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Socialism and capitalism-the two philosophies compared

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Socialism and capitalism–the two philosophies couldn’t be more apart. At least, that’s the common refrain.

But it isn’t so. Not really.

Truth is, as they are practiced, at their core, they are nearly identical.

Each promises that someone else will do the work.

They both have immense bodies of propaganda designed to convince those who produce that the greater part of the wealth created by the producer’s production actually belongs to someone else.

Both deny that they are bound by the laws of exchange. Those same principles that say when I go to the grocery store, I leave behind something of value equal to what I receive. Yet both capitalists and communists espouse systems whereby someone gets but is no longer required to give.

The biggest difference is not philosophy, but numbers. How many not working will be supported by those who bust their butts?

There’s the difference.

The modern capitalist does a better job of hiding the lack of exchange than does the socialist, but that is necessary. The socialist, when successful, has enlisted large portions of the population–and there is a great power in those numbers.

The capitalist–not such big numbers. To compensate, the capitalist starts out by entering into exchange, giving an investment for a share. But as quickly as possible, that share becomes complete control and lasts forever.

I’ve written before about the reality of a company–it consists primarily of the knowledge and production of those doing the work. Though it’s not an even division, some know more and produce more, some know and do less, there is still a proportionate share of ownership created each and every day, created and maintained by that good, knowledgeable production.

Nothing folds up a company faster than having all those involved with production, along with all the knowledge of production, walk away.

What is the value of a share of nothing?

What is the value of a share of a company that consists of hardware, buildings and such, but has no one left who knows what goes on in those buildings? Well, what will the buildings and stuff bring at auction? It’s not even a company. Just some stuff that might be valuable to those with the knowledge to use it to make another company.

Yet the modern capitalist will claim that because of money lent years ago, or centuries ago, that the “company” belongs to the capitalist. If great-great grandpa put a hundred bucks into ATT, great-great grandson doesn’t need to produce anything. He gets to siphon the profit and wealth from those doing the work.

Siphon the profit and wealth. Does that remind you of something?

It ought to. That is the driver behind socialism, communism, feudalism and monarchies, and is also key to such simpleminded political structures as dictatorships and totalitarian states.  Somebody wants a free ride and those of us creating products get to do the heavy lifting.

Socialism, having numbers on its side, doesn’t bother with any initial investment. You work, we take. Thank you very much. We’ll be back tomorrow for your next “contribution.”

Capitalism says, you work, we take–because there was at one point a contribution made to help enable the production. Where this morph’s over into a “you give, we take” scheme, is when time is entered into the equation.

If I give you a hundred bucks so that you can buy tools to make doodads, then I should get something in return. Absolutely–that is simple and fair exchange.

But do I own the company years later when you’re producing millions of doodads and selling them for a bundle? Is all that profit mine for my hundred buck investment? Your years of work, your reinvestment into goods and equipment, your accumulation of knowledge, your daily creation–but my hundred bucks?

At some point, the exchange created by the initial investment has been made trivial by the investments of time, effort, knowledge and production of those doing the work. How does one know that such a condition exists? Just have the knowledge and production fail to show up on Monday.

It’s like Vito saying, “Keep the money. But you owe me ‘favors’ for the rest of your life. And then your kids owe me favors. And their kids owe me too. And the kids after that right on out to the end of time.”

An investment should be paid back, and an obligation exists until it is. But dollars of investment can’t create eternal obligation. Eternal obligation–that’s slavery.

That’s something for nothing.

So you see, at their hearts, as they are practiced, socialism and capitalism are blood brothers.

The real difference is:  How many we have to carry on our backs.

The real question is:  How does your back feel?

Speaking of capitalism–what is a founder’s share?

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Speaking of capitalism, what about the situation where someone founds a company? Doesn’t just make an investment, but rolls up his sleeves and dives in?

Who owns that company?

Is the founder by rights an absolute dictator, sole heir to all profit and benefit?

No, not quite.

Ownership is still measured by contribution.

Let’s say that after years of work, hard work by everyone including the founder, that everyone but the founder walks away. It’s a mess, but the founder can create another company, right? If he’s been in there swinging, he’s got the knowledge–most of it, anyway. He can hire new people, train them, get things rolling again–but at how much effort, at how much lost profit, production, and customers?

That extra, the part that disappears with the people, is the least of what the former “employees” owned. The “owner” only owns what is left. That may be more. It may be less. It depends on the real contribution, on the amount of creation. But ownership of this thing called a company is shared.

How do we know that?

Because it went away when those creating it left.

So, even a sole founder is not so sole.

Very quickly ownership spreads out.

And it’s easy to understand.

After all, the creation of a company is the sum of many, many individual acts of creation. Most, nearly all, of those acts must be replayed every day to keep the company created. When a company is rebuilt, it’s a new company, created newly by new actions and new efforts.

What a founder does is enlist the creation of others–but he can never own their ability to create. That is unless one subscribes to slavery. That’s what slaveholders try to do–own someone’s ability to create, own all that someone does create.

Even then, it doesn’t last. Eventually the system collapses–slaves have very little stake in success.

Neither do employees who are denied their rights to ownership, denied the recognition and exchange demanded by their individual acts of creation.

Such companies eventually die.

That’s because the life leaves them.

It simply walks out the door.

Jobs overseas and parasites at home

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IBM was in the news recently for laying off more Americans and hiring more electronic migrants. Some writer pontificated that the workers had no right to complain.

They were just employees.

Such drivel, this idea that IBM owes the workers nothing. What IBM executives think they own, what the shareholders think they own, and what they actually own are two very different things.

It is very easy to calculate. Consider, tomorrow morning, no one employed by IBM, no one more than a few levels below vice-presidents, shows up for work? What happens the next day? Or the days after that?

What’s left? Aside from computer rooms, network cables, empty factories and panicked clients? Whatever it is, it’s worth only a small fraction of the current share price.

That’s not what Wall Street wants to hear. It’s not what the IBM board wants to hear. And it’s not what the executives at IBM want to hear.

But there it is. Take away the “employees” and the company ceases to exist.

A company is not a thing like a kitchen chair or a lawn ornament. The greatest part of most enterprises is intangible. It is the skills, the knowledge, the drive, the production, the creation, and the work. That intangible wholly owned by those disdainfully known as employees.

That label hides a truth, for they are not employees nor even workers, but producers. Even better, creators. They create the company and do it each day by walking in the door and bringing the company to life.

So I ask again: What is left if the producers leave IBM? If the producers don’t producer? If the creators don’t create? If they walk away?

A corpse. That’s what you call a body when the life is gone. And then you bury the thing.

A century ago, Carnegie and his ilk fought a war to deprive those who create from the rewards of their creation. Unfortunately, Carnegie won. Modern capitalism was born. Carnegie’s minions wrote the history books. His cultural descendants keep the lie alive.

Perhaps it was inevitable. The monarchies had fallen. Slavery was out of fashion. And the world had room for only so many warlords. The inveterate parasites had to find another way to feed. The key for all of them is, and always has been, to find a way to take from those who create and give to those who, well, don’t create.

Does that seem harsh? Perhaps. But there remain these questions:

What is a company?

And if it disappears when the producers stop and the creators cease, then how can someone else possibly own it?

Outsourcing insanity

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When it comes to this outsourcing insanity, it doesn’t just stop with computer professionals. Any job using computers is at risk: Accounting. Order taking. Computerized factory floor. Even debt collection.

How appropriate–after a corporation electronically brings in a migrant to do your job, they’ll electronically bring in another to harass you as you go broke.

It is such a drain on our economy that any sane person has to ask: Why do we have to let those jobs go?

Of course, we don’t. But large corporations want it. It gives them an advantage over small companies. They can sell to Americans but not hire Americans. These corporations pay enough in campaign bribes to get their way–and the correct term is bribes. The campaign money comes with strings even if the Supreme Court can’t see it, yet any fool outside the Court’s ivory tower knows that what looks, works and stinks like a bribe, is a bribe. Those bribes grease the way for multinational conglomerates that prefer to ignore national boundaries.

Yet the jobs exist. The jobs are here. Americans could be doing them.

So there’s no law.

It’s our border. These are our jobs.

We can make a law.

Our politicians may think that they work for the multinationals ninety-nine percent of the time, but they still need our votes, even if it’s only once every few years. As a matter of fact, they need our votes this year.

Maybe our politicians have forgotten that?

Maybe we should remind them?

A footnote for 2020:  One might get the impression that I don’t like immigrants or foreigners. I hope not. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are people, just like you and me. I’ve trained and work with any number of people working in India, as well as worked and work with lots of immigrants.  Though I resented the company firing Americans to hire in a foreign country, I still found and do find I like my Indian compatriots. Today, of course, after driving so many Americans out of Information Systems, the mostly likely candidate for a job in America is an immigrant.  I have some Indian friends who have become citizens and now live with the threat of their job going overseas.  So at least the corporate hate for jobs in America applies to everyone in America.

It’s not the people in the jobs.  It’s the destruction of the American economy as a substitute for knowing how to run a business that gripes me.

This, I think, is the major reason for President Trump’s unpopularity with Big Tech. They are the worst offenders at building companies with Americans and our tech and then firing the Americans to make themselves even richer.

Offshored and outsourced — lies our corporations tell us

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What would you think if a manufacturing plant, one somewhere along our coast, parked a ship full of illegal immigrants twelve miles offshore and then ran a bundle of rods, cables and levers from that ship to their plant so that the foreigners could operate the machinery?

It would be obvious that the plant owner was breaking immigration laws.  Even if a loophole was found for the owner to slither through, the stink would be so great that the practice wouldn’t be practiced for long.

But with a little trickery, some smoke, mirrors and curtains, this operation is being run.  And the stink is kept so far offshore that you don’t catch the smell. You are most likely to notice when it is your job that is gone.

Last year, one “American company” unloaded the better part of 24,000 U.S. workers by exactly this means. That company was far from alone. Mind you, the work is not gone. The work is here, in this country, just as it always has been.  Though the foreigners are not sitting just offshore, the rods, cables and levers do run from plants and offices inside our border into the ocean but reach all the way to places like India, China and Egypt. The work still appears here and the products are directly used here, but the worker sits at an electronic console, and the rods, cables and levers run though wires on the internet and do it so smoothly that no one notices the remote control.

It is a clever scheme. The companies successfully avoid U.S. laws on immigration. They use our country’s resources, our infrastructure, and the wealth and order that our social systems have produced, but they manage to avoid most of the contribution we expect from companies that depend upon and use our society.  They avoid the local, state and federal taxes, the employee taxes, the social security taxes and the medicare taxes.  More than that, they avoid the contribution made by the payroll, and with that they cut off all the secondary jobs that a payroll would have supported.  There is no money for the local grocery, restaurant or gas stations.  No money for haircuts, none for lawn mowers, none for books nor for schools, and not any for new clothes or even old.

These corporations need Americans to buy their products but the fewer Americans they can employ, the happier they are. They need American money but not American expense. They take but do their best to not give back.

They want the use of our society, but they do not want to support our society.

A sane person calls this one-sided operation stealing. The companies call it outsourcing or offshoring, claiming that the work is done overseas. That argument is, at best, debatable, and in many ways, simply a lie.  Just consider for a moment: Where does the work result occur?  Here.  The computers being monitored are?  Here.  The systems being changed are?  Here.  The products appear?  Here.

Only the body of the worker sits offshore. If that internet goes down–the work will not be done. It cannot be done–because the work product is here. The production occurs here. The end result happens here.

Just the same as if the machine sat at the end of rods and levers.

What do you think the People’s Republic of China would say if multinational corporations proposed moving offshore millions of the best jobs in China?  Keep in mind that the machines and computers and end results would stay in China, but all the payrolls, all the taxes, all the knowledge and all the skills would be moved overseas.

Do you think the People’s Republic would approve?

Would any country concerned with its own destiny allow this?

Do you need any time to come up with that answer?

Me neither.

Yet in our country, our politicians, apparently for the sake of campaign contributions, have allowed the shipment of millions of our best jobs overseas and continue to allow the sending away of tens and hundreds of thousands of jobs each year.  And with them go hundreds of thousands and millions of secondary jobs that wither away when those primary payrolls no longer flow through the rest of our economy.

Corporations want this debate to center only on the issue of where the operator’s body sits.  Where the work product materializes is an issue they dismiss.  The multinational corporation’s concern is only in what allows them the most profit.

Yet societies that wish to survive must deal with the broader definition of profit–the definition that has to do with the health of their society.

Since these corporations and their businesses ultimately depend upon our society, and our society must determine and act for its own survival, it is our society’s right to decide how to deal with these offshoring operations.  This is not an abstract point.  It is our citizens, these are our jobs, it is our economy, and it is our future that are at stake.

Truly, it seems there is only question:  Why do such operations continue?

* * *

Too many companies too clearly envision a world with what they call a level playing field. But what they mean by that is a world where all the workers live in huts made of tin and scraps, where all the employees are terrified of the shop boss, where all the workers are less than slaves, just bodies to be used and discarded. Apparently, for them, there should be two classes of people:  the very, very rich and the very, very poor.  To them, the average American’s quality of life is an insult, speaking only of money wasted on pay to workers when that money should properly be in the coffers of the elite.

The effects of those who take but do not pay are apparent, and the quality of life for the average American has fallen.

Of course, this behavior could not exist had we not allowed it.  I am as guilty as any.  I once advocated free trade, back when I believed the lie that the goal was to improve the lives of our Mexican neighbors, to relieve the need for them to illegally cross our borders to find work.

Now I wonder how I could have been that stupid. It seems clear that the goal always was, and remains, the degradation and return to slavery of the working man, the average citizen, all of us who do not sit on the Board or speculate with billions on Wall Street.

This is the critical fact that almost everyone has missed: Every job that involves a computer is on the list to be setup for remote control from overseas. Whether you are an accountant, take orders in a store, or punch into a console on the manufacturing line. Look around a bit harder and you will find it happening. So far as the multinational corporations are concerned, your job belongs where it can be done cheapest and to hell with you, your loved ones, your community and your country.

These multinational corporations are, in fact, scavengers, and we, our society and our country, are the body upon which they feed.

As our economy limps through this recession, we need to remember that the last time the geniuses on Wall Street totally bunged up the works, there was at least the hope that the jobs would be revived. Today companies are setting up remote-control operations and sending work overseas as quickly as they can, quite clearly precipitating, accelerating, and maintaining the current decline. Tens of thousands have been laid off and are being laid off every month, even every week, not because there is no work, but because there is no work for Americans in America. There is only work for foreigners doing American work.

Indeed, Wall Street demands that the jobs be sent offshore. After all, how can American businesses thrive if Americans are working?

What?  Can Wall Street be that stupid?  If no American works, there is no American pay, no money, no products purchased, and all the companies die!  How can the imbecility of that logic not ping off a person’s head like a bowling ball from the fourth floor?

And why is it that our legislators do not feel that thud?  Are they cushioned by all those lovely, thick mounds of campaign dollars?

The people on Wall Street are not financial geniuses.  If the last few years are not proof enough, we have centuries of evidence.  Too many, apparently the majority, are either imbeciles or criminals.  Their financial and stock operations need to be viewed in that context.

These identical masterminds, those who gave us Black Tuesday, the dot-com crash and the sub-prime fiasco, are now engineering their greatest escapade ever–the reduction of the American worker to french-fry cooks, gatherers of lost shopping carts, and of course, to the unemployed. How far will the economy fall, and will there ever be a recovery, since the skilled and manufacturing jobs are going, gone, and promised to never, ever be here again?

I predict that the fall will be pretty damn far.

Here is a litmus test for your Federal representatives–your Senators, your Congressmen and your President: Do they support immediate action to  create laws and restrictions on work done remotely? If they don’t, then you know at once that they do not believe that they work for you. They believe that they work for their multinational, corporate paymasters.

You should ask the question of your representatives.

I’d like to know what you find out.

Wouldn’t you?