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”?
you're the one with the completely heterodox definition of capitalism here bud
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 accepted principles in statistics, population analysis, sociology, medicine, etc. are that, in fact, we can look at groups of people who share notable traits — socioeconomic status and gender, for example, along with race, sexual orientation, geographical location, etc — and examine the ways that they tend to share interests, even though they will not universally share interests. The lack of universality does not devalue trends or tendencies. This is not only orthodox but considered trivially true by almost all professionals in these fields, regardless of political alignment, even anti-technocratic ideologues.
Your post suggests that you don't believe this to be the case. To be clear I think this is not just wrong but bizarre. You bring up the concept of a "unified class" but that is not a requirement for the concept of class to be useful in any application I have ever read or seen. Is it that economic class is a special instance where we cannot operate based on trends and tendencies? Why?
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
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
I don't believe the bolded happened and that interpretation requires a lot of creative misrepresentation of what they were saying.
Id find arguments that we can regulate and welfare our way out of the malign effects of class based capitalism more persuasive if we werent seeing an across the board failure to do so as we speak.
Yet the failures of real life implementations of communism don't count.
Of course they count, but there's a fundamental silliness in these debates where communists have to spell out the meeting minutes for the hypothetical land use committee for the 4th Wisconsin District's January rulings on private vs personal property while also having to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that their system is better than an elusive form of liberal capitalism that gets to selectively take credit for everything good now while brushing off the system's sins by actually being the hypothetical ideal liberal capitalism that has yet to manifest.
When you are proposing a massive fundamental restructuring of society I think you have to prove that it is going to be better than the status quo. And obviously the magnitude of the burden of proof depends in part on how bad the status quo is. Personally I think most people in the developed world are not bad off enough to be sold on radical solutions, but I'll admit that as collapse accelerates that may change.
A bunch of societies lived without capitalism for a long time before Capitalism moved into their territory in the form of Imperialism to change them from living communally into fitting into the invaders ideas of capitalism.
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
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? 👀
Extremely badly, which is why I'm not exactly keen on a system where the same setup is used to decide everything because it's "democratic."
"Under communism, things will be like the current mess, only it will be ideologically sound" is not an argument for communism.
And that's the fucking problem: all the "solutions" have either the same, or more, failure point as the current system.
What actually work is to ignore the utopia and deal with problems one by one, as they come.
Worker co-ops are not a good idea because they avoid alienation (and they don't really; Alienation is unavoidable with group work), they are a good idea because they redistribute wealth more equitably and place the power on (some of) the people dealing with the consequences of bad decisions.
In some cases, they won't work well (large scale enterprise, for example,) so the solution is not to use a co-op. Simple, but a direct contradiction of the ideology.
In some cases, they will fail because democracy include bad, and horrific, decisions, and changing need making some co-ops superfluous. That's fine, we can add stuff like UBI to mitigate that, and regulations.
There's still the need for investment (i.e., Capital), but we can try to make it so that it gives less control. For example, using loans and enthusiastic taxation.
And even then, there's all kind of exciting and unexpected ways they will fail, and it's quite possible that the best solution involves capital and private ownership of some means of production.
Better a good society than an ideologically sound society.
Focusing on the utopia and pretending that there's a solution to everything only lead to the same ridiculous re-invention of existing system that's going on with crypto-currencies and banking.
Or the few anarcho-capitalists that are not complete monsters re-inventing the welfare state by accident.
I've only been skimming the thread, but just because I'm tired of seeing this "human nature" shit trotted out by people who are apparently unaware of the field of anthropology:
If there's one thing that's pretty consistent about human nature, it is that it is very malleable and adaptable. Humans have lived in a great variety of forms of social organization. Stateless, classless societies exist to this very day. In terms of our time on this planet, humans have lived in societies without a state more than they have with a state. Economic class is not an inherent aspect of human society, or a ubiquitous one. It is one form of social organization that, depending on your perspective, some peoples chose to adopt, or that arises from certain material conditions - I prefer the latter framework on a broad scale. Material conditions are constantly changing, and it is impossible to know what possibilities arise from the change in those conditions, or what possibilities are closed off. For example, currently we see global capitalism's effect on the environment rapidly forclosing upon the possibility of the continued viability of global capitalism. This isn't some communist theory, it is increasingly accepted by many liberals and capitalists themselves. A change in material conditions is being forced on us - largely as a result of our economic system - and a new mode of organization will result. Which isn't to say that it will be a good one - if us socialists don't become hugely more effective and successful in the near-medium future, it may very well be even worse than our current hellscape, maybe some neo-feudal thing, or maybe some new terrible way of doing things that we haven't imagined yet. On the other hand, a full transition to renewable energy sources would also be a major change in material conditions that would inevitably alter our social organization in many ways - at the very least, geopolitics and the global economy would not look remotely like they do now if fossil fuels ceased to be used.
The fact that many humans have lived successfully without a state and without class society doesn't mean it's a simple thing to reorganize our own society along those lines. Our material conditions are vastly different from those of the people who live that way or did so in the past. But the difficulties of communism or anarchism really have nothing to do with "human nature." That is the kind of objection I expect from a teenager who has just read Atlas Shrugged. Human nature is compatible with anarchism and monarchism, communism and capitalism, patriarchy or gender equality.
Speaking of patriarchy, I notice an inconsistency in liberal thinking here. Patriarchy is just as widespread and historical as class society and the state. Broadly speaking, the same set of material economic circumstances tends to give rise to all three. It is perhaps easier for some to imagine a society without patriarchy than a society without economic class. But I keep seeing the lack of examples of successful industrial classless or stateless societies given as reasoning for why we shouldn't want those things. All of this logic - and even the "human nature" bollocks - applies as well to the oppression of women by men as to the oppression of poor by rich. In that both are ubiquitous to agricultural civilization. Liberals argue that mitigating capitalism's worst features is the best that can be hoped for, given the aforementioned ubiquity. Why, then, do liberals not make this argument about patriarchy (any more)? It would be just as justified (i.e. not justified) to say that patriarchy is just a result of human nature as to say that of class society. We could look around at our uniformly patriarchal nation-states - which only differ in degree of patriarchy - and say that patriarchy can at best be mitigated and that we should not seek the unrealistic goal of abolishing it. But we do not say that, because it is stupid. Patriarchy is obviously morally wrong. It should be abolished. Discussing how to get there is a matter of strategy and tactics. Contemporary left-liberals, to their credit, are generally on board with this! And yet many do not seem to see that these low-effort arguments against the abolition of class society could easily be turned against feminism just by changing a few words if some bigot were so inclined.
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”?
I don’t know, the steadily growing income inequality and degradation of life for anyone who isn’t rich as fuck seems to be doing an excellent job of showing a lot of folks that capitalists are wrong.
Just not, oddly, the people still benefiting from the inequity of the system.
Well
Not that oddly
+6
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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
I don't believe the bolded happened and that interpretation requires a lot of creative misrepresentation of what they were saying.
it definitely did, but i understand how you could get this impression with the way they talk around their actual beliefs, and their implications
maybe try PMing them, they're a lot more honest about their material conditions and positions in private
There's a lot of decrying of people who used "human nature" when the crux of the entire argument seemed to be that certain things will be scarce and desirable with maybe a couple of posts talking about people desiring a hierarchy.
Humanity is flexible, but in all directions and at all times. That is both our virtue and our horrible flaw, and why power is such a contentious subject. A single person can be a saint and a shitlord and back again in their lifetime.
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
They [the Luddites] had an understanding with merchants stretching over decades to centuries that there should be a sense of fair profit. The merchants were buying their stuff, reselling it, and providing some capital, sometimes to buy machines. But the profit should be fairly shared all the way around.
What happens is you get Adam Smith publishing his seminal work on free market capitalism [Wealth of Nations] in late 18th century. At the beginning of the 19th century, the merchants are starting to go, “Wait a minute. There is no such thing as a fair profit. There’s just whatever I can get from the marketplace. There is no moral imperative for us to give up a larger chunk of our profits to these people.”
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”?
you're the one with the completely heterodox definition of capitalism here bud
I can assure you that the Marxist definition of capitalist is a heterodox definition. While i am being very wide with the definition of capitalist such to accommodate people that marxists consider capitalists who may not consider themselves capitalist. It most definitely is the case that private ownership of capital production regardless of whom its owned by (unless its owned by the state) is considered by just about fucking everyone to be capitalist.
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”?
I don’t know, the steadily growing income inequality and degradation of life for anyone who isn’t rich as fuck seems to be doing an excellent job of showing a lot of folks that capitalists are wrong.
Just not, oddly, the people still benefiting from the inequity of the system.
Well
Not that oddly
So you're not going to answer the question or respond to the comments I made?
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.
A worker co-operative's reaction to more efficient production should not be layoffs. If you are obtaining the same surplus value for less labour, it sounds to me like you can reduce the required working hours for the workers without reducing their wages/share of surplus. Same with automation: social ownership means that greater efficiency benefits and liberates you, instead of threatening your employment.
In practice, this demands sound policy when constructing the co-operative and elaborating its rules of operation, because perverse incentives always loom (e.g. firing workers when possible so you get a bigger share of the surplus)
I don't understand the argument of art and capitalism being the fair way for people to see it while communism will stop people.
There's only so many tickets under capitalism, too. And most people aren't going to fly to Paris and the see the Mona Lisa and everything else at the Louvre under capitalism any easier than under communism. Communism isn't some kind of vow of poverty its for an equal sharing of wealth.
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.
I don't think I was very clear. If I and my fellow workers own the business and we make decisions about its operation as a collective, that's not any different in re: private ownership than if I just owned it myself. The group of people who own it is larger, but we still own it and you don't. That’s still capitalist.
If ownership of the business is not a thing in any context, it’s not a co-op but it invites “why work there because it’s sucks” questions we haven’t answered except with an implied “or else we consequences you”.
If ownership is collective across All the Workers, is it really? Is ownership meaningful in that context?
If the State does, that’s not Communism.
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
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”?
you're the one with the completely heterodox definition of capitalism here bud
I can assure you that the Marxist definition of capitalist is a heterodox definition. While i am being very wide with the definition of capitalist such to accommodate people that marxists consider capitalists who may not consider themselves capitalist. It most definitely is the case that private ownership of capital production regardless of whom its owned by is considered by just about fucking everyone to be capitalist.
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”?
I don’t know, the steadily growing income inequality and degradation of life for anyone who isn’t rich as fuck seems to be doing an excellent job of showing a lot of folks that capitalists are wrong.
Just not, oddly, the people still benefiting from the inequity of the system.
Well
Not that oddly
So you're not going to answer the question or respond to the comments I made?
again, it's not owned privately, it's owned by the collective of workers, if that changes via retirement without transition of ownership to new workers it ceases to be a true coop and will gradually morph into something horrible like publix or half the startups i worked for with predatory, obfuscated division of ownership
I don't understand the argument of art and capitalism being the fair way for people to see it while communism will stop people.
There's only so many tickets under capitalism, too. And most people aren't going to fly to Paris and the see the Mona Lisa and everything else at the Louvre under capitalism any easier than under communism. Communism isn't some kind of vow of poverty its for an equal sharing of wealth.
It is important and beneficial to be charitable in argument. I think it's safe to assume that most people here are asking how communism would allocate access to luxuries, not arguing directly that it would fail to.
(Same way we do now when wealth doesn't offer direct access: lotteries, first come first serve lots, assiduous research and effort, etc. Think high-end bottles of whiskey, and how people get them right now. How it would allocate the production of luxury resources is probably a tougher question)
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.
I don't think I was very clear. If I and my fellow workers own the business and we make decisions about its operation as a collective, that's not any different in re: private ownership than if I just owned it myself. The group of people who own it is larger, but we still own it and you don't. That’s still capitalist.
If ownership of the business is not a thing in any context, it’s not a co-op but it invites “why work there because it’s sucks” questions we haven’t answered except with an implied “or else we consequences you”.
If ownership is collective across All the Workers, is it really? Is ownership meaningful in that context?
If the State does, that’s not Communism.
Of course it’s different. It’s as different as a democratic state is to an autocratic one.
I don’t need to own your business, Spool; I don’t work there! Maybe I’ll buy from it or hire whatever service you provide, but again: I don’t work there. The aspect of private versus collective isn’t on the whole of society, it’s in the vein of self-management. It’s the issue of lower case D democracy!
Think of the business in the same way as you would a country. If I am outside of your country, and my only interaction with it is that of just purchasing the occasional good or service, what right do I have to tell you and your fellow laborers how to run it? Why shouldn’t that be your collective decision, as the people who have to work there?
Beyond that, why should I be able to buy a portion of your business, perform no work, and collect rents from your labor in the form of profit shares
Worker coops are literally the workers controlling the means of production. Like it's hard for me to imagine a more socialist institution in my head; it's pretty much definitional.
It doesn't mean that coops can't exist within a capitalist society (they can, obviously) or that everyone who works at a coop is a socialist (though I'd bet a significantly higher percentage of such workers are socialists).
It's fine by me if capitalists want to view them as capitalist institutions because they accrue and reinvest capital or whatever. If you want to say that they are both socialist and capitalist at once then ok, I guess, although I think that if that's where your definitions bring you then you should probably redefine one or the other term. The relationship of exploitation and domination that is the employer - employee relationship is pretty core to what socialists object to in capitalism, so from our perspective a coop lacks or should lack that central odious characteristic.
I don't understand the argument of art and capitalism being the fair way for people to see it while communism will stop people.
There's only so many tickets under capitalism, too. And most people aren't going to fly to Paris and the see the Mona Lisa and everything else at the Louvre under capitalism any easier than under communism. Communism isn't some kind of vow of poverty its for an equal sharing of wealth.
It is important and beneficial to be charitable in argument. I think it's safe to assume that most people here are asking how communism would allocate access to luxuries, not arguing directly that it would fail to.
(Same way we do now when wealth doesn't offer direct access: lotteries, first come first serve lots, assiduous research and effort, etc. Think high-end bottles of whiskey, and how people get them right now. How it would allocate the production of luxury resources is probably a tougher question)
The other question, which is just as important, is how to avoid controlling access leading to power.
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.
I don't think I was very clear. If I and my fellow workers own the business and we make decisions about its operation as a collective, that's not any different in re: private ownership than if I just owned it myself. The group of people who own it is larger, but we still own it and you don't. That’s still capitalist.
If ownership of the business is not a thing in any context, it’s not a co-op but it invites “why work there because it’s sucks” questions we haven’t answered except with an implied “or else we consequences you”.
If ownership is collective across All the Workers, is it really? Is ownership meaningful in that context?
If the State does, that’s not Communism.
Spool please read my replies ilu
Distribution of the surplus among the workers of the enterprise, rather than the owners having that surplus and the workers not having it, is the crucial difference and a core, orthodox definition of social ownership
Broader socialist systems often propose total worker ownership in that the surplus of all enterprises is divided among all workers, often referred to as a social dividend; this is a lot closer to communism, yes
Both fall under "social ownership"
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
They [the Luddites] had an understanding with merchants stretching over decades to centuries that there should be a sense of fair profit. The merchants were buying their stuff, reselling it, and providing some capital, sometimes to buy machines. But the profit should be fairly shared all the way around.
What happens is you get Adam Smith publishing his seminal work on free market capitalism [Wealth of Nations] in late 18th century. At the beginning of the 19th century, the merchants are starting to go, “Wait a minute. There is no such thing as a fair profit. There’s just whatever I can get from the marketplace. There is no moral imperative for us to give up a larger chunk of our profits to these people.”
The Venetian and Florentine merchants were so fucking rich that they took turns *buying the Papacy* several centuries prior to Smith, so, you know, color me skeptical.
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”?
you're the one with the completely heterodox definition of capitalism here bud
I can assure you that the Marxist definition of capitalist is a heterodox definition. While i am being very wide with the definition of capitalist such to accommodate people that marxists consider capitalists who may not consider themselves capitalist. It most definitely is the case that private ownership of capital production regardless of whom its owned by is considered by just about fucking everyone to be capitalist.
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”?
I don’t know, the steadily growing income inequality and degradation of life for anyone who isn’t rich as fuck seems to be doing an excellent job of showing a lot of folks that capitalists are wrong.
Just not, oddly, the people still benefiting from the inequity of the system.
Well
Not that oddly
So you're not going to answer the question or respond to the comments I made?
again, it's not owned privately, it's owned by the collective of workers, if that changes via retirement without transition of ownership to new workers it ceases to be a true coop and will gradually morph into something horrible like publix or half the startups i worked for with predatory, obfuscated division of ownership
Yea... Its privately owned by a collective of workers. Who get to decide how to allocate their ownership. And are free to enforce sale at retirement and buy in to work. Or free to not do that. They own it, they get to decide. They get to decide their ownership structure. They get to decide their governance structure. It is not "not capitalist" because they decided something that seems like snidely whiplash would disapprove.
Unless you're saying that Google is a communist system because its "publicly" owned. No. Google is privately owned by various members of the public. Those owners even get to vote on many things google does in order to change the direction of the company in accordance with the founding documents and the sales agreement for equity.
These structures are not exactly the same in the eyes of a capitalist but not because one of them isn't capitalist. But because they just have different ownership and sales requirements. Its even more "hella super free market" because the most free market capitalists tend to say that there are fewer types of organizational structures and contracts that should be disallowed. (like restrictive covenants, which is effectively how a coop enforces its ownership structure)
Like. Yall(lanz/sammic et al) call the fucking Soviet Union capitalist. But a coop isn't? Man fucking what?
The structure of ownership is what is at issue. Worker co-ops are substantively different from privately owned firms in how they make decisions, distribute surplus value, and apportion stake. These differences are what make them socialist.
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”?
you're the one with the completely heterodox definition of capitalism here bud
I can assure you that the Marxist definition of capitalist is a heterodox definition. While i am being very wide with the definition of capitalist such to accommodate people that marxists consider capitalists who may not consider themselves capitalist. It most definitely is the case that private ownership of capital production regardless of whom its owned by is considered by just about fucking everyone to be capitalist.
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”?
I don’t know, the steadily growing income inequality and degradation of life for anyone who isn’t rich as fuck seems to be doing an excellent job of showing a lot of folks that capitalists are wrong.
Just not, oddly, the people still benefiting from the inequity of the system.
Well
Not that oddly
So you're not going to answer the question or respond to the comments I made?
again, it's not owned privately, it's owned by the collective of workers, if that changes via retirement without transition of ownership to new workers it ceases to be a true coop and will gradually morph into something horrible like publix or half the startups i worked for with predatory, obfuscated division of ownership
Yea... Its privately owned by a collective of workers. Who get to decide how to allocate their ownership. And are free to enforce sale at retirement and buy in to work. Or free to not do that. They own it, they get to decide. They get to decide their ownership structure. They get to decide their governance structure. It is not "not capitalist" because they decided something that seems like snidely whiplash would disapprove.
Unless you're saying that Google is a communist system because its "publicly" owned. No. Google is privately owned by various members of the public. Those owners even get to vote on many things google does in order to change the direction of the company in accordance with the founding documents and the sales agreement for equity.
These structures are not exactly the same in the eyes of a capitalist but not because one of them isn't capitalist.
Like. Yall(lanz/sammic et al) call the fucking Soviet Union capitalist. But a coop isn't? Man fucking what?
Because labor does not have power, and works under the whim of the state
You seem to have a lot of trouble processing bottom up versus top down here
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”?
you're the one with the completely heterodox definition of capitalism here bud
I can assure you that the Marxist definition of capitalist is a heterodox definition. While i am being very wide with the definition of capitalist such to accommodate people that marxists consider capitalists who may not consider themselves capitalist. It most definitely is the case that private ownership of capital production regardless of whom its owned by is considered by just about fucking everyone to be capitalist.
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”?
I don’t know, the steadily growing income inequality and degradation of life for anyone who isn’t rich as fuck seems to be doing an excellent job of showing a lot of folks that capitalists are wrong.
Just not, oddly, the people still benefiting from the inequity of the system.
Well
Not that oddly
So you're not going to answer the question or respond to the comments I made?
again, it's not owned privately, it's owned by the collective of workers, if that changes via retirement without transition of ownership to new workers it ceases to be a true coop and will gradually morph into something horrible like publix or half the startups i worked for with predatory, obfuscated division of ownership
Yea... Its privately owned by a collective of workers. Who get to decide how to allocate their ownership. And are free to enforce sale at retirement and buy in to work. Or free to not do that. They own it, they get to decide. They get to decide their ownership structure. They get to decide their governance structure. It is not "not capitalist" because they decided something that seems like snidely whiplash would disapprove.
Unless you're saying that Google is a communist system because its "publicly" owned. No. Google is privately owned by various members of the public. Those owners even get to vote on many things google does in order to change the direction of the company in accordance with the founding documents and the sales agreement for equity.
These structures are not exactly the same in the eyes of a capitalist but not because one of them isn't capitalist.
Like. Yall(lanz/sammic et al) call the fucking Soviet Union capitalist. But a coop isn't? Man fucking what?
A state is made up of private citizens, as is the government. That doesn't make state ownership a form of private ownership. You are effectively arguing that all ownership is private and that there is no system that falls outside of capitalism.
The structure of ownership is what is at issue. Worker co-ops are substantively different from privately owned firms in how they make decisions, distribute surplus value, and apportion stake. These differences are what make them socialist.
Yeah I think some of these arguments are getting kind of pedantic
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
This part is so frequently ignored by capitalists. "Well it's not just the laborers that create the product, they need the machine, and that guy who owns the machine provides it!"
Yeah ok, who built the machine though? Who came up with its idea? What previous machines and ideas did it build off of? What scientific advancements were necessary for it to be engineered? How were the engineers educated in their trade - who taught them, and at whose expense?
The structure of ownership is what is at issue. Worker co-ops are substantively different from privately owned firms in how they make decisions, distribute surplus value, and apportion stake. These differences are what make them socialist.
And then you have private/public... surely there's a better term we can use for "owned by one" vs. "owned by all".
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
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.
I don't think I was very clear. If I and my fellow workers own the business and we make decisions about its operation as a collective, that's not any different in re: private ownership than if I just owned it myself. The group of people who own it is larger, but we still own it and you don't. That’s still capitalist.
If ownership of the business is not a thing in any context, it’s not a co-op but it invites “why work there because it’s sucks” questions we haven’t answered except with an implied “or else we consequences you”.
If ownership is collective across All the Workers, is it really? Is ownership meaningful in that context?
If the State does, that’s not Communism.
Of course it’s different. It’s as different as a democratic state is to an autocratic one.
I don’t need to own your business, Spool; I don’t work there! Maybe I’ll buy from it or hire whatever service you provide, but again: I don’t work there. The aspect of private versus collective isn’t on the whole of society, it’s in the vein of self-management. It’s the issue of lower case D democracy!
Think of the business in the same way as you would a country. If I am outside of your country, and my only interaction with it is that of just purchasing the occasional good or service, what right do I have to tell you and your fellow laborers how to run it? Why shouldn’t that be your collective decision, as the people who have to work there?
Beyond that, why should I be able to buy a portion of your business, perform no work, and collect rents from your labor in the form of profit shares
personally, i started out my political journey as a right wing libertarian, went liberal and then eventually found my way back to pre-randian leftist libertarianism
i'm incredibly skeptical that there's much more i could learn about capitalism and markets, or management, especially given the general trajectory of my career and investments
but that's what really burns me up, about the status quo, it's incredibly shitty business
worker coops and publicly owned utilities regularly outperform their capitalist counterparts by leaps and bounds, it's almost impossible not to, without all that middle management and executive bloat extracting profit from the business (whole reason amazon was so extraordinarily successful is back in the day bezos took a much longer view, reinvested nearly all the profit into the business until he had a juggernaut), and they tend to be more nimble, because they have a wealth of eyes and ears and perspectives that are much closer to where the snags in business happen than an executive suite
whole reason i'm trying to start a housing coop is i'm currently renting a home from one of those companies that spun out of the '08 recession and started gobbling up private residences is there is no way a tenant coop wouldn't be more effective at spending on maintenance and repairs than these weirdos
they're a giant, more removed version of the slumlord i had back in california that would end up spending double or triple redoing a repair she insisted on getting done for the lowest bid possible, no matter what the person's qualifications or track record are
only reason the entire model hasn't folded inward is they're juicing it with their own capital to keep the bubble going (worst example of this that comes to mind is lennar homes buying up their own inventory for inflated prices)
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”?
you're the one with the completely heterodox definition of capitalism here bud
I can assure you that the Marxist definition of capitalist is a heterodox definition. While i am being very wide with the definition of capitalist such to accommodate people that marxists consider capitalists who may not consider themselves capitalist. It most definitely is the case that private ownership of capital production regardless of whom its owned by is considered by just about fucking everyone to be capitalist.
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”?
I don’t know, the steadily growing income inequality and degradation of life for anyone who isn’t rich as fuck seems to be doing an excellent job of showing a lot of folks that capitalists are wrong.
Just not, oddly, the people still benefiting from the inequity of the system.
Well
Not that oddly
So you're not going to answer the question or respond to the comments I made?
again, it's not owned privately, it's owned by the collective of workers, if that changes via retirement without transition of ownership to new workers it ceases to be a true coop and will gradually morph into something horrible like publix or half the startups i worked for with predatory, obfuscated division of ownership
Yea... Its privately owned by a collective of workers. Who get to decide how to allocate their ownership. And are free to enforce sale at retirement and buy in to work. Or free to not do that. They own it, they get to decide. They get to decide their ownership structure. They get to decide their governance structure. It is not "not capitalist" because they decided something that seems like snidely whiplash would disapprove.
Unless you're saying that Google is a communist system because its "publicly" owned. No. Google is privately owned by various members of the public. Those owners even get to vote on many things google does in order to change the direction of the company in accordance with the founding documents and the sales agreement for equity.
These structures are not exactly the same in the eyes of a capitalist but not because one of them isn't capitalist.
Like. Yall(lanz/sammic et al) call the fucking Soviet Union capitalist. But a coop isn't? Man fucking what?
A state is made up of private citizens, as is the government. That doesn't make state ownership a form of private ownership. You are effectively arguing that all ownership is private and that there is no system that falls outside of capitalism.
No. I think that if the government owns it its public ownership. I do not think that "state capitalism" is "capitalism". I do not think that google is communist because its "publicly owned". The point was that that was ridiculous.
But a coop isn't public ownership. Its really not. Its private ownership. Only the members of the coop get a say in the governance and membership is determined by the members and the governance documents. The state does not own a coop. The public does not own a coop. Its privately owned.
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
capitalists leverage capital (the means of production) to steal from the fruits of laborers
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
This part is so frequently ignored by capitalists. "Well it's not just the laborers that create the product, they need the machine, and that guy who owns the machine provides it!"
Yeah ok, who built the machine though? Who came up with its idea? What previous machines and ideas did it build off of? What scientific advancements were necessary for it to be engineered? How were the engineers educated in their trade - who taught them, and at whose expense?
The machine is the common heritage of humanity.
Yeah, no, another guy built it with another machine, all the way down to the extraction of the ore. It's the twenty-first century. Everything, and I do mean everything, is produced via capital investment first and labor second.
The structure of ownership is what is at issue. Worker co-ops are substantively different from privately owned firms in how they make decisions, distribute surplus value, and apportion stake. These differences are what make them socialist.
And then you have private/public... surely there's a better term we can use for "owned by one" vs. "owned by all".
The point is that co-operatives are generally aligned with the economic proposals and moral theory of socialism. They are a way for groups to operate in a socialist manner even within capitalist systems.
I like co-ops. Co-ops are on par with private ownership enterprises in terms of productivity, are much more stable and resilient, and offer much greater security and autonomy to workers at all levels of the enterprise. They do have issues with competition for higher-level salaried positions, though, and as mrondeau said, they do not have any special resistance against issues like sexism and racism in the workplace.
I am more interested in what an economy primarily organized around co-ops would look like, tbh, than in discussing a label for them, because either way they embody a lot of the principles that I support
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”?
you're the one with the completely heterodox definition of capitalism here bud
I can assure you that the Marxist definition of capitalist is a heterodox definition. While i am being very wide with the definition of capitalist such to accommodate people that marxists consider capitalists who may not consider themselves capitalist. It most definitely is the case that private ownership of capital production regardless of whom its owned by is considered by just about fucking everyone to be capitalist.
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”?
I don’t know, the steadily growing income inequality and degradation of life for anyone who isn’t rich as fuck seems to be doing an excellent job of showing a lot of folks that capitalists are wrong.
Just not, oddly, the people still benefiting from the inequity of the system.
Well
Not that oddly
So you're not going to answer the question or respond to the comments I made?
again, it's not owned privately, it's owned by the collective of workers, if that changes via retirement without transition of ownership to new workers it ceases to be a true coop and will gradually morph into something horrible like publix or half the startups i worked for with predatory, obfuscated division of ownership
Yea... Its privately owned by a collective of workers. Who get to decide how to allocate their ownership. And are free to enforce sale at retirement and buy in to work. Or free to not do that. They own it, they get to decide. They get to decide their ownership structure. They get to decide their governance structure. It is not "not capitalist" because they decided something that seems like snidely whiplash would disapprove.
Unless you're saying that Google is a communist system because its "publicly" owned. No. Google is privately owned by various members of the public. Those owners even get to vote on many things google does in order to change the direction of the company in accordance with the founding documents and the sales agreement for equity.
These structures are not exactly the same in the eyes of a capitalist but not because one of them isn't capitalist.
Like. Yall(lanz/sammic et al) call the fucking Soviet Union capitalist. But a coop isn't? Man fucking what?
A state is made up of private citizens, as is the government. That doesn't make state ownership a form of private ownership. You are effectively arguing that all ownership is private and that there is no system that falls outside of capitalism.
No. I think that if the government owns it its public ownership. I do not think that "state capitalism" is "capitalism". I do not think that google is communist because its "publicly owned". The point was that that was ridiculous.
But a coop isn't public ownership. Its really not. Its private ownership. Only the members of the coop get a say in the governance and membership is determined by the members and the governance documents. The state does not own a coop. The public does not own a coop. Its privately owned.
My point is that the collective that owns an enterprise being composed of private citizens is not sufficient to make it private ownership, or else all ownership is private, because all collectives — including states and governments — are composed of private citizens.
Your position here is at odds with every source on social ownership that I've read or seen. Social ownership does not mean state ownership. Social ownership is a specific socialist idea of ownership that includes state ownership but also other forms of collective ownership. State ownership and private ownership are not the only two options for ownership.
The structure of ownership is what is at issue. Worker co-ops are substantively different from privately owned firms in how they make decisions, distribute surplus value, and apportion stake. These differences are what make them socialist.
And then you have private/public... surely there's a better term we can use for "owned by one" vs. "owned by all".
The point is that co-operatives are generally aligned with the economic proposals and moral theory of socialism. They are a way for groups to operate in a socialist manner even within capitalist systems.
I like co-ops. Co-ops are on par with private ownership enterprises in terms of productivity, are much more stable and resilient, and offer much greater security and autonomy to workers at all levels of the enterprise. They do have issues with competition for higher-level salaried positions, though, and as mrondeau said, they do not have any special resistance against issues like sexism and racism in the workplace.
I am more interested in what an economy primarily organized around co-ops would look like, tbh, than in discussing a label for them, because either way they embody a lot of the principles that I support
I'm not quibbling the point, just frustrated at muddled terms.
I like co-ops as well. I use a local one for groceries when I can even though it hurts my wallet and has a frustrating selection. I'd love to see them expand.
Posts
you're the one with the completely heterodox definition of capitalism here bud
The accepted principles in statistics, population analysis, sociology, medicine, etc. are that, in fact, we can look at groups of people who share notable traits — socioeconomic status and gender, for example, along with race, sexual orientation, geographical location, etc — and examine the ways that they tend to share interests, even though they will not universally share interests. The lack of universality does not devalue trends or tendencies. This is not only orthodox but considered trivially true by almost all professionals in these fields, regardless of political alignment, even anti-technocratic ideologues.
Your post suggests that you don't believe this to be the case. To be clear I think this is not just wrong but bizarre. You bring up the concept of a "unified class" but that is not a requirement for the concept of class to be useful in any application I have ever read or seen. Is it that economic class is a special instance where we cannot operate based on trends and tendencies? Why?
It's this definition which is absurd. If capital is required to produce something then it is not stealing for the person providing that capital to be compensated for it.
I don't believe the bolded happened and that interpretation requires a lot of creative misrepresentation of what they were saying.
A bunch of societies lived without capitalism for a long time before Capitalism moved into their territory in the form of Imperialism to change them from living communally into fitting into the invaders ideas of capitalism.
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how'd they get the capital? 🤔
because my great grandfathers are a light skinned black man that escaped a lynching and had to start over across the country 50 years after emancipation, and a kentucky hillbilly
really feels like there was a lot of historical violence and oppression that lead to the current capital holders holding their capital, just comparing my family's intergenerational wealth to less disadvantaged white people
"Under communism, things will be like the current mess, only it will be ideologically sound" is not an argument for communism.
And that's the fucking problem: all the "solutions" have either the same, or more, failure point as the current system.
What actually work is to ignore the utopia and deal with problems one by one, as they come.
Worker co-ops are not a good idea because they avoid alienation (and they don't really; Alienation is unavoidable with group work), they are a good idea because they redistribute wealth more equitably and place the power on (some of) the people dealing with the consequences of bad decisions.
In some cases, they won't work well (large scale enterprise, for example,) so the solution is not to use a co-op. Simple, but a direct contradiction of the ideology.
In some cases, they will fail because democracy include bad, and horrific, decisions, and changing need making some co-ops superfluous. That's fine, we can add stuff like UBI to mitigate that, and regulations.
There's still the need for investment (i.e., Capital), but we can try to make it so that it gives less control. For example, using loans and enthusiastic taxation.
And even then, there's all kind of exciting and unexpected ways they will fail, and it's quite possible that the best solution involves capital and private ownership of some means of production.
Better a good society than an ideologically sound society.
Focusing on the utopia and pretending that there's a solution to everything only lead to the same ridiculous re-invention of existing system that's going on with crypto-currencies and banking.
Or the few anarcho-capitalists that are not complete monsters re-inventing the welfare state by accident.
If there's one thing that's pretty consistent about human nature, it is that it is very malleable and adaptable. Humans have lived in a great variety of forms of social organization. Stateless, classless societies exist to this very day. In terms of our time on this planet, humans have lived in societies without a state more than they have with a state. Economic class is not an inherent aspect of human society, or a ubiquitous one. It is one form of social organization that, depending on your perspective, some peoples chose to adopt, or that arises from certain material conditions - I prefer the latter framework on a broad scale. Material conditions are constantly changing, and it is impossible to know what possibilities arise from the change in those conditions, or what possibilities are closed off. For example, currently we see global capitalism's effect on the environment rapidly forclosing upon the possibility of the continued viability of global capitalism. This isn't some communist theory, it is increasingly accepted by many liberals and capitalists themselves. A change in material conditions is being forced on us - largely as a result of our economic system - and a new mode of organization will result. Which isn't to say that it will be a good one - if us socialists don't become hugely more effective and successful in the near-medium future, it may very well be even worse than our current hellscape, maybe some neo-feudal thing, or maybe some new terrible way of doing things that we haven't imagined yet. On the other hand, a full transition to renewable energy sources would also be a major change in material conditions that would inevitably alter our social organization in many ways - at the very least, geopolitics and the global economy would not look remotely like they do now if fossil fuels ceased to be used.
The fact that many humans have lived successfully without a state and without class society doesn't mean it's a simple thing to reorganize our own society along those lines. Our material conditions are vastly different from those of the people who live that way or did so in the past. But the difficulties of communism or anarchism really have nothing to do with "human nature." That is the kind of objection I expect from a teenager who has just read Atlas Shrugged. Human nature is compatible with anarchism and monarchism, communism and capitalism, patriarchy or gender equality.
Speaking of patriarchy, I notice an inconsistency in liberal thinking here. Patriarchy is just as widespread and historical as class society and the state. Broadly speaking, the same set of material economic circumstances tends to give rise to all three. It is perhaps easier for some to imagine a society without patriarchy than a society without economic class. But I keep seeing the lack of examples of successful industrial classless or stateless societies given as reasoning for why we shouldn't want those things. All of this logic - and even the "human nature" bollocks - applies as well to the oppression of women by men as to the oppression of poor by rich. In that both are ubiquitous to agricultural civilization. Liberals argue that mitigating capitalism's worst features is the best that can be hoped for, given the aforementioned ubiquity. Why, then, do liberals not make this argument about patriarchy (any more)? It would be just as justified (i.e. not justified) to say that patriarchy is just a result of human nature as to say that of class society. We could look around at our uniformly patriarchal nation-states - which only differ in degree of patriarchy - and say that patriarchy can at best be mitigated and that we should not seek the unrealistic goal of abolishing it. But we do not say that, because it is stupid. Patriarchy is obviously morally wrong. It should be abolished. Discussing how to get there is a matter of strategy and tactics. Contemporary left-liberals, to their credit, are generally on board with this! And yet many do not seem to see that these low-effort arguments against the abolition of class society could easily be turned against feminism just by changing a few words if some bigot were so inclined.
I don’t know, the steadily growing income inequality and degradation of life for anyone who isn’t rich as fuck seems to be doing an excellent job of showing a lot of folks that capitalists are wrong.
Just not, oddly, the people still benefiting from the inequity of the system.
Well
Not that oddly
it definitely did, but i understand how you could get this impression with the way they talk around their actual beliefs, and their implications
maybe try PMing them, they're a lot more honest about their material conditions and positions in private
I can assure you that the Marxist definition of capitalist is a heterodox definition. While i am being very wide with the definition of capitalist such to accommodate people that marxists consider capitalists who may not consider themselves capitalist. It most definitely is the case that private ownership of capital production regardless of whom its owned by (unless its owned by the state) is considered by just about fucking everyone to be capitalist.
So you're not going to answer the question or respond to the comments I made?
A worker co-operative's reaction to more efficient production should not be layoffs. If you are obtaining the same surplus value for less labour, it sounds to me like you can reduce the required working hours for the workers without reducing their wages/share of surplus. Same with automation: social ownership means that greater efficiency benefits and liberates you, instead of threatening your employment.
In practice, this demands sound policy when constructing the co-operative and elaborating its rules of operation, because perverse incentives always loom (e.g. firing workers when possible so you get a bigger share of the surplus)
There's only so many tickets under capitalism, too. And most people aren't going to fly to Paris and the see the Mona Lisa and everything else at the Louvre under capitalism any easier than under communism. Communism isn't some kind of vow of poverty its for an equal sharing of wealth.
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I don't think I was very clear. If I and my fellow workers own the business and we make decisions about its operation as a collective, that's not any different in re: private ownership than if I just owned it myself. The group of people who own it is larger, but we still own it and you don't. That’s still capitalist.
If ownership of the business is not a thing in any context, it’s not a co-op but it invites “why work there because it’s sucks” questions we haven’t answered except with an implied “or else we consequences you”.
If ownership is collective across All the Workers, is it really? Is ownership meaningful in that context?
If the State does, that’s not Communism.
again, it's not owned privately, it's owned by the collective of workers, if that changes via retirement without transition of ownership to new workers it ceases to be a true coop and will gradually morph into something horrible like publix or half the startups i worked for with predatory, obfuscated division of ownership
It is important and beneficial to be charitable in argument. I think it's safe to assume that most people here are asking how communism would allocate access to luxuries, not arguing directly that it would fail to.
(Same way we do now when wealth doesn't offer direct access: lotteries, first come first serve lots, assiduous research and effort, etc. Think high-end bottles of whiskey, and how people get them right now. How it would allocate the production of luxury resources is probably a tougher question)
well true communism isn't a government since it's stateless, so it seems like you have a conflict of definitions here
Of course it’s different. It’s as different as a democratic state is to an autocratic one.
I don’t need to own your business, Spool; I don’t work there! Maybe I’ll buy from it or hire whatever service you provide, but again: I don’t work there. The aspect of private versus collective isn’t on the whole of society, it’s in the vein of self-management. It’s the issue of lower case D democracy!
Think of the business in the same way as you would a country. If I am outside of your country, and my only interaction with it is that of just purchasing the occasional good or service, what right do I have to tell you and your fellow laborers how to run it? Why shouldn’t that be your collective decision, as the people who have to work there?
Beyond that, why should I be able to buy a portion of your business, perform no work, and collect rents from your labor in the form of profit shares
It doesn't mean that coops can't exist within a capitalist society (they can, obviously) or that everyone who works at a coop is a socialist (though I'd bet a significantly higher percentage of such workers are socialists).
It's fine by me if capitalists want to view them as capitalist institutions because they accrue and reinvest capital or whatever. If you want to say that they are both socialist and capitalist at once then ok, I guess, although I think that if that's where your definitions bring you then you should probably redefine one or the other term. The relationship of exploitation and domination that is the employer - employee relationship is pretty core to what socialists object to in capitalism, so from our perspective a coop lacks or should lack that central odious characteristic.
The other question, which is just as important, is how to avoid controlling access leading to power.
Spool please read my replies ilu
Distribution of the surplus among the workers of the enterprise, rather than the owners having that surplus and the workers not having it, is the crucial difference and a core, orthodox definition of social ownership
Broader socialist systems often propose total worker ownership in that the surplus of all enterprises is divided among all workers, often referred to as a social dividend; this is a lot closer to communism, yes
Both fall under "social ownership"
The Venetian and Florentine merchants were so fucking rich that they took turns *buying the Papacy* several centuries prior to Smith, so, you know, color me skeptical.
Yea... Its privately owned by a collective of workers. Who get to decide how to allocate their ownership. And are free to enforce sale at retirement and buy in to work. Or free to not do that. They own it, they get to decide. They get to decide their ownership structure. They get to decide their governance structure. It is not "not capitalist" because they decided something that seems like snidely whiplash would disapprove.
Unless you're saying that Google is a communist system because its "publicly" owned. No. Google is privately owned by various members of the public. Those owners even get to vote on many things google does in order to change the direction of the company in accordance with the founding documents and the sales agreement for equity.
These structures are not exactly the same in the eyes of a capitalist but not because one of them isn't capitalist. But because they just have different ownership and sales requirements. Its even more "hella super free market" because the most free market capitalists tend to say that there are fewer types of organizational structures and contracts that should be disallowed. (like restrictive covenants, which is effectively how a coop enforces its ownership structure)
Like. Yall(lanz/sammic et al) call the fucking Soviet Union capitalist. But a coop isn't? Man fucking what?
That would just mean that all ownership is private under communism.
The structure of ownership is what is at issue. Worker co-ops are substantively different from privately owned firms in how they make decisions, distribute surplus value, and apportion stake. These differences are what make them socialist.
Because labor does not have power, and works under the whim of the state
You seem to have a lot of trouble processing bottom up versus top down here
A state is made up of private citizens, as is the government. That doesn't make state ownership a form of private ownership. You are effectively arguing that all ownership is private and that there is no system that falls outside of capitalism.
Yeah I think some of these arguments are getting kind of pedantic
Yeah ok, who built the machine though? Who came up with its idea? What previous machines and ideas did it build off of? What scientific advancements were necessary for it to be engineered? How were the engineers educated in their trade - who taught them, and at whose expense?
The machine is the common heritage of humanity.
And then you have private/public... surely there's a better term we can use for "owned by one" vs. "owned by all".
personally, i started out my political journey as a right wing libertarian, went liberal and then eventually found my way back to pre-randian leftist libertarianism
i'm incredibly skeptical that there's much more i could learn about capitalism and markets, or management, especially given the general trajectory of my career and investments
but that's what really burns me up, about the status quo, it's incredibly shitty business
worker coops and publicly owned utilities regularly outperform their capitalist counterparts by leaps and bounds, it's almost impossible not to, without all that middle management and executive bloat extracting profit from the business (whole reason amazon was so extraordinarily successful is back in the day bezos took a much longer view, reinvested nearly all the profit into the business until he had a juggernaut), and they tend to be more nimble, because they have a wealth of eyes and ears and perspectives that are much closer to where the snags in business happen than an executive suite
whole reason i'm trying to start a housing coop is i'm currently renting a home from one of those companies that spun out of the '08 recession and started gobbling up private residences is there is no way a tenant coop wouldn't be more effective at spending on maintenance and repairs than these weirdos
they're a giant, more removed version of the slumlord i had back in california that would end up spending double or triple redoing a repair she insisted on getting done for the lowest bid possible, no matter what the person's qualifications or track record are
only reason the entire model hasn't folded inward is they're juicing it with their own capital to keep the bubble going (worst example of this that comes to mind is lennar homes buying up their own inventory for inflated prices)
No. I think that if the government owns it its public ownership. I do not think that "state capitalism" is "capitalism". I do not think that google is communist because its "publicly owned". The point was that that was ridiculous.
But a coop isn't public ownership. Its really not. Its private ownership. Only the members of the coop get a say in the governance and membership is determined by the members and the governance documents. The state does not own a coop. The public does not own a coop. Its privately owned.
Yeah, no, another guy built it with another machine, all the way down to the extraction of the ore. It's the twenty-first century. Everything, and I do mean everything, is produced via capital investment first and labor second.
The point is that co-operatives are generally aligned with the economic proposals and moral theory of socialism. They are a way for groups to operate in a socialist manner even within capitalist systems.
I like co-ops. Co-ops are on par with private ownership enterprises in terms of productivity, are much more stable and resilient, and offer much greater security and autonomy to workers at all levels of the enterprise. They do have issues with competition for higher-level salaried positions, though, and as mrondeau said, they do not have any special resistance against issues like sexism and racism in the workplace.
I am more interested in what an economy primarily organized around co-ops would look like, tbh, than in discussing a label for them, because either way they embody a lot of the principles that I support
My point is that the collective that owns an enterprise being composed of private citizens is not sufficient to make it private ownership, or else all ownership is private, because all collectives — including states and governments — are composed of private citizens.
Your position here is at odds with every source on social ownership that I've read or seen. Social ownership does not mean state ownership. Social ownership is a specific socialist idea of ownership that includes state ownership but also other forms of collective ownership. State ownership and private ownership are not the only two options for ownership.
I'm not quibbling the point, just frustrated at muddled terms.
I like co-ops as well. I use a local one for groceries when I can even though it hurts my wallet and has a frustrating selection. I'd love to see them expand.