The language that communism and capitalism 'care' about different things is deceptive.
They don't care about anything. They'll just do what they do when you input the actions of people into their framework.
Garbage in will get garbage out. Actually, since communism is more delicate and isn't built to eat garbage, it won't spew out garbage, it'll fly apart completely and you'll end up pulling your capitalism back out of the closet and it'll be a whole ass mess.
Put good stuff in and...who knows, we've never tried it with either.
If you're interested in playing Neil DeGrasse Tyson-style semantical quibbling about the using of terms like "cares about" and "is concerned with," turns of phrases that philosophers use all the goddamn time when talking about philosophy, then I'm not sure how serious you are interested in actually engaging in the substance.
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
Like unions being good, worker owned co-ops being better?
Yes i already agree with that.
But there is nothing not capitalist about worker owned coops.
From that you get a market-efficient allocation of goods through common ownership of the means of production.
This is wrong. In order to guarantee an efficient allocation of goods you must allow production of apples and oranges to scale with prices.
Can you elaborate on this.
Let there be a well formed utility function U such that dU/df is positive and (dU/df)^2 is is negative. IE this means that for any individual person they prefer having 2 apples more than 1 apple but they prefer going from 1 Apple to 2 apples less than going from 0 apples to 1 apple. But we do not specify if 1 Apple is worth more than 1 orange or even 2 oranges.
If we allow that there is an equal distribution of goods then the trade outcome will be Pareto* efficient but if we allow a third good, labor, to have a price between all three where people can work apples or oranges depending on whether or not people want apples or oranges more then utility is increased. Trivially it should be clear that if apples/oranges is Pareto that apples/oranges/labor is also pareto. And also that at worst apples/oranges/labor produces the same outcome as apples/oranges. This unless a/o/l produces exactly the same amount as the distribution you voted on its utility increasing.
*meaning that you cannot make anyone better off without making someone else worse off
But allowing that third good (labor, to work for apples and oranges) contradicts the construction in that it A. adds a third good and B. would not be possible without a vote of the commune on how the means of production is used.
Yes but those provisions mean that the vote on how production is used is inefficient compared to utilizing prices to determine productivity…
That is what you asked me to show. Labor is the production (technically labor apples and labor oranges, I could have been more precise we should have four goods with a limiting constraint that La + Lo = constant but this produces the same results) thus it’s almost certainly better when the market also determines the ratio of labor
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
How does communism allocate housing? Depends on how your communist government works. It could be a market, it could be assifned based on industry, "you work in government and this is where your department office is" etc.
Zag, markets and trade are not exclusive to a capitalist mode of production
So I was writing up a whole thing about this and the process of working through has actually helped me realize something interesting about communism.
For a market to exist you have to have two parties willing to trade a good or service to the other. As communism dissolves private property, this would be personal property. However, since private property (capital, the means of production) is required to create personal property, and since private property is held in common, then what reason is there for either party to willingly trade their personal property when the commune will determine the amount of personal property they receive? Well, if the utility they parties derive from good/service A is greater than good/service B such that they're willing to pay the market "price" (note this does not have to be money, a common misconception) to forego their own stock of good/service B (which was determined by the commune) to acquire good/service A that they have greater utility for, then you can still have a reasonably efficient market mechanism for those two parties. Whether said market mechanism scales well I think depends on the instruments of trade. For example, money under capitalism is inherently the price exchanged for your provision of labor -- this is true whether you own the means of production or not, as the means of production is acquired through accumulated savings and time. Under communism where money would not inherently be the price for the exchange of labor, but rather could be the price pegged to something necessary to all people -- say food -- it would be reasonable to me to keep money as a uniform unit of exchange in communism just for ease of facilitating these markets where you can still get a pareto optimal outcome.
Huh. I need to sit with this more.
The history and philosophy of Labor Vouchers/Labor Notes/Labor Cheques may be of interest to you, Oghulk.
I mean, there's another word for credit vouchers, issued by the employing entity, and only redeemable through their vendors.
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
Like unions being good, worker owned co-ops being better?
Yes i already agree with that.
But there is nothing not capitalist about worker owned coops.
Goum, could you please give us your definition or Capitalism, or at least what the core tenets are in your view?
Because if you think “worker ownership of the means of production” is capitalistic instead of socialistic in nature, I think we are rapidly grinding tire rims on asphalt here
Already did. Like 7 pages ago? I wasn’t as through as I could have been but I felt like I connected the disparate tissue well enough
Edit: like. The idea that people buying stock and/or making a company would not be capitalist is kind of farcical. Capitalism (in the sense of markets for capital goods as not all capitalists believe all goods or all capital goods should be on the market) is not about who owns what it’s about the fact of the ownership.
This is why Smith argued for unions as a curb to the power capital and that the union breaking laws and anti-union activities were bad. Unless Adam Smith was a secret communist or “not a capitalist” rather than like… the UR-capitalist… then it seems hard to argue that these types of things are anti-capitalist.
Wiki: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit."
Yes, I am aware of the definition.
Worker Ownership is not Private Ownership. This is like, bedrock socialist theory.
The key feature of capitalism is that the ownership class isn't actually providing anything of value (no, CEOs do not provide anything of value), they just have the paperwork saying they own things and therefore get the biggest cut of the value produced. Basically they're parasites with legal protection.
Wiki: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit."
Yes, I am aware of the definition.
Worker Ownership is not Private Ownership. This is like, bedrock socialist theory.
The key feature of capitalism is that the ownership class isn't actually providing anything of value (no, CEOs do not provide anything of value), they just have the paperwork saying they own things and therefore get the biggest cut of the value produced. Basically they're parasites with legal protection.
When you say ownership class, what about all the owners who are not of the class?
Also, ignoring that there is a cultural history isn't going to convince anyone that you have any idea of what value is.
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
How does communism allocate housing? Depends on how your communist government works. It could be a market, it could be assifned based on industry, "you work in government and this is where your department office is" etc.
Zag, markets and trade are not exclusive to a capitalist mode of production
So I was writing up a whole thing about this and the process of working through has actually helped me realize something interesting about communism.
For a market to exist you have to have two parties willing to trade a good or service to the other. As communism dissolves private property, this would be personal property. However, since private property (capital, the means of production) is required to create personal property, and since private property is held in common, then what reason is there for either party to willingly trade their personal property when the commune will determine the amount of personal property they receive? Well, if the utility they parties derive from good/service A is greater than good/service B such that they're willing to pay the market "price" (note this does not have to be money, a common misconception) to forego their own stock of good/service B (which was determined by the commune) to acquire good/service A that they have greater utility for, then you can still have a reasonably efficient market mechanism for those two parties. Whether said market mechanism scales well I think depends on the instruments of trade. For example, money under capitalism is inherently the price exchanged for your provision of labor -- this is true whether you own the means of production or not, as the means of production is acquired through accumulated savings and time. Under communism where money would not inherently be the price for the exchange of labor, but rather could be the price pegged to something necessary to all people -- say food -- it would be reasonable to me to keep money as a uniform unit of exchange in communism just for ease of facilitating these markets where you can still get a pareto optimal outcome.
Huh. I need to sit with this more.
The history and philosophy of Labor Vouchers/Labor Notes/Labor Cheques may be of interest to you, Oghulk.
I mean, there's another word for credit vouchers, issued by the employing entity, and only redeemable through their vendors.
Labor vouchers are, historically and philosophically, a different thing entirely from company scrip
They have their issues and criticisms (such as arguably just another form of money), but they’re not company scrip.
And again, the point was for Oghulk to be able to add a historic attempt to solve the problem he’s turning about in his head and go from there about if its workable or not. It’s not like the Labor Voucher is without disagreement in socialist circles, a debate literally as old as Kropotkin’s writings.
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
Like unions being good, worker owned co-ops being better?
Yes i already agree with that.
But there is nothing not capitalist about worker owned coops.
Goum, could you please give us your definition or Capitalism, or at least what the core tenets are in your view?
Because if you think “worker ownership of the means of production” is capitalistic instead of socialistic in nature, I think we are rapidly grinding tire rims on asphalt here
Already did. Like 7 pages ago? I wasn’t as through as I could have been but I felt like I connected the disparate tissue well enough
for conveniences sake, could you reiterate. Because, again, you are constructing an explicitly socialist construct as though it were Capitalist.
Fake edit: I swear to christ Spam block, if you’re going to keep me at two and a half minute intervals, either give me a damn counter on my remaining time or at least have the decency to not reset the clock every time I have misguessed when your infernal timer has ended.
for conveniences sake, could you reiterate. Because, again, you are constructing an explicitly socialist construct as though it were Capitalist.
Normally yes but in this case no. I was pretty thorough and it took a decent amount of time to put together. If you want to search easier [/tim curry] is a part of the text.
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jmcdonaldI voted, did you?DC(ish)Registered Userregular
for conveniences sake, could you reiterate. Because, again, you are constructing an explicitly socialist construct as though it were Capitalist.
Normally yes but in this case no. I was pretty thorough and it took a decent amount of time to put together. If you want to search easier [/tim curry] is a part of the text.
it's literally on the first page of your posts under your profile as well - shouldn't be that hard for anyone interested to find.
Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. Worker-owned co-ops are not private ownership, in most definitions—they are social ownership. Your ownership as a worker is tied to your status as a worker, as opposed to simply owning a company or part of a company as property, which could allow you to treat the company as an investment or passive income. I would describe a worker co-op as socialist. Socialism isn't incompatible with capitalism, but it is distinct from capitalism.
Communism is usually described as social ownership of the means of production, which can mean state ownership (centralized) or distributed worker ownership (decentralized). There is a distinction between socialism and communism as well, in that communism is a specific form of socialism.
The language that communism and capitalism 'care' about different things is deceptive.
They don't care about anything. They'll just do what they do when you input the actions of people into their framework.
Garbage in will get garbage out. Actually, since communism is more delicate and isn't built to eat garbage, it won't spew out garbage, it'll fly apart completely and you'll end up pulling your capitalism back out of the closet and it'll be a whole ass mess.
Put good stuff in and...who knows, we've never tried it with either.
If you're interested in playing Neil DeGrasse Tyson-style semantical quibbling about the using of terms like "cares about" and "is concerned with," turns of phrases that philosophers use all the goddamn time when talking about philosophy, then I'm not sure how serious you are interested in actually engaging in the substance.
It matters in a very real way, especially in this argument that's almost exclusively social-democrat style capitalists vs socialists, that the intentions with which a system is designed are, if not wholly irrelevant, not the beginning and end of the conversation.
No one here arguing for capitalism--or, perhaps more accurately, against socialism as a solution worth seeking at this point in time--wants the outcomes the socialists blame on capitalism. They just don't believe or are skeptical that socialism is the best way to get the practical results socialists want (and don't care about or don't prioritize the moral angles that aren't strictly practical, i.e. would prefer safer, stabler, happier workers with (slightly) richer capitalists taking a piece than workers in a worse position but who justly retain the full value of their labor, if that's what's necessary).
Socialism isn't necessarily the best system to produce the results socialism intends to produce just because it explicitly aims at those results. Capitalism with the right adjustments might be better, even if it's been massively worse than what socialism wants historically.
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ElJeffeRoaming the streets, waving his mod gun around.Moderator, ClubPAMod Emeritus
Wiki: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit."
Yes, I am aware of the definition.
Worker Ownership is not Private Ownership. This is like, bedrock socialist theory.
The key feature of capitalism is that the ownership class isn't actually providing anything of value (no, CEOs do not provide anything of value), they just have the paperwork saying they own things and therefore get the biggest cut of the value produced. Basically they're parasites with legal protection.
I mean, no, this isn't really accurate. It's part of the knee-jerk "managers are useless, we don't need them" mentality that is cathartic, maybe, but also unrealistic.
A CEO is a manager at the top of the company who has the broadest view of the company's activities and guides overall direction. That most CEO's today are inept, corrupt, and/or wildly overvalued does not mean the entire concept is devoid of merit.
Even in the most socialist of socialisms you would need to have someone who's job it is to shuffle things around and keep the operation functioning, even if they received the same pay as everyone else and could be voted out of power by the other employees. You can call them something else if you'd prefer, but they're still CEOs.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
OK so what is [tim curry]Capitalism[/tim curry]. At least who are the capitalists and what do they believe. I approach this from the frame of who the communists will tell you are the capitalists but how those capitalists will describe their beliefs. This because the primary side of this discussion is marxists and not using their definitions makes things difficult even if no one else uses their definitions. So this kind of covers a pretty wide swath that encompasses most orthodox and even heterodox economics of the current and past day.
Capitalism has had many adherents and structures over the years but is mainly unified in the belief that markets are at least decent ways to find prices and allocate goods. There are many types of capitalism, but state capitalism is not one of them. Because in state capitalism the state determines good allocation and distribution. And, while this is not impossible*. It is hard. And not like in the "oh boy that took a day" sense but like the "we don't actually know if this is possible" way. And does not utilize markets at all, which, if there is one, would be considered the "one central tenet" of capitalism. Capitalism as a whole does not make a statement as to what the optimal allocation of goods is but does allow for a government to make that determination and work towards it. The hypothetical utopian communism, besides being stateless, moneyless, and classless, would be a legitimate capitalist end goal. This because a capitalist would recognize that money would be needed for markets. Classes are social constructs and will be developed regardless of what the state does. And state would be necessary in order to regulate human interaction to achieve the goal. This does not mean that there do not exists anarcho capitalists, those who believe that no regulation of the market is optimal. It just means that capitalists who think that you can achieve equality tend to think that this will require government. And while anarcho-capitalists are dumb they would still fit within the umbrella of capitalism. Because they have similar beliefs in markets and are built on similar first principles as people who support large UBI, government regulation, and nationalization of heavily externally priced industries.
Capitalism is built on the first principle of interaction. That is. People interact. If those interactions are "free" then there exist ranges for prices under which they will trade. These ranges eventually coalesce into a single price for the goods which are traded at a market. And this price has, at least, a base level of a specific type of efficiency. The necessary conditions for this are roughly that people need to be rational and information needs to be relatively even across the system, and costs need to be internalized. These conditions are often derided but they do not generally mean what the people complaining about them mean. Rationality does not mean that people are robots or cannot have "dumb preferences" or preferences that other people get things but that their preferences are well ordered. I.E. if you would prefer an apple to a banana this does not depend on whether or not you currently have a banana**. Perfect information does not mean that everyone knows everything about a product but that there are differences in the information about a product that people have. For the most part these two conditions are rarely met. And the third condition is easily breakable. However examination of the real world has found that even when those conditions are not met markets can still work pretty well so long as they're met well enough.
The practice of capitalism has largely been to examine markets, examine how and why and when they fail, and to figure out how to fix them. This is more or less on the assumption that managing markets is easier than controlling an economy. Market type, market structure, information structure, externality structure, and preference structure are all things that are studied in an attempt to have a better understanding of the underlying system and so be able to produce better systems to control better outcomes. edit: Capitalists tend to be quite cognizant of the fact that removing money from a system tends to mean distribution is allocated on other and potentially less desirable methods. This may be whomever has the most time or whomever is the most pretty or whomever is the most white. Some capitalists ignore natural market problems that are resolved in those manners or assume that the market principles apply in excess of the markets make those inefficient results optimal. But this does not encompass the majority of capitalists working in the field.
There are two main schools of thought in this at the mirco level. First best and second best(though they will not always be listed in this manner). First best assumes that there is a continuum between an imperfect market and a perfect market. And that the closer a market is to a perfect market the better outcomes in terms of pareto efficiency are produced. Thus, when given the choice to regulate, a regulation that moves the market closer to perfect is a better choice. The second best school does not assume this. And realizes that there are often imperfections that can be introduced into an imperfect market that makes it more efficient. A standard example of a first best solution would be cap and trade. By internalizing costs the market will find the price for pollution, that price will be paid to the government/people for use how it sees fit, and pollution will be lowered. A standard second best solution would be vice taxes. People are bad at long term thinking with regards to vices. So we introduce an extra cost into the system to compensate for that irrationality. (edit) In general a first best solution is going to prioritize overall or productive efficiency while a second best will prioritize social or utilitarian efficiency.
The first best solution to a monopoly would be to break up the monopoly. The second best solution to a monopoly would be to regulate the monopoly in order to prevent it from raising prices (and thus making it behave like competitive market). First best runs the gamut from "generally this is how i want to fix things with policy" to "maybe we only need police and courts so prevent people from killing each other" to "actually policy is dumb because everything is already as first best as it could ever be". Second best runs the gamut from "generally this is how i want to fix things with policy" to "how about we just give people money" to "there are a huge number of goods better produced by the government". Though that last one is usually a pick and choose that runs across the spectrum i am putting it there because nationalization is generally the most extreme second best solution available and eventually nationalization of enough things tends to stop you from being considered capitalist.
Capitalism is government system agnostic though "most" capitalists today are also democratic at least in principle this is not a necessary component of capitalism. Capitalism as a practice isn't terribly interested in how the government is set up as opposed to what the government does. Capitalists tend to group other ideologies based how they deal with the problems inherent in their first principles of interaction and/or whether or not they deal with them at all. This is why capitalists tend to view communists as those that propose state ownership of private property***. Because non-ownership of private property is an impossibility that will be "corrected" by people interacting. Also because the mid point states of a system aren't "not that system" if you have to go through them to get there.
Many second best capitalists will want to call themselves something other than capitalist(and many of the further first best will also want to call them not capitalist). And this is reasonable. I am lumping them in despite the way in which they talk about things largely because they will be lumped into that group by other ideologies regardless. Many communists like to call people capitalist if there is any inequality in the system they propose or if it involves private property at all. And like to call many things capitalist regardless of its relation to what capitalists believe or study or work towards I.E. "Racial Capitalism" in the paper that Lanz linked, is capitalism the natural state of things or is capitalism a preference towards a system of government policies? Many second best capitalists would agree with the "racial capitalism" statement that its the natural state of things and then we work within that natural state to achieve what we want(and thus not call themselves capitalist) but in this case calling someone a capitalist makes no sense. But here we are describing capitalism as the system of government policy that generally results from examination of the natural state in the specific manner and not the natural state itself.
*specifically a general equilibrium exists on any starting allocation of goods such that the outcome of trade in the system is pareto efficient. However this is an IFF statement, not merely an if statement. Such that for any desired outcome that is pareto efficient(and all desired outcomes are pareto efficient) there is also a starting allocation of goods that will produce that desired outcome. This is one of the basis's for distributive taxing such as UBI.
**I picked this one because its decidedly NOT true. While there are potentially rational reasons for it "Ownership" can bias people and this can be experimentally shown (potentially rational reasons for this would be algorithmic cognitive cost minimization such that when you own something your brain just assumes you like it because if you didn't why would you have it; this to prevent you from having to evaluate your life choices all the time whenever you encountered something you could maybe potentially acquire by trading other personal property you owned)
***For ease i am using the marxist definition wherein private property means capital. Most capitalists would not differentiate between "private" and personal property. Property is private or public and whether or not it should be either depends on a number of conditions, this describes not a type of property but the manner in which it is owned. Other distinctions might be capital property vs consumptive property (I.E. that which you intend to keep around and that which you intend to use up for personal gratification) and real versus chattel property (I.E. land vs able to be moved). Though none of these are terribly hard distinctions except private/vs public in the ownership structure. If you're reading non-marxist literature today the definition of private property will not be the one utilized in this text. It will be the one relating to ownership structure.
There, I found it and quoted it so we have access to it not buried ten pages back
By and large, honestly I find this to be… well, not actually useful. It practically reads as though essentially as “A Capitalist is anyone who engages with the practicals of economies.” And does nothing to confront the the disparity and power structures inherent to labor relations, nor does it seem to engage meaningfully with ownership of capital and the way that confers power and control in society, which is at the core of socialist philosophy.
At it’s core, its like that final scene from the Yankee Hankee episode of King of the Hill: “Fine fine, everyone’s a Texan; change planes in Dallas, you’re a Texan.”
Also, Lanlaorn, I think that if your opinion, as indicated in your earlier post, is that “class warfare is not a thing,” then honestly there’s little reason for us to engage with each other, because our fundamentals are that at odds with each other. If that is your position, we believe in fundamentally different ideas regarding society’s organization and the social pressures that drive its behavior to actually come to terms.
I'm not sure there is adequate evidence that there is any such thing as a unified class that has a set of particular interests that are odd with other classes. Like, the notion that there is such a thing as the "working class" that we can ascribe a set of unified desires and interests to is something i'm skeptical of.
1. If there were unified classes with class interests those interests would have to be shared by all members of the class
2. These interests would probably be unique to the class in question and it would be logically required for the set of interests that belong to a particular class to be exclusive to that class (if two classes had the same set of interests then how would we distinguish them from one another? this is kind of a set theory problem and assumes that the set of interests is the intention of the set that the class is)
So, Jim in West Virginia working at a WalMart stocking shelves and Jose in Arizona working at a WalMart stocking shelves seem like a good place to start analyzing class. Seemingly we would want to put them in the same class. They both work at WalMart, they are both men (let us stipulate) so thus far it seems reasonable to say that they have the set of interests that belong to anyone stocking shelves at WalMart who is a man. Then we have Jenni, who works at a WalMart stocking shelves in Oklahoma, but is a woman. Do all three of them have the same interests even with respect to working at WalMart? Jenni has to contend with sexism from the customers and coworkers. Jose (a man born in El Salvador) has to contend with the racism from customers and coworkers. Jenni's interests as a woman who stocks shelves at WalMart are different than Jose's interests as a latino who stocks shelves at WalMart. Is there really a united class here? And this doesn't even take into consideration how interests fluctuate regionally, generationally, with respect to sexuality, or family status. All of these things go in to a huge diverse set of interests where Jenni might consider it worth it to get less of a pay raise in return for more robust systems of justice with respect to her gender. Basically if classes with interests exist I think that they have to exist as classes with only a handful of people in them. There doesn't appear to a naturally unified "working class" to which I, Jenni, Jose, and Jim belong. We may share some interests but we don't share the same hierarchy of interests, and if we make our interests vague enough and say that perhaps Jenni and Jose are both interested in a just workplace, well who the fuck isn't interested in that? That risks exploding our class into being a class of everyone.
Not to mention the amount of amateur psychology that invoking class results in. When you can simply declare and ownership class and insist that they all share the same motivations and psychology it eliminates the human agency from the very real alive people. I mean, as much as I don't want to erase the humanity of the people who are barely getting by, I don't think that somehow it's okay to eliminate the humanity of even someone like Bill Gates. He has thoughts, feelings, desires, and an inner life that isn't just "lol ownership class"
The more I learn about Marxist analysis of the world, the less convinced I am by it. I still think that there is a better more equitable world possible and that we ought to be striving for the most egalitarian world that we can possibly make. But I tend to predicate my socialism in very practical terms. I just want a world where every person has the maximum opportunity (here opportunity being actionable, more of a positive liberty than a negative one) to develop themselves as a human being consistent with others having the same opportunity.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Wiki: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit."
Yes, I am aware of the definition.
Worker Ownership is not Private Ownership. This is like, bedrock socialist theory.
How is it not? I don’t own their co-op, they do. I get no say whatever about their business operation. That’s still privately owned!
Unless you mean “all the workers own all the private property” and that’s not a co-op.
They own the thing they work with/under.
You do not work there.
Why should you own the thing that you are not working under? Why should your say account more than that of the people who actually live under it?
To put this in a fashion that I think you might relate to better: How would you feel if your municipality decided that a collection of New York City residents now have the right to vote in your civic elections, but you didn’t, and your only choices were to bear it or move somewhere else… where, well actually to be honest, you still don’t actually have any say in how things are run. You just get to maybe choose which unaccountable municipality you live under. If they decide to let you live there, that is.
Lanz on
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
The language that communism and capitalism 'care' about different things is deceptive.
They don't care about anything. They'll just do what they do when you input the actions of people into their framework.
Garbage in will get garbage out. Actually, since communism is more delicate and isn't built to eat garbage, it won't spew out garbage, it'll fly apart completely and you'll end up pulling your capitalism back out of the closet and it'll be a whole ass mess.
Put good stuff in and...who knows, we've never tried it with either.
If you're interested in playing Neil DeGrasse Tyson-style semantical quibbling about the using of terms like "cares about" and "is concerned with," turns of phrases that philosophers use all the goddamn time when talking about philosophy, then I'm not sure how serious you are interested in actually engaging in the substance.
No one is forcing you to engage with people you think are uninterested in engaging
Wiki: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit."
Yes, I am aware of the definition.
Worker Ownership is not Private Ownership. This is like, bedrock socialist theory.
How is it not? I don’t own their co-op, they do. I get no say whatever about their business operation. That’s still privately owned!
Unless you mean “all the workers own all the private property” and that’s not a co-op.
Co-operative ownership is social ownership. The surplus produced by the organization is distributed among the worker-owners rather than being extracted by the owners and not distributed to the workers.
Also, Lanlaorn, I think that if your opinion, as indicated in your earlier post, is that “class warfare is not a thing,” then honestly there’s little reason for us to engage with each other, because our fundamentals are that at odds with each other. If that is your position, we believe in fundamentally different ideas regarding society’s organization and the social pressures that drive its behavior to actually come to terms.
I'm not sure there is adequate evidence that there is any such thing as a unified class that has a set of particular interests that are odd with other classes. Like, the notion that there is such a thing as the "working class" that we can ascribe a set of unified desires and interests to is something i'm skeptical of.
1. If there were unified classes with class interests those interests would have to be shared by all members of the class
2. These interests would probably be unique to the class in question and it would be logically required for the set of interests that belong to a particular class to be exclusive to that class (if two classes had the same set of interests then how would we distinguish them from one another? this is kind of a set theory problem and assumes that the set of interests is the intention of the set that the class is)
So, Jim in West Virginia working at a WalMart stocking shelves and Jose in Arizona working at a WalMart stocking shelves seem like a good place to start analyzing class. Seemingly we would want to put them in the same class. They both work at WalMart, they are both men (let us stipulate) so thus far it seems reasonable to say that they have the set of interests that belong to anyone stocking shelves at WalMart who is a man. Then we have Jenni, who works at a WalMart stocking shelves in Oklahoma, but is a woman. Do all three of them have the same interests even with respect to working at WalMart? Jenni has to contend with sexism from the customers and coworkers. Jose (a man born in El Salvador) has to contend with the racism from customers and coworkers. Jenni's interests as a woman who stocks shelves at WalMart are different than Jose's interests as a latino who stocks shelves at WalMart. Is there really a united class here? And this doesn't even take into consideration how interests fluctuate regionally, generationally, with respect to sexuality, or family status. All of these things go in to a huge diverse set of interests where Jenni might consider it worth it to get less of a pay raise in return for more robust systems of justice with respect to her gender. Basically if classes with interests exist I think that they have to exist as classes with only a handful of people in them. There doesn't appear to a naturally unified "working class" to which I, Jenni, Jose, and Jim belong. We may share some interests but we don't share the same hierarchy of interests, and if we make our interests vague enough and say that perhaps Jenni and Jose are both interested in a just workplace, well who the fuck isn't interested in that? That risks exploding our class into being a class of everyone.
Not to mention the amount of amateur psychology that invoking class results in. When you can simply declare and ownership class and insist that they all share the same motivations and psychology it eliminates the human agency from the very real alive people. I mean, as much as I don't want to erase the humanity of the people who are barely getting by, I don't think that somehow it's okay to eliminate the humanity of even someone like Bill Gates. He has thoughts, feelings, desires, and an inner life that isn't just "lol ownership class"
The more I learn about Marxist analysis of the world, the less convinced I am by it. I still think that there is a better more equitable world possible and that we ought to be striving for the most egalitarian world that we can possibly make. But I tend to predicate my socialism in very practical terms. I just want a world where every person has the maximum opportunity (here opportunity being actionable, more of a positive liberty than a negative one) to develop themselves as a human being consistent with others having the same opportunity.
LFX this is a weirdly reductive take. Does your argument not also suggest that gender doesn't exist, because different people within a gender have differences in their interest? Intersectionality is an important concept but it does not erase or preclude the existence of the sections that make up a given population.
Co-ops have issues, quite a few, in fact, but it's a structure that doesn't require massive leaps of faith, address immediate problems with no regards for ideology, and can be implemented right now.
It's basically the opposite of Communism.
Important to note: some real co-ops will decide to do harmful things, and will perfectly democratically decide to throw some of their members, probably marginalized ones, under the metaphorical bus, but that's not really different from the current structure.
And that's alright, we can use whatever works to address the other problems, as long as we don't filter solutions through a restrictive ideological sieve.
Also, Lanlaorn, I think that if your opinion, as indicated in your earlier post, is that “class warfare is not a thing,” then honestly there’s little reason for us to engage with each other, because our fundamentals are that at odds with each other. If that is your position, we believe in fundamentally different ideas regarding society’s organization and the social pressures that drive its behavior to actually come to terms.
I'm not sure there is adequate evidence that there is any such thing as a unified class that has a set of particular interests that are odd with other classes. Like, the notion that there is such a thing as the "working class" that we can ascribe a set of unified desires and interests to is something i'm skeptical of.
1. If there were unified classes with class interests those interests would have to be shared by all members of the class
2. These interests would probably be unique to the class in question and it would be logically required for the set of interests that belong to a particular class to be exclusive to that class (if two classes had the same set of interests then how would we distinguish them from one another? this is kind of a set theory problem and assumes that the set of interests is the intention of the set that the class is)
So, Jim in West Virginia working at a WalMart stocking shelves and Jose in Arizona working at a WalMart stocking shelves seem like a good place to start analyzing class. Seemingly we would want to put them in the same class. They both work at WalMart, they are both men (let us stipulate) so thus far it seems reasonable to say that they have the set of interests that belong to anyone stocking shelves at WalMart who is a man. Then we have Jenni, who works at a WalMart stocking shelves in Oklahoma, but is a woman. Do all three of them have the same interests even with respect to working at WalMart? Jenni has to contend with sexism from the customers and coworkers. Jose (a man born in El Salvador) has to contend with the racism from customers and coworkers. Jenni's interests as a woman who stocks shelves at WalMart are different than Jose's interests as a latino who stocks shelves at WalMart. Is there really a united class here? And this doesn't even take into consideration how interests fluctuate regionally, generationally, with respect to sexuality, or family status. All of these things go in to a huge diverse set of interests where Jenni might consider it worth it to get less of a pay raise in return for more robust systems of justice with respect to her gender. Basically if classes with interests exist I think that they have to exist as classes with only a handful of people in them. There doesn't appear to a naturally unified "working class" to which I, Jenni, Jose, and Jim belong. We may share some interests but we don't share the same hierarchy of interests, and if we make our interests vague enough and say that perhaps Jenni and Jose are both interested in a just workplace, well who the fuck isn't interested in that? That risks exploding our class into being a class of everyone.
Not to mention the amount of amateur psychology that invoking class results in. When you can simply declare and ownership class and insist that they all share the same motivations and psychology it eliminates the human agency from the very real alive people. I mean, as much as I don't want to erase the humanity of the people who are barely getting by, I don't think that somehow it's okay to eliminate the humanity of even someone like Bill Gates. He has thoughts, feelings, desires, and an inner life that isn't just "lol ownership class"
The more I learn about Marxist analysis of the world, the less convinced I am by it. I still think that there is a better more equitable world possible and that we ought to be striving for the most egalitarian world that we can possibly make. But I tend to predicate my socialism in very practical terms. I just want a world where every person has the maximum opportunity (here opportunity being actionable, more of a positive liberty than a negative one) to develop themselves as a human being consistent with others having the same opportunity.
This is where Intersectionality comes into play; we understand that Class, Gender, Race, etc. are all distinct axes, but their distinction from each other does not preclude their existence.
Jenni, Jim and Jose are all working class. That is their Class Axis.
Jenni is a woman; Jim and Jose are men; that allows us to understand their positions along gender axis.
Jose is a Latino Immigrant, which gives us an indication of where he is along the axis of race.
Et cetera, et cetera.
From those intersecting axes, we can better understand and remedy the discriminations each of them face, but we cannot simply pretend one of those axes does not exist because of the existence of the others.
As it stands, in American Society is still heavily class stratified however; we have distinct classes of income and ownership; literally everyone you’ve mentioned in this hypothetical would exist as lower economic, working class people, and share a set of pressures that come with that economic reality.
We understand, further, in socialist theory, how the upper classes have historically used the other axes as fracture lines to divide the working class. Historically, this dates back at least as far as the Colonial Period of America, which is part of what led to the development of race as a social construct by the slave owning landed gentry, who understood the threat (as seen in instances like Bacon’s Rebellion, where free white people and black people of varying freedoms banded together against the governor of the Virginia colony and burned down the capital) posed by the lower classes finding solidarity. (The other part, of course, being “slavers didn’t want to lose their free labor, and so sought to erase the conditions in Protestant colonies that allowed for the emancipation of the enslaved, so sought to tie it to the color of their skin rather than issues of Christian faith).
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
How does communism allocate housing? Depends on how your communist government works. It could be a market, it could be assifned based on industry, "you work in government and this is where your department office is" etc.
Zag, markets and trade are not exclusive to a capitalist mode of production
So I was writing up a whole thing about this and the process of working through has actually helped me realize something interesting about communism.
For a market to exist you have to have two parties willing to trade a good or service to the other. As communism dissolves private property, this would be personal property. However, since private property (capital, the means of production) is required to create personal property, and since private property is held in common, then what reason is there for either party to willingly trade their personal property when the commune will determine the amount of personal property they receive? Well, if the utility they parties derive from good/service A is greater than good/service B such that they're willing to pay the market "price" (note this does not have to be money, a common misconception) to forego their own stock of good/service B (which was determined by the commune) to acquire good/service A that they have greater utility for, then you can still have a reasonably efficient market mechanism for those two parties. Whether said market mechanism scales well I think depends on the instruments of trade. For example, money under capitalism is inherently the price exchanged for your provision of labor -- this is true whether you own the means of production or not, as the means of production is acquired through accumulated savings and time. Under communism where money would not inherently be the price for the exchange of labor, but rather could be the price pegged to something necessary to all people -- say food -- it would be reasonable to me to keep money as a uniform unit of exchange in communism just for ease of facilitating these markets where you can still get a pareto optimal outcome.
Huh. I need to sit with this more.
The history and philosophy of Labor Vouchers/Labor Notes/Labor Cheques may be of interest to you, Oghulk.
I mean, there's another word for credit vouchers, issued by the employing entity, and only redeemable through their vendors.
Labor vouchers are, historically and philosophically, a different thing entirely from company scrip
And again, the point was for Oghulk to be able to add a historic attempt to solve the problem he’s turning about in his head and go from there about if its workable or not. It’s not like the Labor Voucher is without disagreement in socialist circles, a debate literally as old as Kropotkin’s writings.
Far fewer differences than you'd expect. They are essentially pay-by-piece scrip, of a value determined by the issuer, who is also the only legal receiver. The main difference between labor vouchers and other forms of scrip is that they can't be traded privately. That, ironically, gives them an even greater potential for exploitation of the recipient than company scrip, because the issuer has a legally enforceable monopoly on receiving them. It's of little surprise that the historical examples have all failed rapidly. You may be giving it to Oghulk as a place to start, but it's a place on wrong side of modern monetary systems from where we want to be.
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.
Damn, hit post too early, need to make a double here so the bat signals work
Heffling i haven’t forgot you, it’s taking a fair bit of energy to write this effort post, but I am working on it
Incenjucar i think you’d really get a kick out of learning about historical materialism as a philosophy, and how it shapes how people think and respond to their world. You seem like you’re genuinely interested in this type of stuff, so hit me up if you come up dry on your google searching and need some reading recommendations
No worries from my end. My wife had surgery yesterday and is currently hospitalized for complications, so I've had way more important things to focus on.
Wiki: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit."
Yes, I am aware of the definition.
Worker Ownership is not Private Ownership. This is like, bedrock socialist theory.
The key feature of capitalism is that the ownership class isn't actually providing anything of value (no, CEOs do not provide anything of value), they just have the paperwork saying they own things and therefore get the biggest cut of the value produced. Basically they're parasites with legal protection.
It is not. That may be a feature of the strawman of capitalism you imagine it to be but in actual fact capitalists provide what it says on the tin, capital. They pay for all the infrastructure necessary to enable production.
Wiki: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit."
Yes, I am aware of the definition.
Worker Ownership is not Private Ownership. This is like, bedrock socialist theory.
How is it not? I don’t own their co-op, they do. I get no say whatever about their business operation. That’s still privately owned!
Unless you mean “all the workers own all the private property” and that’s not a co-op.
They own the thing they work with/under.
Do they? If they leave does the coop need to buy them out of their ownership share? If it doesn't, then I would argue they don't actually own anything, they are renting it from whatever state entity organizes and enforces this arrangement.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
OK so what is [tim curry]Capitalism[/tim curry]. At least who are the capitalists and what do they believe. I approach this from the frame of who the communists will tell you are the capitalists but how those capitalists will describe their beliefs. This because the primary side of this discussion is marxists and not using their definitions makes things difficult even if no one else uses their definitions. So this kind of covers a pretty wide swath that encompasses most orthodox and even heterodox economics of the current and past day.
Capitalism has had many adherents and structures over the years but is mainly unified in the belief that markets are at least decent ways to find prices and allocate goods. There are many types of capitalism, but state capitalism is not one of them. Because in state capitalism the state determines good allocation and distribution. And, while this is not impossible*. It is hard. And not like in the "oh boy that took a day" sense but like the "we don't actually know if this is possible" way. And does not utilize markets at all, which, if there is one, would be considered the "one central tenet" of capitalism. Capitalism as a whole does not make a statement as to what the optimal allocation of goods is but does allow for a government to make that determination and work towards it. The hypothetical utopian communism, besides being stateless, moneyless, and classless, would be a legitimate capitalist end goal. This because a capitalist would recognize that money would be needed for markets. Classes are social constructs and will be developed regardless of what the state does. And state would be necessary in order to regulate human interaction to achieve the goal. This does not mean that there do not exists anarcho capitalists, those who believe that no regulation of the market is optimal. It just means that capitalists who think that you can achieve equality tend to think that this will require government. And while anarcho-capitalists are dumb they would still fit within the umbrella of capitalism. Because they have similar beliefs in markets and are built on similar first principles as people who support large UBI, government regulation, and nationalization of heavily externally priced industries.
Capitalism is built on the first principle of interaction. That is. People interact. If those interactions are "free" then there exist ranges for prices under which they will trade. These ranges eventually coalesce into a single price for the goods which are traded at a market. And this price has, at least, a base level of a specific type of efficiency. The necessary conditions for this are roughly that people need to be rational and information needs to be relatively even across the system, and costs need to be internalized. These conditions are often derided but they do not generally mean what the people complaining about them mean. Rationality does not mean that people are robots or cannot have "dumb preferences" or preferences that other people get things but that their preferences are well ordered. I.E. if you would prefer an apple to a banana this does not depend on whether or not you currently have a banana**. Perfect information does not mean that everyone knows everything about a product but that there are differences in the information about a product that people have. For the most part these two conditions are rarely met. And the third condition is easily breakable. However examination of the real world has found that even when those conditions are not met markets can still work pretty well so long as they're met well enough.
The practice of capitalism has largely been to examine markets, examine how and why and when they fail, and to figure out how to fix them. This is more or less on the assumption that managing markets is easier than controlling an economy. Market type, market structure, information structure, externality structure, and preference structure are all things that are studied in an attempt to have a better understanding of the underlying system and so be able to produce better systems to control better outcomes. edit: Capitalists tend to be quite cognizant of the fact that removing money from a system tends to mean distribution is allocated on other and potentially less desirable methods. This may be whomever has the most time or whomever is the most pretty or whomever is the most white. Some capitalists ignore natural market problems that are resolved in those manners or assume that the market principles apply in excess of the markets make those inefficient results optimal. But this does not encompass the majority of capitalists working in the field.
There are two main schools of thought in this at the mirco level. First best and second best(though they will not always be listed in this manner). First best assumes that there is a continuum between an imperfect market and a perfect market. And that the closer a market is to a perfect market the better outcomes in terms of pareto efficiency are produced. Thus, when given the choice to regulate, a regulation that moves the market closer to perfect is a better choice. The second best school does not assume this. And realizes that there are often imperfections that can be introduced into an imperfect market that makes it more efficient. A standard example of a first best solution would be cap and trade. By internalizing costs the market will find the price for pollution, that price will be paid to the government/people for use how it sees fit, and pollution will be lowered. A standard second best solution would be vice taxes. People are bad at long term thinking with regards to vices. So we introduce an extra cost into the system to compensate for that irrationality. (edit) In general a first best solution is going to prioritize overall or productive efficiency while a second best will prioritize social or utilitarian efficiency.
The first best solution to a monopoly would be to break up the monopoly. The second best solution to a monopoly would be to regulate the monopoly in order to prevent it from raising prices (and thus making it behave like competitive market). First best runs the gamut from "generally this is how i want to fix things with policy" to "maybe we only need police and courts so prevent people from killing each other" to "actually policy is dumb because everything is already as first best as it could ever be". Second best runs the gamut from "generally this is how i want to fix things with policy" to "how about we just give people money" to "there are a huge number of goods better produced by the government". Though that last one is usually a pick and choose that runs across the spectrum i am putting it there because nationalization is generally the most extreme second best solution available and eventually nationalization of enough things tends to stop you from being considered capitalist.
Capitalism is government system agnostic though "most" capitalists today are also democratic at least in principle this is not a necessary component of capitalism. Capitalism as a practice isn't terribly interested in how the government is set up as opposed to what the government does. Capitalists tend to group other ideologies based how they deal with the problems inherent in their first principles of interaction and/or whether or not they deal with them at all. This is why capitalists tend to view communists as those that propose state ownership of private property***. Because non-ownership of private property is an impossibility that will be "corrected" by people interacting. Also because the mid point states of a system aren't "not that system" if you have to go through them to get there.
Many second best capitalists will want to call themselves something other than capitalist(and many of the further first best will also want to call them not capitalist). And this is reasonable. I am lumping them in despite the way in which they talk about things largely because they will be lumped into that group by other ideologies regardless. Many communists like to call people capitalist if there is any inequality in the system they propose or if it involves private property at all. And like to call many things capitalist regardless of its relation to what capitalists believe or study or work towards I.E. "Racial Capitalism" in the paper that Lanz linked, is capitalism the natural state of things or is capitalism a preference towards a system of government policies? Many second best capitalists would agree with the "racial capitalism" statement that its the natural state of things and then we work within that natural state to achieve what we want(and thus not call themselves capitalist) but in this case calling someone a capitalist makes no sense. But here we are describing capitalism as the system of government policy that generally results from examination of the natural state in the specific manner and not the natural state itself.
*specifically a general equilibrium exists on any starting allocation of goods such that the outcome of trade in the system is pareto efficient. However this is an IFF statement, not merely an if statement. Such that for any desired outcome that is pareto efficient(and all desired outcomes are pareto efficient) there is also a starting allocation of goods that will produce that desired outcome. This is one of the basis's for distributive taxing such as UBI.
**I picked this one because its decidedly NOT true. While there are potentially rational reasons for it "Ownership" can bias people and this can be experimentally shown (potentially rational reasons for this would be algorithmic cognitive cost minimization such that when you own something your brain just assumes you like it because if you didn't why would you have it; this to prevent you from having to evaluate your life choices all the time whenever you encountered something you could maybe potentially acquire by trading other personal property you owned)
***For ease i am using the marxist definition wherein private property means capital. Most capitalists would not differentiate between "private" and personal property. Property is private or public and whether or not it should be either depends on a number of conditions, this describes not a type of property but the manner in which it is owned. Other distinctions might be capital property vs consumptive property (I.E. that which you intend to keep around and that which you intend to use up for personal gratification) and real versus chattel property (I.E. land vs able to be moved). Though none of these are terribly hard distinctions except private/vs public in the ownership structure. If you're reading non-marxist literature today the definition of private property will not be the one utilized in this text. It will be the one relating to ownership structure.
There, I found it and quoted it so we have access to it not buried ten pages back
By and large, honestly I find this to be… well, not actually useful. It practically reads as though essentially as “A Capitalist is anyone who engages with the practicals of economies.” And does nothing to confront the the disparity and power structures inherent to labor relations, nor does it seem to engage meaningfully with ownership of capital and the way that confers power and control in society, which is at the core of socialist philosophy.
At it’s core, its like that final scene from the Yankee Hankee episode of King of the Hill: “Fine fine, everyone’s a Texan; change planes in Dallas, you’re a Texan.”
You wanted to know what made a capitalist a capitalist and under what structure of thought they operated that is the answer. It is not the answer that communists give but too bad. Communists do not get to define capitalism. And that is capitalism as expressed by its adherents and practitioners.
Some capitalists work to deal with the power imbalances between labor and capital. But this is not all capitalists and so is not a useful definition of “capitalism”. You call me a capitalist despite it being obviously true that I think that society should deal with the imbalances between labor and capital so I had to come up with a definition that both encompassed me and also the Ayn Rand folks you lump me into.
My definition is exceedingly kind to your structure of thought and preferences for definitions. I could give a more tight definition but then you would not be arguing against capitalism, because there would be no capitalists here for which to argue.
In marxism, and a lot of socialist thought, there is often a confusion (intentional or otherwise) between the capitalist “class” and capitalist “thought”. Thus capitalists thought must be that capitalists think the capitalist class should be on top. Rather than like a coherent set of beliefs that have consequences and can be followed and examined.
Part of this problem stems from Marx. The Bourgeoisie were roughly a new class at the time, rising at the same time as many “capitalist” thinkers like Smith, right after the aristocracy had been overthrown (at least in france, but any theory of society had to account both for France and for societies that still had aristocracy and those societies that had not murdered their landed gentry still had bourgeoisie). So when the problems in france continued despite the aristocracy getting murdered the problem must have been the next most prosperous people. Those damned city folk.
But part of this stems from you. Because capitalists have moved on. My 1936 reference in the other thread was because that is when Keynes posted his general theory and the conception of capitalism that you had fucking died forever. Even the most laissez faire capitalists today still use that professional economic structure. Mankiw, the man heralded here as the next coming of Von Mises is a ”New Keynesian” in structure of thought. The fundamental critique (as bullshit as it was) from the insurgence of neo liberal economics (notably a very different definition as to what you consider neo liberal) was that the math wasn’t rigorous enough or the right type and didnt originate enough from individual action.
Marx liked to think in materialism* which emphasized things that happened over theories of action. Classes existed and classes were in conflict therefore class conflict was the defining aspect of society that drove history. This is how Marx can envision a dictatorship of the proletariat without that proletariat (either collectively or individually) raising in terms of class. For him, class was the defining basic structure that did not change. But capitalists do not think that way. They base their belief in a theory of action and of market efficiency. Ricardian labor value as philosophical justification for classes is fucking dead. Dramatic irony here; Marx killed it. It was his greatest success.
*let us ignore that this is a fancy way to say that non-communists were fake thinkers. He had a penchant for invective. It would be like the physics vs metaphysics distinction in pre-enlightenment philosophy except as an explicit diss. Materialism is no less ephemeral than early modeling was and is significantly moreso than modern social sciences natural experiments
Wiki: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit."
Yes, I am aware of the definition.
Worker Ownership is not Private Ownership. This is like, bedrock socialist theory.
How is it not? I don’t own their co-op, they do. I get no say whatever about their business operation. That’s still privately owned!
Unless you mean “all the workers own all the private property” and that’s not a co-op.
Yup. And workers who own their property are free to set up the structure of how they want their ownership to proceed. They can voluntarily give up their ownership to another worker at any time (usually these work by forcing people to buy into the coop/sell out of the coop unless the coop doesn’t just become a standard enterprise when people retire/leave but nothing prevents that under a capitalist structure.)
Like. A fundamental aspect of capitalist culture (as it were) is for you, yes you, regardless of who you are even or especially if you’re a worker, to buy stock in companies.
Edit: formatting issues. Had a pasted section in two places
I tried some googling this but the terms are too common, so I wonder if people know of any studies on it.
I have doubts if co-ops can actually exist at large scale in complex industries, because what may be best for the long term good or even survival of the company and the employees doesn't necessarily align. There is a level of creative destruction that needs to happen for progress to occur.
Take something like the auto industry.
The drivetrain of an ICE car is about 2000 moving parts. An EV's has about 20. An average car contains about 30k parts total-counting every nut/bolt/screw individually. So EVs are a 6% reduction in in total parts, and basically eliminate all the most machining and assembly intensive ones. The estimates I've seen is around a 30% reduction in labor hours per vehicle.
What happens at CO-OP Motors, when they want to go EV. Because GM can just close the transmission plant. But the transmission plant employees don't get a vote in that at GM.
A Company wide vote: We will switch to a new product but 3 in 10 of you will become redundant is not one I think would pass. Even if its a smaller number accounting for non-assembly/manufacturing employees one thing that anyone whose dealt with a HOA or similar thing can attest to is that most people are generally apathetic, a minority of people who care a lot about a single issue can easily carry the day. Think of the condos that continually vote down basic maintenance until the building is condemned or the issue becomes too big to ignore.
Wiki: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit."
Yes, I am aware of the definition.
Worker Ownership is not Private Ownership. This is like, bedrock socialist theory.
The key feature of capitalism is that the ownership class isn't actually providing anything of value (no, CEOs do not provide anything of value), they just have the paperwork saying they own things and therefore get the biggest cut of the value produced. Basically they're parasites with legal protection.
It is not. That may be a feature of the strawman of capitalism you imagine it to be but in actual fact capitalists provide what it says on the tin, capital. They pay for all the infrastructure necessary to enable production.
Wiki: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit."
Yes, I am aware of the definition.
Worker Ownership is not Private Ownership. This is like, bedrock socialist theory.
How is it not? I don’t own their co-op, they do. I get no say whatever about their business operation. That’s still privately owned!
Unless you mean “all the workers own all the private property” and that’s not a co-op.
They own the thing they work with/under.
Do they? If they leave does the coop need to buy them out of their ownership share? If it doesn't, then I would argue they don't actually own anything, they are renting it from whatever state entity organizes and enforces this arrangement.
As I understand it, ownership encompasses several concepts here:
- decision-making power. Worker co-ops are usually democratic, either through direct democracy or worker-elected management, or some combination thereof.
- benefiting from surplus. A privately owned enterprise extracts the surplus to benefit the private owner or owners (though sometimes, at the owner's discretion and generous whim, they may distribute part of the surplus). A worker co-op collectively owns and distributes the surplus product (or value thereof) to the worker-owners, with the result usually being a much more compressed distribution. The rules of allocating that surplus are generally established democratically via the previous aspect of ownership.
- share in stake. Yes, IME worker-owners who decide to leave the co-op often must have their stake bought out. The calculation of that stake is established democratically (e.g., if you signed on a week ago, you're not getting a full share when you quit; you have to put in some labour before you would get a larger share).
Co-ops are sometimes described as "labour employing capital instead of capital employing labour," depending on the manner in which they are operated and founded.
Also, Lanlaorn, I think that if your opinion, as indicated in your earlier post, is that “class warfare is not a thing,” then honestly there’s little reason for us to engage with each other, because our fundamentals are that at odds with each other. If that is your position, we believe in fundamentally different ideas regarding society’s organization and the social pressures that drive its behavior to actually come to terms.
I'm not sure there is adequate evidence that there is any such thing as a unified class that has a set of particular interests that are odd with other classes. Like, the notion that there is such a thing as the "working class" that we can ascribe a set of unified desires and interests to is something i'm skeptical of.
1. If there were unified classes with class interests those interests would have to be shared by all members of the class
2. These interests would probably be unique to the class in question and it would be logically required for the set of interests that belong to a particular class to be exclusive to that class (if two classes had the same set of interests then how would we distinguish them from one another? this is kind of a set theory problem and assumes that the set of interests is the intention of the set that the class is)
So, Jim in West Virginia working at a WalMart stocking shelves and Jose in Arizona working at a WalMart stocking shelves seem like a good place to start analyzing class. Seemingly we would want to put them in the same class. They both work at WalMart, they are both men (let us stipulate) so thus far it seems reasonable to say that they have the set of interests that belong to anyone stocking shelves at WalMart who is a man. Then we have Jenni, who works at a WalMart stocking shelves in Oklahoma, but is a woman. Do all three of them have the same interests even with respect to working at WalMart? Jenni has to contend with sexism from the customers and coworkers. Jose (a man born in El Salvador) has to contend with the racism from customers and coworkers. Jenni's interests as a woman who stocks shelves at WalMart are different than Jose's interests as a latino who stocks shelves at WalMart. Is there really a united class here? And this doesn't even take into consideration how interests fluctuate regionally, generationally, with respect to sexuality, or family status. All of these things go in to a huge diverse set of interests where Jenni might consider it worth it to get less of a pay raise in return for more robust systems of justice with respect to her gender. Basically if classes with interests exist I think that they have to exist as classes with only a handful of people in them. There doesn't appear to a naturally unified "working class" to which I, Jenni, Jose, and Jim belong. We may share some interests but we don't share the same hierarchy of interests, and if we make our interests vague enough and say that perhaps Jenni and Jose are both interested in a just workplace, well who the fuck isn't interested in that? That risks exploding our class into being a class of everyone.
Not to mention the amount of amateur psychology that invoking class results in. When you can simply declare and ownership class and insist that they all share the same motivations and psychology it eliminates the human agency from the very real alive people. I mean, as much as I don't want to erase the humanity of the people who are barely getting by, I don't think that somehow it's okay to eliminate the humanity of even someone like Bill Gates. He has thoughts, feelings, desires, and an inner life that isn't just "lol ownership class"
The more I learn about Marxist analysis of the world, the less convinced I am by it. I still think that there is a better more equitable world possible and that we ought to be striving for the most egalitarian world that we can possibly make. But I tend to predicate my socialism in very practical terms. I just want a world where every person has the maximum opportunity (here opportunity being actionable, more of a positive liberty than a negative one) to develop themselves as a human being consistent with others having the same opportunity.
I don't find the Marxist definitions to be that relevant to today's world. For instance, My wife and I own a duplex which accounted for about 6% of our household income last year (assuming we can actually realize the increase in property value, otherwise it represents like 0.04% of our income). We personally have to do a lot of the upkeep on that house. I think that puts us in the Petite Bourgeoisie class (or maybe the Landlord class?). But in a country where about 65% of the population owns their home, 40% of the population contributes to a 401(k), countless others own at least some nominal stock, crypto, etc., then most people don't fall strictly in Bourgeoisie or Proletariat classes.
I think the Marxist definitions of class don't work as well as dividing classes strictly by income and type of work. I think an upper middle class software developer has significantly more in common with a small business owner than either a large business owner or a retail worker despite the small business owner being part of the Bourgeoisie and the software developer being part of the Proletariat.
I don't think that disagreeing with the Marxist definitions of class is a good argument against communism, though.
Wiki: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit."
Yes, I am aware of the definition.
Worker Ownership is not Private Ownership. This is like, bedrock socialist theory.
The key feature of capitalism is that the ownership class isn't actually providing anything of value (no, CEOs do not provide anything of value), they just have the paperwork saying they own things and therefore get the biggest cut of the value produced. Basically they're parasites with legal protection.
I mean, no, this isn't really accurate. It's part of the knee-jerk "managers are useless, we don't need them" mentality that is cathartic, maybe, but also unrealistic.
A CEO is a manager at the top of the company who has the broadest view of the company's activities and guides overall direction. That most CEO's today are inept, corrupt, and/or wildly overvalued does not mean the entire concept is devoid of merit.
Even in the most socialist of socialisms you would need to have someone who's job it is to shuffle things around and keep the operation functioning, even if they received the same pay as everyone else and could be voted out of power by the other employees. You can call them something else if you'd prefer, but they're still CEOs.
I may have been a bit hyperbolic, yes. Management is necessary, but the CEO role as it exists today doesn't strike me as management so much as someone making decisions in such broad terms as to be useless then leaving the details to the underlings to actually work out.
Also, Lanlaorn, I think that if your opinion, as indicated in your earlier post, is that “class warfare is not a thing,” then honestly there’s little reason for us to engage with each other, because our fundamentals are that at odds with each other. If that is your position, we believe in fundamentally different ideas regarding society’s organization and the social pressures that drive its behavior to actually come to terms.
I'm not sure there is adequate evidence that there is any such thing as a unified class that has a set of particular interests that are odd with other classes. Like, the notion that there is such a thing as the "working class" that we can ascribe a set of unified desires and interests to is something i'm skeptical of.
1. If there were unified classes with class interests those interests would have to be shared by all members of the class
2. These interests would probably be unique to the class in question and it would be logically required for the set of interests that belong to a particular class to be exclusive to that class (if two classes had the same set of interests then how would we distinguish them from one another? this is kind of a set theory problem and assumes that the set of interests is the intention of the set that the class is)
So, Jim in West Virginia working at a WalMart stocking shelves and Jose in Arizona working at a WalMart stocking shelves seem like a good place to start analyzing class. Seemingly we would want to put them in the same class. They both work at WalMart, they are both men (let us stipulate) so thus far it seems reasonable to say that they have the set of interests that belong to anyone stocking shelves at WalMart who is a man. Then we have Jenni, who works at a WalMart stocking shelves in Oklahoma, but is a woman. Do all three of them have the same interests even with respect to working at WalMart? Jenni has to contend with sexism from the customers and coworkers. Jose (a man born in El Salvador) has to contend with the racism from customers and coworkers. Jenni's interests as a woman who stocks shelves at WalMart are different than Jose's interests as a latino who stocks shelves at WalMart. Is there really a united class here? And this doesn't even take into consideration how interests fluctuate regionally, generationally, with respect to sexuality, or family status. All of these things go in to a huge diverse set of interests where Jenni might consider it worth it to get less of a pay raise in return for more robust systems of justice with respect to her gender. Basically if classes with interests exist I think that they have to exist as classes with only a handful of people in them. There doesn't appear to a naturally unified "working class" to which I, Jenni, Jose, and Jim belong. We may share some interests but we don't share the same hierarchy of interests, and if we make our interests vague enough and say that perhaps Jenni and Jose are both interested in a just workplace, well who the fuck isn't interested in that? That risks exploding our class into being a class of everyone.
Not to mention the amount of amateur psychology that invoking class results in. When you can simply declare and ownership class and insist that they all share the same motivations and psychology it eliminates the human agency from the very real alive people. I mean, as much as I don't want to erase the humanity of the people who are barely getting by, I don't think that somehow it's okay to eliminate the humanity of even someone like Bill Gates. He has thoughts, feelings, desires, and an inner life that isn't just "lol ownership class"
The more I learn about Marxist analysis of the world, the less convinced I am by it. I still think that there is a better more equitable world possible and that we ought to be striving for the most egalitarian world that we can possibly make. But I tend to predicate my socialism in very practical terms. I just want a world where every person has the maximum opportunity (here opportunity being actionable, more of a positive liberty than a negative one) to develop themselves as a human being consistent with others having the same opportunity.
LFX this is a weirdly reductive take. Does your argument not also suggest that gender doesn't exist, because different people within a gender have differences in their interest? Intersectionality is an important concept but it does not erase or preclude the existence of the sections that make up a given population.
Well, I might be open to that kind of thing.
But really what it does preclude is that gender is a class of people given certain interests. The notion of a "working class" is that there is a set of people that share a common interest or set of interests. That is what the class is, just a group of people with the same set of interests. A gender is not a group of people with the same set of interests, so saying that there is no unified set of interests that belong to "women" or "men" doesn't undermine the reality of gender.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
Boy, I am sure glad to know my living conditions, in communism, will be dictated by how charismatic I am, and how good I am at negotiation, and public speaking. That sounds great and not at all like a way to create an authoritarian system.
just curious, how do you think interviewing works for most people currently? 👀
Because people keep telling me in this thread that a better, more equitable world isn’t possible, and cite as their reasons Van Gogh’s artistic output, the Beatles, and apparently that not everyone can live in New York City, Seattle or the Grand Canyon.
Literally nobody in the thread has said a better world isn't possible.
Please don't strawman us.
"We are skeptical of your utopia" is not the same as "what we have is the theoretical optimum."
okay, but i've been following along in this thread and it's pretty literally where a handful of y'all end up
incenjecuar's whole argument is that because his family has suffered personal hardship (but not enough hardship to prevent them from having enough intergenerational wealth and community to build a petit bourgeoisie collective) a collectivist society just can't work
spool literally said we have to force people to do shitty jobs, with the example of modern sweatshop shoe production, for society
but those labor conditions wouldn't even exist without capitalists in a country on the other side of the planet manipulating local markets to create conditions in which they can exploit workers
i don't really care about how comfortable
y'all's existence in the current system is when you're building your mcmansions out of other people's bones
OK so what is [tim curry]Capitalism[/tim curry]. At least who are the capitalists and what do they believe. I approach this from the frame of who the communists will tell you are the capitalists but how those capitalists will describe their beliefs. This because the primary side of this discussion is marxists and not using their definitions makes things difficult even if no one else uses their definitions. So this kind of covers a pretty wide swath that encompasses most orthodox and even heterodox economics of the current and past day.
Capitalism has had many adherents and structures over the years but is mainly unified in the belief that markets are at least decent ways to find prices and allocate goods. There are many types of capitalism, but state capitalism is not one of them. Because in state capitalism the state determines good allocation and distribution. And, while this is not impossible*. It is hard. And not like in the "oh boy that took a day" sense but like the "we don't actually know if this is possible" way. And does not utilize markets at all, which, if there is one, would be considered the "one central tenet" of capitalism. Capitalism as a whole does not make a statement as to what the optimal allocation of goods is but does allow for a government to make that determination and work towards it. The hypothetical utopian communism, besides being stateless, moneyless, and classless, would be a legitimate capitalist end goal. This because a capitalist would recognize that money would be needed for markets. Classes are social constructs and will be developed regardless of what the state does. And state would be necessary in order to regulate human interaction to achieve the goal. This does not mean that there do not exists anarcho capitalists, those who believe that no regulation of the market is optimal. It just means that capitalists who think that you can achieve equality tend to think that this will require government. And while anarcho-capitalists are dumb they would still fit within the umbrella of capitalism. Because they have similar beliefs in markets and are built on similar first principles as people who support large UBI, government regulation, and nationalization of heavily externally priced industries.
Capitalism is built on the first principle of interaction. That is. People interact. If those interactions are "free" then there exist ranges for prices under which they will trade. These ranges eventually coalesce into a single price for the goods which are traded at a market. And this price has, at least, a base level of a specific type of efficiency. The necessary conditions for this are roughly that people need to be rational and information needs to be relatively even across the system, and costs need to be internalized. These conditions are often derided but they do not generally mean what the people complaining about them mean. Rationality does not mean that people are robots or cannot have "dumb preferences" or preferences that other people get things but that their preferences are well ordered. I.E. if you would prefer an apple to a banana this does not depend on whether or not you currently have a banana**. Perfect information does not mean that everyone knows everything about a product but that there are differences in the information about a product that people have. For the most part these two conditions are rarely met. And the third condition is easily breakable. However examination of the real world has found that even when those conditions are not met markets can still work pretty well so long as they're met well enough.
The practice of capitalism has largely been to examine markets, examine how and why and when they fail, and to figure out how to fix them. This is more or less on the assumption that managing markets is easier than controlling an economy. Market type, market structure, information structure, externality structure, and preference structure are all things that are studied in an attempt to have a better understanding of the underlying system and so be able to produce better systems to control better outcomes. edit: Capitalists tend to be quite cognizant of the fact that removing money from a system tends to mean distribution is allocated on other and potentially less desirable methods. This may be whomever has the most time or whomever is the most pretty or whomever is the most white. Some capitalists ignore natural market problems that are resolved in those manners or assume that the market principles apply in excess of the markets make those inefficient results optimal. But this does not encompass the majority of capitalists working in the field.
There are two main schools of thought in this at the mirco level. First best and second best(though they will not always be listed in this manner). First best assumes that there is a continuum between an imperfect market and a perfect market. And that the closer a market is to a perfect market the better outcomes in terms of pareto efficiency are produced. Thus, when given the choice to regulate, a regulation that moves the market closer to perfect is a better choice. The second best school does not assume this. And realizes that there are often imperfections that can be introduced into an imperfect market that makes it more efficient. A standard example of a first best solution would be cap and trade. By internalizing costs the market will find the price for pollution, that price will be paid to the government/people for use how it sees fit, and pollution will be lowered. A standard second best solution would be vice taxes. People are bad at long term thinking with regards to vices. So we introduce an extra cost into the system to compensate for that irrationality. (edit) In general a first best solution is going to prioritize overall or productive efficiency while a second best will prioritize social or utilitarian efficiency.
The first best solution to a monopoly would be to break up the monopoly. The second best solution to a monopoly would be to regulate the monopoly in order to prevent it from raising prices (and thus making it behave like competitive market). First best runs the gamut from "generally this is how i want to fix things with policy" to "maybe we only need police and courts so prevent people from killing each other" to "actually policy is dumb because everything is already as first best as it could ever be". Second best runs the gamut from "generally this is how i want to fix things with policy" to "how about we just give people money" to "there are a huge number of goods better produced by the government". Though that last one is usually a pick and choose that runs across the spectrum i am putting it there because nationalization is generally the most extreme second best solution available and eventually nationalization of enough things tends to stop you from being considered capitalist.
Capitalism is government system agnostic though "most" capitalists today are also democratic at least in principle this is not a necessary component of capitalism. Capitalism as a practice isn't terribly interested in how the government is set up as opposed to what the government does. Capitalists tend to group other ideologies based how they deal with the problems inherent in their first principles of interaction and/or whether or not they deal with them at all. This is why capitalists tend to view communists as those that propose state ownership of private property***. Because non-ownership of private property is an impossibility that will be "corrected" by people interacting. Also because the mid point states of a system aren't "not that system" if you have to go through them to get there.
Many second best capitalists will want to call themselves something other than capitalist(and many of the further first best will also want to call them not capitalist). And this is reasonable. I am lumping them in despite the way in which they talk about things largely because they will be lumped into that group by other ideologies regardless. Many communists like to call people capitalist if there is any inequality in the system they propose or if it involves private property at all. And like to call many things capitalist regardless of its relation to what capitalists believe or study or work towards I.E. "Racial Capitalism" in the paper that Lanz linked, is capitalism the natural state of things or is capitalism a preference towards a system of government policies? Many second best capitalists would agree with the "racial capitalism" statement that its the natural state of things and then we work within that natural state to achieve what we want(and thus not call themselves capitalist) but in this case calling someone a capitalist makes no sense. But here we are describing capitalism as the system of government policy that generally results from examination of the natural state in the specific manner and not the natural state itself.
*specifically a general equilibrium exists on any starting allocation of goods such that the outcome of trade in the system is pareto efficient. However this is an IFF statement, not merely an if statement. Such that for any desired outcome that is pareto efficient(and all desired outcomes are pareto efficient) there is also a starting allocation of goods that will produce that desired outcome. This is one of the basis's for distributive taxing such as UBI.
**I picked this one because its decidedly NOT true. While there are potentially rational reasons for it "Ownership" can bias people and this can be experimentally shown (potentially rational reasons for this would be algorithmic cognitive cost minimization such that when you own something your brain just assumes you like it because if you didn't why would you have it; this to prevent you from having to evaluate your life choices all the time whenever you encountered something you could maybe potentially acquire by trading other personal property you owned)
***For ease i am using the marxist definition wherein private property means capital. Most capitalists would not differentiate between "private" and personal property. Property is private or public and whether or not it should be either depends on a number of conditions, this describes not a type of property but the manner in which it is owned. Other distinctions might be capital property vs consumptive property (I.E. that which you intend to keep around and that which you intend to use up for personal gratification) and real versus chattel property (I.E. land vs able to be moved). Though none of these are terribly hard distinctions except private/vs public in the ownership structure. If you're reading non-marxist literature today the definition of private property will not be the one utilized in this text. It will be the one relating to ownership structure.
There, I found it and quoted it so we have access to it not buried ten pages back
By and large, honestly I find this to be… well, not actually useful. It practically reads as though essentially as “A Capitalist is anyone who engages with the practicals of economies.” And does nothing to confront the the disparity and power structures inherent to labor relations, nor does it seem to engage meaningfully with ownership of capital and the way that confers power and control in society, which is at the core of socialist philosophy.
At it’s core, its like that final scene from the Yankee Hankee episode of King of the Hill: “Fine fine, everyone’s a Texan; change planes in Dallas, you’re a Texan.”
You wanted to know what made a capitalist a capitalist and under what structure of thought they operated that is the answer. It is not the answer that communists give but too bad. Communists do not get to define capitalism. And that is capitalism as expressed by its adherents and practitioners.
Some capitalists work to deal with the power imbalances between labor and capital. But this is not all capitalists and so is not a useful definition of “capitalism”. You call me a capitalist despite it being obviously true that I think that society should deal with the imbalances between labor and capital so I had to come up with a definition that both encompassed me and also the Ayn Rand folks you lump me into.
My definition is exceedingly kind to your structure of thought and preferences for definitions. I could give a more tight definition but then you would not be arguing against capitalism, because there would be no capitalists here for which to argue.
In marxism, and a lot of socialist thought, there is often a confusion (intentional or otherwise) between the capitalist “class” and capitalist “thought”. Thus capitalists thought must be that capitalists think the capitalist class should be on top. Rather than like a coherent set of beliefs that have consequences and can be followed and examined.
Part of this problem stems from Marx. The Bourgeoisie were roughly a new class at the time, rising at the same time as many “capitalist” thinkers like Smith, right after the aristocracy had been overthrown (at least in france, but any theory of society had to account both for France and for societies that still had aristocracy and those societies that had not murdered their landed gentry still had bourgeoisie). So when the problems in france continued despite the aristocracy getting murdered the problem must have been the next most prosperous people. Those damned city folk.
But part of this stems from you. Because capitalists have moved on. My 1936 reference in the other thread was because that is when Keynes posted his general theory and the conception of capitalism that you had fucking died forever. Even the most laissez faire capitalists today still use that professional economic structure. Mankiw, the man heralded here as the next coming of Von Mises is a ”New Keynesian” in structure of thought. The fundamental critique (as bullshit as it was) from the insurgence of neo liberal economics (notably a very different definition as to what you consider neo liberal) was that the math wasn’t rigorous enough or the right type and didnt originate enough from individual action.
Marx liked to think in materialism* which emphasized things that happened over theories of action. Classes existed and classes were in conflict therefore class conflict was the defining aspect of society that drove history. This is how Marx can envision a dictatorship of the proletariat without that proletariat (either collectively or individually) raising in terms of class. For him, class was the defining basic structure that did not change. But capitalists do not think that way. They base their belief in a theory of action and of market efficiency. Ricardian labor value as philosophical justification for classes is fucking dead. Dramatic irony here; Marx killed it. It was his greatest success.
*let us ignore that this is a fancy way to say that non-communists were fake thinkers. He had a penchant for invective. It would be like the physics vs metaphysics distinction in pre-enlightenment philosophy except as an explicit diss. Materialism is no less ephemeral than early modeling was and is significantly moreso than modern social sciences natural experiments
Wiki: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit."
Yes, I am aware of the definition.
Worker Ownership is not Private Ownership. This is like, bedrock socialist theory.
How is it not? I don’t own their co-op, they do. I get no say whatever about their business operation. That’s still privately owned!
Unless you mean “all the workers own all the private property” and that’s not a co-op.
Yup. And workers who own their property are free to set up the structure of how they want their ownership to proceed. They can voluntarily give up their ownership to another worker at any time (usually these work by forcing people to buy into the coop/sell out of the coop unless the coop doesn’t just become a standard enterprise when people retire/leave but nothing prevents that under a capitalist structure.)
Like. A fundamental aspect of capitalist culture (as it were) is for you, yes you, regardless of who you are even or especially if you’re a worker, to buy stock in companies.
Edit: formatting issues. Had a pasted section in two places
this whole post is absurd, and your definition of capitalism is about as far off from the meaning as rothbard's capture of the word libertarian
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
a worker's coop is leveraging their labor in addition to whatever means of production they have access to to generate an equitable division of profit for their labor
nobody's skimming off somebody else's sweat because they had rich parents, or got lucky with an investment
ergo the ownership is public, even if it's on a small enough scale that it's not a state of its own (and most anarchists with a communist bent wouldn't ever want to grow it to the point that it would be)
otoh, there are capitalist captured versions of this model that are "coops" like publix, where all they've done is create a private share structure, but the vast majority is owned by the family, who "work" for the company
versus an organization like winco which has a much more worker oriented distribution of equity despite starting out as an explicitly capitalist organization before transitioning to worker ownership
Lanz, I think it’s fair to draw a distinction between financial incentive and economic coercion.
I mean plumbing sucks but plumbers make bank. They aren’t being forced into plumbering, they have an incentive to do that over some other trade.
Yeah, but like, we’re not even how many pages away from folks asking “but how will we get our shoes
And like
My Collective Dudes
The folks making your shoes ain’t making bank on that. That’s sweatshop labor at the moment.
That was the whole point of asking, because making shoes fucking sucks and you either need to externalization the cost, pay the market value, or force people into becoming shoemakers.
Currently, we force people into becoming shoemakers or else their family starves, and often such production jobs are dangerous and harmful to work.
I don't think this is meaningfully better at all.
also under capitalism there is no incentive to improve the lives of the workers as a form of encouragement if violence will do, automation is only a concern where it can turn a profit.
communism would value automation on it's ability to produce shoes, not profit.
What is the mechanism for making communism value anything?
the needs of society + scarcity. This is some basic stuff we already covered.
What is the mechanism for applying that?
Scarcity is the mechanism, people are motivated to improve the world around them. Pretty sure Lanz posted about this on the first page?
Quiet literally people needing shoes is the mechanism that motivates people to make shoes.
The fact that not wearing shoes will destroy your feet and leave you in pain for the rest of your life on modern walking surfaces is the need that creates the scarcity.
How do we get people to care about shoes once they already have shoes?
Not everyone needs to, but personally I think everyone deserves shoes even though I have a couple pairs myself.
Is your position seriously that people will simply perform labor they do not enjoy for purely altruistic reasons for the betterment of society?
This obviously devolves into a pre-industrial artisan civilization where the most complex goods are what individual craftsmen can produce by trading in raw goods on a barter system to support small villages of mostly farmers, where everyone works much harder to just cover the bare necessities.
Do you never just do things because they need to be done? Do you not volunteer in your community or help a stranger every now and then?
I do, but I also recognize that this is also a very dangerous road for a society to go down as well. A lot of our cultural oppression of women revolves around the unpaid "second shift" of domestic labor that they are culturally expected to do, to give one particularly notorious case.
A lot of cultural oppression is also the result of the Capitalist class entrenching itself, like the sexism that leads to unpaid domestic labor. The 1950's nuclear example is essentially "exploit your wife to raise a child and run a house so your boss can exploit you to buy a boat".
Which, goes even further, particularly because it is hard for women to find gainful employment with the wealth gap now, or just sexism in general. This leaves them vulnerable to their husband who controls the income.
With proper safety nets in place, an individual in an abusive marriage who is forced to stay due to financial reasons would have recourse instead of staying with their abuser.
First, if you think that sexism and misogyny are purely capitalist affairs, I have a bridge to sell you. Socialism and other such ideologies have had long, ignoble histories with them, which should not be forgotten.
Second, you've missed my point, which is that volunteerism as the mechanism to provide societal goods does not exactly have the best track record - either the good gets forgotten about (see the Heartbleed fiasco for a case study) or that people are made to "volunteer" - a burden that is routinely leveled on those with less status in the community.
First - I don't and I didn't say that; I did expand on your point and apply it to how we see it used as a tool by capitalists. Equality and Access are core pillars of Marxism, if I didn't believe it would be a problem under a non-capitalist society I would have said "lol sexism go bye bye" or something as equally vapid as the belief itself. And shoving that accusation in to your post then engaging with it like it's fact is poor form.
Two - No, I REALLY didn't, I gave an example of it! BECAUSE I AGREE, and part of addressing that is social safety nets!
playing loosey goosey so you can pick fights is a bummer.
Also, Lanlaorn, I think that if your opinion, as indicated in your earlier post, is that “class warfare is not a thing,” then honestly there’s little reason for us to engage with each other, because our fundamentals are that at odds with each other. If that is your position, we believe in fundamentally different ideas regarding society’s organization and the social pressures that drive its behavior to actually come to terms.
I'm not sure there is adequate evidence that there is any such thing as a unified class that has a set of particular interests that are odd with other classes. Like, the notion that there is such a thing as the "working class" that we can ascribe a set of unified desires and interests to is something i'm skeptical of.
1. If there were unified classes with class interests those interests would have to be shared by all members of the class
2. These interests would probably be unique to the class in question and it would be logically required for the set of interests that belong to a particular class to be exclusive to that class (if two classes had the same set of interests then how would we distinguish them from one another? this is kind of a set theory problem and assumes that the set of interests is the intention of the set that the class is)
So, Jim in West Virginia working at a WalMart stocking shelves and Jose in Arizona working at a WalMart stocking shelves seem like a good place to start analyzing class. Seemingly we would want to put them in the same class. They both work at WalMart, they are both men (let us stipulate) so thus far it seems reasonable to say that they have the set of interests that belong to anyone stocking shelves at WalMart who is a man. Then we have Jenni, who works at a WalMart stocking shelves in Oklahoma, but is a woman. Do all three of them have the same interests even with respect to working at WalMart? Jenni has to contend with sexism from the customers and coworkers. Jose (a man born in El Salvador) has to contend with the racism from customers and coworkers. Jenni's interests as a woman who stocks shelves at WalMart are different than Jose's interests as a latino who stocks shelves at WalMart. Is there really a united class here? And this doesn't even take into consideration how interests fluctuate regionally, generationally, with respect to sexuality, or family status. All of these things go in to a huge diverse set of interests where Jenni might consider it worth it to get less of a pay raise in return for more robust systems of justice with respect to her gender. Basically if classes with interests exist I think that they have to exist as classes with only a handful of people in them. There doesn't appear to a naturally unified "working class" to which I, Jenni, Jose, and Jim belong. We may share some interests but we don't share the same hierarchy of interests, and if we make our interests vague enough and say that perhaps Jenni and Jose are both interested in a just workplace, well who the fuck isn't interested in that? That risks exploding our class into being a class of everyone.
Not to mention the amount of amateur psychology that invoking class results in. When you can simply declare and ownership class and insist that they all share the same motivations and psychology it eliminates the human agency from the very real alive people. I mean, as much as I don't want to erase the humanity of the people who are barely getting by, I don't think that somehow it's okay to eliminate the humanity of even someone like Bill Gates. He has thoughts, feelings, desires, and an inner life that isn't just "lol ownership class"
The more I learn about Marxist analysis of the world, the less convinced I am by it. I still think that there is a better more equitable world possible and that we ought to be striving for the most egalitarian world that we can possibly make. But I tend to predicate my socialism in very practical terms. I just want a world where every person has the maximum opportunity (here opportunity being actionable, more of a positive liberty than a negative one) to develop themselves as a human being consistent with others having the same opportunity.
This is where Intersectionality comes into play; we understand that Class, Gender, Race, etc. are all distinct axes, but their distinction from each other does not preclude their existence.
Jenni, Jim and Jose are all working class. That is their Class Axis.
Jenni is a woman; Jim and Jose are men; that allows us to understand their positions along gender axis.
Jose is a Latino Immigrant, which gives us an indication of where he is along the axis of race.
Et cetera, et cetera.
From those intersecting axes, we can better understand and remedy the discriminations each of them face, but we cannot simply pretend one of those axes does not exist because of the existence of the others.
As it stands, in American Society is still heavily class stratified however; we have distinct classes of income and ownership; literally everyone you’ve mentioned in this hypothetical would exist as lower economic, working class people, and share a set of pressures that come with that economic reality.
We understand, further, in socialist theory, how the upper classes have historically used the other axes as fracture lines to divide the working class. Historically, this dates back at least as far as the Colonial Period of America, which is part of what led to the development of race as a social construct by the slave owning landed gentry, who understood the threat (as seen in instances like Bacon’s Rebellion, where free white people and black people of varying freedoms banded together against the governor of the Virginia colony and burned down the capital) posed by the lower classes finding solidarity. (The other part, of course, being “slavers didn’t want to lose their free labor, and so sought to erase the conditions in Protestant colonies that allowed for the emancipation of the enslaved, so sought to tie it to the color of their skin rather than issues of Christian faith).
But this is conditioned on the idea that you can separate the axis. That Jenni, Jim, and Jose have a set of interests as workers of no gender or race. You say we have distinct classes of income and ownership but those classes are full of people of diverse race and gender (though not that diverse), and so we push aside their race and gender and say "aha! there is their class interest!" that seems like ignoring intersections of race, gender and economics, not honoring them.
Which is what I am skeptical of. I don't know that such interests exist! I think that the real interests that the people have are going to be difficult or impossible to disentangle. So either we just blindly believe that there is such a thing as their class with interests even though we can't have epistemic access to it, or we say that they are each in their own class according to their particular profile of interests.
Either seems bad for the notion of economic class.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I tried some googling this but the terms are too common, so I wonder if people know of any studies on it.
I have doubts if co-ops can actually exist at large scale in complex industries, because what may be best for the long term good or even survival of the company and the employees doesn't necessarily align. There is a level of creative destruction that needs to happen for progress to occur.
Take something like the auto industry.
The drivetrain of an ICE car is about 2000 moving parts. An EV's has about 20. An average car contains about 30k parts total-counting every nut/bolt/screw individually. So EVs are a 6% reduction in in total parts, and basically eliminate all the most machining and assembly intensive ones. The estimates I've seen is around a 30% reduction in labor hours per vehicle.
What happens at CO-OP Motors, when they want to go EV. Because GM can just close the transmission plant. But the transmission plant employees don't get a vote in that at GM.
A Company wide vote: We will switch to a new product but 3 in 10 of you will become redundant is not one I think would pass. Even if its a smaller number accounting for non-assembly/manufacturing employees one thing that anyone whose dealt with a HOA or similar thing can attest to is that most people are generally apathetic, a minority of people who care a lot about a single issue can easily carry the day. Think of the condos that continually vote down basic maintenance until the building is condemned or the issue becomes too big to ignore.
The only example I'm personally familiar with is grocery stores; I live a few blocks from a couple co-ops, and am a member of one. (You don't need to be a member to shop there, but you get a discount, so duh.)
It seems to work fine; all members can vote on leadership board, there's elections, all the usual business, reporting, and then functionality is basically "it's a store but with lots of hippie stuff". I don't think direct democratic participation on every single decision is required for an institution to be "democratic" or "cooperative"; once you hit a few thousand people that's just unwieldy, so you elect/decide on representatives to handle X Y and Z.
In the automotive example, I think it would compare to "we've decided to no longer have a butcher's counter", in which case it's logical to not just fire the people who worked the meat counter, you find them other roles in the company. Lots of precedent for that in lots of industries, even though here (US) it's usually a thin pretext for "layoffs".
A the coop issue makes clear one of the distinctions
Marx had a labor theory of value derived from Ricardian labor theory.
Goes like this: first the strict Ricardian construction
All value is derived from labor. A person labors and may decide to either build capital for tomorrow or to farm resources for today. Capital increases productive capacity and so the person who labored to build capital also built the value that capital provides. Thus people who were more productive in early farming/hunting had more surplus and so could build more capital. They are the capitalists because they’re such good workers/smart to build capital. This is fair because the capitalists are so good at things.
Marx was like… nah that is dumb
All value is derived from labor. So people who build capital get the value of that capital and people who are more productive get the value of that surplus. Buuuuuut not all land was distributed equal. There exist personal productivity factors based on luck or violence and these power imbalances continue such that inequality did not stem from capitalists being better but by capitalists repressing people.
Capitalists eventually realize that under this construction Marx is correct. Initial distribution of land and materials and capital matters*. Some say “well but I don’t care” but others do.
Where the difference came in is that Marx proposed a solution to this that the people/workers should own the capital. Those of that specific class. And the capitalists decided that ownership should be well defined with disagreement over whether or not that initial condition was fair** or whether correcting it would be fair and how to fairly correct it.
So in a capitalist framework a group of people deciding that they, the workers, should own the capital and then setting up that structure violates no tenets of capitalism. Under capitalism the workers are banding together to make investment decisions based on their shared values. Literally no different than people who don’t “work” doing the same thing. You’re the capitalists now dog is the response they would give.
In a communist framework this cannot be capitalism because it is communism, meaning the workers own the production. And communism cannot be capitalism.
*heeey I wasn’t bringing up those issues of general equilibrium indicating that initial distribution matter for no reason!
**not going to deny that there is/was no “but I don’t want my stuff confiscated in order to correct the initial condition problems” going around but whether or not it’s reasonable to correct this (and how to do so, more importantly, once you decide to do it!) is a significant argument in capitalist thought.
Also, Lanlaorn, I think that if your opinion, as indicated in your earlier post, is that “class warfare is not a thing,” then honestly there’s little reason for us to engage with each other, because our fundamentals are that at odds with each other. If that is your position, we believe in fundamentally different ideas regarding society’s organization and the social pressures that drive its behavior to actually come to terms.
I'm not sure there is adequate evidence that there is any such thing as a unified class that has a set of particular interests that are odd with other classes. Like, the notion that there is such a thing as the "working class" that we can ascribe a set of unified desires and interests to is something i'm skeptical of.
1. If there were unified classes with class interests those interests would have to be shared by all members of the class
2. These interests would probably be unique to the class in question and it would be logically required for the set of interests that belong to a particular class to be exclusive to that class (if two classes had the same set of interests then how would we distinguish them from one another? this is kind of a set theory problem and assumes that the set of interests is the intention of the set that the class is)
So, Jim in West Virginia working at a WalMart stocking shelves and Jose in Arizona working at a WalMart stocking shelves seem like a good place to start analyzing class. Seemingly we would want to put them in the same class. They both work at WalMart, they are both men (let us stipulate) so thus far it seems reasonable to say that they have the set of interests that belong to anyone stocking shelves at WalMart who is a man. Then we have Jenni, who works at a WalMart stocking shelves in Oklahoma, but is a woman. Do all three of them have the same interests even with respect to working at WalMart? Jenni has to contend with sexism from the customers and coworkers. Jose (a man born in El Salvador) has to contend with the racism from customers and coworkers. Jenni's interests as a woman who stocks shelves at WalMart are different than Jose's interests as a latino who stocks shelves at WalMart. Is there really a united class here? And this doesn't even take into consideration how interests fluctuate regionally, generationally, with respect to sexuality, or family status. All of these things go in to a huge diverse set of interests where Jenni might consider it worth it to get less of a pay raise in return for more robust systems of justice with respect to her gender. Basically if classes with interests exist I think that they have to exist as classes with only a handful of people in them. There doesn't appear to a naturally unified "working class" to which I, Jenni, Jose, and Jim belong. We may share some interests but we don't share the same hierarchy of interests, and if we make our interests vague enough and say that perhaps Jenni and Jose are both interested in a just workplace, well who the fuck isn't interested in that? That risks exploding our class into being a class of everyone.
Not to mention the amount of amateur psychology that invoking class results in. When you can simply declare and ownership class and insist that they all share the same motivations and psychology it eliminates the human agency from the very real alive people. I mean, as much as I don't want to erase the humanity of the people who are barely getting by, I don't think that somehow it's okay to eliminate the humanity of even someone like Bill Gates. He has thoughts, feelings, desires, and an inner life that isn't just "lol ownership class"
The more I learn about Marxist analysis of the world, the less convinced I am by it. I still think that there is a better more equitable world possible and that we ought to be striving for the most egalitarian world that we can possibly make. But I tend to predicate my socialism in very practical terms. I just want a world where every person has the maximum opportunity (here opportunity being actionable, more of a positive liberty than a negative one) to develop themselves as a human being consistent with others having the same opportunity.
I don't find the Marxist definitions to be that relevant to today's world. For instance, My wife and I own a duplex which accounted for about 6% of our household income last year (assuming we can actually realize the increase in property value, otherwise it represents like 0.04% of our income). We personally have to do a lot of the upkeep on that house. I think that puts us in the Petite Bourgeoisie class (or maybe the Landlord class?). But in a country where about 65% of the population owns their home, 40% of the population contributes to a 401(k), countless others own at least some nominal stock, crypto, etc., then most people don't fall strictly in Bourgeoisie or Proletariat classes.
I think the Marxist definitions of class don't work as well as dividing classes strictly by income and type of work. I think an upper middle class software developer has significantly more in common with a small business owner than either a large business owner or a retail worker despite the small business owner being part of the Bourgeoisie and the software developer being part of the Proletariat.
I don't think that disagreeing with the Marxist definitions of class is a good argument against communism, though.
I suspect this is the case to. I'm just certainly not well read enough in Communist theory to know what Communism is with most of the Marx removed. I'd be interested in it.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
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So in a capitalist framework a group of people deciding that they, the workers, should own the capital and then setting up that structure violates no tenets of capitalism. Under capitalism the workers are banding together to make investment decisions based on their shared values. Literally no different than people who don’t “work” doing the same thing. You’re the capitalists now dog is the response they would give.
except for all the accrued capital that creates perverse incentives, market distortions, and stagnant labor conditions when the people that don't work do it in this, our neo-feudalist dystopia
this is disingenuous af and your clearly know enough about economics to understand the imbalance in leverage here, what are you doing?
this whole post is absurd, and your definition of capitalism is about as far off from the meaning as rothbard's capture of the word libertarian
[…]
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
If you do not understand capitalism you will never defeat it. Nor will you be able to effectively convince capitalists that they’re wrong or people that capitalists are wrong.
It doesn’t matter what you call them it matters what they think. And you have to engage with that.
So in a capitalist framework a group of people deciding that they, the workers, should own the capital and then setting up that structure violates no tenets of capitalism. Under capitalism the workers are banding together to make investment decisions based on their shared values. Literally no different than people who don’t “work” doing the same thing. You’re the capitalists now dog is the response they would give.
except for all the accrued capital that creates perverse incentives, market distortions, and stagnant labor conditions when the people that don't work do it in this, our neo-feudalist dystopia
this is disingenuous af and your clearly know enough about economics to understand the imbalance in leverage here, what are you doing?
Please read the rest of the posts by me on this page? Like. I do not see how this is disingenuous? Capitalists do not see coops as non-capitalist. It is neither theoretically nor practically non-capitalist.
That doesn’t mean capitalism is prefect it just means that coops aren’t “not capitalist”. Is a worker buying stock “communist”?
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If you're interested in playing Neil DeGrasse Tyson-style semantical quibbling about the using of terms like "cares about" and "is concerned with," turns of phrases that philosophers use all the goddamn time when talking about philosophy, then I'm not sure how serious you are interested in actually engaging in the substance.
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Gotcha, okay that makes sense.
I mean, there's another word for credit vouchers, issued by the employing entity, and only redeemable through their vendors.
- John Stuart Mill
Yes, I am aware of the definition.
Worker Ownership is not Private Ownership. This is like, bedrock socialist theory.
Already did. Like 7 pages ago? I wasn’t as through as I could have been but I felt like I connected the disparate tissue well enough
@lanz
Edit: like. The idea that people buying stock and/or making a company would not be capitalist is kind of farcical. Capitalism (in the sense of markets for capital goods as not all capitalists believe all goods or all capital goods should be on the market) is not about who owns what it’s about the fact of the ownership.
This is why Smith argued for unions as a curb to the power capital and that the union breaking laws and anti-union activities were bad. Unless Adam Smith was a secret communist or “not a capitalist” rather than like… the UR-capitalist… then it seems hard to argue that these types of things are anti-capitalist.
The key feature of capitalism is that the ownership class isn't actually providing anything of value (no, CEOs do not provide anything of value), they just have the paperwork saying they own things and therefore get the biggest cut of the value produced. Basically they're parasites with legal protection.
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When you say ownership class, what about all the owners who are not of the class?
Also, ignoring that there is a cultural history isn't going to convince anyone that you have any idea of what value is.
Labor vouchers are, historically and philosophically, a different thing entirely from company scrip
They have their issues and criticisms (such as arguably just another form of money), but they’re not company scrip.
And again, the point was for Oghulk to be able to add a historic attempt to solve the problem he’s turning about in his head and go from there about if its workable or not. It’s not like the Labor Voucher is without disagreement in socialist circles, a debate literally as old as Kropotkin’s writings.
for conveniences sake, could you reiterate. Because, again, you are constructing an explicitly socialist construct as though it were Capitalist.
Fake edit: I swear to christ Spam block, if you’re going to keep me at two and a half minute intervals, either give me a damn counter on my remaining time or at least have the decency to not reset the clock every time I have misguessed when your infernal timer has ended.
You say this as though there is not an entire socialist academia that exists beyond Marx
Normally yes but in this case no. I was pretty thorough and it took a decent amount of time to put together. If you want to search easier [/tim curry] is a part of the text.
it's literally on the first page of your posts under your profile as well - shouldn't be that hard for anyone interested to find.
Communism is usually described as social ownership of the means of production, which can mean state ownership (centralized) or distributed worker ownership (decentralized). There is a distinction between socialism and communism as well, in that communism is a specific form of socialism.
It matters in a very real way, especially in this argument that's almost exclusively social-democrat style capitalists vs socialists, that the intentions with which a system is designed are, if not wholly irrelevant, not the beginning and end of the conversation.
No one here arguing for capitalism--or, perhaps more accurately, against socialism as a solution worth seeking at this point in time--wants the outcomes the socialists blame on capitalism. They just don't believe or are skeptical that socialism is the best way to get the practical results socialists want (and don't care about or don't prioritize the moral angles that aren't strictly practical, i.e. would prefer safer, stabler, happier workers with (slightly) richer capitalists taking a piece than workers in a worse position but who justly retain the full value of their labor, if that's what's necessary).
Socialism isn't necessarily the best system to produce the results socialism intends to produce just because it explicitly aims at those results. Capitalism with the right adjustments might be better, even if it's been massively worse than what socialism wants historically.
I mean, no, this isn't really accurate. It's part of the knee-jerk "managers are useless, we don't need them" mentality that is cathartic, maybe, but also unrealistic.
A CEO is a manager at the top of the company who has the broadest view of the company's activities and guides overall direction. That most CEO's today are inept, corrupt, and/or wildly overvalued does not mean the entire concept is devoid of merit.
Even in the most socialist of socialisms you would need to have someone who's job it is to shuffle things around and keep the operation functioning, even if they received the same pay as everyone else and could be voted out of power by the other employees. You can call them something else if you'd prefer, but they're still CEOs.
There, I found it and quoted it so we have access to it not buried ten pages back
By and large, honestly I find this to be… well, not actually useful. It practically reads as though essentially as “A Capitalist is anyone who engages with the practicals of economies.” And does nothing to confront the the disparity and power structures inherent to labor relations, nor does it seem to engage meaningfully with ownership of capital and the way that confers power and control in society, which is at the core of socialist philosophy.
At it’s core, its like that final scene from the Yankee Hankee episode of King of the Hill: “Fine fine, everyone’s a Texan; change planes in Dallas, you’re a Texan.”
How is it not? I don’t own their co-op, they do. I get no say whatever about their business operation. That’s still privately owned!
Unless you mean “all the workers own all the private property” and that’s not a co-op.
I'm not sure there is adequate evidence that there is any such thing as a unified class that has a set of particular interests that are odd with other classes. Like, the notion that there is such a thing as the "working class" that we can ascribe a set of unified desires and interests to is something i'm skeptical of.
1. If there were unified classes with class interests those interests would have to be shared by all members of the class
2. These interests would probably be unique to the class in question and it would be logically required for the set of interests that belong to a particular class to be exclusive to that class (if two classes had the same set of interests then how would we distinguish them from one another? this is kind of a set theory problem and assumes that the set of interests is the intention of the set that the class is)
So, Jim in West Virginia working at a WalMart stocking shelves and Jose in Arizona working at a WalMart stocking shelves seem like a good place to start analyzing class. Seemingly we would want to put them in the same class. They both work at WalMart, they are both men (let us stipulate) so thus far it seems reasonable to say that they have the set of interests that belong to anyone stocking shelves at WalMart who is a man. Then we have Jenni, who works at a WalMart stocking shelves in Oklahoma, but is a woman. Do all three of them have the same interests even with respect to working at WalMart? Jenni has to contend with sexism from the customers and coworkers. Jose (a man born in El Salvador) has to contend with the racism from customers and coworkers. Jenni's interests as a woman who stocks shelves at WalMart are different than Jose's interests as a latino who stocks shelves at WalMart. Is there really a united class here? And this doesn't even take into consideration how interests fluctuate regionally, generationally, with respect to sexuality, or family status. All of these things go in to a huge diverse set of interests where Jenni might consider it worth it to get less of a pay raise in return for more robust systems of justice with respect to her gender. Basically if classes with interests exist I think that they have to exist as classes with only a handful of people in them. There doesn't appear to a naturally unified "working class" to which I, Jenni, Jose, and Jim belong. We may share some interests but we don't share the same hierarchy of interests, and if we make our interests vague enough and say that perhaps Jenni and Jose are both interested in a just workplace, well who the fuck isn't interested in that? That risks exploding our class into being a class of everyone.
Not to mention the amount of amateur psychology that invoking class results in. When you can simply declare and ownership class and insist that they all share the same motivations and psychology it eliminates the human agency from the very real alive people. I mean, as much as I don't want to erase the humanity of the people who are barely getting by, I don't think that somehow it's okay to eliminate the humanity of even someone like Bill Gates. He has thoughts, feelings, desires, and an inner life that isn't just "lol ownership class"
The more I learn about Marxist analysis of the world, the less convinced I am by it. I still think that there is a better more equitable world possible and that we ought to be striving for the most egalitarian world that we can possibly make. But I tend to predicate my socialism in very practical terms. I just want a world where every person has the maximum opportunity (here opportunity being actionable, more of a positive liberty than a negative one) to develop themselves as a human being consistent with others having the same opportunity.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
They own the thing they work with/under.
You do not work there.
Why should you own the thing that you are not working under? Why should your say account more than that of the people who actually live under it?
To put this in a fashion that I think you might relate to better: How would you feel if your municipality decided that a collection of New York City residents now have the right to vote in your civic elections, but you didn’t, and your only choices were to bear it or move somewhere else… where, well actually to be honest, you still don’t actually have any say in how things are run. You just get to maybe choose which unaccountable municipality you live under. If they decide to let you live there, that is.
No one is forcing you to engage with people you think are uninterested in engaging
Co-operative ownership is social ownership. The surplus produced by the organization is distributed among the worker-owners rather than being extracted by the owners and not distributed to the workers.
LFX this is a weirdly reductive take. Does your argument not also suggest that gender doesn't exist, because different people within a gender have differences in their interest? Intersectionality is an important concept but it does not erase or preclude the existence of the sections that make up a given population.
It's basically the opposite of Communism.
Important to note: some real co-ops will decide to do harmful things, and will perfectly democratically decide to throw some of their members, probably marginalized ones, under the metaphorical bus, but that's not really different from the current structure.
And that's alright, we can use whatever works to address the other problems, as long as we don't filter solutions through a restrictive ideological sieve.
This is where Intersectionality comes into play; we understand that Class, Gender, Race, etc. are all distinct axes, but their distinction from each other does not preclude their existence.
Jenni, Jim and Jose are all working class. That is their Class Axis.
Jenni is a woman; Jim and Jose are men; that allows us to understand their positions along gender axis.
Jose is a Latino Immigrant, which gives us an indication of where he is along the axis of race.
Et cetera, et cetera.
From those intersecting axes, we can better understand and remedy the discriminations each of them face, but we cannot simply pretend one of those axes does not exist because of the existence of the others.
As it stands, in American Society is still heavily class stratified however; we have distinct classes of income and ownership; literally everyone you’ve mentioned in this hypothetical would exist as lower economic, working class people, and share a set of pressures that come with that economic reality.
We understand, further, in socialist theory, how the upper classes have historically used the other axes as fracture lines to divide the working class. Historically, this dates back at least as far as the Colonial Period of America, which is part of what led to the development of race as a social construct by the slave owning landed gentry, who understood the threat (as seen in instances like Bacon’s Rebellion, where free white people and black people of varying freedoms banded together against the governor of the Virginia colony and burned down the capital) posed by the lower classes finding solidarity. (The other part, of course, being “slavers didn’t want to lose their free labor, and so sought to erase the conditions in Protestant colonies that allowed for the emancipation of the enslaved, so sought to tie it to the color of their skin rather than issues of Christian faith).
Far fewer differences than you'd expect. They are essentially pay-by-piece scrip, of a value determined by the issuer, who is also the only legal receiver. The main difference between labor vouchers and other forms of scrip is that they can't be traded privately. That, ironically, gives them an even greater potential for exploitation of the recipient than company scrip, because the issuer has a legally enforceable monopoly on receiving them. It's of little surprise that the historical examples have all failed rapidly. You may be giving it to Oghulk as a place to start, but it's a place on wrong side of modern monetary systems from where we want to be.
- John Stuart Mill
No worries from my end. My wife had surgery yesterday and is currently hospitalized for complications, so I've had way more important things to focus on.
It is not. That may be a feature of the strawman of capitalism you imagine it to be but in actual fact capitalists provide what it says on the tin, capital. They pay for all the infrastructure necessary to enable production.
Do they? If they leave does the coop need to buy them out of their ownership share? If it doesn't, then I would argue they don't actually own anything, they are renting it from whatever state entity organizes and enforces this arrangement.
You wanted to know what made a capitalist a capitalist and under what structure of thought they operated that is the answer. It is not the answer that communists give but too bad. Communists do not get to define capitalism. And that is capitalism as expressed by its adherents and practitioners.
Some capitalists work to deal with the power imbalances between labor and capital. But this is not all capitalists and so is not a useful definition of “capitalism”. You call me a capitalist despite it being obviously true that I think that society should deal with the imbalances between labor and capital so I had to come up with a definition that both encompassed me and also the Ayn Rand folks you lump me into.
My definition is exceedingly kind to your structure of thought and preferences for definitions. I could give a more tight definition but then you would not be arguing against capitalism, because there would be no capitalists here for which to argue.
In marxism, and a lot of socialist thought, there is often a confusion (intentional or otherwise) between the capitalist “class” and capitalist “thought”. Thus capitalists thought must be that capitalists think the capitalist class should be on top. Rather than like a coherent set of beliefs that have consequences and can be followed and examined.
Part of this problem stems from Marx. The Bourgeoisie were roughly a new class at the time, rising at the same time as many “capitalist” thinkers like Smith, right after the aristocracy had been overthrown (at least in france, but any theory of society had to account both for France and for societies that still had aristocracy and those societies that had not murdered their landed gentry still had bourgeoisie). So when the problems in france continued despite the aristocracy getting murdered the problem must have been the next most prosperous people. Those damned city folk.
But part of this stems from you. Because capitalists have moved on. My 1936 reference in the other thread was because that is when Keynes posted his general theory and the conception of capitalism that you had fucking died forever. Even the most laissez faire capitalists today still use that professional economic structure. Mankiw, the man heralded here as the next coming of Von Mises is a ”New Keynesian” in structure of thought. The fundamental critique (as bullshit as it was) from the insurgence of neo liberal economics (notably a very different definition as to what you consider neo liberal) was that the math wasn’t rigorous enough or the right type and didnt originate enough from individual action.
Marx liked to think in materialism* which emphasized things that happened over theories of action. Classes existed and classes were in conflict therefore class conflict was the defining aspect of society that drove history. This is how Marx can envision a dictatorship of the proletariat without that proletariat (either collectively or individually) raising in terms of class. For him, class was the defining basic structure that did not change. But capitalists do not think that way. They base their belief in a theory of action and of market efficiency. Ricardian labor value as philosophical justification for classes is fucking dead. Dramatic irony here; Marx killed it. It was his greatest success.
*let us ignore that this is a fancy way to say that non-communists were fake thinkers. He had a penchant for invective. It would be like the physics vs metaphysics distinction in pre-enlightenment philosophy except as an explicit diss. Materialism is no less ephemeral than early modeling was and is significantly moreso than modern social sciences natural experiments
Yup. And workers who own their property are free to set up the structure of how they want their ownership to proceed. They can voluntarily give up their ownership to another worker at any time (usually these work by forcing people to buy into the coop/sell out of the coop unless the coop doesn’t just become a standard enterprise when people retire/leave but nothing prevents that under a capitalist structure.)
Like. A fundamental aspect of capitalist culture (as it were) is for you, yes you, regardless of who you are even or especially if you’re a worker, to buy stock in companies.
Edit: formatting issues. Had a pasted section in two places
I have doubts if co-ops can actually exist at large scale in complex industries, because what may be best for the long term good or even survival of the company and the employees doesn't necessarily align. There is a level of creative destruction that needs to happen for progress to occur.
Take something like the auto industry.
The drivetrain of an ICE car is about 2000 moving parts. An EV's has about 20. An average car contains about 30k parts total-counting every nut/bolt/screw individually. So EVs are a 6% reduction in in total parts, and basically eliminate all the most machining and assembly intensive ones. The estimates I've seen is around a 30% reduction in labor hours per vehicle.
What happens at CO-OP Motors, when they want to go EV. Because GM can just close the transmission plant. But the transmission plant employees don't get a vote in that at GM.
A Company wide vote: We will switch to a new product but 3 in 10 of you will become redundant is not one I think would pass. Even if its a smaller number accounting for non-assembly/manufacturing employees one thing that anyone whose dealt with a HOA or similar thing can attest to is that most people are generally apathetic, a minority of people who care a lot about a single issue can easily carry the day. Think of the condos that continually vote down basic maintenance until the building is condemned or the issue becomes too big to ignore.
As I understand it, ownership encompasses several concepts here:
- decision-making power. Worker co-ops are usually democratic, either through direct democracy or worker-elected management, or some combination thereof.
- benefiting from surplus. A privately owned enterprise extracts the surplus to benefit the private owner or owners (though sometimes, at the owner's discretion and generous whim, they may distribute part of the surplus). A worker co-op collectively owns and distributes the surplus product (or value thereof) to the worker-owners, with the result usually being a much more compressed distribution. The rules of allocating that surplus are generally established democratically via the previous aspect of ownership.
- share in stake. Yes, IME worker-owners who decide to leave the co-op often must have their stake bought out. The calculation of that stake is established democratically (e.g., if you signed on a week ago, you're not getting a full share when you quit; you have to put in some labour before you would get a larger share).
Co-ops are sometimes described as "labour employing capital instead of capital employing labour," depending on the manner in which they are operated and founded.
I don't find the Marxist definitions to be that relevant to today's world. For instance, My wife and I own a duplex which accounted for about 6% of our household income last year (assuming we can actually realize the increase in property value, otherwise it represents like 0.04% of our income). We personally have to do a lot of the upkeep on that house. I think that puts us in the Petite Bourgeoisie class (or maybe the Landlord class?). But in a country where about 65% of the population owns their home, 40% of the population contributes to a 401(k), countless others own at least some nominal stock, crypto, etc., then most people don't fall strictly in Bourgeoisie or Proletariat classes.
I think the Marxist definitions of class don't work as well as dividing classes strictly by income and type of work. I think an upper middle class software developer has significantly more in common with a small business owner than either a large business owner or a retail worker despite the small business owner being part of the Bourgeoisie and the software developer being part of the Proletariat.
I don't think that disagreeing with the Marxist definitions of class is a good argument against communism, though.
I may have been a bit hyperbolic, yes. Management is necessary, but the CEO role as it exists today doesn't strike me as management so much as someone making decisions in such broad terms as to be useless then leaving the details to the underlings to actually work out.
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Well, I might be open to that kind of thing.
But really what it does preclude is that gender is a class of people given certain interests. The notion of a "working class" is that there is a set of people that share a common interest or set of interests. That is what the class is, just a group of people with the same set of interests. A gender is not a group of people with the same set of interests, so saying that there is no unified set of interests that belong to "women" or "men" doesn't undermine the reality of gender.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
just curious, how do you think interviewing works for most people currently? 👀
okay, but i've been following along in this thread and it's pretty literally where a handful of y'all end up
incenjecuar's whole argument is that because his family has suffered personal hardship (but not enough hardship to prevent them from having enough intergenerational wealth and community to build a petit bourgeoisie collective) a collectivist society just can't work
spool literally said we have to force people to do shitty jobs, with the example of modern sweatshop shoe production, for society
but those labor conditions wouldn't even exist without capitalists in a country on the other side of the planet manipulating local markets to create conditions in which they can exploit workers
i don't really care about how comfortable
y'all's existence in the current system is when you're building your mcmansions out of other people's bones
this whole post is absurd, and your definition of capitalism is about as far off from the meaning as rothbard's capture of the word libertarian
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
a worker's coop is leveraging their labor in addition to whatever means of production they have access to to generate an equitable division of profit for their labor
nobody's skimming off somebody else's sweat because they had rich parents, or got lucky with an investment
ergo the ownership is public, even if it's on a small enough scale that it's not a state of its own (and most anarchists with a communist bent wouldn't ever want to grow it to the point that it would be)
otoh, there are capitalist captured versions of this model that are "coops" like publix, where all they've done is create a private share structure, but the vast majority is owned by the family, who "work" for the company
versus an organization like winco which has a much more worker oriented distribution of equity despite starting out as an explicitly capitalist organization before transitioning to worker ownership
First - I don't and I didn't say that; I did expand on your point and apply it to how we see it used as a tool by capitalists. Equality and Access are core pillars of Marxism, if I didn't believe it would be a problem under a non-capitalist society I would have said "lol sexism go bye bye" or something as equally vapid as the belief itself. And shoving that accusation in to your post then engaging with it like it's fact is poor form.
Two - No, I REALLY didn't, I gave an example of it! BECAUSE I AGREE, and part of addressing that is social safety nets!
playing loosey goosey so you can pick fights is a bummer.
But this is conditioned on the idea that you can separate the axis. That Jenni, Jim, and Jose have a set of interests as workers of no gender or race. You say we have distinct classes of income and ownership but those classes are full of people of diverse race and gender (though not that diverse), and so we push aside their race and gender and say "aha! there is their class interest!" that seems like ignoring intersections of race, gender and economics, not honoring them.
Which is what I am skeptical of. I don't know that such interests exist! I think that the real interests that the people have are going to be difficult or impossible to disentangle. So either we just blindly believe that there is such a thing as their class with interests even though we can't have epistemic access to it, or we say that they are each in their own class according to their particular profile of interests.
Either seems bad for the notion of economic class.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
The only example I'm personally familiar with is grocery stores; I live a few blocks from a couple co-ops, and am a member of one. (You don't need to be a member to shop there, but you get a discount, so duh.)
It seems to work fine; all members can vote on leadership board, there's elections, all the usual business, reporting, and then functionality is basically "it's a store but with lots of hippie stuff". I don't think direct democratic participation on every single decision is required for an institution to be "democratic" or "cooperative"; once you hit a few thousand people that's just unwieldy, so you elect/decide on representatives to handle X Y and Z.
In the automotive example, I think it would compare to "we've decided to no longer have a butcher's counter", in which case it's logical to not just fire the people who worked the meat counter, you find them other roles in the company. Lots of precedent for that in lots of industries, even though here (US) it's usually a thin pretext for "layoffs".
Marx had a labor theory of value derived from Ricardian labor theory.
Goes like this: first the strict Ricardian construction
All value is derived from labor. A person labors and may decide to either build capital for tomorrow or to farm resources for today. Capital increases productive capacity and so the person who labored to build capital also built the value that capital provides. Thus people who were more productive in early farming/hunting had more surplus and so could build more capital. They are the capitalists because they’re such good workers/smart to build capital. This is fair because the capitalists are so good at things.
Marx was like… nah that is dumb
All value is derived from labor. So people who build capital get the value of that capital and people who are more productive get the value of that surplus. Buuuuuut not all land was distributed equal. There exist personal productivity factors based on luck or violence and these power imbalances continue such that inequality did not stem from capitalists being better but by capitalists repressing people.
Capitalists eventually realize that under this construction Marx is correct. Initial distribution of land and materials and capital matters*. Some say “well but I don’t care” but others do.
Where the difference came in is that Marx proposed a solution to this that the people/workers should own the capital. Those of that specific class. And the capitalists decided that ownership should be well defined with disagreement over whether or not that initial condition was fair** or whether correcting it would be fair and how to fairly correct it.
So in a capitalist framework a group of people deciding that they, the workers, should own the capital and then setting up that structure violates no tenets of capitalism. Under capitalism the workers are banding together to make investment decisions based on their shared values. Literally no different than people who don’t “work” doing the same thing. You’re the capitalists now dog is the response they would give.
In a communist framework this cannot be capitalism because it is communism, meaning the workers own the production. And communism cannot be capitalism.
*heeey I wasn’t bringing up those issues of general equilibrium indicating that initial distribution matter for no reason!
**not going to deny that there is/was no “but I don’t want my stuff confiscated in order to correct the initial condition problems” going around but whether or not it’s reasonable to correct this (and how to do so, more importantly, once you decide to do it!) is a significant argument in capitalist thought.
I suspect this is the case to. I'm just certainly not well read enough in Communist theory to know what Communism is with most of the Marx removed. I'd be interested in it.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
except for all the accrued capital that creates perverse incentives, market distortions, and stagnant labor conditions when the people that don't work do it in this, our neo-feudalist dystopia
this is disingenuous af and your clearly know enough about economics to understand the imbalance in leverage here, what are you doing?
If you do not understand capitalism you will never defeat it. Nor will you be able to effectively convince capitalists that they’re wrong or people that capitalists are wrong.
It doesn’t matter what you call them it matters what they think. And you have to engage with that.
Please read the rest of the posts by me on this page? Like. I do not see how this is disingenuous? Capitalists do not see coops as non-capitalist. It is neither theoretically nor practically non-capitalist.
That doesn’t mean capitalism is prefect it just means that coops aren’t “not capitalist”. Is a worker buying stock “communist”?