Blue Thieves @bluethieves - Tumblr Blog

luxatoid-deactivated20200723

chipped

quinndolyns-deactivated20220403

people seem to have trouble understanding why i’m an anti-capitalist, so i’m going to try and put it into simple, real-life terms.

i work at a restaurant. i make $12 an hour, plus tips. minimum wage where i live is relatively high for my country - the national minimum wage is $7.25/hr, and has not been raised since 2009. before taxes, working full time, my yearly income is about $22,000 a year. ($25,000 if you count tips)

at my job, we sell various dishes, with an average price of about $10-$15. we get printouts every week detailing how much money we made that week; in one week, our restaurant makes about $30,000. (one of our other locations actually makes this much on a daily basis!)

i’m not going to go into details, but after the costs of production (payroll for employees, rent for the building, maintenance, and wholesale food purchasing) are accounted for, the restaurant makes an estimated profit of $20,000 per week.

this profit goes directly to the owner, who does not work at this location. the owner of my restaurant has actually been on vacation for a few months, but still profits from the restaurant, because they own it. i have met the owner exactly twice in my year of working here.

to put this into perspective, the owner of this restaurant earns in 2 days what they pay me in one year. and that’s just from this single location - the owner has several other restaurants, all of which make more money than the one i work at. this ends up resulting in the owner having an estimated net worth of tens of millions of dollars, even after accounting for the payroll for every single worker in their employ.

now, i have to ask you: does the owner of my restaurant deserve this income? did they earn it? did their labor result in this value being created?

the naive answer would be “yes”; the owner purchased the location and arranged for the raw ingredients to be delivered, did they not?

the actual answer is “no”. the owner may have used their initial capital to start the location, but the profit is a result of my labor, and the labor of my co-workers.

the owner purchases rice at a very low bulk price of about 25 cents a pound. i cook the rice, and within a few minutes, that pound of rice is suddenly worth about $30. the owner did not create this value, i did. the owner simply provided the initial capital investment required to start the process.

what needs to be understood here is that capitalists do not create value. they use the labor of their employees to create value, and then take the excess profit and keep it.

what needs to be understood is that capitalists accrue income by already HAVING money. the owner of my restaurant was only able to get this far because they started off, from the very beginning, with enough money to purchase a building, purchase food in bulk, and hire hundreds of employees.

that is to say: the rich get richer, and they do so by exploiting the labor of the poor.

the owner of my restaurant could afford to triple the income of every single person in their employee if they felt like it, but this would mean that they were generating less profit for themselves, so they do not.

the owner of my restaurant pays me the current minimum wage of my area, because to them, i am not a person. i am an investment. i am an asset. i am a means to create more money.

when you are paid minimum wage, the message your boss is sending you is this: “legally, if i could pay you less, i would.”

every capitalist on the planet exploits their workers for their own gain. every capitalist, even the small business owners, forces people to stay in poverty so that the capitalist can profit.

dagwolf

good post

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I fucking live for this!!!!!!!!

wolverineburger

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Here’s a fun excerpt from Terry’s 2001 interview with Daniel Handler, AKA Lemony Snicket, the author of the Series of Unfortunate Events books:

TERRY GROSS: Have you run into any parents, teachers or librarians who object to either the tone or the content of your books?

DANIEL HANDLER: Not nearly as many as I thought I would. I really thought that there would just be an overwhelming wave of outrage. And instead, there’ve just been a few isolated complaints that I’ve heard. We were banned in one school district in Decatur, Ga. I’ll always have that. They can’t take that away from me.

GROSS: On what grounds were you banned?

HANDLER: Well, I hate to get too catty about Decatur, Ga., but they were very concerned in The Bad Beginning that Count Olaf wants to marry Violet, who is a distant relative. And this strikes me as something that, without being too stereotypical about the South – that perhaps Decatur, Ga., has heard of before, let’s just say.

And, also, I’m at a loss for how to construct a villain who isn’t doing villainous things. If Count Olaf were only doing things that no one would object to, then he really wouldn’t be much of a villain. So I’m somewhat nonplussed by that kind of criticism, that, ‘Boy, Count Olaf is sure a terrible person.’ And so I always have to write back and say, ‘Well, yes. Yes, he is. He sure is. Let’s catch him.’

And a woman once in in Oregon came up to me at a bookstore and said, ‘You know, in one of your books, you teach that it is sometimes necessary to lie. And that seems like a very disturbing lesson to me. Can you name one time when it would be absolutely necessary to lie?’ And I was so happy that the answer came to me right away, instead of, you know, as it usually does when people say something to you. And then you think three days later, that’s what I should’ve said. Instead, it came right away. And I was able just to turn to her and say, ‘Nice sweater.’

The TV series based on Snicket’s books is now streaming on Netflix. It stars Neil Patrick Harris as Count Olaf. Here’s what our TV critic David Bianculli had to say about it.