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Originally Posted by roachboy
a basic constraint that shapes how capitalist firms operate is the need to assure reproduction of the labor pool.
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I think this concept applies to government not capitalist firms. Individually a capitalist firm has little focus beyond its own needs. A government, as a collective with power concentrated in the hands of a relative few, has a broader focus with the core element of allowing it to perpetuate, which would require the reproduction of the labor pool. A capitalist firm would be willing to exist without labor and in some cases would prefer it.
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back in the old days of nation-states, that meant paying people enough to live, supporting training through taxation which was applied to education and so forth. back in the old days of nation-states, there was a kind of symbiotic relation between the action of firms and the human machines they used, who sold their labor power for a wage. it wasn't much of one from the viewpoint of those who sold their labor power for a wage though. in the old days of nation-states that were the 1859 lincoln-calhoun debates, the only argument that lincoln could muster to claim that capitalism was superior to slavery was that workers, no matter how exploited, could quit their jobs in one place and go get exploited in another. so it was a kind of shitty symbiosis.
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Lincoln was a mercantilist. He strongly supported protectionism through targeted tariffs and centralized subsidizing of domestic production. He did not support free market concepts. Ironically mercantilism being imposed by the King of England lead to the American Revolution. Lincoln was not a champion of capitalism or free markets in the tradition of Adam Smith.
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now in the glorious days of neo-liberal "globalization" subcontractors connected to production through supply chain relations are interchangeable and the problem of reproduction of the labor pool transferred to the process of bidding for contracts. so it's disappeared as a tangible matter, dissolved into interfaces and the language of supply-chain management. if "problems" arise in one space, move to another. it's all the same from the viewpoint of "procurement specialists" if there's not adequate labor power available to conform to the imperatives which are expressed through price, move to another supplier---the only relevant geography is 2-dimensional and backlit. all social relations that are intertwined with production are expressed through the pseudo-objective language of numbers.
that's why folk can discount work conditions, the politics of production, the need for working people to organize in order to have any meaningful power in the protection of anything like their own interests in the face of a production organization that still tends to reduce human beings to unreliable appendages of machines (one of the few constants in capitalist organization, visible very early in the game, central with the development of mass production).
defending that type of organization is a pure expression of exactly the ideology that enables the dissolving of production into supply-chain management interfaces.
technologies are ideological expressions.
there are consequences of collapsing a sense of interacting with the world into flat glowing monitor-spaces.
it's better to be aware of them than to simply repeat them, dont you think?
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I doubt any one will honestly respond to my questions to Derwood, but I think honest reflection could be illuminating on this subject. I know very few individuals who will consistently pay more for a goods and services than they have to pay, why would we expect corporate entities to act differently?
In some cases we pay what is the norm for goods and services without giving it any thought, why do we think corporate entities would actively conspire to purposefully create a system designed to purposefully exploit labor?
In some cases we pay vastly different amounts for the same level of goods and services due to circumstance, why would we expect corporate entities not be subject to this?
Corporations are run by people. Based on that it is easy for me to observe how basic human behavior is mirrored in corporate behavior. In my view in indictment made against corporate entities is an indictment made against core human nature.