really liked his simple language, in breaking down Marxist thought. Really helps in me trying to understand Marx's point of view. I understand in other economic theories that all trades are equal, in some objective sense.
i always wonder why i always had a hate/hate relationship with my employer, it would seem to be well founded when realizing i'm only there to make money for him and his investors, in the 1970's america morphed from an "employment" economy to an "investor" economy, the difference being you now had to make money for people who did nothing more than give money to a stock broker. just another level of exploitation.
To those who think that Wolff has got it the wrong way round: you will never appreciate Marxian logic if you begin your analysis with the individual. For we Marxists the starting point is technical and/or environmental change, leading on to economic, political and cultural change. It is a model used by most historians these days, though they do not necessarily agree with Marx’s conclusions. Those who begin with an individualistic perspective tend to regard society as the product of all its members. We on the other hand regard a society’s members as products of that society. Of course there is an interplay between the two but, to us, the prime mover is the organisation. Individualism finds its strongest expression in religious belief and bourgeois thought, which, no doubt, explains why it is so prevalent in the USA.
So you’re telling me Marxism isn’t Stalinism?! I joke but several years ago I used to be one of the people that conflated the terms communism/Marxism with the authoritarian Stalin regime. Thanks to people like Professor Wolff I’m not as uninformed anymore.
Y'all are all messed up lol Marxism is a grouping of ideologies that use Marxian analysis of political economy as an understanding of capitalism and Marx's ideas. Communism is a Socialist goal. Marxist-Leninist is a specific type of methodology based on Marxist ideology, which is based on Marxian political economy analysis of capitalism. But the Lenin part has not only added ideas about the nature of capitalism, but also it's own methodologies on how to create communism their own way. In Marxist-Leninist that's generally revolution to state Socialism until enough threats are pacified than establish 1st phase Communism and than 2nd phase Communism which essentially becomes Anarchism (Libertarian Communism/Libertarian Socialism). There is also Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, Trotskyists and a whole bunch more statist communists, varying type of statist socialists or minarchist or anti state types Autonomous Marxists, Libertarian Socialists/Libertarian Communists (aka Anarchists). There are a whole freaking bunch. The totalitarian and dogmatic authoritarian ones are what's called "Tankies" because they run all the others over with tanks, no joke, they gunned Anarchists and others down many time, and the crazy part is that they all believe in the same final goal, it's the methodology of approach that is different, and the emphasis on anti authoritarianism or authoritarianism. This isn't a joke, just check out the Maoist guerrillas in India if you want to be reminded how serious this stuff is.
To be fair, the feudal lord provided his serfs with “protection” (fighting men paid from the lord’s surplus)...from other robber barons. In a number of ways serfs were better off than their counterparts under early capitalism, being a resource the lord could ill-afford to run into the ground; just like his sheep and cattle. Especially during labour shortages; following outbreaks of the plague for instance. The early capitalists had no such qualms. Workers were a dime a dozen: desperate and hungry in the wake of the late 18th century agricultural revolution, and the mechanisation of the work they used to perform. All the best comrades.
Hegel is a core element of Richard Wolf's whole idea of Marx writings. So he will point out the dichotomy of all things including exploitational economic systems like feudalism and capitalism. So your point about Feudalism having benefits does not contradict all the criticisms. I know you end up making fun of capitalist society but I wanted to make that clear anyways. Cheers
I hear you, Professor Wolff, saying that Marx did not write about communism or socialism. When talking to someone about it they mentioned "The Communist Manifesto" written by Marx and Engels. Can I get some clarification on that? Did Marx write about Communism in that?
***** Afaik, the Communist Manifesto does not contain an analysis of communism, but it tries to show that history progresses through class struggle, lays a brief outline of capitalism and suggests some measures to be taken for the benefit of the proletariat, some of which were later implemented (for ex. progressive taxation). It is an early work of Marx, not an academic work and nowhere near the analytic clarity of Das Kapital.
He said Marx hardly wrote about Communism. Marx wrote a shit load, on Napoleon, on the US Civil War, on France, on the Paris Commune, on historical modes of production, ESPECIALLY on Capitalism. But comparatively only a small bit was on Communism. And the Communist Manifesto was a small pamphlet commissioned by the Communist League of England which was not an analysis, and he had some articles and letters on communism. But that is nothing compared to all the other large books on other stuff.
Everyone has heard this quote paraphrased. This is a good example of why you should read Marx and not just listen to other cherry pick. Guy was damn poetic sometimes. "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction (1843)
There is a certain irony to the lord defending the serfs in feudalism. The main justification i have seen people give for feudalism was that "The lord protected the serfs". The reality is that lords would defend themselves from each other, and because lords held all the power in the system, they would fight each other to increase their own power. So the whole reason there were wars in the first place, was precisely because the class feudal system existed that lead to so many power struggles, and yet the fact that wars existed in feudalism is the argument that feudalism uses to justify itself, which is very ironic. It ultimately comes down to a self-justification.
You want to read a full quote so many people only paraphrase? "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction (1843)"
It's actually intriguing to see that while the speaker glorifies Marx that he found the inherent flaw in the capitalist system that it exploits workers in some ingenious way, he revealed to me that both Marx and him failed to recognize not only that the value created by a worker would not have been there if the corporation backed by investors who risked their precious capital to start it wasn't there in the first place, and that they both somehow believe that doing a simple repetitive labor is just as valuable as putting one's life-savings at risk to start a business, forming LLC, figuring out logistics and making sure all the compliances are met, etc. It's astonishing to me that a Harvard-educated economist has such limited critical thinking ability as to not see what 15 year old who works at a fast food joint can see. If any of you want to succeed in life and contribute positively to your society, think the exact opposite as what the speaker is saying. It is not exploitation when you freely and voluntarily enter into contract. A worker is not entitled to surplus value since that is for the investors of corporation. This also means that if you want to enjoy that surplus value, you can strive to have your own business and turn it into success. Lastly, don't pay people more than what they actually produce. You'll learn pretty quick on what happens when you do that.
Have you ever considered that maybe the economist with 2 masters and a doctoral degree actually has a better understanding of the systems than you and "any 15 year old who works at McDonald's" do? Of course not, your Econ 101 understanding couldn't possibly be wrong.
@@cosmonaut999 that actually shows that education doesn't mean anything if one is so misguided and deluded as to not see what's right in front of him right? 🤣 as for you my friend, appeal to authority doesn't make a good argument when your authority comes from a pseudo scholar who teaches part time at some leftist art school. No established economists consider him to be their peer... 😂
@@thelvadam5269 because not everyone is equally creative or driven and only the very few have the ability and willingness to actually start a business and grow it. You put together 1000 mid level programmers in the 80s and 90s. You still won't get one Bill Gates. This is not because people have set up system wrong. It's just how things are, duh! When you assume everyone is equal in terms of ability and contribute more or less equally as assumed in socialism, you create an environment where no viable business can be born, which is why socialist and communist countries were left light years behind the US 🤣 the coop model you describe where masses of people share the risk only works for basic industries like agriculture and nothing beyond, which explains why socialist countries always eventually revert back to depending largely on agriculture to sustain itself lol 😂
@@Swing_park Answer yourself, my friend, at least a couple of simple questions: 1) Who is more at risk - a capitalist, whose ass in warm room (it can be a group of people, such as a board of directors) or a miner mining ore; or a woodcutter who fells the forest; or the fisherman who catches fish in the storm for you to devour? You can continue the list yourself ... 2) Where will your whole idea be, for example to fly to Mars, without mining for the manufacture of, for example, a rocket? Will you collect it yourself? One? Lol ... Good luck! It all starts from here, from the mine. From those same men-miners and workers. And is your idea nothing, without his help. What smart, look, I came up with everything! Ahah ... Everything that surrounds you is created, you will not believe...BY LABOR! PHYSICAL LABOR! Not C ++, Java, C #, etc. .. Although even the code needs to be driven in with your pens ... 3) And why is the capitalist's profit growing and growing? The number of workers is many more than directors (creative guys like you, a capitalists).Without these workers, the capitalist will have nothing to eat. And they earnings and life everything only gets worse ... stranger things .. No? .. Maybe will go to ass , such a capitalist ?! Who has 500 sports cars, yachts have nowhere to go and houses with villas ?! It is possible to find a mush labor organizer with the same qualifications among workers. There are plenty of them. With higher education. Not stupider than you, me or any Bill Gates. On the street there is the XXI century, not the XVI, and not even the XVII ... And you, as religious fanatics, climb with your "super-talented leaders". By the way, Billy’s grandfather can’t tell who was? Oh well, grandfather and dad have nothing to do with tons of cash ... So far, not all workers on the planet have realized that everything rests on them and there are is of magnitude more than the so-called super-super-organizers.. But nothing, as you can see the process is going on. With a creak, but it goes. Study at least one scientific book, on history, economics or technology, dupe.. At least how and by whom Microsoft was created, before opening your mouth on this topic. He collected 1000 programmers ... Yeah, And they worked for Chinese noodles... Ahaha. Open your eyes, your pants have down. ... You can't even look in the Wiki and calculate 2 + 2... What books am I talking about?!..?
@@Swing_park Your so called "Socialist and communist" countries were not "Light years behind the US", the USSR launched the first life-form into space a year before the US, landed the first man-made object on the moon, and photographed 70% of its surface.
The employer needs to get an incentive for the Capital he has invested. For organizing a meaningful combination of employees to produce a final product which the worker himself would not be able to do. Hence, the workers shouldn't be owning the surplus, rather the owner should own the surplus.
This is very similar to the "I take the risk, therefore i should reap the rewards" argument. I would like to break this down for you and provide a compelling argument for why this is a very wrong conception of what's going on here. If you want to understand where investable capital in the form of wealth or currency comes from, the first place you have to start it, is who were the first capitalist, and how did they accumulate their wealth to invest So consider this, where did the first capitalist come from? Where did the first capitalist accumulate their wealth, to be the first people to build the first factories for what would slowly develop into what we call 'capitalism' today? it would be absurd to say "they were invested into by wealthy individuals", because then that would further beg the question, where did these first wealthy people get their own wealth from, in order to invest in the first capitalist to build the first factories? The fact is, the wealth that allowed the early development of capitalist factories came from the previous class based societies of slavery, feudalism, and the the advent of colonialism in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The early capitalist had previously accumulated their wealth by exploiting people such as serfs, slaves and even the people and resources of other. countries. They then built the factories by evicting peasants from their land (with the help of the monarchical state), and then claimed "i own the factory and the land it sits on, therefore the peasants who built the factory should not be the owns to control and operate it, and i should reap the full rewards of any work done in the factory, because i own the labor of the factory, because i own the factory!" So essentially, an new system of property rights was developed on private control over basically any workplace, and it was borne straight out of the wealth accumulation of previous class societies, such as slavery and feudalism. The way the new generation of capitalist are created is typically by the capitalist handpicking just a few individuals, and paying them ridiculously huge salaries, effectively making them an indirect part of the class of exploiters of other peoples labor. We can see this today with business executives, whose job it is to figure out how to maximize profits by any means necessary. The job of an executive is in effect, a job to reinforce the capitalist domination over the worker. Capitalist do not even innovate, they create low wage design and think tanks to do the innovation for them, while the capitalist who control production are the ones that predominately profit from the innovations of other people. The business executives that were hand-picked by the capitalist class, can often accumulate the funds to buy property and quickly form a sustainable medium sized company that they personally own, thus continuing the cycle of a system that is innately based on the exploitation of the labor of human beings, to serve the profits of those that control production. The point is, just because the cycle of exploitation has continued for so long, that does not mean that the system has automatically become "self-justifying", and that the wealthy people who gained their wealth through past exploitation are automatically justified when they claim they are "taking a risk" when they make a capital investment.
Sudharsan A Yes, that is correct and marxists acknowledge that in capitalism employers need the surplus to invest and grow their companies, but, and here is the crucial point: You do realize that defending capitalism like this, by its conditions under it functions, is circular reasoning? It begs the question: why have we set up a system where a tiny group of people are the ones that hold the risk, the means of production and the surplus it creates? That is the question you need to answer. Why can't the workplace be run and owned democratically (by the workers)?
No one is talking about the "workers owning the surplus." The whole point is that the surplus belongs to the community and not to any individual or group of individuals.
Sir Leopold Witherfield There are many social-democratic companies which have existed for many decades. They are generally referred to as Co-operatives. Wolff discusses these in other presentations. However, the threat of an increase in awareness and popularity is recognized by the hard-core capitalist who in turn suppresses and does everything to quash the concept. That is why Marxian economics is very rarely taught in the schooling system and why the stigma or relationship between Marx and communism is misinterpreted by many...
Would you mind taking the trouble of explaining what "this" refers to? Also, are you using "guarantee" as a verb? What is its subject? "I"? If so, then who are you, and what are your qualifications?
At precisely 2:40; you say, "because European feudalism was capitalist..." I believe you meant Catholic/Christian. That might cause some confusion
+
God bless you for shining the light Prof. Wolff.
really liked his simple language, in breaking down Marxist thought. Really helps in me trying to understand Marx's point of view. I understand in other economic theories that all trades are equal, in some objective sense.
i always wonder why i always had a hate/hate relationship with my employer, it would seem to be well founded when realizing i'm only there to make money for him and his investors, in the 1970's america morphed from an "employment" economy to an "investor" economy, the difference being you now had to make money for people who did nothing more than give money to a stock broker. just another level of exploitation.
It gives me a surplus in knowledge. Thanks!
Lol
Thank you very much for doing this series, fascinating.
To those who think that Wolff has got it the wrong way round: you will never appreciate Marxian logic if you begin your analysis with the individual. For we Marxists the starting point is technical and/or environmental change, leading on to economic, political and cultural change. It is a model used by most historians these days, though they do not necessarily agree with Marx’s conclusions. Those who begin with an individualistic perspective tend to regard society as the product of all its members. We on the other hand regard a society’s members as products of that society. Of course there is an interplay between the two but, to us, the prime mover is the organisation. Individualism finds its strongest expression in religious belief and bourgeois thought, which, no doubt, explains why it is so prevalent in the USA.
Thank you, Dr. Wolff. Clear and compelling.
Thank you very much for this lesson, Professor.
unbelievably high quality material. thank you
So you’re telling me Marxism isn’t Stalinism?!
I joke but several years ago I used to be one of the people that conflated the terms communism/Marxism with the authoritarian Stalin regime. Thanks to people like Professor Wolff I’m not as uninformed anymore.
A lot of people today still conflate communism/marxism
Y'all are all messed up lol
Marxism is a grouping of ideologies that use Marxian analysis of political economy as an understanding of capitalism and Marx's ideas. Communism is a Socialist goal.
Marxist-Leninist is a specific type of methodology based on Marxist ideology, which is based on Marxian political economy analysis of capitalism. But the Lenin part has not only added ideas about the nature of capitalism, but also it's own methodologies on how to create communism their own way. In Marxist-Leninist that's generally revolution to state Socialism until enough threats are pacified than establish 1st phase Communism and than 2nd phase Communism which essentially becomes Anarchism (Libertarian Communism/Libertarian Socialism).
There is also Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, Trotskyists and a whole bunch more statist communists, varying type of statist socialists or minarchist or anti state types Autonomous Marxists, Libertarian Socialists/Libertarian Communists (aka Anarchists).
There are a whole freaking bunch. The totalitarian and dogmatic authoritarian ones are what's called "Tankies" because they run all the others over with tanks, no joke, they gunned Anarchists and others down many time, and the crazy part is that they all believe in the same final goal, it's the methodology of approach that is different, and the emphasis on anti authoritarianism or authoritarianism.
This isn't a joke, just check out the Maoist guerrillas in India if you want to be reminded how serious this stuff is.
Very good lecture professor.
This series was excellent. Thanks!
Thanks Sir. That was amazing and great explanation in which a guy like me who is a Physics student, got the basic idea of Marxisim.
hey man I'm sure you're finished with your studying in physics by now, Are you still a Marxist?
@@dialectic5361 LOL, it sucks bro:))
Quality series!
To be fair, the feudal lord provided his serfs with “protection” (fighting men paid from the lord’s surplus)...from other robber barons. In a number of ways serfs were better off than their counterparts under early capitalism, being a resource the lord could ill-afford to run into the ground; just like his sheep and cattle. Especially during labour shortages; following outbreaks of the plague for instance. The early capitalists had no such qualms. Workers were a dime a dozen: desperate and hungry in the wake of the late 18th century agricultural revolution, and the mechanisation of the work they used to perform. All the best comrades.
Hegel is a core element of Richard Wolf's whole idea of Marx writings. So he will point out the dichotomy of all things including exploitational economic systems like feudalism and capitalism. So your point about Feudalism having benefits does not contradict all the criticisms. I know you end up making fun of capitalist society but I wanted to make that clear anyways. Cheers
I hear you, Professor Wolff, saying that Marx did not write about communism or socialism. When talking to someone about it they mentioned "The Communist Manifesto" written by Marx and Engels. Can I get some clarification on that? Did Marx write about Communism in that?
***** Afaik, the Communist Manifesto does not contain an analysis of communism, but it tries to show that history progresses through class struggle, lays a brief outline of capitalism and suggests some measures to be taken for the benefit of the proletariat, some of which were later implemented (for ex. progressive taxation). It is an early work of Marx, not an academic work and nowhere near the analytic clarity of Das Kapital.
if you read it you will find that it didn't explain much of communism rather than criticizing the bourgeois
The comunist manifest is a critique of capitalism, not a recipe of how to do communism.
He said Marx hardly wrote about Communism. Marx wrote a shit load, on Napoleon, on the US Civil War, on France, on the Paris Commune, on historical modes of production, ESPECIALLY on Capitalism. But comparatively only a small bit was on Communism.
And the Communist Manifesto was a small pamphlet commissioned by the Communist League of England which was not an analysis, and he had some articles and letters on communism. But that is nothing compared to all the other large books on other stuff.
9:26 I lol’d it’s just so true.
10:25 These three things should make everyone want to stop working someone else. Work for yourself; Start a co-op.
Thank you !You clarified so many things for me .Great teaching !
Thanks, Professor.
A great lecture. Thanks a lot
Below, I have mistakingly described innovation as “technical” where I meant to say “technological.”
Nice series..... Thanks
Everyone has heard this quote paraphrased. This is a good example of why you should read Marx and not just listen to other cherry pick. Guy was damn poetic sometimes.
"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.
It is the opium of the people.
Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction (1843)
Good stuff
Wolff's description of feudalism reminded me of this: watch?v=rAaWvVFERVA
The lord and his army defended the farmer in case of war. If the farmer didn't enlist he would become a landless peasant.
There is a certain irony to the lord defending the serfs in feudalism. The main justification i have seen people give for feudalism was that "The lord protected the serfs". The reality is that lords would defend themselves from each other, and because lords held all the power in the system, they would fight each other to increase their own power. So the whole reason there were wars in the first place, was precisely because the class feudal system existed that lead to so many power struggles, and yet the fact that wars existed in feudalism is the argument that feudalism uses to justify itself, which is very ironic. It ultimately comes down to a self-justification.
You want to read a full quote so many people only paraphrase?
"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.
It is the opium of the people.
Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction (1843)"
Dang all those people worshipping his ideas today are worshipping nothing because he didn’t write anything down about it?
Oops, “mistakimgly” should have been “mistakenly”.
It's actually intriguing to see that while the speaker glorifies Marx that he found the inherent flaw in the capitalist system that it exploits workers in some ingenious way, he revealed to me that both Marx and him failed to recognize not only that the value created by a worker would not have been there if the corporation backed by investors who risked their precious capital to start it wasn't there in the first place, and that they both somehow believe that doing a simple repetitive labor is just as valuable as putting one's life-savings at risk to start a business, forming LLC, figuring out logistics and making sure all the compliances are met, etc. It's astonishing to me that a Harvard-educated economist has such limited critical thinking ability as to not see what 15 year old who works at a fast food joint can see. If any of you want to succeed in life and contribute positively to your society, think the exact opposite as what the speaker is saying. It is not exploitation when you freely and voluntarily enter into contract. A worker is not entitled to surplus value since that is for the investors of corporation. This also means that if you want to enjoy that surplus value, you can strive to have your own business and turn it into success. Lastly, don't pay people more than what they actually produce. You'll learn pretty quick on what happens when you do that.
Have you ever considered that maybe the economist with 2 masters and a doctoral degree actually has a better understanding of the systems than you and "any 15 year old who works at McDonald's" do?
Of course not, your Econ 101 understanding couldn't possibly be wrong.
@@cosmonaut999 that actually shows that education doesn't mean anything if one is so misguided and deluded as to not see what's right in front of him right? 🤣 as for you my friend, appeal to authority doesn't make a good argument when your authority comes from a pseudo scholar who teaches part time at some leftist art school. No established economists consider him to be their peer... 😂
@@thelvadam5269 because not everyone is equally creative or driven and only the very few have the ability and willingness to actually start a business and grow it. You put together 1000 mid level programmers in the 80s and 90s. You still won't get one Bill Gates. This is not because people have set up system wrong. It's just how things are, duh! When you assume everyone is equal in terms of ability and contribute more or less equally as assumed in socialism, you create an environment where no viable business can be born, which is why socialist and communist countries were left light years behind the US 🤣 the coop model you describe where masses of people share the risk only works for basic industries like agriculture and nothing beyond, which explains why socialist countries always eventually revert back to depending largely on agriculture to sustain itself lol 😂
@@Swing_park Answer yourself, my friend, at least a couple of simple questions:
1) Who is more at risk - a capitalist, whose ass in warm room (it can be a group of people, such as a board of directors) or a miner mining ore; or a woodcutter who fells the forest; or the fisherman who catches fish in the storm for you to devour? You can continue the list yourself ...
2) Where will your whole idea be, for example to fly to Mars, without mining for the manufacture of, for example, a rocket? Will you collect it yourself? One? Lol ... Good luck! It all starts from here, from the mine. From those same men-miners and workers. And is your idea nothing, without his help. What smart, look, I came up with everything! Ahah ... Everything that surrounds you is created, you will not believe...BY LABOR! PHYSICAL LABOR! Not C ++, Java, C #, etc. .. Although even the code needs to be driven in with your pens ...
3) And why is the capitalist's profit growing and growing? The number of workers is many more than directors (creative guys like you, a capitalists).Without these workers, the capitalist will have nothing to eat. And they earnings and life everything only gets worse ... stranger things .. No? .. Maybe will go to ass , such a capitalist ?! Who has 500 sports cars, yachts have nowhere to go and houses with villas ?! It is possible to find a mush labor organizer with the same qualifications among workers. There are plenty of them. With higher education. Not stupider than you, me or any Bill Gates. On the street there is the XXI century, not the XVI, and not even the XVII ... And you, as religious fanatics, climb with your "super-talented leaders". By the way, Billy’s grandfather can’t tell who was? Oh well, grandfather and dad have nothing to do with tons of cash ... So far, not all workers on the planet have realized that everything rests on them and there are is of magnitude more than the so-called super-super-organizers.. But nothing, as you can see the process is going on. With a creak, but it goes.
Study at least one scientific book, on history, economics or technology, dupe.. At least how and by whom Microsoft was created, before opening your mouth on this topic. He collected 1000 programmers ... Yeah, And they worked for Chinese noodles... Ahaha. Open your eyes, your pants have down. ... You can't even look in the Wiki and calculate 2 + 2... What books am I talking about?!..?
@@Swing_park Your so called "Socialist and communist" countries were not "Light years behind the US", the USSR launched the first life-form into space a year before the US, landed the first man-made object on the moon, and photographed 70% of its surface.
The employer needs to get an incentive for the Capital he has invested. For organizing a meaningful combination of employees to produce a final product which the worker himself would not be able to do. Hence, the workers shouldn't be owning the surplus, rather the owner should own the surplus.
This is very similar to the "I take the risk, therefore i should reap the rewards" argument. I would like to break this down for you and provide a compelling argument for why this is a very wrong conception of what's going on here.
If you want to understand where investable capital in the form of wealth or currency comes from, the first place you have to start it, is who were the first capitalist, and how did they accumulate their wealth to invest
So consider this, where did the first capitalist come from? Where did the first capitalist accumulate their wealth, to be the first people to build the first factories for what would slowly develop into what we call 'capitalism' today? it would be absurd to say "they were invested into by wealthy individuals", because then that would further beg the question, where did these first wealthy people get their own wealth from, in order to invest in the first capitalist to build the first factories? The fact is, the wealth that allowed the early development of capitalist factories came from the previous class based societies of slavery, feudalism, and the the advent of colonialism in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The early capitalist had previously accumulated their wealth by exploiting people such as serfs, slaves and even the people and resources of other. countries. They then built the factories by evicting peasants from their land (with the help of the monarchical state), and then claimed "i own the factory and the land it sits on, therefore the peasants who built the factory should not be the owns to control and operate it, and i should reap the full rewards of any work done in the factory, because i own the labor of the factory, because i own the factory!" So essentially, an new system of property rights was developed on private control over basically any workplace, and it was borne straight out of the wealth accumulation of previous class societies, such as slavery and feudalism. The way the new generation of capitalist are created is typically by the capitalist handpicking just a few individuals, and paying them ridiculously huge salaries, effectively making them an indirect part of the class of exploiters of other peoples labor. We can see this today with business executives, whose job it is to figure out how to maximize profits by any means necessary. The job of an executive is in effect, a job to reinforce the capitalist domination over the worker. Capitalist do not even innovate, they create low wage design and think tanks to do the innovation for them, while the capitalist who control production are the ones that predominately profit from the innovations of other people. The business executives that were hand-picked by the capitalist class, can often accumulate the funds to buy property and quickly form a sustainable medium sized company that they personally own, thus continuing the cycle of a system that is innately based on the exploitation of the labor of human beings, to serve the profits of those that control production.
The point is, just because the cycle of exploitation has continued for so long, that does not mean that the system has automatically become "self-justifying", and that the wealthy people who gained their wealth through past exploitation are automatically justified when they claim they are "taking a risk" when they make a capital investment.
Sudharsan A Yes, that is correct and marxists acknowledge that in capitalism employers need the surplus to invest and grow their companies, but, and here is the crucial point: You do realize that defending capitalism like this, by its conditions under it functions, is circular reasoning? It begs the question: why have we set up a system where a tiny group of people are the ones that hold the risk, the means of production and the surplus it creates? That is the question you need to answer. Why can't the workplace be run and owned democratically (by the workers)?
No one is talking about the "workers owning the surplus." The whole point is that the surplus belongs to the community and not to any individual or group of individuals.
Sir Leopold Witherfield There are many social-democratic companies which have existed for many decades. They are generally referred to as Co-operatives. Wolff discusses these in other presentations. However, the threat of an increase in awareness and popularity is recognized by the hard-core capitalist who in turn suppresses and does everything to quash the concept. That is why Marxian economics is very rarely taught in the schooling system and why the stigma or relationship between Marx and communism is misinterpreted by many...
guarantee this does not work ...
What doesnt work?
Would you mind taking the trouble of explaining what "this" refers to? Also, are you using "guarantee" as a verb? What is its subject? "I"? If so, then who are you, and what are your qualifications?