Capitalism made your iphone

What the capitalists did was pay all the workers right after they did the work, even though the phones wouldn’t actually be sold for some time after that. Capitalists bring capital. Money. It takes money to get things started.

I completely agree that the rewards are all disproportionate. The people who put up the capital shouldn’t get all the rewards. But it’s just dumb to claim that they play no role at all. If that’s true, walk out of your house and make a phone you designed yourself out of sticks you find on the ground.

- You can't get the same product tho. And it's not the only thing.
  The actual man power is only a fraction of what went into it.
  Connections, property, minerals, education and many many other aspects went into it.
  To design it with out capital you would need to find people who with out capital educated themselves
  With out capital find individuals who have the minerals and resources
  Lastly you need a way to connect all these people after you have found them
  None of this requires actual money to do in theory, but now you need to find a way to justify to these people to provide their fancy rocks and knowledge into a project that doesn't actually benefit them unless a pre existing system that relied on capital existed to push development to the current state.
  The fundamental flaw that gets over looked is different economic systems push towards different advancements in technology.
  So to argue that a different system would be better suited is just a fallacy. You don't get capitalist products and goods in a communist system.
  A system that optimizes for the worker would produce goods and services that improve the workers existence for example.
  You might get some over lap but the implementation would also be so wildly different. Hell for example in a theoretical non corrupt communist system LLMs and AI systems would be lauded as amazing by everyone.
  They are the ideal improvement of a system that shares resources to stream line and reduce the burden and quality of life of the working class. Since everyone would equally benifit from them and it would drive the hobbies artist out of a job but instead freeing them to make more personal art instead of art for the community.
- So the workers will work unpaid?
  Some of y’all have never run a small business, and it shows.
Where did that capital come from?
- The same place the fed and skilled laborers came from: the proceeds of previous enterprises.
It only "takes money to get things started" because our economy is organized that way.
- How else are you going to get 200 people together to assemble phones for a week?

Capitalist funded the creation of the iPhone and withdrawal rent on their funding.

There are many ways to fund the process.

Capitalists like capitalism because they get to extract more than they funded with no upper bound.

They leech off of the value of the workers who created the product because they think funding the arrangment entitles them to infinite returns on their investment.

It's rent seeking with more steps and no overhead. There is zero upkeep because the input is the output, capital.

If capital was additive then adding twice as much capital would result in twice as much output and that is clearly not the case.

It's a valve and it is like a damn operator taking credit for the river.

Its just such a stupid argument on its face. We wouldn't argue that tribalism gave us agriculture, or that somehow feudalism is good because of windmills. As a society we have ideas, we direct resources to those ideas, and then we reap the benefits of those ideas. Capitalism is simply a more effective driver of resources than the systems before. But mathematically driven aristocracy is still aristocracy.

creation of a surplus of devices, through exploitation, for the purposes of profit is capitalism.
just buying stuff is just markets. barters and lemonade stands are not capitalist.
- Where can I find this arbitrary definition of capitalism? Because barters and lemonade in a free market stands still sounds like capitalism to me, just on a smaller scale. Just because it seems more sympathetic doesn't mean it's not the same thing.
  Im not saying that what you describe in your first paragraph isn't bad, but words have meaning. If you intend to spread your thoughts on them, you'd do well to go beyond "capitalism bad mkay" because it makes people take your thoughts less seriously. So you end up preaching to the choir who's already on your side and we've learned from reddit, Twitter and Fox that echo chambers are bad.
Purchase of the device is Capitalism, because your money IS your vote, and YOU are the Capital of Capitalism!
Capitalism describes the division of labour and profits, not the purchasing of goods. YOU are not theCapital in capitalism unless you are working for the profits of the owner. The root word of Capitalism is Caput, meaning head or cattle. Capitalism's root definition is basically the ownership of cattle or chattel.
In a planned economy, there are beepers and payphones. No one builds the most expensive commercial endeavor in all of human history – advanced silicon fab nodes
According to? The Soviets made it to space before we did, and China currently fabricates the vast majority of that technology. Technology isn't native to any economic structure.
- But capital is. Both Russia and China are fighting for capital.
  With the space race the capital was military research, propaganda and money.
  In China it's just money military research and propaganda
  No different than the United States where the capital is money, military research and propaganda
  End of the day it's all just capital. How it's controlled and what the capital is changes.
  But it all still the same thing being fought over.
Absolutely nothing requires the only two options to be capitalisim and planned economy. Market socialism is a thing.
Why would anyone build beepers if there are no mobile phones? That's an entire wireless infrastructure that doesn't need to be created or maintained. Beepers were the impetus for early wireless repeaters and signal towers. Phones created the data and load bearing standards but the hardware was built for the devices before phones.
In a planned economy the onus is on the person to be where they need to make or receive a call. Like the 70s and rotary phones. "Plan your day around what the day has planned for you" is what one of the most annoying teachers I've ever had said and it's the perfect model for blaming the individual for problems outside their control. And that's why central planners will use it to deflect from criticism.

I love when these assholes try to convince you that the capitalists created the company and therefore deserve all the capital.

Like, ok, give all your money to your parents and grandparents.

Always fun to see a nuanced Marxist concept escape lemmy.ml and be argued against by people who have zero idea what they’re talking about.

I always blame Edward Bernays for a lot of things we have today.

Because he was responsible for taking his uncle’s insights and weaponizing them for profit and power?

It's really not that complicated. Someone or something. Had to finance the research that lead to the technology. So, yes. Capitalism did indeed make your iPhone. It's the driving factor of financing technological advancements outside of perhaps the military

That doesn't mean those working the lines, writing the software, cleaning the office, maintaining the buildings, etc, deserve a fiftyeleven:th rate payoff.

It's the same with all of your paraphrasing posts. It's just unnecessary. You could just let the content speak for itself without looking like a clown.

It can be true that capitalism did indeed make your iPhone, and that it's growing out of control in terms of exploitation and evolving into an oligarchy.(US)

Capitalists told workers to make the iphone.

Wouldn't capitalism be the whole system and capitalists menaing here the top owning class?