and Adam Smith was arguing through this reasoning that the people of the world would be better off, as well as their bosses, if businesses were in competition rather than having the state an immobile hierarchy based on hereditary inheritences. ultimately, this comic presents what BOTH Smith and Marx had to say about capital within a capitalist society: that ownership of the means of production is the ultimate source of power. what Marx struck on, though i would argue less well than his anarchist contemporaries, or his indigenous and Black contemporaries, is that the top class in a classist society does not hoard the means of production through greed, but through cruelty justified through greed. Adam Smith, ultimately, is an early reformer/incrementalist. there are a few things he got right, but a lot of stuff he got wrong. i don’t think just because Adam Smith said somthing is a reason to discredit that thing

edit: wrote cooperation where i meant competition

You do realize that even Karl Marx himself agreed with Smith on a number of points, right (including this one)? I know this is Lemmy where uneducated socialism is the predominant ideology to the point of what often amounts to hostility to learning more about anything, but it would be a good idea to read an actual book every now and then and learn how to recognize nuance, especially in political and economic topics. It astounds me how few of the self-proclaimed socialists on Lemmy have read any of the actual views or History of Karl Marx.

Das Kapital must’ve been about something else. Like a legally distinct ‘Kapitalism’.

That’s only in capitalism. If the labourers owned the thresher it would mean they would spend less time threshing and could choose what to do with the newly freed time.