I’d say that capitalists use property ownership to exploit the cost of producing redundancy. They would capture a good or capital and prevent their use unless a ransom is paid. If consumers don’t wish to pay it, then they can re-produce the captured good in order to fulfill the same amount of demand. Re-producing the same good while the captured good remains unused is producing redundancy.

For example, a landlord purchases a home to transform into a rental property and asks for a compensation for its access. Consumers can decide not to pay, but if the house was built to fulfill a demand and its capture prevents its access, an additional house has to be built to fulfill the same amount of demand. Building 2 houses to only be able to use one is twice the cost of a house, which is a way higher cost than the price of the ransom the landlord asks for. This exploitation of the cost of producing redundancy is what gives the landlord his bargaining power. No one would otherwise need to pay the landlord to not produce anything.

So, the problem with exploiting the cost of producing redundancy is that it lacks a reasonable justification. A redundant good or capital is something that semantically doesn’t have a function. You can’t reasonably justify paying a cost, like the cost of labor or expending resources, to produce something that doesn’t have the function of fulfilling a demand.

And here’s the important part. To receive or ask for a payment, a reasonable justification is required by law. Here’s a criminal code article from Canada:

346 (1) Every one commits extortion who, without reasonable justification or excuse and with intent to obtain anything, by threats, accusations, menaces or violence induces or attempts to induce any person, whether or not he is the person threatened, accused or menaced or to whom violence is shown, to do anything or cause anything to be done.

After reading the definition, you might think that, yeah, there might not be a reasonable justification to exploiting the cost of producing redundancy, but it’s not done under threats, menace, accusations or violence. But you’d be wrong. The production of redundancy, which is synonym with the waste of resources, is itself a menace. Wasting resources leads to a reduction of wealth, not something anyone would want. The production of redundancy or the payment of the ransom are also forced through violence. If consumers don’t want to either pay the ransom or produce redundancy, the only option is to use the captured good or capital without paying the unjustified portion of the asked price. If consumers do that, they subject themselves to threats by law enforcement since it will be understood as theft. So there’s is two different sources of threats, menace, accusations or violence that forces the payment of the ransom, the menace of having to produce redundancy and the threats of being arrested for theft.

So in conclusion, it becomes apparent that generating profits from sole ownerships of goods or capital is literal extortion, a criminal act.

If that’s the case, fixing capitalism could be rather easy. Compensations for prejudices could be sought after, or citizen’s arrests could be made against law enforcement or the judiciary. We could then eliminate compensations for the sole ownership of stuff.

  • knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Liberalism and capitalism aren’t internally coherent. The only reason why they’ve stuck around so long is the sheer power the capitalist class wields via their institutions of state and private property. While you could argue that capitalism is illegal, even in capitalist nations, the capitalist class holds the institutions of justice and law in its hands and will never make a ruling that compromises its own ability to take ever more capital.

    It’s true that at the core of it, the immediate effect of private property is extortion. That’s the basis of all class relations under capitalism. Private property itself has its basis in theft. The capitalist has property, the worker doesn’t, so the worker must do something for the capitalist in order to gain conditional access to said property. Taken further it’s also why social democratic compromises can only go so far, for if everyone has a reasonable quality of life they will not agree to the extortionate demands of the capitalists.

    To your last thought, there is no fixing capitalism. It inevitably ends in monopolies, rentierism, imperialism, and the cooption/destruction of everything around it to feed the machine.