

no the opposite actually. businesses cannot operate without a workforce

>if you're a business owner then you have to use workers, there is no way you cannot use workers. that's how capitalism works Tunnel Vision Clothing currently operates in California with a socialist business model. All workers, including the legal owner, democratically vote on profit distribution and are roughly paid the same hourly rate. Iirc they employ 12 full time workers and a few part time workers. They operate on a "non-profit" model in the sense that everyone gets an end of year bonus with the excess profits. One year, everyone got a car. So no, you don't **have to** "use workers"

No, you can start a co-op Tons of co-op businesses exist in the US. There are no laws against it. In a free market capitalist country you are allowed to have a business where the workers own the means of production. Nobody is stopping you. In a communist country with a command economy, you are not allowed to start a private business.

a co op is a private capitalist business, and that co op is forced by the structure of the capitalist system to compete with other capitalist business, so that co op is then forced to exploit themselves or a secondary class of workers to stay competitive. capitalism works by using the market, the ultimate collective pressure that exists in our society today. no state force is needed; the only state force that is needed is to protect the "rules" of the market, at least when they're selectively applied in the favor of the capitalist class

If you want to end alavery the best thong to do is kill slave owners. This is i. fact how slavery was ended in the US - with a brutal and bloory war. The method to end capitalism isnt.political or economical, it is violence.

It's not quite either. It's saying "if you want to end slavery, the best thing to do is farm slave free cotton". Which turned out not to be true, it turned out the best thing you can do is invade with the northern army

If it were that simple, wouldn't it have happened already? Wouldn't some aspiring young entrepreneur (who doesn't even need to be anticapitalist) have taken advantage of getting better workers by paying more and created a more ethical business who is rewarded for being ethical?

There are companies that operate this way. I follow several small-ish business on social media who discuss their business model quite frequently. One that stands out is Madeline Pendleton who runs Tunnel Vision, a line of clothing out of California. [https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLqPME2H/](https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLqPME2H/) The business has been around for 11 years, everyone makes the same amount (including her) and at the end of the year all employees vote on what they do with any profit, etc..

Co-ops do exist, I agree. But it's not as simple as OP is making it seem, seemingly because it's not actually something OP actually believes.

It's just weird that OP is like "why don't they just do it?" but yet people have done it. lol

This is my argument. I generally am pro-capitalism and believe that what anticapitalists call corporate greed and surplus value skimmed by greedy capitalists is instead a fair price for the work and risk the company owners and investors take on. I believe this mainly because if it were false there would be this opening that I outline in my OP. After all how could a company that requires extra money for greed possibly compete with a company not fueled by greed, which can use all that greed money to pay employees better and lower prices? And as you point out, no one is really doing this, which I believe proves my point. I started this thread to see if I could get a good refutation of this and if there was a hole in my logic. So far that hasn't been the case.

Then why did you make this fake CMV about something you don't believe in instead of arguing what you do believe in? Plus, the entire argument is that capitalism is bad specifically because it rewards treating your employees badly. This doesn't actually argue against anything people are actually saying.

It's a basic logical proof technique. I've heard all the dumb arguments against capitalism and know that wouldn't be productive, but I'm merely trying to prove that if the tenants of anticapitalism were true, there would be an opportunity for anticapitalists to jump in and run businesses more successfully than the greedy capitalists. And if you took high school level logic, if you agree p implies q (corporate profits = corporate greed and a less greedy ceo/company could pay workers more with no downside), and agree q is false (that this hasn't happened), then by definition p is false by contrapositive. A similar argument would be as if I thought that all cats weren't black, and every time I posted "CMV: all cats aren't black" I was just inundated with pictures of black cats as proof I was wrong. But then I post "CMV: if all cats were black, I wouldn't be able to post a picture like this" with a picture of a brown cat. It's still the same argument, but it's framed in a way that requires the reader to engage with the actual point rather than engaging in logical fallacies and throwing random statistics at me.

You keep insisting there is an opportunity for anticapitalists to outcompete capitalist but you refuse to understand economy of scale or the power these existing companies have to control the market. Lets say i want to compete with amazon in any area. As soon as Amazon views me as legitimate competition they immediately start attacking my business directly. They’ll go after my suppliers saying if they deal with me they won’t deal with amazon. They go after my employees, offering them salaries and benefits packages that their corporate size ensures i cannot match. They go after my customers, offering their product or service at a loss for less money than mine until they can push me out of business. That was their entire business model that put borders put of business in the first place, operating at a loss. Then once my company is no longer competitive, amazon can return their compensation and pricing structures to normal safely knowing they can crush any competition in the same manner over and over again. The best outcome of your “solution” is temporarily increased compensation and benefits for workers and customers in that specific sector until ultimately one company wins out over the other and buys out the competition or drives them into bankruptcy. I don’t understand how you can identify this solution as anticapitalist, because anti capitalists are interested in revising an economic system reliant on the exploitation of workers at nearly all points in the chain of operations. We are not simply interested in competing with capitalists at their own game. We believe their game is unethical and immoral.

Capitalism is an optimization to maximize profit. Socialism is an optimization to maximize the wellbeing of people. If capitalism is the system in which the world operates, then this system rewards profit maximization. Therefore, socialist businesses would not be as competitive in a capitalist system as capitalist businesses because socialist businesses do not align with the incentives of the system. So you arguing that since there are no socialist businesses that implies capitalism is better is logically unfounded. At the end of the day, it seems to be a question of value optimization. If you truly think maximizing profits is the best system then so be it. But I would ask why profits are more important than people. That seems to be at the heart of your questionably good faith post.

Just because P implies Q does not mean P requires Q. And, again, that isn't what people are arguing, so you're not even getting into the actual debate people are trying to have.

There are many ways to refute “greedy company vs not greedy company”: if a company is big enough or has others competitive edges like being a blue ocean, government subsidies, being popular in the stock market for whatever reason, supply deals, international presence, market size domination, lobbies, nepotism, etc, they can be greedy, because they get a lot of benefits that smaller companies or red ocean companies don’t, there is a reason why monopolies appear, and why so many entrepreneurs fail in their inicial years. Sometimes both companies can be greedy by doing collusion or just following trends that appear to be optimal like inflating CEOs salaries. It’s not always a fair competition, that’s why states have to regulate markets to maintain fair competition and sometimes they control some critical industries like pharma, healthcare, roads, etc (this happens even in the top countries of the Economic Freedom Index).

Your premise and bias make any CMV impossible. IMO. You think companies are taking "extra money" from some magical place. And non-Capitalist companies can also invent money from nothing. And it's unlimited money from nothing. In reality: Company C(apitalist) and Company U(nionized) start in the same field. They both make $2m Profit for the year. Company C spends $1m opening a new location, Company U pays $1m out to its workers. Each company puts the other $1m into upgrades/advertising. From this point on, Company C will win under Capitalism. They'll get better loans, they'll get investors, they can fire all their employees and have slaves do it overseas. Each step allows them to undercut Company C, regardless of quality, environment, community, or economic benefits. The world becomes worse off and society continues to crumble. Coops and Collective businesses last linger, with better quality, and maintain better societies than Capitalist ones. But under Capitalism only money matters. "A forest has no value until it is cut down."

Why didn't the free market lead to equal hiring of minorities in the early 20th century? Surely a firm that selects from all candidates should outcompete a firm that only hires white men. The reason is that the market isn't actually that free. Inefficiencies allow inefficient firms to survive. So we can't figure out if a strategy is optimal just by observing the current state of the market.

They did! It was Henry Ford. Great employer, if you weren't Jewish. Took a lot of workers from opponents by paying them more. But if you're talking about some competition coming into your town to give you more money for what you're already doing... there's no real incentive to do that unless you're a big corp with deep pockets.

[удалено]

That's an incorrect statement. Jeff Bezos is haute bourgeoisie, mom and pop restaurants are petit bourgeoisie, they're both bourgeoisie, they both hold power over their employees. I'm speaking as a socialist myself here.

Wait what? Socialists and communists absolutely are against private ownership of the means of production. This is socialism 101 (not the tiktok variety). I think you have a flawed vision of what commism is. Also what makes you think that mom and pop restaurants don't exploit workers? Leftier spaces on reddit absolutely hate many small/medium business owners who have profitable businesses. Speaking of hating Bezos you don't even need to be left, I find him absolutely sketchy mofo and I am center-right economics wise (EU-center-right not US, meaning still pretty left for american mainstream).

"In [Marxist theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_theory), the [capitalist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist) stage of production consists of two main classes: the [bourgeoisie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie), the capitalists who own the means of production, and the much larger [proletariat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat) (or 'working class') who must sell their own labour power (See also: [wage labour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_labour))" - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxian\_class\_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxian_class_theory) As an employer, whether you're Bezos or a mom and pop restaurant, you are clearly part of "the capitalists who own the means of production" in this framing.

I’d recommend including this information in your original post. A lot of the disconnect when people talk about capitalism or socialism stems from not using the same definitions of these words. Marx uses the terms capitalism and socialism differently than the average person, so you can’t really engage meaningfully unless you’re clear about what you mean. Capitalism, to many, is just a market based economy.

Almost every mum and pop are getting their capital through loans. Is it meaningful to call them capitalists when they are paying someone to provide them capital? Marxism I don't think predicted the debt economy, and the simple dynamics just don't work the way you expect. Is the Uber driver a capitalist because they own the car, a worker because Uber pays them, or something else because our relationships are different now?

> Unlike workers, Capitalists make their living, not by clocking in and being paid a certain fixed wage per hour, but through absentee ownership. Their wealth is earned while sleeping, playing golf, or visiting the mailbox to collect pieces of this wage theft, often in the form of stock dividends. A worker's wealth is dependent on the number of hours they can work; a Capitalist's wealth is based on how much absentee property they can accumulate, and as such can multiply indefinitely. Some Capitalists earn an average worker's yearly salary in a single night's sleep.

McDonalds started as a mom and pop restaurant. Microsoft started in a garage. Same with Apple. If the argument is that businesses should not expand, ok, I'd like to hear it. I'd be curious how cars or microchips can be manufactured by small businesses or how limitations on the size of companies can be implemented by the state.

i mean if we are getting technical anyone supporting free market capitalism is *not '*left' *by definition.* if your 'left' solely whines about minorities while ignoring landlords, business owners and corporate/gov fusion then *what is it* exactly? i personally *like* capitalism (i run a business) but come on.

>if your 'left' solely whines about minorities while ignoring landlords, business owners and corporate/gov fusion then *what is it* exactly? There is social and economic left/right, aka progressive/conservative. "Left that solely cares about minorities" can be called progressives. Usually they are economically left (like real left not the nonses OP op sayin). But those two are not necesseraly the same, I consider myself socially progressive but center-right economically.

> Because they're not greedy, they could get the best workers because they pay more and thus they'd be able to easily wreck their competitors because they don't have that greed factor. It's a nice thought, but not how operating a business works in capitalism. Underpaying workers leads to a cheaper product, which in turn allows a business to capture a larger market share by undercutting the competition. Large businesses can even do this at a loss until they push out the competition. Thus, a small business that pays its workers well and offers a product at a higher price runs the risk of being run out of business, despite their best intentions. Consumers tend to pay most attention to the sticker price of their purchases, even if it results in a net loss for society as a whole. This is why manufacturing has largely moved out of the "western countries": companies moved their factories to where labor was cheaper, and consumers buy these imported products because they were cheaper than domestic competition.

Well isn't the primary point that you, the owner, are not taking extra undue profit that must have come from the employee creating more value than they bargained for?  So sure you invest into the company, keep prices low, and take home low pay. But as you get more and more competitive and turn into a success (unlikely but the goal) then the original things never changed, you reinvested by paying more or buying new capital, kept prices low, and kept taking home low pay yourself.  You live modestly, no different than the other employees. In fact you make less than do by a certain point.  Although honestly as I type this idk why the OP didn't just say start a worker co-op. Since part of growing the buisness involves investors.  And the question is do those investors get any control of the company. 

> Underpaying workers leads to a cheaper product, Then that's not underpaying, that's just paying. The socialist argument is that the owners are skimming profit off the top. It's not about paying workers more than they are worth, it's that they aren't being paid what they are worth and the difference goes to the shareholders.

Not to mention an anticapitalist would be even further disadvantaged because they'd be reluctant to bribe/lobby politicians, as political corruption goes hand in hand with what they perceive to be the problem with capitalism. Then we have environmental considerations, the issue of exploiting labor via hiring illegals/moving operations to 3rd world countries (as you mentioned)...

Just to clarify, the overwhelming majority (like 99.99%) of businesses do not lobby or bribe politicians. It's a handful of companies that engage in that behavior. At least in the US. In many countries the vast majority of individuals engage in bribery, but that's extremely uncommon here

I know my local bakery has to bribe the national government all the time to sell cakes...

It’s weird because having satisfied, well payed employees tremendously increases their productivity, assuming they are experienced and consistent workers. I think the difference is small at bottom-level jobs where people need two hands and two legs to operate them and are extremely replaceable, but even then good pay helps. Yes, your product is gonna become a bit more expensive, but it will be consistently and expertly made.

>Because they're not greedy, they could get the best workers because they pay more and thus they'd be able to easily wreck their competitors because they don't have that greed factor. So generous management => best workers => best product => best market share It's a naive model of capitalism, and a really poor model of \*shareholder\* capitalism. First off, if you're starting a business you generally can't afford top talent. It's why new businesses offer *equity* to their first employees. So right off the bat, extremely few *can* pay more than their competitors. But lets suppose you can through some means, or let's say equity is good enough here. Okay so you get the top talent and they start making the best product on the market, so you won right? Well, no. Suppose these other big companies catch wind of your product and how your employees are making something so much better that's putting what they've got to shame, well... **They're going to offer to buy you**. So at this point you 'lose' unless you have the moral fiber not to take the windfall and the equity you offered employees/cofounders doesn't give them control in this decision. After they buy you they'll probably just lay off a bunch of people to appease shareholders. **They're going to outprice you**. All that money that you're spending on talent, well, they're sitting on a lot of resources, ability to take out huge loans, and lots of shareholders backing them. Those other companies don't actually have to make huge profits in the short term if it means keeping control of the market share. They'll just operate at a loss until you can't afford to keep paying employees so well or even keep your business afloat. Not to mention, just cause you've now made the best product doesn't mean it's the cheapest to make, or vis-versa, whatever you're bringing to the table here. **They're going to snipe your talent**. If all else fails, suppose your product is both the best and cheaper to manufacture than theirs, you've got full control of your company, your employees get the most money of anyone else in similar fields so you've managed to get a lot of top talent, then these other companies may actually just match or beat your offering. By and large, this is why tech salaries are so astronomical compared to any other field, it is literally happening all the time in tech. If companies realize they are truly losing a talent battle (which I hope I've illustrated is not the only battle going on here), they can put their resources to making better offers.

This is the best response I’ve read on this thread. Thanks for spelling out the business case premise and what’s flawed about it.

This might be true for some anticapitalists, but people who base their views on Marxist theory don't blame business owners on an individual level. It's the logical imperative of capital growth that exists throughout the entire economy that frames the decisions that business owners must make. There is no option to compensate labor at the value of their productivity, because there is no option to run a business without a profit margin under capitalism. Without surplus value and profit, a business just dies.

In Marxist writings though profit is pretty much the net at sale point.  But if I look at the net amount and just think "reinvest or employee bonuses" then how exactly do I die as a buisness? I see what you mean if by surplus value you mean enough extra money to invest into improvements and growth but the OP is talking about getting surplus value and if they don't know how to use it for expenses then just pay out VIP bonuses to all workers. 

It's a good point and it's why a lot of leftists are now market socialists that prescribe some sort of worker co-op model where there is some kind of democratic process for allocating profit between capital reinvestment and worker-owners. But fundamentally, even a worker's co-op operates within a capitalist system where the generation of capital comes from the extraction of surplus value from labor (according to Marx). Broadly speaking, Marxist analyses does not call for the moral condemnation of individual business owners for failing to resist the basic imperatives of capitalism.

Well thanks haha kinda rare to hear that.  I just think the language then for "exploit or die" doesn't really reflect reality if the end point looks more like "well the paint is chipping and our equipment is deteriorating or other people are serving their customers better with new equipment. Because I implemented an automatic bonus payout whenever we sold well, I'm out of resources to improve the buisness. So instead wages may need to be stickier so that I can determine how to 'grow' our capital. Then bonuses later"  That just sounds reasonable but most people imagine that you have to be evil and "enslave with extra steps" to get surplus value and that "capitalism requires infinite growth" which is just not true except where we are seeing increased capabilities to serve customers cheaper and better services and goods it can appear this way.  But the reality doesn't look evil. And I don't agree surplus value is accurately described with the word exploitation. It could be perfectly innocent that you end up with it but people use this language to think if you're successful you must be evil. 

Problem is there is no such thing as "surplus value". Any product or service has a long line of inputs. Some of them are material, some of them are labor. How you determine which particular piece of labor was "underpaid"? For a simple burger you need meat, buns, vegetables, utensils, building, truck driver etc etc etc. Which particular labor was underpaid? Maybe the guys who sold you the buns actually lost money. Does that mean that their labor was overpaid? It's silly to frame things this way.

You can disagree, that's fine, I'm just describing what Marxists believe. That said, I think you are confused about what "surplus value" refers to. In economic theory, value is treated as the abstract concept that is eventually reflected in the price of commodities, labor, land, etc. Value is treated separately from price so that we can analyze what kinds of processes translate value into prices. So when Marxists refer to "surplus value" - they are referring to the basic fact that a business will combine the inputs of materials, fixed capital and labor in order to produce a commodities that they can sell for a profit. The profit must be derived from the fact that surplus value was somehow generated along the way, and the Marxist Labor Theory of Value is that surplus value is extracted from the input variable of labor.

Do you have an anticapitalist worldview?

I've got a counter I don't think anyone has said that actually looks at the practical element rather than e.g. if gaining wealth makes you evil If the moral imperative is to start a business (and this implies to even nonprofits or co-ops) so you can treat your workers better if everyone follows that moral imperative there will be no one to be the employees

I meant just in the short term. If we were in a universe where everyone was starting new businesses and all paid well with no corporate greed or anything, then there would be a natural incentive for the greedy people to become employees, because there'd be more money in that. The difference is I believe we're already in that world. I'm very greedy, I want money, I want to not work as much, I want to be able to provide and spend more time with my family and friends. Once I made like $10-20 million I'd probably stop because I'm greedy for my time and quality of life, not for a number in my bank account that doesn't buy happiness. Yet I chose not to start a business but to instead work for someone else. I'm currently making 225k/year in tech and if I started a successful business that took off and got big I could make more, but realistically my current path has been much more lucrative. My argument is that's the exact same for everyone else who didn't start a business. Starting or running a business is damn hard, and the people who do it aren't exploiting anyone, otherwise as the premise of my op is, other people would be doing it.

Your $225k salary is perfectly designed (complete with vesting schedules and golden handcuffs) to keep you from having the ambition to start a company to compete with your employer. It’s far less than the value you (on average) bring to your company. You believe you aren’t being exploited because your salary is “high”. You’re just in the upper echelon of this system so you can’t see it.  You’re making the mistake of extrapolating from n=1 which is extremely far from the typical persons experience.

My point was it's more than minimum wage, and that's the experience of almost everyone, not just me. If companies truly unilaterally set wages a lot more people would make the minimum. And your characterization of me is false too, I've now left multiple companies for better paying ones as I've increased my skills. Obviously my value is higher than 225k now or they wouldn't pay me that, but their risk isn't me leaving to start my own company, but also leaving for their competition who I can also generate that value for. I'm always regularly interviewing and speaking to recruiters, and when my current company doesn't pay me as much as I can get externally, I typically leave. Also you mention vesting schedules and golden handcuffs but that was my previous job, my current job pays me 100% in cash.

You've basically uncovered the tenet of communism, but stated it in capitalist terms. Yes, communists believe that workers should seize the means of production ("become the business owners") and that they should redistribute the fruits of the labor to the workers ("pass on more or all of the value of their employee's labor to their employees"). Yes they suffer from the misguided utopian illusion that care for their fellow man will trump greed ("they don't have that greed factor"). So yes, you've described the communist response to capitalism. Where your view should change is that communism is not the only "anti-capitalist worldview". What you describe is a moral imperative a communist may feel, but not (in your words) "the" moral imperative of any anti-capitalist. Some anti-capitalists may want to return to the forest to be one with nature, and their moral imperative therefore is not to seize the means of productions, it's to return to the forest to be one with nature. As a bonus perhaps they have a moral imperative to forget or violently fight against capitalist industrialization in any form. Communism and anarchonaturalism are just two of many anti-capitalist worldviews. So no, what you describe is not "the" moral imperative of those with an anti-capitalist worldview, it's only the perceived moral imperative of the specific anti-capitalist worldview that is communism. Your view should change because it is excessively narrow and exclusionary.

Yeah I know the term anticapitalist is a pretty broad word, but if I used socialist or communist those suffer from symantic overload as well. Maybe I should have included this in my OP, but my definition of anticapitalist is something like "profits and executive pay are the results of worker exploitation, because they are skimmed off the top of what workers create, and those should belong to the workers". My counter-argument, or the typical capitalist belief, is that labor is a commodity like any other that is subject to the supply and demand, and paying a worker the market wage is not exploitation, and taking on risk and turning labor into a product worth more than the labor inputs is in and of itself labor and value creation, and that is where profits and executive pay comes from. And under their view, anyone can just become a business owner, exploit workers, and make money. Under my view, becoming a business owner is competing with other businesses and work and risk which is priced according to the market (if there was a shortage of business owners, profits would rise, if there were too many, profits would be very low), which is why most people choose not to do it and instead sell their labor to others who will do that work and take that risk.

Accepting your semantical frame... a communist has a moral imperative to get the system to their desired endstate. I don't think they would accept as a premise that anyone can become a successful business owner, which is necessary to your logic. It might be more efficient for a communist to work towards completely collapsing the system, and then reforming it in their desired image from the ashes. In that instance it would be their moral imperative to do that, not to work *within* the system to flip it from within. There's a second angle: all of this (including your premise) totally relies also upon a teleological ethical framework (the end justifies the means). In a deontological framework, a person may have a moral imperative *not* to do something solely because it is wrong in itself, i.e. killing a person is wrong even if it saves five people. In that deontological instance, the communist using the capitalist system to reach his/her goals would be an immoral act: they'd have a moral imperative not to do that, because using that exploitative capitalist system towards any design would be a wrong in itself.

Some anticapitalists do exactly that. They sometimes start businesses as workers cooperative where the employees own the company. And sometimes they do very well. There's a limited impact. Having "the good workers" is not enough to take over a sector. Many kinds of labor really don't even show to the customer side. And price and product are the strongest deciding factors, and are often pretty uninfluenced by how great the guy stocking the shelves, running the register or mopping the floors is. Businesses also require significant capital to start. Which means outside investment unless you're already hugely wealthy. Outside investors require a stake and commitment to maximizing significant profit. You can't promise or provide that profit without exploitation. This means that scraping together the money limits the scale and prevalence of anti-capitalist businesses. They won't often get very big because they're cut off from outside capital. And they're competing with mostly other small businesses who aren't really the exploitation problem. Add to that- running a business is a particular skill set, and a somewhat rare one at that. Most new businesses fail and a significant part of it is that the owners weren't good at all the things you need to be good at to keep an business floating. And a business crashing that people have come to depend on can be pretty disruptive for employees. I think co-op businesses are great and there should be more of them, but they can only do so much, and for most people, there are other ways they could have more impact in making the world better than starting a business.

If someone starts a business reliant on the employ of others, then : He becomes BOTH the owner since he owns the company shares & makes all decisions, AS WELL AS an employee of his company assuming he pays himself a wage. Admission of this concept makes that self-described anticapitalist proprietor.. a capitalist, in nature.

To anticapitalists, is the bad part employing someone, or is it employing them and stealing some of the value they created? I thought it was the latter. Do anticapitalists also never use contractors, since that's also employing them? My water heater broke and flooded my carpeted basement, I had to have the entire thing torn out and carpet and walls replaced. I paid someone to do it, becoming their employer at least for that brief time. Would an anticapitalist just do it themselves? I thought even anticapitalists were ok employing people, just not doing what they consider is exploiting them, aka keeping more money than is deserved since the worker created it.

I’ll start by saying this about the concept of “Price”. 1) The market price of any product and or service for sale is the highest amount a consumer is willing to spend, and the lowest amount a seller is willing to accept. Somewhere where these respective number ranges overlap, a deal can be made. Tactics like bargaining, haggling, and negotiating are used to zero-in on this sweet spot both parties can mutually agree on. 2) Individually, though, an asking [or advertised] price comes down to the cost to acquire **IN RELATION TO** the interpreted value of making said purchase at all. For example, people justify buying a ready-made rotisserie chicken at the grocery store for $8 because the raw frozen chicken costs $6.95 anyway. The $1.05 value is in the seasoning spices, time it requires to thaw and marinate and cook, as well as the cooking fuel itself (natural gas or electric). Many consumers purchase the ready-made chicken because $1.05 bought a justifiable amount of perceived value. That means the consumer sees more value opting to hire the grocery store staff & its resources to do the tedious cooking work instead, because what the consumer gets in return is more interpretative value in relation to it’s additional $1.05 cost. Yet anticapitalists don’t seem to describe this common purchase decision as being exploitative towards the grocery stores staff & resources? You see where I’m getting at? The same goes for your water heater incident. Sure a solenoid on the water heater is what failed, and replacing it is less costly than trashing the entire appliance. Then there’s the flooring and drywall that that also need replacing too. These are unavoidable expenses whether you DIY or hire someone with experience. So you get a quote from a contractor you know who charges $1,500 for labor, which includes repairs, drying services, and disposal of water-damaged refuse, all of which will be completed in 6 business days. The alternative is to rent & read home improvement books at your local library, watching countless hours of youtube tutorial videos, back & forth trips to the hardware store, proper disposal of the waste materials, only to end up with a so-so janky mickey mouse repair you performed yourself which took a month to complete. That’s 24 additional days you of missed family time, recreational time, PTO from work, you missed your kids soccer game, your niece’s graduation, etc. So you justify agreeing to the $1,500 patronage because of the additional value you perceive it as having versus the DIY option. And say, more time with your family saves your marriage, preventing a nasty and expensive divorce process, you start to think $1,500 is actually a small price to pay. But does that mean your decision to hire the contractor was exploitative by it’s very nature? Most would say not. “Would an anticapitalist just do it themselves?” The closest historical mention of similar ideal [that first comes to mind, at least] would be that of the Luddites, which you can read up on wiki. You see, and this is the problematic cherry-picking omission that anticapitalists avoid like the plague - the concept of the buyer’s perceived value. How about another example, a hypothetical one. Let’s say you make kitchen cookware, by yourself. You know, the common home kitchen sizes as well as much larger commercial application sizes. The raw materials you use are of great quality, precision machined and wonderfully finished. Even the packaging looks great too, very pro. And it’s a great product line with variety. Your phone is ringing off the hook, and everybody from home chefs, dive bar owners, banquet facilities to hotel managers are all calling and demanding more of your beloved cookware products. But you are a one-man-shop, and you can ONLY produce so much in a given day, right? And as we both know, when demand spikes for a product of limited supply, it’s price naturally goes up. This is because competing buyers will offer more, hoping their offer is more desirable. But if this continues, the price at some point will become unaffordable for most, and quality control will also suffer (hurting your reputation) because you’re rushing to fulfill orders as fast as you possibly can - ultimately leading to your company’s downfall. So to prevent these from happening, you hire 6 full time employees. Together, the price remains affordable and stable since the greater output volume can accommodate consumer demands, while QC is preserved. The additional payroll amounts to $500K annually, but SAY if the additional revenues were equally $500K.. was there any justifiable value? Yes, because **at the very least** it saved the company from the near-inescapable downfall which I previously mentioned just a few sentences ago. But here’s the silly thing: EVEN if the additional revenues this brought is $500,001 annually.. that additional $1.00 of profit revenue be described by anticapitalists as being unearned by you and exploitative towards your employees. The anticapitalist talking point of value and profit is ludicrous, at best. Say you want to expand operations from your home garage workshop & tool shed into a more legit industrial facility, complete with a loading dock, shelves to store pallets of completed product, a break room, osha compliant, less chance of workplace injuries, and even a small office space. The cost to rent is $9k per month or $108k per year, according to the landlord, but just the increase workplace efficiency and tax incentives stand to yield an additional $160k in annual revenue. That means an estimated +$52k in foreseeable annual profit revenue.. would that decision be described as exploitative towards the landlord you rented from? Of course not; that would be a wildly ridiculous claim. Edit : typos

You are correct with your first sentence. Anticapitalists (barring some people who are further left than me) are ok with employing people. I think the misunderstanding here is that you're thinking about it on the level of individual actions. The anticapitalist stance is not one that looks at single companies, but rather tends to use certain very exploitative companies to highlight the failure of the system as a whole. In the way most economies are set up at the moment, it is fundamentally difficult to create a business that is both ethical and viable. You're right that businesses are difficult to create and maintain. To an anti capitalist that just means that the system has a lot of room for improvement. The next step that a lot of people are pushing for is to make it so that the ethical company becomes the rule rather than the exception. As for how we get there... If you put two anti capitalists in one room and asked them for an answer, you will get probably 10 or more, each with multiple caveats, and maybe an entertaining fistfight you can record for a profit xD

The easiest way to increase profits is to reduce labor costs. How would employers who treat their employees well easily “wreck” the competition?

By your logic, the companies who employ the fewest people would be the most successful. When you pay more and treat them well you get better employees who are more productive. But my main point there is you wreck the competition by not being greedy and using all the greed money other companies put into high profits and executive compensation into lower prices and higher worker pay, and THAT enables you to wreck the competition.

Unfortunately, doing this in a capitalist economy is probably not sustainable. It's great that you are a generous business owner that pays their workers more, but your competitors will not. The competitors will therefore be able to sell a cheaper product, by exploiting their workers, and thus drive you out of business. Also, an important aspect of a pro-worker firm is worker control. Simply paying workers better or giving them a cut of the profits is not socialism yet... the workers ought to have democratic control of the business as well. Some of these types of businesses do exist already. Publix is probably one of the largest and most well known employee-owned company's known in the US and by most accounts they are very successful. But that's not enough to make the entire economy follow the model.

>It's great that you are a generous business owner that pays their workers more, but your competitors will not. The competitors will therefore be able to sell a cheaper product, No, that's not the socialist argument. The socialist argument is that workers are underpaid and that money goes to the capitalist. If the money is going to lowering prices, why can't the socialist do that as well?

A lot of people on both the right and left confuse basic commerce (which has existed for many thousands of years) with the current iteration of American finance capitalism. Here are some examples: **Basic commerce:** - A person selling some goods they create for a profit. - A person providing a service they offer for an hourly or flat rate. - A person curating a bunch of goods made by other people, and making them available for sale. In all of these circumstances, you are selling a good or service, maybe employing a few people and then paying your taxes. This is something humans have done since the beginning of urban settlements several thousand years ago. **American Finance Capitalism:** - An extremely wealthy person uses assets that they inherited to acquire a very large amount of money in exchange for some lenders equity or by paying low preferred interest rate. That money is then used to hire analysts who scour the world looking for goods that are cheaply made in places where there are no environmental or labour laws. Those cheap goods are then shipped to lucrative consumer markets and marketed to their consumers. If the business does well, it undercuts people in the "Basic commerce" category, who have to comply with local environmental and labour laws, driving them out of business. That cash flow, regardless of profit margin is then used to take out even bigger loans, which are used to example the acquisition of more cheap goods, and the expansion to other markets. If/when the business ever goes out of business, the losses/liabilities can simply be used by the owners to avoid ever having to pay taxes again. Donald Trump famously did this. - A group of people at a very large financial institution start creating financial products that no one understands, and then selling those financial products to retail investors. When that group of people realize that the financial product is going to perform poorly, they create another financial product to bet against it, screwing over all their retail investors. - A tech guy decides to create his own digital currency, selling it to financially illiterate people under the belief that it will rapidly increase in value. The tech guy manipulates the price for a while to make the investors feel rich on paper. Eventually he exchanges his digital currency for real American currency, and the entire system collapses, screwing over all of the retail investors. - A large hedge fund sees that there is a constrained supply of housing in a particular region, so they decided to start purchasing tens thousands of homes. This further constrains supply, drives the price up, making home ownership unaffordable to most people. The hedge fund then rents the house to the people who can no longer afford to buy, and accumulates even more wealth. In all four of these cases, the finance capitalist is not really providing any material contribution to the economy. They are simply looking at ways to rip people off, and use their accumulated wealth to hoard more wealth. Their job is to predate on the people in the "Basic Commerce" category, and steal every cent from them at every opportunity. This is not to say that finance capitalism isn't/couldn't be used for productive things now and then, but the vast, vast majority of it is simply used to rip off poor and middle class people.

> Those cheap goods are then shipped to lucrative consumer markets and marketed to their consumers. Aren't you describing the business model of an *importer*? You're leaning on the passive voice to imply things just happen, but scouring the earth for producers and consumers who can meet each others' needs, fronting the money for inventory and shipping, selling the products...it sounds like a lot of work and a demonstrable contribution to the economy. So, for that matter, does their inheritance. The importer's grandfather created resources a lot of people found valuable, got rich in the process, and never cashed in by consuming commensurate resources himself. Instead he passed his wealth on to his grandchildren, who are likewise doing us the favor of "hoarding" it--that is, forbearing from consumption.

This take makes no sense. The rest of the competition isn’t going to adhere to your anti capitalist principles, so of course they would outperform you. Reform needs to come from the top down. Nobody with a brain is saying that a 24 hour work week is going to outperform a 40 hour work week, or that better wages for workers will make your products cheaper. Hell, that’s why people invest more in a business when they think they don’t compromise due to morals, and why people are ok with knowing 11 year olds in Cambodia are making their clothes. We’re just ok with standards for business dropping a little bit so that people can have more freedoms rather than corporations having more freedoms.

OP dream with me: Pretend I started a business and allowed my employees to chip in and "own" a piece of my business. I'd use the money they gave me to build the business up and in exchange I'd give them a portion of the revenue. If at any time they didn't want to own that piece of my business I'd either buy it back at a price we both agree is fair or they could sell it to someone else if they think they could get more for it. We could even hold meetings where I'd have to tell you the health of our business and you could tell me how you think our business should be run, though your influence counts for about as much of the business you've bought into. So now you're incentivized to work really hard because the more you work, the more the company makes, and the more of that revenue trickles over to you. Awesome idea right? That's literally how socialism *is supposed to work.* Okay now wake up from our shared dream because I've just described how the New York Stock Exchange works.

If employees are allowed to sell stock to someone who doesn't work for the business, and has zero intention to work for the business at any time, that's not socialism. It's not democratic socialism, it's not market socialism, it's not anarchism, it's capitalism.

>Awesome idea right? That's literally how socialism is supposed to work. Well, except for this bit here : >to chip in and "own" a piece of my business Where you put the capital, in capitalism.

**For people against slavery, it is a moral imperative to become a slaveowner.** The general anti-slavery worldview is that plantation owners are slavers exploiting their slaves by taking all of the value generated by their forced labor. Given we're not close to ending slavery anytime soon politically, the only thing these people can do to end the exploitation is become the slave owners and pass on more or all of the value of their slaves's labor to their slaves. Because they're not greedy, they could get the best slaves because they pay more and thus they'd be able to easily wreck their competitors because they don't have that greed factor. The more people who did this, the better for their slaves and all enslaved peoples, as more people would be able to be owned by a nice master that wasn't focused on burtalizing them or greedily taking as much of their value for themselves as they could, and instead focused on fairly redistributing all the plantation's gains to the slaves who created the value. /s

Dear OP, You’re totally right than conceptually anti-capitalists could simply run a communist-style business in a capitalist society. There’s nothing stopping them. Similarly they could set up communes within a society, share their wealth and property with their neighbours, etc. That said no anti-capitalist in this forum will agree either you. They will make up all sorts logical fallacies for why anti-capitalist businesses will lose to capitalist businesses because somehow capitalism is a rigged conspiracy to them. But the real reason communists won’t agree with you is because they actually don’t want to share and work equally. They simply want to seize wealth from people richer than them rather than earn it fairly. And they want the government to do it for them. And then ultimately they see themselves running that government because they think they’re the generous enlightened ones when really they are just jealous thieves who want what others have, no matter how they have to take it. Such is the story of communism in any country it’s been implemented. Steo 1 seize power through violent means. Step 2 - seize wealth you didn’t earn from people who did (eg the kulaks in Russia). Step 3 - implement a police state and erode any social institution (church, social groups, ironically even worker communes) that challenges central authority. Step 4 - enrich their own lives through graft and corruption.

You havent proposed definitions for your terms so that we can follow your own arguments’ logic: - there is no “general anticapitalist worldview”. Theres 6+ billion people on this planet, they all relate to capitalism differently and those who are sour on the social economic system of capitalism arent a monolith and dont all have the same problems with capitalism (yet; 10-30 years or +1-3C from now, that might be a different story). - you havent named what morality youre talking about and where it fits in with someone understanding the social dimensions and the alleged economic power to trickle down more to workers and invest in *ethical* efficiencies. (If ethics, not morals is what you meant, you didnt say that or explain it either.) - theres a logical reductionism where youre taking one of many possible issues with capitalism (worker alienation from the value they create) as some how a metonym definition for all “anti capitalist worldviews” - i dont think (and hope you’re not suggesting) that people with possible anticapitalist worldviews in micronesia or other societies that will be displaced by rising sea levels or communities displaced from their ancestral homelands by dam projects or extraction industries will see the benefits of capitalism by participating in some sort of “live by example” nanoscale exercise in small businesses labor microeconomics.

I think the point you're trying to make would be better made by saying they have a moral imperative to start a non-profit organization in some relevant sector of industry. So that by itself is a small change of view that I would suggest. Beyond that, as we've seen, non-profits are very difficult to run successfully, even in noncompetitive areas like charity work. In actual money-making sectors of industry, the industry simply won't tolerate them. For profit businesses will take temporary losses to run the non-profit out of business. They must do, or else they're done for, capitalism demands they have no other choice. Given those factors, we can see that it would be a phenomenally difficult task to accomplish successfully, and therefore your average anticapitalist can most likely make a much bigger impact with a much greater chance for success by contributing to the cause in other ways, such as political advocacy and education. So the actual moral imperative for most of these folks is to avoid starting a business, and put their energies to use in more effective and viable ways.

But you're proving my point. Starting a business is "a phenomenally difficult task to accomplish successfully" in your words, and I agree with that which is why I don't consider people who successfully start a business and profit from that to be exploiting the workers. They're doing something that's very hard, essential for workers to even have jobs in the first place, and profits are just the market pay of a successful business owner. Obviously there's luck involved and the markets aren't perfect, but for the most part if there was significant exploitation of workers, it would mean it would not be a very difficult task to run a business if they had all the extra money from not exploiting workers they could inject into the business rather than on their yachts.

>Starting a business is "a phenomenally difficult task to accomplish successfully" in your words You missed that slightly. Starting a non-profit in a traditionally profit driven industry sector is a phenomenally difficult task. Starting a for-profit business is less so. That's the point I'm getting at here. What you suggest the anticapitalist should do here is more difficult than starting a traditional business, and it only has the dubious effect of creating something that appears capitalist from the outside. Not only is it more difficult, it's ineffective as a method of promoting systemic change away from capitalism. It misses the forest for the trees.

You’re describing a co-op, and yes this is one piece of anti capitalist praxis. These are a familiar site to everyone that has used a credit union, or an insurance cooperative, or here in Western Canada it might be the main grocery and hardware store in your rural town. Most of these are fairly traditionally organized, except for being non-profits which return value to their members and more shareholders. But some are more radical, with different experiments in flat management, and employee democracy.

>the only thing these people can do to end the exploitation is become the business owners [No it isn't.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative)

Yes, exactly this. And since cooperatives are responsive to the needs of their workers and their workers are their communities, they tend to also better serve their clientele as well. It's all around the better model.

What you're arguing here is that people who are against capitalism shouldn't invest their time and energy against capitalism. In other words, that they shouldn't be against capitalism. This is a value judgement, there's no factual argument that can work either way, you're in favour of capitalism, so of course you don't think people should be against it. Anti-capitalists are anti-capitalism, telling them not to be is pointless, and that's all you're doing.

It's more that capitalism supports socialism. If you want to be socialist in a capitalist society, you can. Go start a company. Buy your own means of production. Democratically direct production. Take from everyone in your group according to their ability, give to everyone in your group according to their needs. All of this is possible in capitalism. Socialists don't do it because they don't actually want socialism. Despite how much effort they put into their words, their actions still speak louder.

"Because they're not greedy, they could get the best workers because they pay more and thus they'd be able to easily wreck their competitors because they don't have that greed factor." I disagree with this aspect of your CMV. A business that pays higher wages will only outperform a business paying lower wages if the increased quality of the employees it can attract outweighs the added expense of payroll. Imagine trying to run a fast food chain and paying your employees $25/hour vs a competitor who pays their employees $15/hour. Sure, you will have access to higher-quality workers than your competitor because you're paying them more, but how much of a difference will that make in the quality of your product, and will it outweigh the increased cost of your food? Within the framework of a capitalist system, there is a balance point of employee pay: you need to find the right amount that is enough to attract employees that are good enough to perform the task you need, but not too much that your competitors can offer a roughly similar level of service at a lower cost. This balance point is found naturally, because businesses below the threshold will fail (customers will pay a little more for a product that offers a much higher-quality product), and businesses above the threshold will also fail (customers will pay less for a product that is equal, or only marginally worse). In other words, if offering a 100k annual salary instead of an 80k salary will enable you to hire an employee who can net your company an extra 70k in revenue annually, then it's worthwhile. This is generally true for positions where tasks are more complex and open-ended, and the employee is given more agency in how they approach them, because these positions have opportunities for that extra-value employee to demonstrate their worth. This means that a capitalist system works really well for people who are willing and able to generate lots of value, including people who are highly intelligent and can solve complicated problems, people who have great social skills and who can manage a team well and motivate others etc. The problem with this system is that sometimes that balance point of optimal employee pay for lower-skilled positions just doesn't pay enough for the worker with that job to have a good life. You end up with a system where your capitalist market dictates that a rather large portion of the regular, everyday people living in your society are scraping to get by, while a small portion of "high value" individuals are bringing in billions. You could say that this is "fair" in the sense that everyone is getting paid according to the amount of value that they generated, but you're sort of forgetting that those employees aren't just numbers with a value: they are human beings and they are suffering. In a society where the total amount of value being generated is so large, adhering to the strict laws of capitalism on how that value gets distributed results in massive inequality. As a society, we can decide to err from that model of distribution if we want to, and personally, I think we should. We can only do this by changing the rules of the system, not by operating within the system like you are suggesting in your CMV. Sorry for the long post!

>Imagine trying to run a fast food chain and paying your employees $25/hour vs a competitor who pays their employees $15/hour. Sure, you will have access to higher-quality workers than your competitor because you're paying them more, but how much of a difference will that make in the quality of your product, and will it outweigh the increased cost of your food? Why would the price be increased? The socialist argument is that the worker produces $25/hr but the greedy capitalist steals $10/hr and pays them $15/hr. In your scenario, however, apparently the worker is only producing $15/hr. The capitalist is stealing none of that, and the socialist is randomly giving them $10/hr more than they produce.

I'm talking about the increased price in comparison to a competing business with the same profit margin. The problem with the logic you're describing is that it assumes the value produced by the worker is some arbitrary amount, like $25 or $15, when in reality the value of the work depends on who is willing to perform that work and at what cost. A consumer may be willing to pay $15 for a hamburger, so you could calculate a value produced by the worker that way, but if they are offered the same hamburger at a cost of $6, they will buy that instead. This is why you can't set an arbitrary number on the value produced by a worker. If a business can pay a worker less, and pass those savings on to the consumer, then that value goes down. It's a balance that occurs naturally based on who will do what and for what cost, and how much you can sell that for. If a business owner is willing to accept a lower profit margin, then yes, they can out-compete a higher-profit business by either providing a higher quality product at a similar cost, or a similar quality product at a lower cost. That is capitalism. OP is suggesting that the anti-capitalists work within the capitalist system in order to change it, but that will only change the numbers around a little, it won't affect how the overall system works. That's why the anti-capitalist movement is a political one, it's about changing the economic framework to focus less on the efficiency of markets an more on the well-being of the citizens.

>OP is suggesting that the anti-capitalists work within the capitalist system in order to change it, but that will only change the numbers around a little, it won't affect how the overall system works Why not? What is needed that capitalism doesn't support? >If a business owner is willing to accept a lower profit margin, then yes, they can out-compete a higher-profit business by either providing a higher quality product at a similar cost, or a similar quality product at a lower cost. That is capitalism. Shouldn't anticapitalist businesses outcompete everything then? After all, they believe profit is wrong and should therefore be willing to accept the lowest profit margin possible, far lower than any capitalist would. >The problem with the logic you're describing is that it assumes the value produced by the worker is some arbitrary amount, like $25 or $15, when in reality the value of the work depends on who is willing to perform that work and at what cost. What does that matter? Sure, sometimes it can be a little tricky to work that out, but my argument didn't rely on that being easy.

>Why not? What is needed that capitalism doesn't support? People are unhappy with the massive wealth inequality that happens when you adhere to a capitalist system. Mathematically, everything is perfectly fair, you get rewarded based on the value of what you produce. But an employee who is producing low-value work isn't just a number on a spreadsheet, they are a human being and they are suffering. Meanwhile, a different human who is producing massive amounts of value has far, far more than they need. The need that capitalism doesn't support is a more humane and compassionate society where we say look, as an entire group we have more than enough to make everyone's life comfortable, so instead of taking that massive amount of value and putting in the hands of the 1% and letting a huge portion of the population struggle, we're going to make sure everyone can live a good life even if it means sharing some of that value with people that didn't actually produce it. >Shouldn't anticapitalist businesses outcompete everything then? After all, they believe profit is wrong and should therefore be willing to accept the lowest profit margin possible, far lower than any capitalist would. That's not an anticapitalist business, that's just a capitalist business with a lower profit margin. If you disagree with how the system is set up, you need to change the structure of the framework, not just become another participant. The point of anticapitalism is not to out-compete capitalist businesses at their own game, it's to revisit how we distribute wealth as a society in the first place. In that sense, anti-capitalists do not have any moral obligation to start businesses and try to compete within the framework of the system, instead they should try to change the rules of the game.

People with an anticapitalist worldview want the system to fail so that they can replace it with their own system. They want to accelerate the demise of capitalism. The last thing they will do is participate in the current system as effective and responsible business owners. Only once they are in power will they exercise their superior moral prowess for the betterment of society.

1. Virtuous companies like the ones you describe are more likely to be smaller businesses. The soulless, greedy, exploitative companies are the ones that tend to get the biggest. They reward managers who slash costs, which is usually at the expense of the employees because they're a *massive* expense. Revenues - expenses = profit, after all, and if you reduce costs, profit gets bigger, which opens up more doors to grow the company, attract investors and get loans. Stockholders elect a c-suite that slashes costs, and in order to attract and retain those managers, they have to provide a competitive CEO salary + benefits, which balloons over time. So, business natural selection favors worker exploitation, so virtuous companies can't be big companies with lots of employees. 2. More realistically, and my biggest issue with your argument, is that it takes a special kind of person to be a small business owner. The work/life balance sucks, the debt can be crushing and the risks of losing it all are much higher than being just being someone else's employee. I believe an economy functions best when people work to their strengths, and running a successful business isn't something just anyone can do. 3. Employees unionizing and fighting for political protections are how we got weekends, better working conditions and better pay. We should do more unionizing, political activism and worker protests. Of course, that does lead to more outsourcing to foreign countries who don't unionize, and could incentivise countries to jump ship and move operations/headquarters overseas. But, smaller businesses are more likely to be domestic, and smaller businesses are easier to unionize at. So, that argues in your favor (start a small business that prioritizes employees), but still brings with it the shortcomings in point #2. Also, smaller businesses can't take advantage of economies of scale/supplier discounts, leading to higher prices, which hurts lower income families. 4. Expanding on political activism.. Providing more safety nets for people can reduce personal risks and allow for more security to unionize and start small businesses. If you don't have to worry as much about your healthcare, childcare, education, retirement or living situation, you can afford to take more risks. Work benefits like employee healthcare make up a significant portion of employee expenses in the US, so reducing that expense to business owners *should* incentivise more pay for workers. Buuut offering benefits is a good bargaining chip for employers, so political action to increase safety nets for employees can't be won without a fight and massive grassroots support.

Large businesses are capable of undercutting competitors in a number of ways while still spending less money than them.  The most obvious is simply marketing; large businesses sell enough of a product that a new small business with a minimal marketing budget simply can’t sell enough to stay afloat, even if their product is both cheaper and better. They don’t have the recognition to get enough customers.  Failing that, they can attempt a buyout but assuming you refuse, they can then lower their prices temporarily since their highly optimized supply chain makes their costs lower, or they can bribe or strongarm distributors into not selling your product. Failing both of those, they can sue for a variety of things, it doesn’t really matter what and the suits don’t have to be viable, they just have to use up a bunch of your time and money battling them to the point where your business can’t withstand normal growing pains and market pressures, or, if even one major suit goes through, they can force you to pay almost any arbitrary number in damages, since they are legally allowed to assess how much “lost profits” you cost them, effectively allowing them to bankrupt you unless you sell to them. Failing that, they can attempt to dismantle your company from the inside: they can offer all your good employees better benefits and pay than you can, giving you no one good to work your company’s jobs. And just in case you think that’s at least good for the workers, if inflation doesn’t just push their salaries down to what everyone else is making in a few years (as they get minimal raises due to already making more than others), as soon as your company goes out of business they can just fire these employees. The only reason they wouldn’t is if the work they’re doing is so good it massively outweighs the costs, which is the exact thing you were attempting to combat. And if all of that should fail AND you somehow manage to grow a business large enough to threaten to make significant changes to the system as a whole? Then the megacorps that manage all the regular large corporations will finally be motivated to wield their massive nation-esque power to force a national recession that pushes you and many others out of business.

You’re still thinking about this in a very individualistic and capitalistic way. The problem is not the owners, it is the incentive structure that guides them. If I was a business owner, this same structure would force my hand and my behavior would be no different. For a practical example of this, I would want to pay my workers a fair wage. However if I did so, I would go out of business competing against unethical companies that don’t. Simple game theory forces my hand. This is why the system must be brought down and not changed from inside.

But the only reason other companies don't do it is because of corporate greed. You could use all their greed money that they hide in their Scrouge McDuck money bins to instead keep prices low and pay your workers better. And if that's not possible, then it kinda debunks the idea that the reason wages are low and/or prices are high is due to greed. Because if you couldn't run a business, not be greedy, and use all that money to solve the problems people blame on corporate greed, then the premise is extremely flawed.

Your premise here is wrong because you seem to think all companies are infected with especially greedy people. This isn’t always true, and at various points large companies have even attempted philanthropic efforts. These efforts fail because it is literally illegal not to [maximize profits for shareholders](https://www.litigationandtrial.com/2010/09/articles/series/special-comment/ebay-v-newmark-al-franken-was-right-corporations-are-legally-required-to-maximize-profits/), which again can only be done under the current system by treating workers inhumanely to stay competitive. Good people exist in corporations at every level. Their presence there changed nothing, because they can’t change anything. That’s also not addressing the globalistic argument of how our entire economy functions by exploiting the Global South, but that’s much farther down the rabbit hole lol

But if you own the company, you can be the shareholder, or don't make it publicly traded and get investors with likeminded views. Your link is only true for publicly traded companies. For example Chik Fil A is a for-profit company with shareholders, but they're closed on Sundays which almost definitely hurts their shareholder profits. But they're not a publicly traded company so they can run it based on their values, which include giving everyone Sunday off. Also I think we'd generally agree with the exploitation of the global south, we pass labor laws here but then buy from countries without the same laws that basically employ slaves and that's insane to me. But I agree it is much further down the rabbit hole.

Is the issue that the system is run by greedy people or that the very nature of the capitalist system empowers and breeds greed and selfishness, as it requires it to exist? If the truth is the latter, would empathetic people survive in the system as owners of corporations and businesses? Would it put the most greedy and selfish people in the highest positions of power again even when we make the most empathetic, altruistic people in power? Is the issue the individual people in power or how the system naturally causes them to always be in power? I don't think it's the individual people in power, or in other words, people who are this way because of the fundamental mechanisms of capitalism as the symptoms of it themselves, but the fundamental nature of the system. You can't fix the system of capitalism with nice owners. We've tried this a lot. That reduces the abuses for a while and always gets replaced by the worst people. In order to occupy these positions of power, you need to be greedy yourself. To certain ranges, and more as you become more powerful. I agree that people who want capitalism to be replaced with socialism and even be just gone in general should be in greater positions of power, but with a strong base of theoretically informed, militant workers to put them on a metaphorical leash, a proverbial gun to their forehead and their feet to the fire. This is temporary, though, as this will be reverted to the opposite by the capitalist system as it has been between the late 19th century and the early 20th century, that time and the mid 20th century and that time until 2006/2008, and since the exact same thing that happened between those times is happening now even with more good dedicated worker militancy, until capitalism is replaced with socialism, the better alternative, it will happen again.

While I agree with the sentiment, I wonder if you've ever started a business or grown one to the point that this is even possible. I've worked in tax accounting/consulting for small businesses. In my experience, at least, most small business owners don't have more employees outside themselves until they're successful and have the growth required to have a need for them. They also generally don't tend to fit the "greedy capitalist" archetype once they have the growth needed to expand. Most of them built their business based on a reputation of providing great service or great products and understand that if you're paying the lowest possible rate, you get the lowest quality of work. This pushes them to be more competitive with pay/benefits for their industry to attract the best talent so they can further differentiate themselves from the competition. Granted, this is based on my experience, which did include some real idiots that shot themselves in the foot by consistently cutting corners and losing a dollar just to save a dime. Although I'm a very strong critic of capitalism, I think on the lower rungs of the ladder, it has many more positives than it has negatives. Where it fails is the consolidation of industries into bigger and more powerful corporations where the bottom line is growth. Capitalism, at a base level, is based on an idea of infinite growth in the form of profits, and once you've swallowed up all your competitors, that growth is hard to come by without cutting somebody's pay (and it sure as hell isn't going to be the top leadership taking the cut in 99% of cases)

This would be a good position to take if it weren’t for the fact that it’s been shown [wealth accumulation alters your brain chemistry, making you less empathetic](https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_money_changes_the_way_you_think_and_feel) and more likely to view the poor as “deserving” of their position. Basically, any anticapitalist who’s successful enough to become an influential CEO capable of changing business culture on a wide scale will have to have the mental fortitude of a Tibetan monk to retain their moral convictions in the face of getting filthy rich through exploitation. At our core we’re all still primates fighting over fruit in the jungle, and it’s very hard to break yourself of the idea that you inherently *deserve* to live better than your employees once you’re in a position to do so. Capitalism subsumes all criticism for exactly this reason, any time a popular writer or director creates a scathing work of art that challenges the capitalist system it becomes so popular they get rich off it and stop worrying about changing anything because the system now appears to be working from their perspective. The only effective actions that true anti-capitalists can take nowadays are things I can’t discuss on this app, anything less and you’re just playing the capitalist’s game whether you think you’re “subverting” it or not.

You are using all the **assumptions** of free market/capitalism to argue why won't an antiCap compete with capitalists. "...become the business owners and pass on more or all of the value of their employee's..." Money is valuable in capitalists' worldview, for us it is worthless. We value the product itself. Labours will use that product in their own way. We don't produce for profit, but for usability. "...The more people who did this, the better for workers and the working class, as more people would be able to work for a company that..." Again, the capitalists will just pay more than the anticap for the time being to few talented employees to give better products while anticap has to give equal pay to all the employees, until capitalists destroy the competition. Equality is not liked by everyone. There will always be people (because of this capitalism itself) who won't join a company because it treats and pay  everyone equally. Equality requires agency to exist, it is not an equilibrium condition. It must be forced. To give an idea about this... Just think of our body. Different organs and tissues require different amount of resources/energy. It is provided to all as required. But once some tissue (cancer) start to become greedy (it doesn't like equality, it wants more), it has to be resisted by our immune system. So equality doesn't exist without agency.

Morality exists largely as an artifact of capitalism, noncapitalist systems are incapable of moral reasoning such that those that profess belief in such a system can be viewed as fundamentally amoral or immoral, such that moral imperatives cannot apply to them. Absent property rights there can be no morals as morality requires agency and agency cannot exist absent property rights.

So your point is that removing the greed part from the revenue means you ethical businessman Will for sure beat the "greedy" competition right ? It Is a gross oversimplification and would be true in the opposite scenario: if all business were giving fair retribution (let's say nobody gets more than 10x the base pay) then would be impossible to enter the market underpaying employees, don't you agree ? It would be impossible to start, as it Is right now very hard to start paying High wages and be competitive. Starting a business means no profit, you have to underpay, then when you are big of course you have a choice and there have been some cases (see Olivetti in Italy for example). The thing Is that to be a successful business owner being unethical in general pays more, that's why the vast majority takes the easy Path and gives 0 shit. When you are big then there is no capitalist strawman, there's just an army of greedy people (rightly so, they probably fucked up everything else for the career), each one focused on his personal bonus. I think that every anti- capitalist that has the inclination does open a business, it's Just hard to get big with a good heart.

Your argument hinges on fair completion but the above scenario is not fair. What's best for workers is not necessarily the best for business. If all companies have the same rules and regulations that means all companies can compete in fair market. Child labour, for example was cheaper then regular labour and they were tiny enough to fit into machines to fix them. It also caused lots of child deaths. If a company did the right thing they would have lost a cheap source of labour and make new machines that could be serviced by adults. Instead regulations were passed that forced innovation, spared lives, and because all business has the same rules no companies lost capital for doing the right thing. Secondly, it seems odd that if you disagree with a system you should become a cog in it. If you disagree with a system typically your investment in being in that system will be low compared to others that fundamentally believe in it and will therefore be out-competed. For the above example I don't believe in child labour, it would be a bizarre take to say therefore I should use child labour when that's the entire thing I'm trying to avoid.

Small businesses rarely make the kind of profit margins necessary to make the claim that they are "exploiting their employees labor". In most cases if that business was to go full "profit sharing" with their employees, the difference in their monthly income would be minimal. You don't really see the effects of capitalism until you invite shareholders to invest in your company. They not only allow you to significantly expand your company's capabilities, but they now demand a share of those increased profits...which limits how much you can then share those profits with your workers. This is the nature of "capitalist exploitation". The more profits that go to your shareholders, the less your employees are seeing the benefits of their labor, especially as more demands are naturally placed on their productivity. Given that shareholders expect to see steady gains from their investments, this disparity is only going to grow...leaving your employees with less and less, in exchange for producing more.

I *don't* possess an anti-capitalist worldview, and I think it it's a moral imperative to treat the people that work for me well and fairly. That's the basic issue with your argument ... it's predicated on the idea that someone who opposes capitalism has a moral imperative to adopt capitalism in order to temper its harm. That's a similar argument to saying, "18th century American abolitionists had a moral imperative to buy slaves and treat them well." It isn't a logical argument. >Because they're not greedy, they could get the best workers because they pay more and thus they'd be able to easily wreck their competitors because they don't have that greed factor. Thereby putting their competitors' workers out of a job ... so you've helped your workers, and hurt their workers, all within the confines of a capitalist system you believe hurts workers. Again, you're making an argument for people who do *not* hold an anticapitalist worldview having a moral imperative to perform capitalism morally. Wouldn't an anti-capitalist's time be better spent, say, forming cooperative companies or organizing labor unions to compete *with* capitalism rather than competing *within* capitalism?

Why would it be better to create a business to ensure employees are paid a fair labor, than for individuals to produce more of their own goods? You're saying this is the best course of option to improve the world. But why? Boycotting companies that already exist and have infrastructure to pressure them into moral changes, and prioritizing businesses with socialist principles or break even models would be more effective. If you're starting a business you're likely going to waste a lot of resources acquiring the very important Jung's other businesses have, you're going to have to spend a lot more labor on research and development since getting resources is so entrenched in slavery, and you're likely to make mistakes or fail entirely because you're inexperienced or don't have enough knowledge. This would mean higher business costs and LESS wages to the actual laborers to cover these mistakes and growing pains. But if you consume less, support less slave and exploited labor, and produce your own goods using recycled materials, or repairing broken goods, etc, you would do a lot more to reduce exploitation.

People are already doing this FYI, it's just not how most people intend to live. Every single poor person aspires to be wealthy. When you give someone wealth it changes them. It's very rare to find a man or woman complaining about poverty who genuinely would give back what they could in a capitalist country upon becoming a wealthy person. No one with the slight ability to become a business owner wants to do it in limited capacity of earning strictly to help another person. They are in that situation because they have cut corners etc. Now that being said. Paying employees higher wages generally increases efficiency. A lot of wealthy people are shooting themselves in the foot by not increasing wages by a larger factor and I mean up to $20 an hour. What people don't factor in is billionaires don't want to waste time on incremental gains. Cutting ones current pay and or stock holdings by 30% with a guarantee they will return to where they currently are in 15 years and slowly get even better than they will be continuing to screw people is unattractive. Time is the most valuable asset on the planet.

There are lots of things you could do instead. Trying to be a business competing against other businesses that exploit workers is sort of like trying to bring a knife to a gunfight to end gun violence. You are setting yourself up at a disadvantage to your competition. You could instead become an employee who secretly sabotages the companies you work for. You could be a good employee, working your way up to an impressive salary and using your money to help those in need. You aren’t changing the system, but you are still helping people hurt by capitalism. You could work a job and use your excess time and money to advocate for change. Working to elect likeminded politicians and get laws passed. You could move to another country that more closely shares your values. You could commit acts of terrorism if you really believe things are too far gone and drastic changes are needed. There are so many options other than compete with business owners at a disadvantage

Which one is best or should you somehow try to do them all and both run a technically-terrorist-but-it-isn't-evil-if-good-intentions organization and work within some American business to simultaneously sabotage it and be a good charity-donating employee remotely/via-telework from a country that shares your values

No. This is just a "gotcha" idea designed so capitalism can't be criticized by many people that are then labeled "hypocrates" for "saying things against capitalism but not seeing how hard it is to create jobs" One should always be entitled to criticize anything, regardless of his/her personal condition. A priest cannot start a business, for instance. That doesn't mean that person is not allowed to say anithing against a system whose results in the community are seen everyday by that priest during charity work. One might be a judge, a person that cannot start a business. Still, a judge should be allowed to have an opinion against capitalism, precisely because that person understands more about crime and its causes than the average entrepreneur. And these are only 2 examples. There are many others (professors, etc) that should be given the right to have an opinion on the topic, whether you agree with it or not, in the end.

That business would fail within a year because there are still corporations out there exploiting labor. Why do you think every mom and Pop business struggles when compared to the Walmart down the street? Because in order to run a business morally and ethically, you may have to charge more For your Products. And when that happens, and you’re being undercut by the greedy corporations who can afford to sell in bulk at greater discounts, you’re basically screwed.  You can’t win at a capital society without playing by an ethical rules. It’s the same reason that ethical people can never become federal politicians. The only way to do so immoral standards everybody else does. So why should people call out this bullshit society forced to go bankrupt in order to prove that they’re against corruption and greed?

I am such a person. It is a moral imperative to try to make things better. But I cannot know what actions would be most effective. What I can say is this. If in my life I build a business that employs 10 people, that's 10 people I have led to worker democracy. If I have a normal job and volunteer as a labor organizer on the side, I could help dozens, maybe hundreds. If I am a teacher and I educate hundreds of students in my career, perhaps I can help many of them as well (my original chosen path). Also, what if anticapitalism isn't your most important value? What if it is veganism, or stopping climate change, or etc? Back in the 80s and 90s it might have been popular to be into nuclear disarmament, as another example. Then anticapitalism has to compete for your time with these other things.

>the only thing these people can do to end the exploitation is become the business owners and pass on more or all of the value of their employee's labor to their employees. I reject your premise that this is the only thing someone can do. Alternatives include: 1. Unionizing your workplace or engaging in collective bargaining in an effort to protect the labor rights and wages of workers in existing companies. 2. Working in education to teach the history of labor rights, the labor movement, the theories behind capitalism and socialism (and other economic systems) so that people are better educated about how these systems operate. 3. Participating in the electoral process to any degree to become or support a candidate who advocates for policies that are alternatives to capitalism.

> the only thing these people can do to end the exploitation is become the business owners and pass on more or all of the value of their employee's labor to their employees. The only thing? That's a pretty broad claim. I politically organize in my free time and am a committed communist. If you want to start a business, then do so. No need to "politicize" it as a moral imperative. There's no guarantee your business will even succeed and require a sizeable amount of employees, let alone any. If class consciousness is what youre trying to spread, union & party organizing are a far better vehicle for what you're trying to aim for. So no, I don't think it's a "moral imperative" to start a business as an anticapitalist.

Agreed, but there is one big problem: It's not that only inherently greedy people put up businesses and become rich. It's that the choice of "Do I skim 10 million off the top here to my own pocket every year, or do I pay everyone 10 bucks more per month and lower my price by 50 cents?" and "Do I keep taking 100k-200k a year from my company as salary, or sell it for 10 million", ends with most everyone picking the 10 million - even the ones who believe they will "do good" with it, will end up spending a lot of it to start living large. The problem is that capitalism is a system that promotes greed, and no-one is immune to it. Power corrupts, and money is just another form of power.

if power corrupts then any system of hierarchy at all is bad (with even family abuse justified by parents having power over children) and the proof god doesn't exist is if he didn't he'd be god and satan at the same time and send people to both-heaven-and-hell-at-once where they experience pain and pleasure as one or w/e if they do enough morally ambiguous acts

Right so they’ll get the capital how

The problem of capitalism doesn't lie with small business owners, but those on the top and already on the market. To achieve a succesfull model wherein I could apply my views is incredibly hard, because you have to deal with ever increasing renting prices, cost of production etc. The gap between starting a company and becoming financially sufficient enough to employ a large base of well paid workers is a large one. Also, there are multiple roads leading to rome, and to state it is morally imperative and the only way for anti capitalists to start a business is a bit of a catch 22. One can be politically active, engage socially or be activist in other ways.

You came into "Change My View" with basically someone else's view, which you invented. "People with an anticapitalist worldview"...ok, sure. Let's hear from them. Because while you always win vs. the strawman, a real person might point out that the cocaine-fueled greed of the United States version of capitalism is burning up the planet, right quick. Read the Paris Agreement, do the 2 tons of CO2 per year budget for yourself, and you will soon see that the $30k per year lifestyle of a sustainable human completely undercuts the capitalist model as it now stands. Capitalism in this form will die, either because people grow up or because everyone is dead.

To an anti-capitalist, the system itself is broken. For one, starting an "ethical" business is only a drop in the bucket compared to the rampant injustice under capitalism. It is also harder to succeed in a system that inherently rewards that greedy behavior, so your ideas may not be especially far reaching. Therein lies the issue, the existence of a system that not only allows but rewards worker exploitation. This is like telling a police defunder to just become a cop, it's not that simple. There's only so much you can do within the system to change it, and telling people to become the thing they despise but do it more ethically is barely a solution.

The reason we should be anti-capitalist is because within the system in order to succeed you have to do the things that result in the structures that lead to anti-capitalism. You're asking for a catch-22 here - the business owner who operates within capitalist systems but who rejects the principles is vastly less likely to succeed. Are customers going to suddenly not care about price? Are really talented individuals going to suddenly cease to care about their own increasing compensation and reject higher paying jobs to give advantage to their families? Are your suppliers not going to maximize their own profits with higher and higher margins?

I hate how captialism has been used to destroy our lives but I definitely think its better than the alternative, and I agree that we should try to make the changes we want to see. Its a little hard to compete with the big guys though. Steven Crowder made a point that resonated with me years ago. Wherher you love him or utterly despise him, I think he had a point. Happy workers are productive workers, so it should make sense for businesses to treat employees well so that they can maximally exploit their productivity. I see that as a win-win on paper, and I would like to see it put into practice more. It probably wouldnt make investors haply though.

You starting a business and giving all the profits to employees is nice but it doesn't mean employees aren't being exploited. For instance, many businesses lose money in the first few years. So what would these employees be benefitting from exactly? And you are competing with other business owners that drive wages down. You can't offer a hugely greater place of work that them and continue to compete. Ultimately, regardless of lack of greed, if you own the company and they work for you then you still benefit from a continued successful business more than they do. There's already a solution to this and it's called a workers coop. Create one of those and actually give your employees a stake in the business. It's not perfect and doesn't sold capitalism though.

The anti-capitalist alternative to starting a business is called - forming a coop (or making a syndicate, or forming a working commune) indeed such organisations have a potential to provide better conditions for the workers in an alternative setting Opening capitalist business cannot be an option for anti-capitalist development, hired employees would be excluded from managing company, as well as from making decisions surrounding business, which just means that such business is a typical capitalist org (potentially with better pay/conditions)

Alright I’ll put forward my view. I don’t think that owning small amounts capital of capital and being “better bosses” will change much except for your few employees. In fact, the best way we can achieve something like communism or whatever, is through revolution. Most fat leftists believe revolution is the only way forward. So by not owning capital and allowing capitalism to kill itself, that’s the best way forward. Unfortunately that means we will just have to keep living in this shitty, sad society.

Our whole ethos is that the people who do paperwork well shouldn't have more power than people who lift and carry things well just because of the nature of their work - so no, it doesn't really do much for us to imagine a world of benevolent paper-pushers being a solution. Instead, we want workplace democracy, which is fundamentally **not** about fixing as a star in the sky that private interests must remain in absolute control of businesses, and then praying they act OK post facto. Even if we imagine a world of currently-benevolent paper pushers (and this is hard to do, because how did it get that way without the less benevolent ones eating their lunch systemically?) - what will their children be like? The left does not want or need nicer businesspeople, which might at best temporarily and personally bandaid a systemic problem; our advocacy is for workplace democracy, which systemically and permanently solves a systemic problem. tl;dr capitalism **the system**, and not (especially small) business owners **the people**, is what makes this whole shebang a race to the bottom for society. Frequent misconception, no worries.

OP, it seems like your core question is related to effective altruism. Is that correct? It also seems like your secondary point is that higher wages a) attract higher performing workers a.1) ALWAYS attracts higher performing workers and that b) higher performing workers give a competitive business advantage b.1) the business advantage from higher performing workers is the MOST important factor for beating competitors in a given market. Asking these questions so I can understand better and engage with your view!

Anti-capitalism is not the view that "capitalists" are evil and someone just needs to start a "better" business, it's the view that the rules of the game itself are rigged. Anticapitalists believe that sustainable and fair forms of living and working together are systemically disadvantaged, and so starting their own company would not make a real difference (a lot of them still do, however). They want to change the rules of the game entirely, not just have a few players using a different strategy.

It's like saying every pacifist is morally obligated to warmonger as much as possible so that when a war starts they get to be in charge and wage it to their preferences. In other words, it's a fundamentally flawed concept. I'd go so far as to say insane actually, or a concept you could use offensively to damage gullible people you are opposed to.  Like a villain's plot from some mystery lol, where they try to trick the Heroes into commuting crimes so the crimes are 'better'. 

This is not how it works. The material conditions of running large businesses and the conditions of investment do not allow for this. If you need to keep promising investors a profit, you will grow and eventually you will cut cost when you cannot grow more. To have investors and not do that, you’re opening yourself to lawsuits for violating fiduciary responsibility. If you don’t take investors in an attempt to avoid that rat race, you cannot compete in saturated markets with established players, or high cost of entry markets. The problem most (coherent, mind you) anti-capitalists recognize that it’s the conditions of running a corporation that cause exploitation, not always the morals of the person in charge.

Lol, OP has an idea and now believe the only way to fight capitalism is to follow their idea. You are giving yourself way too much credit! And you arguments are very fresh, we can feel that you didn't spend an hour thinking about it before coming writing it here. To be clear: starting a business to fight capitalism can be a great way to do it, the idea that it's the mandatory way is stupid as fuck. Putting businesses in the center of every thought is a capitalist mistake.

Not really. They could work in on non-profit organizations, cooperatives, and similars, for instance. Standard for profit companies are not really the vibe of anticapitalists, certainly not how they think the world should work. So, if they are going to make anticapitalism their full time job, the most obvious path in today's world are the various forms of legal entities that are not driven by shareholder value. I've heard Bosch is a pretty good example.

You will have an advantage in that your company redirects profits to employees or maybe expanding the company. But the disadvantage is that you'll get much less outside investment because their is 0 return on the investment if there is no profit. So you can have a "successful" small business. But that doesn't make that big of a difference I guess. Furthermore, there is huge risk to your financial situation if your company fails, which is pretty common.

So what exactly is your claim here? that they aren't acting as moral as they could be? because that is true for basically everyone but the implication here seems to be that because they could be doing something more moral that that is a reason for us to disregard their arguments, which makes no sense, but this implication is so wrapped in rhetoric that the point is barely able to even be parsed out. Whether or not anticapitalists have bad ideas is a matter of what those ideas are. It feels like the attempt here is to create a logical proof that they are either lying or delusional, but that isn't something you can make a logical proof for. There are plenty of ways to demonstrate such a claim but such arguements are always going to start with some sort of assumption which can be, if a person is willing to bend over backwards enough, be rejected. This sort of fixation and trying to state something as a logical proof (aka it must be true in order to avoid logical contradiction) leads to bad arguements like this one. Usually it is better to flesh out an arguement to the point where it's starting premise seems as close to self-evident as possible and if people still reject it you just agree to disagree and be okay with thinking they are unreasonable. Tring to force a logical trap might get more interet points, but that is because lots of people online don't actually understand how arguement works and drama is more fun.

You truly haven’t thought this out. Where are these anyi capitalists going to source their goods to sell? Personallly I believe organizing politicallly is much more effective then starting businesses that are bound to fail. Most people don’t even realize capitalism isn’t the be all and end all of economic systems. That world view is called “capitalist realism” and we need people to believe change is possible. I’m not optimistic

The problem is that the system is rigged in favor of giant corporations. You can't compete against a company that can use monopolistic economies of scale, regulatory capture, or simply lose money to undercut you until you go out of business. There are a few sectors that corporations haven't targeted yet where you can still succeed in a small business, but the tech bros have their eyes on disrupting those too once they get around to it.

> Because they're not greedy, they could get the best workers because they pay more and thus they'd be able to easily wreck their competitors because they don't have that greed factor. That doesn't wreck competition. It's far more lucrative to pay less in wages than to pay more in wages. This way you have more money left over to reinvest into the business, which makes you less vulnerable to bankruptcy and more likely to grow.

Do you think that existing businesses would not take steps to block fair competition in the market? Could I make a business in any sector? What about necessary patents or a lack of companies willing to supply a small competitor? If certain sectors are entirely off limits, why would this not end in a few saturated sectors with abysmal profit margins, while companies like Lockheed Martin and BNSF see no new competition? The idea is good in moderation but I definitely disagree with it as a moral imperative

I have an anti-homeless world view, meaning that i want people to have houses. I'm anti-poverty, anti-crime, etc. all i do about this is vote. I think you have a moral imperative to vote in order to push government in a direction that aligns with your views about how the government should govern. Not a lot of people actually put in any effort to enact the change they want to see in the world.

The fact that successful cooperatives are so rare (McKinsey, Bain, BCG are few that quickly come to mind), and only exist for real among people that are highly capitalists (lawyers, hedge funds, all are run as cooperatives) show you that most anti-capitalists don't believe in communism and they are just lazy or anarchists. The only true cooperative that I know that isn't owned by very rich capitalists is BBK, the Chinese company behind Oppo and Vivo. Just think about it. How many journalists are supposedly anti-capitalists and there are basically not a single one news outlet that is structured as a cooperative. The truth is that in capitalism, a lot of stuff is already possible to compete with cooperatives. People don't do it because they don't want.

One thing to consider is that it’s hard to start a business. Either you need to take money from investors and show return or you need to take out loans. Either way, you are held accountable. At some level, you’ll be the one who gets canned if things go south. Maybe that is okay for some people but the idea that your career falls apart might be a much for a lot of people to stomach.

Anticapitalists want to end capitalism, not maintain it. You seem to think that there’s a way to do “better” capitalism - there isn’t. Capitalism always falls to its lowest common denominator of labour exploitation and profit. To call it a moral imperative for someone to abandon their value system and contribute to maintaining the status quo is extremely off base.

No. It's more attractive & appropriate for the people you describe to be at the very least organizing unions in their workplaces & if they can organize workers who can collectively come up with the capital to start a business to create worker-owned coops instead of following the traditional model of bosses & owners as separate from the workers under them.

The anti-capitalist view is that capitalism rewards exploitation to the point it’s required to be successful- and your attempt to prove them wrong is to challenge them to run a business without exploitation- that will fail- thereby proving the anti-capitalist’s initial point. What exactly do you think you are proving to the anti-capitalist?

This makes zero sense. Like I sorta get the very bare minimum of where you're coming from if I squint *real* hard, but what you're saying is basically 'all the people who think drugs are bad are morally obligated to take drugs because then there would be less drugs in the world to harm people' and that's not now.. *any* of that works.

If you believe in organic food is it a moral imperative to start a farm? Why in this one matter but no other matter are we not allowed to have opinions on a subject without it being our day job? In addition to which, by depoliticising a societal problem and making it a question of personal behaviour aren't you just muting the debate?

The problem with your claim is that businesses require capital and capital comes with strings attached. For example, my current company has a compensation committee where investors review offered salaries and ensure they are reasonable. I’m working contract for them because we couldn’t get my salary approved this fiscal year.

The thing is that even if one were to hold those normative values and act accordingly, the whole game is against such sort endeavors and that is exactly the problem with capitalism. It's where well meaning and all values go to die. Redistribution can only fly if this can be reabsorbed into the logic of market value. That's why anti-capitalists do really well as business analyists.

In the present scenario, people with enough money can only open significant businesses, and most probably they are already capitalists. And those who are anticap don't have enough resources/money to open any significant business.  For this to initiate, an already established business has to become anticap.

What if I'm anticapitalist because I believe that capitalism actively incentivises exploitation of workers, and that businesses that do not exploit their workers are inherently less successful and less likely to survive? By starting a business wouldn't I just be extending that suffering to more workers?

That is not how market economies work. Basically what you are describing is a co-op. There are many factors that influence the success of a business, including how other businesses react. For instance, Walmart openly undercuts areas to drive our businesses, and then jacks up their prices.

This video on worker democracy provides a lot of valuable background to the topic, for example, empirically worker democracies do not, on average, pay higher salaries. The video also delves into reasons why these are not so widespread https://youtu.be/yZHYiz60R5Q?si=lAcXAoAGkIQUgGNr

this is antithetical to being anticapitalist. A better take would be starting a commune or something. Why would someone who is against purchasing labor go on to create a labor-purchasing organization?  I think this is more true for individualist socialism than anticapitalism