Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Yep. And under American capitalism women have always suffered the
most. Also put to the 'reds under the bed' phobics, there are other ways

Is Capitalism Built on Greed?

[...]

But what prevents the capitalist from operating philanthropically, and taking nothing for themselves? Or taking home only the same amount as the lowest-paid worker? Why does the capitalist need to “take something home” over and above the amount needed to subsist? It’s perfectly possible to start a business and operate it in the interests of the community without using it to make a fortune. The capitalist chooses to try to make money, and it’s that choice that is accurately described as acquisitiveness, or greed, because nothing in the economic system mandates it. Jeff Bezos does not need to be a billionaire. He didn’t need to take any ownership of Amazon himself. He exploits people for his own benefit because he has an insatiable greed and lust for power, not because facts about the economy compel him to own the company.

When we are asking whether capitalists act as they do out of greed or if they are compelled by some kind of systemic force, one way to test the proposition is to think about what would happen if we substituted an altruist in the capitalist’s role. We can see that certain things would not change. If you made the CEO of a company an altruist, but the CEO was under a legal mandate to maximize shareholder value, then if they exploited their workers less the board of directors might replace them. The altruistic CEO alone may have few options to improve the company. But the owner of a company, the person who puts up the capital, can make a huge difference depending on whether they are pursuing gain or the public good. Pursuing gain means that workers have to be more exploited than market pressures alone require so that a sum of profit can go to the owner. If public good is the goal, no such sum need be generated. Nor does the owner need to relentlessly expand the business in order to pursue larger profits. The business can stay the same size, if doing so serves the public good.

Since it is obviously wrong to say that capitalists aren’t greedy, why would socialists make this argument? One reason is that Marxism, often presented as a kind of “scientific socialism .. https://www.marxists.org/archive/weisbord/conquest17.htm ,” developed as a way of trying to understand the economy as a machine that operated according to certain principles. Engels,...

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/06/is-capitalism-built-on-greed