Two debaters clash over whether capitalism inherently exploits workers. One argues employers extract value while paying low wages. The other counters that profit-sharing and equity alignment can fix the problem. They cite the Luddites, who weren't against machines but against owners who refused to share mechanization gains.
All capitalism is worker exploitation.
I don't agree with that premise. This is like an age-old misconception of some fundamental, almost like ideological or teleological even, competition between capital and labor. I fundamentally don't agree with that. I think the best arranged companies create equity-based alignment between labor and capital. To the extent maybe, Salim, what you're highlighting here is opportunities for better alignment between labor, call it economics 1.0, where I think the trend is very real for, for taking existing service economy jobs and, and using existing labor to train and annotate datasets for, for capital to substitute for that. But it's not an intrinsic, like, death match between— or it doesn't have to be— between capital and labor.
I didn't say that. I would totally say that capitalism historically has been a labor arbitrage. You hire somebody for $20 an hour and they make you $100 an hour. What you're talking about is how do you equitably share that outcome. I want to just do a quick shout out here. People talk about the Luddite Revolt, right? And people fighting, beating the machines and breaking the machines. It turns out the Luddites were not raging against the machines for machine's sake. They're raging against the owners of the machines for not sharing the profits back with them.
