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This was earlier this year. Link:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/beaver-dam-czech-republic
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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How did they do this with no profit motive?
And no teams meetings?!
without ai assistance‽
That’s the reason it was made quickly, efficiently, and works so well. No emails, no meetings, no AI slop.
I wanna be like beavers.
No remote workers
That beaver literally did that shit from home
They did do it for a profit motive. Through whatever instincts or thought processes the beavers had, they figured that they would benefit from damming the river. The dam creates favorable conditions for hunting, nesting, and storing food. These benefits are a sort of profit. Money is a convenient kind of profit, because you can easily turn it into whatever other kind of thing you want and you can store it for later use - and also it is convenient to talk about in economic terms, since it is uniform and easily quantifiable. But no one (or, few people anyway) want money purely for the sake of having money - they want money because it allows them to have other things. Food, housing, good conditions for mating and raising their young.
Sorry. The beavers were only in it for themselves.
So what you say is that Beavers are filthy little capitalists?
Yes and no. They are petite bourgeois. They own their own means of production.
More like semi-aquatic homesteaders.
You almost had it, but the for profit (in the marxist The Capital) is exactly what you said here:
"But no one (or,** few people anyway**) want money purely for the sake of having money"
That phrase, that "Want money purely for the sake of having money" is the definitive aspect of capitalism.
What you implied the beavers did is a Commodity-Money-Commodity model (edit: money=work realized in case of beavers) and it is what commerce does and how humans lived before capitalism (no sarcasm but humans lived quite well without the machinery of capitalism).
You make it very clear with the phrase "they want money because it allows them to have other things. Food, housing, good conditions for mating and raising their young."
This is C-M-C model, which defines the proletariat.
Now, capitalist (which makes capitalism exist) are exactly the opposite.
They live based on M-C-M model.
They only purchase a commodity with the intent of turning it into a profit.
In short, they use money for the sole objectivity of having more money (so that they can use more money to have more more money).
This is capitalism:
Turning the monetization the end goal and the winner(???) is the one with the biggest numbers.
Almost had what? You seem to be reading a lot into my comment. Also, the way you are phrasing it makes you sound like a pompus asshole.
Yeah. I'm kinda reading a lot into your comment.
Also, I admit I was being a pompous asshole.
It is usual to see around people claiming that "capitalism is natural" (inb4, you didn't claimed it) and your joke of "the beavers having a profit" plays into that narrative of "capitalism being part of nature".
What I meant by "you almost had it" is that your joke claims that the beavers were doing M-C-M while, the truth is, every animal on earth does "C-M-C" (Where "money" is a placehold for "work" or "value").
Again. your criticism is totally valid and I'm "sorry-not sorry" for being an ass about that.
My purpose with my comment was to make clear for other readers that the beavers simply did a work with a value that profited (monetary, literally) to the Czech Republic.
TL:DR Fuck capitalism! Return to beaver!
Umm, no, it isn't? Profit is whatever is left over from your income after expenses. If you run a business for yourself, with zero employees (so there literally is no "others [sic] labour"), once you subtract the cost of any rent, materials, etc. what you have left is your profit.
Except in your example you are stealing your own labor since your business is not paying its one employee, you.
He is correct that in business profit is derived from the balance of labor vs what the business can sell the products of that labor for. Yes, overhead costs exist, material costs exist, but without labor, nothing happens. You can buy all the materials you want, rent all the spaces you want, get all of the utilities brought in you want, without labor, it all does nothing. So profit is a derivitive of labor, even if all of the labor done is your own, and even if the labor is turned into a passive source of income. Even landleeches profits are derived from the labor of their tenants since without a tenant doing labor, there is no paycheck to hand over to the landleech.
The view you have of "profit" is honestly the result of a concerted propaganda effort undertaken over the last eighty years to swing public opinion away from the the anti-trust labor-centric mindset of the past. It is brainwashing on the grandest of scale. I learned it too. It was not until I got my math degree and started studying capitalism through the lens of it being a dynamical system that I really started to piece of together. So much of what is "taught" about economics and business in the USA is spoon fed by people who do better and make more money if people think the way you described instead of understanding why unions came into existence in the first place, and what they fought for, and why we still need them.
🤷♂️ I don't expect any of this to change any minds. You have your reality which you ascribe to and maybe it lines up with mine, maybe it doesn't, but odds are it is a reality you find comfortable and are willing to fight tooth and nail to protect that comfort.
Costs and prices are an attempt to measure units of work (Not Joules, to be pedantic, but job-type work).
The models M-C-M and C-M-C explain clearly and simply how capitalists steal job-value from others (doing M-C-M) and how workers get poorer and poorer (edit: doing C-M-C)
https://www.newappsblog.com/2017/10/c-m-c-m-c-m-and-marxs-understanding-of-power.html
Thins is one among many resumes around this topic treated in The Capital from Karl Marx.
No, I understand that capitalists exploit labour for profit. I'm not disputing that. I'm disputing the nonsensical claim that profit always comes by exploiting workers, and that in a non-capitalist system there would be no such thing as profit.
I'm actually interested in your reason on why the claim that "profit always comes by exploiting workers" is nonsensical.
First, to clear up, I understood that you meant that "capitalism can (sometimes) profit without exploiting workers"
And I also want to make clear that I agree with Marx claims about labor is what have value (that later is codified as money or as profit).
If you could provide an example where there is profit without exploitation of worker, I think that would help clarify.
Again, and to make clear, I'm just interested in getting a clear picture on why you claim that.
So to be clear, I absolutely was not saying that. Almost by definition, capitalism requires exploitation. I'm not sure I agree with the Marxist point of view of the labour theory of value that labour is the only thing that provides value (because it seems obvious to me that capital does provide value—I think there was a great video from Unlearning Economics on the subject), but I do agree that when workers don't own the capital, their labour is going to be exploited and the surplus value extracted.
Because of the example I described earlier. I could run a business consisting only of myself, and still theoretically have a profitable business.
By extension, it should be possible (maybe in a worker-owned co-op) for multiple workers to work in a business which is also profitable. Maybe they decide to spend that profit on bonuses for each other; maybe they invest it back into the business by buying more capital to make themselves more efficient. Maybe something else. But the point is that workers don't have to be exploited for profit to exist.
I'm not going to agree with you either. While difficult to maintain and impossible to make a consistent system due to the nature of some humans, ethical capitalism can and does exist. I would prefer a universal egalitarian society with no money and labor for the sake of labor, not survival, but that is not realistic either.
There should be fair pay. The gap between executive pay and laborer pay should be under 10x, in my opinion at least. There should also be fair pricing. But there does need to be some functional level of income above expenses for labor and materials. That is where responsible growth lives. That is where being able to hire on more people that you still pay fairly lives. If you are paying a minimum of 75k, you need at least 75k over your outlay before you can give another person a job. If businesses operated how you described, always existing at break even, then the job marker would quickly stagnate and the only positions that would be available to entry level people would be ones that were vacated by termination or death, because promotions would also not be possible. You described an equilibrium state which prevents growth of any kind.
The problem with ethical capitalism is that, in the long run, it is an utopia.
I say that because any ethical capitalism will under perform against unethical (or even criminal) capitalism. By that, I mean that ethical capitalism earns less profit margins compared with unethical capitalism.
At some point, the ethical company will either be bought by an (richer) unethical one or will be pushed out of the market.
Anyways, I do agree with you that an ethical capitalism would be better and, maybe even an first step towards socialism?
There are examples of Ethical Capitalism in the market. Arizona Iced Tea, Costco, and Valve are all companies that I would say are as close as we are going to get to ethical capitalists. Neither Arizona Iced Tea nor Valve are publicly traded, which means that there is only one way to buy them, and neither are interested. I'm pretty sure this is a key to Ethical capitalism, an end to trading on companies.
Honestly, there is probably only one change that needs made to being even traded companies in line, and that is to make a mandate that a successful company is one that provides the best work environment and a great product, not the one with the largest market cap.
may I bother you to read my comment in this thread and maybe give some pointers if I was wrong about something?
https://lemmy.world/post/33595089/18512171
inb4, as you'll see, I do agree with you that the joke is a capi apologista thing (I do argue in the link above that the beavers did C-M-C, or better yet; Commodity-Work-Commodity, hence, beavers are proletariat)
(PS: The government extracted profit from beavers work on top of that (and that should be the joke))
Clearly these beavers don't know the Rules of Acquisition.
They used Jira
Really?
Tap for spoiler
Hindi : Jira, Jeera, Zira or Safaid jeera Or Zeera Bengali : Safaid jira or Zeera Gujarati : Jiru or Jeeru Kannada : Jeeriege Kashmiri : Zyur Malayalam : Jeerakam Marathi : Jeregire Oriya : Jira, Jeera Sindhi : Zero Sanskrit : Jiraka, Jira Tamil : Ziragum or Jeeragam Telugu : Jidakara, Jikaka