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?
I think that something important is missing, and that's my fault for not articulating it well enough
I think that the interests that Jose has, as a laborer are informed by his race, such that Jime lacks THAT set of interests. I don't think one can abstract away to this thing, economic class in some easy way. I don't know that I believe that there are any interests that any worker has anywhere that are only due to wealth and are not informed by any other groups to which that person belongs. In a sense, I think that it is an invented class, one that is not based on anything in nature but rather something invented as the basis for a theory.
Trends and tendencies are of course what we can operate on, and we can even say that something might be good or bad for workers based on what contributes to some notion of their well being. I think that the problem is understanding that interests=well being. I can have real interests in things that are not beneficial to me. So to say that a class has some interest, is to say that the members of that class do, and that just seems to fundamentally make a mistake about humans and their interests. That you can organize people into a set and call it "workers" is only of as much interest as that you can organize the group of people who are in this room right now into a set. It doesn't tell you much that we ought to be basing our society on.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
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.
“Change planes in Dallas, you’re a Texan.”
Also I’d note it’s not just me, sammich, et al calling the Soviet Union and China state capitalist. There’s plenty of academia and historical analysis on the functioning of these states and their relationship with labor
Under a true communist system, says Resnick, the workers would control all aspects of production and decide how any surpluses are used. But in the wake of the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks imposed a layer of state managers to operate industry in the name of the people. That system, which Resnick and Wolff call "state capitalism," actually ceded decisions about the use of profits to government officials.
If communism ever existed within the USSR, says Resnick, it was during a brief period following the revolution when the Bolsheviks redistributed land to the peasants, who formed farming collectives. Working at the local level, farmers reached consensus on how their surplus products would be used.
But as Wolff notes, those collective decisions didn't fit into the plans of the Soviet leaders and their state capitalism. By the mid-1930s, the Soviet state was having such a hard time getting enough food to feed the workers that Josef Stalin "decided that whole revolution was at risk because of the farmers," says Wolff. In response, the Soviet leader abolished the collectives in favor of "state farms run like factories."
Resnick and Wolff contend that state capitalism was originally seen by the Bolsheviks as a necessary step in the evolution towards a communist state. But after Lenin's death in 1923, says Wolff, Stalin short-circuited those plans by simply declaring the Soviet Union a communist-socialist state.
What further complicates matters is a clash of economic systems. China practices state capitalism; the government owns many large firms and decides which industries will receive subsidies, protected markets and favorable loans. In the United States, private markets and firms mostly determine which companies grow or shrink.
The result is a stalemate. Many Chinese policies and practices (rules that coerce the transfer of new technologies or business plans to Chinese businesses, or that discriminate against foreign companies) make perfect sense in the context of state capitalism. But to Americans and other private investors, they violate the norms of open competition and fairness.
This makes negotiations exceedingly difficult. For China to abandon its policies would mean, in effect, scrapping its whole economic model. Politically, this would be hard to swallow. Similarly, for the United States to condone China’s state capitalism would legitimize a system that puts U.S., foreign and private investors at a permanent disadvantage.
"State-controlled capitalism" may sound like a contradiction in terms, but author Ian Bremmer says it's a growing threat to U.S. corporations.
In his new book, The End of the Free Market, Bremmer, who runs Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm, argues that corporations based in free-market economies face growing competition from companies based in state capitalist economies.
Bremmer defines state capitalism as economies in which the state is the principal actor and judge, and uses the markets for political gains. China, Russia and Venezuela are among the examples. In free-market economies, such as the U.S., Europe and Japan, multinational corporations are the principal actors.
According to Walder and Gong’s analysis of pamphlets published by the WAF, workers were first and foremost concerned with economic issues directly affecting their livelihoods, such as inflation and inequality. These problems, which emerged during the marketization reforms, produced strongly negative sentiments toward the reforms. However, workers didn’t focus solely on the economic dimension, but provided an explicitly political understanding of these economic problems and articulated a vision of democracy accordingly. Workers understood that inflation and inequality had a common, underlying political source: “Stalinist dictatorial bureaucracy.”
The WAF’s analysis of inflation attributed rising prices to the bureaucrats who controlled pricing of domestic and imported goods and deliberately set the prices high to make room for their own hoarding and profiteering. Therefore, the only way to eradicate inflation and inequality was to overthrow the bureaucracy as a whole and restore to workers the power to control the production and circulation of goods. This democratic vision based on anti-bureaucratism is reminiscent of the workers’ rebellions of 1966 and 1967, the early years of the Cultural Revolution.
Workers’ direct experience with the oppressiveness of bureaucracy didn’t arise from the absence of freedom of speech or voting rights in the formal political sphere, but from the lack of power in the workplace. For workers, the bluntest manifestation of “dictatorial bureaucracy” was one-man rule in the factories. A worker interviewed by Walder and Gong said:
“(I)n the workshop, does what the workers say count, or what the leader says? We later talked about it. In the factory the director is a dictator; what one man says goes. If you view the state through the factory, it’s about the same: one-man rule… Our objective was not very high; we just wanted workers to have their own independent organization.”
In other words, while the workers who participated in the movement were undoubtedly fighting for democracy, “democracy” in workers’ eyes meant first and foremost democracy in the workplace. The WAF’s articulation of the democratic ideal was intertwined with sharp criticisms of China’s official trade union system, which didn’t really represent workers, and with a vision of workers having the right to organize independent unions, supervise managers, and bargain collectively.
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
I do not understand what this has to do with anything? Do a group of people fucking own it? Do they have exclusive rights to the property as defined by their governance structure? Are they able, within the bounds of the structure they decided on, able to prevent others from utilizing their property?
Because if it meets those AND its not owned by the state then its capitalist. I don't know how to tell you this better. I have done it many time and in many, quite in depth.
Like. If you start a business and buy(or make!) all the capital for the business and are the only one who works the machines. You're not a communist business because the worker owns the means of production. Well... i mean ok i will accept that you can call it that. But its sure as shit still a capitalist business.
A coop is just that business model but with more people. Doing the explicitly capitalist thing (even in fucking Marx's time) of pooling their capital in order to achieve better results.
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
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 do think it's fairly important to define what a coop is more tightly tho, because legally, any company with majority "worker" owned shares is a coop, even if it's not any more equitable or democratic than wal-mart in the distribution of those shares
the way some companies are doing it's goddamned labor washing, and i worry about similar capture of the nascent labor movement push towards unionizing when people like reggie fils-aimé are coming out saying companies need to get used to unions
there's a lot of ways to ratfuck the structure of collective ownership and bargaining that mean it does nothing to challenge the power dynamics created by established capital
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.
Coops aren't a form of public ownership, but they are a form of common ownership. The fact that a coop is not publicly owned - that the profits it gains belong to the coop, and not to society as a whole - is indeed an important distinction from state ownership or any other society-wide form of social control. A society organized according to worker-owned coops satisfies some conceptions of socialism, but not communism. But the fact that they are organized according to the principle of workers collectively owning the enterprise is divergent from what is commonly thought of as "privately owned," and, while I can't speak to how the neoclassical or Keynesian schools of economic thought divide and define such concepts, I would say that what is meant by "privately owned" in classic political economy - from Smith through Marx - is not a worker-owned cooperative.
i want to note that consumer owned co-ops (which I'm guessing is the grocery store you're talking about and places like REI) are not the same thing as workers' co-ops and generally not even as close to as good at creating socialist outcomes
probably still better than a standard corp but still quite capable of shitting all over their workers, like with REI's union busting
Aioua on
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
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.
Then Capital, perchance, can mine its own ore and build its own machines. If, indeed, labor is so secondary in this relationship.
Lanz on
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered 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.
i can see why capitalists want to frame it this way when their accrued capital was mostly extracted via genocidal white supremacist policy, but that doesn't make the capital any less derived from slave labor
i want to note that consumer owned co-ops (which I'm guessing is the grocery store you're talking about and places like REI) are not the same thing as workers' co-ops and generally not even as close to as good at creating socialist outcomes
probably still better than a standard corp but still quite capable of shitting all over their workers, like with REI's union busting
I agree with all of this. That said my state's DSA is trying to get the terrible privately owned electric utility monopoly replaced by a consumer owned one, which I think is a good plan.
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.
It is at odds with marxist social ownership thought to consider it capitalist. But it is not at odds with capital private ownership thought to consider it capitalist. Marxists do not get to define capitalism.
This is because capitalists do not care from what class or background a person is that owns. They care about the legal structure of that ownership. And coops fit within the legal structure of that ownership that capitalists consider capitalist. Its privately owned. The private owner operates the equipment themselves. The number of owners does not fucking matter. Is a family business not capitalist if they only "hire" people inside the family? Is your marriage not capitalist if you live in a community property state?
Thus a coop is not "anti-capitalist" or "not capitalist". It is. Its workers being the capitalists now.
This is why few capitalists consider the USSR "capitalist" even though they fit the marxist definition of "state capitalist". State capitalism isn't capitalism because no capital property is privately owned and there are no markets through which to efficiently price it. Just because Marx put the moniker "capitalist" on it doesn't make it so.
Goumindong on
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
i want to note that consumer owned co-ops (which I'm guessing is the grocery store you're talking about and places like REI) are not the same thing as workers' co-ops and generally not even as close to as good at creating socialist outcomes
probably still better than a standard corp but still quite capable of shitting all over their workers, like with REI's union busting
I agree with all of this. That said my state's DSA is trying to get the terrible privately owned electric utility monopoly replaced by a consumer owned one, which I think is a good plan.
i think this is ideal for utilities tbh
a worker's coop utility in a capitalist society would have the same perverse incentives as PG&E
they should definitely have a place at the bargaining table, but consumers whose very lives rely on a utility they're paying to upkeep deserve at least as much of a vote as the workers
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.
I will try my best to engage with this hypothetical in the terms of my own employment, which is a loose fit at best.
I work for an architecture/engineering firm that was created in the mid-1980s. I'm going to ignore the literal machines that we use (computers, phones, ipads, etc.) and focus on the useful thing that ownership actually provides us. Each fully trained A/E is able to perform our job either on our own or collectively. We don't need the company in order to do our job. Theoretically each of us could branch off and set up our own firms. In fact, that is how this firm started. The specific work we do does not include a couple of big projects per year, but rather multiple smaller projects per month. If I were to branch off and try and start my own firm performing the exact same job, I would almost certainly be unable to secure enough projects to earn my current salary for a very long time (if ever). The primary owner of our company did take that risk on and eventually grew his company to a modest side.
The portfolio and contacts are the primary "machine" initially provided by ownership of the company. He also does the same work as us and earns money for the company and provides a significant level of expertise, but it's the ability to continually provide new contracts that has the most value. Does taking on the risk to create the company and expanding it to what it is today deserve no additional financial compensation beyond that earned by the other employees? I understand that there is a line where the additional financial compensation is clearly too much, but if I thought his share was too much and that my share was too little I would leave.
I don't want my argument to be twisted to state that I think the market will regulate itself. I understand that it's a lot easier for me to leave for greener pastures than it is for someone who works at the shoe sweatshop we keep discussing. I think that enough money needs to be taken from the wealthy to create a large enough safety net that everyone can walk away from their jobs to find better employment if the pay and benefit are not adequate. I think we saw wages rise in retail and restaurant jobs during the pandemic for this very reason.
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
Anyone who thinks that class warfare doesn't exist presumably has never read a history book because it... factually has? It has been declared to exist by the people engaging in it?
Also, Lanlaorn, I think that if your opinion, as indicated in your earlier post, is that “class warfare is not a thing,” then honestly there’s little reason for us to engage with each other, because our fundamentals are that at odds with each other. If that is your position, we believe in fundamentally different ideas regarding society’s organization and the social pressures that drive its behavior to actually come to terms.
I'm not sure there is adequate evidence that there is any such thing as a unified class that has a set of particular interests that are odd with other classes. Like, the notion that there is such a thing as the "working class" that we can ascribe a set of unified desires and interests to is something i'm skeptical of.
1. If there were unified classes with class interests those interests would have to be shared by all members of the class
2. These interests would probably be unique to the class in question and it would be logically required for the set of interests that belong to a particular class to be exclusive to that class (if two classes had the same set of interests then how would we distinguish them from one another? this is kind of a set theory problem and assumes that the set of interests is the intention of the set that the class is)
So, Jim in West Virginia working at a WalMart stocking shelves and Jose in Arizona working at a WalMart stocking shelves seem like a good place to start analyzing class. Seemingly we would want to put them in the same class. They both work at WalMart, they are both men (let us stipulate) so thus far it seems reasonable to say that they have the set of interests that belong to anyone stocking shelves at WalMart who is a man. Then we have Jenni, who works at a WalMart stocking shelves in Oklahoma, but is a woman. Do all three of them have the same interests even with respect to working at WalMart? Jenni has to contend with sexism from the customers and coworkers. Jose (a man born in El Salvador) has to contend with the racism from customers and coworkers. Jenni's interests as a woman who stocks shelves at WalMart are different than Jose's interests as a latino who stocks shelves at WalMart. Is there really a united class here? And this doesn't even take into consideration how interests fluctuate regionally, generationally, with respect to sexuality, or family status. All of these things go in to a huge diverse set of interests where Jenni might consider it worth it to get less of a pay raise in return for more robust systems of justice with respect to her gender. Basically if classes with interests exist I think that they have to exist as classes with only a handful of people in them. There doesn't appear to a naturally unified "working class" to which I, Jenni, Jose, and Jim belong. We may share some interests but we don't share the same hierarchy of interests, and if we make our interests vague enough and say that perhaps Jenni and Jose are both interested in a just workplace, well who the fuck isn't interested in that? That risks exploding our class into being a class of everyone.
Not to mention the amount of amateur psychology that invoking class results in. When you can simply declare and ownership class and insist that they all share the same motivations and psychology it eliminates the human agency from the very real alive people. I mean, as much as I don't want to erase the humanity of the people who are barely getting by, I don't think that somehow it's okay to eliminate the humanity of even someone like Bill Gates. He has thoughts, feelings, desires, and an inner life that isn't just "lol ownership class"
The more I learn about Marxist analysis of the world, the less convinced I am by it. I still think that there is a better more equitable world possible and that we ought to be striving for the most egalitarian world that we can possibly make. But I tend to predicate my socialism in very practical terms. I just want a world where every person has the maximum opportunity (here opportunity being actionable, more of a positive liberty than a negative one) to develop themselves as a human being consistent with others having the same opportunity.
I don't find the Marxist definitions to be that relevant to today's world. For instance, My wife and I own a duplex which accounted for about 6% of our household income last year (assuming we can actually realize the increase in property value, otherwise it represents like 0.04% of our income). We personally have to do a lot of the upkeep on that house. I think that puts us in the Petite Bourgeoisie class (or maybe the Landlord class?). But in a country where about 65% of the population owns their home, 40% of the population contributes to a 401(k), countless others own at least some nominal stock, crypto, etc., then most people don't fall strictly in Bourgeoisie or Proletariat classes.
I think the Marxist definitions of class don't work as well as dividing classes strictly by income and type of work. I think an upper middle class software developer has significantly more in common with a small business owner than either a large business owner or a retail worker despite the small business owner being part of the Bourgeoisie and the software developer being part of the Proletariat.
I don't think that disagreeing with the Marxist definitions of class is a good argument against communism, though.
I agree that I think Marx's class analysis is outdated
Although I will say that as a landlord you probably won't find Marxism and the subsequent theories it formed to be overly friendly
Anyone who thinks that class warfare doesn't exist presumably has never read a history book because it... factually has? It has been declared to exist by the people engaging in it?
Motherfuckers dropped leftover WWI munitions cobbled into bombs on miners back in Blair Mountain! That was barely a century ago!
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.
It is at odds with marxist social ownership thought to consider it capitalist. But it is not at odds with capital private ownership thought to consider it capitalist. Marxists do not get to define capitalism.
This is because capitalists do not care from what class or background a person is that owns. They care about the legal structure of that ownership. And coops fit within the legal structure of that ownership that capitalists consider capitalist. Its privately owned. The private owner operates the equipment themselves. Is a family business not capitalist if they only "hire" people inside the family? Is your marriage not capitalist if you live in a community property state?
Thus a coop is not "anti-capitalist" or "not capitalist". It is. Its workers being the capitalists now.
This is why few capitalists consider the USSR "capitalist" even though they fit the marxist definition of "state capitalist". State capitalism isn't capitalism because no capital property is privately owned and there are no markets through which to efficiently price it. Just because Marx put the moniker "capitalist" on it doesn't make it so.
I just don't see how this definition is useful or worth respecting. Of course capitalism would define itself extremely broadly, since that works to its benefit. Any system that works is ultimately capitalism, and only systems that fail are not capitalist. But there are alternatives to both capitalism and state communism!
Your definition of capitalism sounds like it would include anarchocommunism. Why wouldn't it? A stateless society, so it can't be publicly owned, and the owners of the capital are all worker collectives made up of private individuals.
Social ownership is a common, accepted, well-understood concept distinct from private ownership in almost every dimension — purpose, organization, control, source of capital, distribution of surplus, etc. It's bizarre to essentially reject it.
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.
Also, Lanlaorn, I think that if your opinion, as indicated in your earlier post, is that “class warfare is not a thing,” then honestly there’s little reason for us to engage with each other, because our fundamentals are that at odds with each other. If that is your position, we believe in fundamentally different ideas regarding society’s organization and the social pressures that drive its behavior to actually come to terms.
I'm not sure there is adequate evidence that there is any such thing as a unified class that has a set of particular interests that are odd with other classes. Like, the notion that there is such a thing as the "working class" that we can ascribe a set of unified desires and interests to is something i'm skeptical of.
1. If there were unified classes with class interests those interests would have to be shared by all members of the class
2. These interests would probably be unique to the class in question and it would be logically required for the set of interests that belong to a particular class to be exclusive to that class (if two classes had the same set of interests then how would we distinguish them from one another? this is kind of a set theory problem and assumes that the set of interests is the intention of the set that the class is)
So, Jim in West Virginia working at a WalMart stocking shelves and Jose in Arizona working at a WalMart stocking shelves seem like a good place to start analyzing class. Seemingly we would want to put them in the same class. They both work at WalMart, they are both men (let us stipulate) so thus far it seems reasonable to say that they have the set of interests that belong to anyone stocking shelves at WalMart who is a man. Then we have Jenni, who works at a WalMart stocking shelves in Oklahoma, but is a woman. Do all three of them have the same interests even with respect to working at WalMart? Jenni has to contend with sexism from the customers and coworkers. Jose (a man born in El Salvador) has to contend with the racism from customers and coworkers. Jenni's interests as a woman who stocks shelves at WalMart are different than Jose's interests as a latino who stocks shelves at WalMart. Is there really a united class here? And this doesn't even take into consideration how interests fluctuate regionally, generationally, with respect to sexuality, or family status. All of these things go in to a huge diverse set of interests where Jenni might consider it worth it to get less of a pay raise in return for more robust systems of justice with respect to her gender. Basically if classes with interests exist I think that they have to exist as classes with only a handful of people in them. There doesn't appear to a naturally unified "working class" to which I, Jenni, Jose, and Jim belong. We may share some interests but we don't share the same hierarchy of interests, and if we make our interests vague enough and say that perhaps Jenni and Jose are both interested in a just workplace, well who the fuck isn't interested in that? That risks exploding our class into being a class of everyone.
Not to mention the amount of amateur psychology that invoking class results in. When you can simply declare and ownership class and insist that they all share the same motivations and psychology it eliminates the human agency from the very real alive people. I mean, as much as I don't want to erase the humanity of the people who are barely getting by, I don't think that somehow it's okay to eliminate the humanity of even someone like Bill Gates. He has thoughts, feelings, desires, and an inner life that isn't just "lol ownership class"
The more I learn about Marxist analysis of the world, the less convinced I am by it. I still think that there is a better more equitable world possible and that we ought to be striving for the most egalitarian world that we can possibly make. But I tend to predicate my socialism in very practical terms. I just want a world where every person has the maximum opportunity (here opportunity being actionable, more of a positive liberty than a negative one) to develop themselves as a human being consistent with others having the same opportunity.
I don't find the Marxist definitions to be that relevant to today's world. For instance, My wife and I own a duplex which accounted for about 6% of our household income last year (assuming we can actually realize the increase in property value, otherwise it represents like 0.04% of our income). We personally have to do a lot of the upkeep on that house. I think that puts us in the Petite Bourgeoisie class (or maybe the Landlord class?). But in a country where about 65% of the population owns their home, 40% of the population contributes to a 401(k), countless others own at least some nominal stock, crypto, etc., then most people don't fall strictly in Bourgeoisie or Proletariat classes.
I think the Marxist definitions of class don't work as well as dividing classes strictly by income and type of work. I think an upper middle class software developer has significantly more in common with a small business owner than either a large business owner or a retail worker despite the small business owner being part of the Bourgeoisie and the software developer being part of the Proletariat.
I don't think that disagreeing with the Marxist definitions of class is a good argument against communism, though.
I agree that I think Marx's class analysis is outdated
Although I will say that as a landlord you probably won't find Marxism and the subsequent theories it formed to be overly friendly
I feel like from a very practical point of view, ownership of homes is an interesting division point in the capital/mercantile/feudal economic megastructure vs a more, I dunno what you'd call it, ethical system? A less exploitative system anyway.
That being that rent is basically exploitation, and rent seeking actors are bad. If I had my way nobody would be a landlord renting out the homes other people need to live. You can give whatever name with an -ism on the end you like to my dream of cheerfully abolishing landlords en masse
I'm not sure that just talking about economics and governance with the filter of "what ends in ism" is going to be a coherent enough topic for a thread here. The "isms" listed are hardly related or comparable- it kinda seems like we'll just have an opportunity for some people to find some particular dichotomy and go off on it (like the present communism v. anticommunist conversation).
As a constructive suggestion, maybe we can first talk about power, since that's usually the thing people are trying to grapple with as part of economics and governance. There are a lot of aspects of power, even just narrowing it down to just "political power". Where do the currently acknowledged forms of government locate the source of political power, and how is it framed? Here's my quick stab at identifying this:
Autocracy:
Political power is only derived from the will of one person. This is framed as some sort of divine right or, on occasion, a populist decision to put power into the hands of the autarch. The most commonly recognized form of this would be a monarchy, but functionally this describes many governments that concentrate power in the hands of one individual- the degree and style of delegation of that power is usually the main distinguishing factor.
It should be noted that there are many "monarchies" extant today that don't fit this description, but functionally when the power is no longer specifically in the hands of a monarch it's hard to argue the term "monarchy" isn't ornamental.
Aristocracy:
Political power is derived from the will of the elite class. This is framed as a consequence of a some superiority of the elites- this can translate to a meritocracy or technocracy, but it's historically existed in the form of nobility that mimics or exists parallel to autocracies/monarchies or in the form of merchant republics such as the city states of the Mediterranean.
No government tends to use "aristocracy" as part of its own branding that I know of.
Democracy:
Political power is derived from the will of the people equally. This is framed, more often than not, as a natural consequence of the consent of the governed being inherent in democratic processes. There are many kinds of democracies, including some that don't actually use the term democracy, and the main distinguishing factor is the degree and style of delegation of the power of the people.
In the same way as a monarchy, once the power is no longer coming from the people, "democracy" is more PR than a real governmental identity.
Okay so
Having lined up where political power is situated and how it is framed in these forms of government, it's useful to remember the framing and sourcing of political power can easily change without massive modifications to the infrastructure and organization of the government- the shotcallers just get moved around. The reason this happens is there's nothing inherent about where the power is coming from. The balance of power - actionable power, not just theoretical - is decided by the material circumstances of the systems involved.
Political power comes from the ability to enforce the will that it represents. This can be an incentive system ("I have resources, I will give you some if you agree to follow my rule") or a disincentive system ("I have weapons, I will use them against you if you do not agree to follow my rule"), or some blend of the two. Violence is the first place many people go to in their heads for this- there's a reason why "the last argument of kings" (or "Ultima Ratio Regum") was engraved on the side of Louis XIV's cannons- but it's not the only form. Economic or resource based enforcement is pretty well known and it is often the deciding factor for who might have more capacity to enforce their will through violence anyway. Social and cultural enforcement is also effective: creating a social system that rewards certain behaviors with greater prestige and punishes other behaviors with shame and disassociation is essentially how you establish what Gramsci called "cultural hegemony".
From here, we get to some of these other, not-really-governments "isms" that are talked about in the OP.
Authoritarianism
is sort of a retread of autocracy/aristocracy. It's not super useful to talk about because it's sort of just a way to say "a non-democratic government that I don't like", but it's worthwhile to note that one of the more broadly accepted points is that it most enforcement of the political will is done through violence.
Capitalism
is a system that starts with the assumption that A. there is a market for exchanging products and money, B. there are those who have labor power (workers), and C. those who have capital, or the means for converting labor power into product (employers). Ignoring any other social, cultural, or military factors (as those often come from other commonly associated systems): the employer enforces this through incentivizing work with wages ("I need your labor to convert this capital into product and I have resources that you need to live, I will give you resources in exchange for your labor") and the worker ostensibly agrees and becomes a wage laborer. As a consequence of basic logic, the system only works if the wages are less than the exchange value of the labor product- otherwise, the employer will soon have no more resources to incentivize workers with. There is not much of a backstop to keep the difference between the resources gained by the employer equitable with the resources gained by the worker, aside from the cost to the employer for acquiring more capital for the worker to convert into capital. If the difference between profit and wages is inequitahle, this shifts resources (and the power to incentivize) towards being held by a few rather than many, as you may have heard. One could guess that, left to its own devices, this system should tend towards shaping its government into an aristocracy.
Colonialism
is less a system and more a phenomenon that results from an autocratic or aristocratic government (the "colonizer") using social, cultural, economic, and military enforcement on an outgroup that the colonizer lays claim over. It's a way that a democracy can functionally become an aristocracy without much of a major change to the overall government.
Communism
is a political ideology branching from Socialism, which will be talked about later- it's based around achieving or arguing the possibility of a "communist society", which is a society that was imagined as a result of Capitalism's resource-based incentivization being unsustainable in the future where we have a super abundance of resources. You can't really incentivize someone to work for you by offering them resources you have if they both have resources already and can easily get their own resources if they want to, right? So keeping that in mind, the political ideology is focused on bringing that about. The society itself (and potential forms of government, enforcement of balance of power, etc) is separate. As you can imagine, there are a lot of forms of Communism because it's a pretty broad ideology.
As a brief aside, the communist society imagined above would only be possible in a society that guaranteed everyone in the society equal power- so, a democracy. The enforcement mechanisms available to the people in this society are a big part of the debate in the associated ideology, but the general agreement is that it would not be economic or violent incentivization. Anarcho communist thought generally tends towards social and cultural incentivization/disincentivization. The dedicated contributer would be rewarded with prestige, praise, social standing, cultural enshrinement- the saboteur or non-participant member of society might retain access to resources, but they would be regarded as socially and cultural unacceptable, resulting in them being shunned or exiled in extreme instances.
Fascism
is a term that isn't super useful for debate, similar to authoritarianism. It's just even worse authoritarianism, basically- and what "even worse" means changes depending on who's reading it. it might be more helpful to use this as an opportunity to talk about
Nationalism
which is a political ideology that sees political power as being derived from the nation itself. This means nothing, as the nation doesn't actually have any will to enforce- it's just an organizing factor for power, similar to Capitalism but distinct in that its enforcement system is more varied across social and cultural lines. It relies on creating a National Identity that requires an outgroup to contrast against- which outwardly manifests as violence and enforcement of political will on people outside the nation in the form of colonialism and war, or internally manifests as finding members of its population to mark as outgroups and violently oppress. If the Nationalist government manages to focus its ire solely on those outside the nation, it might be charitably be considered a democracy, but mostly Nationalism tends towards stratifying its own population and developing an aristocracy or a blended autocracy with a parallel elite class (like, y'know, the Nazis).
Feudalism
in the classic Western world is a general cultural status quo that has a couple features that aren't necessarily 100% consistent. A loose description is that it starts the assumption that there are A. people who have labor power (peasants), B. people who own land and have military power (nobility and royalty), and C. people who have cultural power (clergy). The general idea is that the clergy use their cultural power to incentivize the nobility and royalty by validating their ownership of land and military power (divine right of kings type stuff), in exchange for maintaining their privileged position over the peasantry. In turn, the nobility and royalty incentivize the peasants to work the land and produce resources by allowing them to live on that land and enjoy some of the resources themselves, as well as ostensibly being protected via military force from other people outside their society. They also disincentivize any rebellion against this order by using military force against peasants that do not follow their rule.
Reaganism
is a neoliberal political ideology also known as Reaganomics that doesn't really fit in with any of these other concepts and confused me even more than the sole inclusion of colonialism did at first. It's basically just philosophically in favor of Capitalism in a liberal government with no interest in regulation or taxation of anyone with large amounts of income or capital. This means I'm going to have to take a stab at describing liberalism, ugh.
Liberalism
is a political ideology that forms a philosophical and cultural basis in support of a state where everyone has equal rights and equal consideration under the law, and that law provides for a variety of rights and freedoms (or "liberties", hence "liberal"). However, these freedoms come with the core concept that people can't be fundamentally trusted to respect each other's freedoms without an enforcement system- people in a state of nature are selfish and destructive, in the liberal framework. The enforcement system is the set of social, cultural, economic, and military incentives/disincentives that keep those liberties in check- sometimes called the "civil society". Liberalism theoretically supports democracy as the mode of government- power may be delegated by the people to a subset, even to something that would look like an aristocracy or autocracy, but that power should still ultimately be merely on loan from the people.
As a segue to the next topic: Classical (and neo) liberalism advocates only for intefering with free trade as much as is absolutely necessary to keep it free- preventing monopolies or artificial scarcity- as it contends that more regulation would be more harmful to freedom than not. Accounting for the economic power creep that is a result of unchecked Capitalism was a source of much debate amongst liberal philosophers- this lead naturally to the development of the concept of modern liberalism (or social liberalism), social democracy, and the next topic from the OP:
Socialism
is a political ideology that supports the social ownership of the means of production- essentially eliminating the employer from Capitalism and making it possible for workers to make use of socially-owned capital goods and convert their labor power into products directly, with the excess product then distributed equally in society. The idea is that this is more equal, more efficient, and will eventually result in a sustainable democratic society with greater living standards. The incentive system is that society offers the worker resources in exchange for their labor power. Due to the excess product being distributed equally to the rest of society, this ideally keeps the overall power balance from shifting. One could kind of think of it like this: liberalism contends that if society protects everyone's rights equally, it will result in a sustainable equal distribution of power. Socialism contends that if society maintains a sustainable equal distribution of power, eventually everyone's rights will be protected equally.
It's worth noting that Socialism is not really related to social liberalism or social democracy- the general "social" term gets used to refer to any situation where general "society" is given some form of power to redistribute or allocate resources. It's similar, but Socialism itself is concerned specifically with how capital and labor interact.
Also jeez I have been working on this post and y'all have gone like 18 pages of back and forth with this communist/anti-communist bit, maybe this is a hopeless endeavor.
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
How does communism allocate housing? Depends on how your communist government works. It could be a market, it could be assifned based on industry, "you work in government and this is where your department office is" etc.
...how on earth do you have a market in a classless, moneyless, stateless society?
Are we bartering goods and services directly for preferred real estate?
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
Being concerned about making sure there's enough luxury apartments for people to live in, when there's a housing shortage for those looking for affordable housing? That's capitalism right now, my friend!
The survey, conducted by the federal Census Bureau between February and mid-July 2021, presents a sweeping review of New York City’s housing stock, median rents and individual borough vacancy rates that reflect the city’s affordable housing crunch. In Manhattan, more than 10 percent of apartments sat vacant. In the Bronx, the vacancy rate was less than 1 percent. In Queens and Staten Island, the vacancy rate was 4.15 percent. It was 2.73 percent in Brooklyn.
The median monthly asking rent on vacant apartments was $2,750 during the survey period, meaning household income would need to top $110,000 for a tenant to pay less than 30 percent of their earnings on rent, the threshold at which a tenant is considered “rent-burdened.” More than half of New York City renter households met that threshold last year, the report found. At least 13 percent of tenants reported missing at least one rent payment.
The findings also mean that the median household income for renters—$50,000, according to the survey—would have to more than double to keep up with median asking rent.
...
At the other end of the spectrum, 12.64 percent of units priced above $2,300 were vacant and available for rent; just over 4 percent of apartments priced between $1,500 and $2,299 were empty, the survey found.
The vacancy rate disparities reflect the dwindling supply of affordable housing citywide. Between 2017 and 2021, New York City lost about 96,000 units priced below $1,500 per month while adding about 107,000 units renting for $2,300 or more, the survey found. That dramatic loss of affordable housing continues a 30-year trend across the five boroughs. New York City has lost about 500,000 apartments priced below $1,500 since 1991 while adding about 500,000 priced at $2,300 or more.
...
New York City housing production trails population growth by a wide margin, but another factor is also driving rising rents and limited supply: more than 353,400 units remain vacant but are not available for rent—up from 248,000 in 2017—the HVS found. Nearly 103,000 of those units are second homes, or pied-a-terres, according to the survey, a finding that could renew calls for a “pied-a-terre tax” on empty units used seasonally or sparingly.
"Hey look a squirrel" is a piss-poor answer.
No, you asked a piss-poor question that points at the forest but asks you to ignore the trees. I've little patience for hand-wringing about luxury goods when basic needs aren't being met.
Failing to consider the power of luxury goods over the minds of the people is how you get the USSR.
Sure but the answer is "dont resist transitioning to luxury good production as hard as they did". Its hardly insurmountable.
Not all luxuries can be mass-produced.
Sure but I dont think society hinges on its ability to mass produce diamond encrusted watches
We enslaved and massacred people over gold.
Damn, sure glad capitalism put an end to all that.
Just because Capitalism isn't able to properly address a problem doesn't mean some alternative isn't going to fail to address the problem as well.
One of the main differences between Capitalism and Communism to me is specifically how they address markets. In Communism, a market is the answer the question "How do we allocate scarce resources in a fair manner?" In Capitalism, it's the answer to every question. So, I don't think it's too surprising that markets become associated with Capitalism, fair or not.
And I think it's also worth noting that a market has been a part of every socioeconomic system we've used since the invention of agriculture.
i want to note that consumer owned co-ops (which I'm guessing is the grocery store you're talking about and places like REI) are not the same thing as workers' co-ops and generally not even as close to as good at creating socialist outcomes
probably still better than a standard corp but still quite capable of shitting all over their workers, like with REI's union busting
I agree with all of this. That said my state's DSA is trying to get the terrible privately owned electric utility monopoly replaced by a consumer owned one, which I think is a good plan.
i think this is ideal for utilities tbh
a worker's coop utility in a capitalist society would have the same perverse incentives as PG&E
they should definitely have a place at the bargaining table, but consumers whose very lives rely on a utility they're paying to upkeep deserve at least as much of a vote as the workers
Yeah, agreed. Coops makes sense for making and selling goods. Services I would often prefer in the hands of the state. Socialize telecommunications, healthcare, utilities, and some other things. Usually I conceive of this as state ownership, but the Maine Public Power plan is an interesting alternative. Don't nationalize the video game industry, though, or the clothing industry. Workers collectively taking control of enterprises in those industries sounds much better.
Edit - energy should definitely be wholly socialized too, both as a commodity and a service, not just cooperatively owned
Like from a practical view, you have society, a complex bunch of interrelating systems. You try to improve those systems to make them less unequal and exploitative, over time, as best you can.
I'd generally say that the capitalist part of those systems tends to turn that dial up so I'd go the opposite way on most things.
I don't need an -ism to tell me that poverty wages, massive shareholder bonuses, failing public services, useless privatised services, rising inequality and falling class mobility and so on are all bad. And they're all practically the consequence of unrestrained capitalism. And I'd like to get rid of them all. Resulting in a less capitalist state, happy days.
I feel like from a very practical point of view, ownership of homes is an interesting division point in the capital/mercantile/feudal economic megastructure vs a more, I dunno what you'd call it, ethical system? A less exploitative system anyway.
That being that rent is basically exploitation, and rent seeking actors are bad. If I had my way nobody would be a landlord renting out the homes other people need to live. You can give whatever name with an -ism on the end you like to my dream of cheerfully abolishing landlords en masse
I'm well aware of what would be in store for me if some of the posters here had their say.
I personally don't feel I'm exploiting the person on the other side of the wall and I don't believe she feels that way either, but should the vanguard come I will certainly put a door between the two 2-bedroom units and create a 4-bedroom single family home.
I think that probably rent-seeking is inherently exploitative for various reasons although I'm not particularly directing that at anyone in this thread, I think it's just a good discussion point.
I think that probably rent-seeking is inherently exploitative for various reasons although I'm not particularly directing that at anyone in this thread, I think it's just a good discussion point.
My post was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. There's definitely an exploitation in rent-seeking at certain scales, but I don't feel that's necessarily true on a small scale.
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.
I will try my best to engage with this hypothetical in the terms of my own employment, which is a loose fit at best.
I work for an architecture/engineering firm that was created in the mid-1980s. I'm going to ignore the literal machines that we use (computers, phones, ipads, etc.) and focus on the useful thing that ownership actually provides us. Each fully trained A/E is able to perform our job either on our own or collectively. We don't need the company in order to do our job. Theoretically each of us could branch off and set up our own firms. In fact, that is how this firm started. The specific work we do does not include a couple of big projects per year, but rather multiple smaller projects per month. If I were to branch off and try and start my own firm performing the exact same job, I would almost certainly be unable to secure enough projects to earn my current salary for a very long time (if ever). The primary owner of our company did take that risk on and eventually grew his company to a modest side.
The portfolio and contacts are the primary "machine" initially provided by ownership of the company. He also does the same work as us and earns money for the company and provides a significant level of expertise, but it's the ability to continually provide new contracts that has the most value. Does taking on the risk to create the company and expanding it to what it is today deserve no additional financial compensation beyond that earned by the other employees? I understand that there is a line where the additional financial compensation is clearly too much, but if I thought his share was too much and that my share was too little I would leave.
I don't want my argument to be twisted to state that I think the market will regulate itself. I understand that it's a lot easier for me to leave for greener pastures than it is for someone who works at the shoe sweatshop we keep discussing. I think that enough money needs to be taken from the wealthy to create a large enough safety net that everyone can walk away from their jobs to find better employment if the pay and benefit are not adequate. I think we saw wages rise in retail and restaurant jobs during the pandemic for this very reason.
This is a good and classic question.
There are several orthodox responses:
- Risk assumed is usually short-term, or at least limited. When an enterprise achieves stability, and is no longer risky, why does the owner continue to receive a greater share? We can assess risk quantitatively with any number of tools; should there not be a threshold when that risk is "paid off"? When owners have not only greater compensation but also greater control over the enterprise, sometimes sole control, it's pretty hard to get them to give up that compensation, though.
- How much of a risk is it, really, relative to the wealth of the owner? Sometimes it's legitimately a very significant risk. But capital accumulates and coheres; the best way to obtain capital is to have capital you can leverage. So often, an investor or owner is not taking a significant risk relative to their wealth, but they are making a significant gain off a successful venture. Combine this with primitive accumulation — the notion that capital was not originally, historically accumulated by virtuosic decision-making or expert business acumen, but by violent seizure and exploitation which formed the basis of class division — and you construct a scenario in which you are rewarding low or negligible risk with consistent centralization of capital resources. As we know, excessive centralization of wealth and power and control is dangerous.
- We often talk about the owner or the investor taking a risk, but what about the workers who decide to take a job there, especially early on? They are risking their income and stability and security on the success of this venture, too. And we do see this risk compensated for employees sometimes, to be fair, but almost exclusively in high-paying, highly desirable professional fields where employees have a lot of power and must be lured in. But all labour involves a great sacrifice of time and effort, and sometimes bodily risk; the common argument is that we dramatically undervalue the risks taken by workers in an enterprise.
- More broadly, why is this system of risk assumption necessary? One of the appeals of worker co-operatives is that the risk is distributed, just as are the dividends. There are more radically alternative systems for the creation and administration of enterprise, too, of course.
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
Like unions being good, worker owned co-ops being better?
Yes i already agree with that.
With the big caveat that workers act like shareholders and don't make direct decisions.
Office politics suck, create informal hierarchies, and, frankly, most people have opinions without expertise.
I pity the IT department of a co-op where workers decide on the IT policy democratically, for example. Imagine: a world where everyone has the same power over security and infrastructure as execs... That's a nightmare.
Like I said, the bare minimum here.
Formulate the democratic arrangement of the workplace in question to your discretion, so long as it maintains a democratic and equitable character for all those working under it.
Lanz, this seems to be the "magic box" answer that others don't like. Because there are a lot of very important details that if you get even one wrong would cause the system to be non-democratic, and you can't just say "it must be democratic and fair". Let me give some examples.
Let's say that we have a peaceful worker revolution in which all employees of a corporation are given 1,000 voting shares in their company, and all other voting shares are made null and void. This would, on paper, appear to be a fair system for the workers; but it's not.
Firstly, not all companies are equal in value.
Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company has assets of $404.4B and ~80-82,000 employees. Let's make their asset value per employee a nice round number, so $400,000M / 80,000 employees = $5M USD per employee.
Tyson Foods has an asset value of $36.3B and 139,000 employees, for an asset value per employee of $0.26M USD per employee.
And this doesn't even address contractors, self-employed, and the like.
Secondly, you have to address how these new stocks will be transferred. You haven't eliminated the capitalist trading of current value for increased future value, such as forgoing luxuries now to trade my peers for their shares, so I have greater voting power in the company. You also have to address how these stocks will be inherited, as if you have multiple children then the voting power of your family won't change, but the individual voting power will go down over time.
Thirdly, you'd need a way to address new employees. People won't stay in the same job forever, and you can't just issue each new hire 1,000 shares or people would just hop jobs. You could require that when someone leaves any shares they have are turned over to the company, to be distributed to new employees. But that will create a seniority system in addition to limiting the companies growth to the current number of employees.
Fourthly, you have the power of incumbency to address, as the current leadership will fight to retain their position and influence (and probably fight harder under communism as that's all you have). And it would be very easy for current employees to retain the same management as they know these people and how they work.
And certainly my entire premise could be founded on poor principles, as I only have experience on democratic capitalism. If it is, please let me know!
I think that probably rent-seeking is inherently exploitative for various reasons although I'm not particularly directing that at anyone in this thread, I think it's just a good discussion point.
There's a reason even Adam Smith, the so-called father of capitalism, talked about landlords as stupid lazy parasites.
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.
I will try my best to engage with this hypothetical in the terms of my own employment, which is a loose fit at best.
I work for an architecture/engineering firm that was created in the mid-1980s. I'm going to ignore the literal machines that we use (computers, phones, ipads, etc.) and focus on the useful thing that ownership actually provides us. Each fully trained A/E is able to perform our job either on our own or collectively. We don't need the company in order to do our job. Theoretically each of us could branch off and set up our own firms. In fact, that is how this firm started. The specific work we do does not include a couple of big projects per year, but rather multiple smaller projects per month. If I were to branch off and try and start my own firm performing the exact same job, I would almost certainly be unable to secure enough projects to earn my current salary for a very long time (if ever). The primary owner of our company did take that risk on and eventually grew his company to a modest side.
The portfolio and contacts are the primary "machine" initially provided by ownership of the company. He also does the same work as us and earns money for the company and provides a significant level of expertise, but it's the ability to continually provide new contracts that has the most value. Does taking on the risk to create the company and expanding it to what it is today deserve no additional financial compensation beyond that earned by the other employees? I understand that there is a line where the additional financial compensation is clearly too much, but if I thought his share was too much and that my share was too little I would leave.
I don't want my argument to be twisted to state that I think the market will regulate itself. I understand that it's a lot easier for me to leave for greener pastures than it is for someone who works at the shoe sweatshop we keep discussing. I think that enough money needs to be taken from the wealthy to create a large enough safety net that everyone can walk away from their jobs to find better employment if the pay and benefit are not adequate. I think we saw wages rise in retail and restaurant jobs during the pandemic for this very reason.
This is a good and classic question.
There are several orthodox responses:
- Risk assumed is usually short-term, or at least limited. When an enterprise achieves stability, and is no longer risky, why does the owner continue to receive a greater share? We can assess risk quantitatively with any number of tools; should there not be a threshold when that risk is "paid off"? When owners have not only greater compensation but also greater control over the enterprise, sometimes sole control, it's pretty hard to get them to give up that compensation, though.
- How much of a risk is it, really, relative to the wealth of the owner? Sometimes it's legitimately a very significant risk. But capital accumulates and coheres; the best way to obtain capital is to have capital you can leverage. So often, an investor or owner is not taking a significant risk relative to their wealth, but they are making a significant gain off a successful venture. Combine this with primitive accumulation — the notion that capital was not originally, historically accumulated by virtuosic decision-making or expert business acumen, but by violent seizure and exploitation which formed the basis of class division — and you construct a scenario in which you are rewarding low or negligible risk with consistent centralization of capital resources. As we know, excessive centralization of wealth and power and control is dangerous.
- We often talk about the owner or the investor taking a risk, but what about the workers who decide to take a job there, especially early on? They are risking their income and stability and security on the success of this venture, too. And we do see this risk compensated for employees sometimes, to be fair, but almost exclusively in high-paying, highly desirable professional fields where employees have a lot of power and must be lured in. But all labour involves a great sacrifice of time and effort, and sometimes bodily risk; the common argument is that we dramatically undervalue the risks taken by workers in an enterprise.
- More broadly, why is this system of risk assumption necessary? One of the appeals of worker co-operatives is that the risk is distributed, just as are the dividends. There are more radically alternative systems for the creation and administration of enterprise, too, of course.
Thanks for the reply. I want to reply to this, but tomorrow (probably 20 pages from now)
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
Lots of ways. Sometimes they just stole it! It doesn't make current exchanges between labor and capital theft.
Intergenerational wealth is a more complicated issues than a lot of the discussion here acknowledges. People generally do not like hereditary aristocracies much anymore but they also do want to be able to give their children a better life and build generational wealth. The US could certainly do a lot better on striking the right balance on this issue like so many others.
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
The bolded never happened. Spool responded to a post from another forumer who was at the time advocating for slavery, and I misread that as being his stance. The person who advocated for slavery has also recanted that position. So I think we can move on from the idea that communism or socialism has to be built on the back of slave labor.
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
I feel like from a very practical point of view, ownership of homes is an interesting division point in the capital/mercantile/feudal economic megastructure vs a more, I dunno what you'd call it, ethical system? A less exploitative system anyway.
That being that rent is basically exploitation, and rent seeking actors are bad. If I had my way nobody would be a landlord renting out the homes other people need to live. You can give whatever name with an -ism on the end you like to my dream of cheerfully abolishing landlords en masse
extending my previous comment about individual landlording being shitassed business
why are you doing that on your own? when if you got together with your friends and leveraged your equity as a collective, you can get the same benefits of economies of scale as a larger company, and outgrow them because you aren't siphoning profit in a way that degrades your portfolio
I just don't see how this definition is useful or worth respecting. Of course capitalism would define itself extremely broadly, since that works to its benefit. Any system that works is ultimately capitalism, and only systems that fail are not capitalist. But there are alternatives to both capitalism and state communism!
Your definition of capitalism sounds like it would include anarchocommunism. Why wouldn't it? A stateless society, so it can't be publicly owned, and the owners of the capital are all worker collectives made up of private individuals.
Social ownership is a common, accepted, well-understood concept distinct from private ownership in almost every dimension — purpose, organization, control, source of capital, distribution of surplus, etc. It's bizarre to essentially reject it.
A capitalist might say that anarchocmmunism produces capitalism. But only because they think anarchocommunism will fail. Under anarcho communism if it were to actually exist then no it is not capitalism. Because anarcho communism does not have any private ownership of capital property (personal property is respected but private property in the marxist sense is not) despite their being no state. Nor does it have markets or currency. Capitalists might think this is dumb and will produce an anarchocapitalist hellscape. But "it will fail" is different than "its capitalist"
You could maybe get away with dropping a few things there and still be considered capitalist*. But if you don't have markets and you don't have private property (again, in the marxist sense), it ain't capitalism.
But i do not see why you would not respect it. My definition is only broad because Smith had a lot of ideological off shoots and because the marxists want to argue against all of them all at once. Their solution is to end private property(in the marxist sense). So more or less anyone whose got private property(in the marxist sense) in their idealized policy structure is a capitalist. And more or less this, and the construction of markets (you can see my longer definition earlier in the thread), is the actual working definition of capitalism as practiced by governments today.
Furthermore a definition that excludes me as a capitalist would make no sense in this binary argument. The marxists here want you to think marxism is good because capitalism is bad(one reason why they brought up the whole "the USSR was actually capitalist" thing). As if there were only two ideologies that could exist. I understand why this dichotomy exists rhetorically and know that feeding it by saying "capitalism is bad but other things which we also still capitalism that also contain capitalist ideas are good" neither contains the problem nor is honest about the ideological structure and pitfalls of capitalism.
Is capitalism a broad structure? Yes. But so is communism a broad structure. This is one of the reasons we spent so much time attempting to figure out what the hypothetical communist state would look like. How it would distribute goods etc. Because without those communism was a nebulous concept that ascribed to no common structure of governance or choices that the governance made. It was just "not capitalism" until it failed and then once it failed it was capitalism again.
This is why I have given examples of policies that capitalist governments might institute in order to solve problems. The fact of those policies not always being implemented them is not necessarily a problem of capitalism because capitalism is not about how choices are made in society. If the US abolished private property tomorrow the US would not still be capitalist but it would still be a democracy. But i can tell you the types of choices that different types of capitalists would want a government to make regardless of what their governance structure is. I can tell you for what reason the various capitalists believe this, for why they think it would work or be better, and the thread that unites those aspects. And notably, i have done so
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
Like unions being good, worker owned co-ops being better?
Yes i already agree with that.
With the big caveat that workers act like shareholders and don't make direct decisions.
Office politics suck, create informal hierarchies, and, frankly, most people have opinions without expertise.
I pity the IT department of a co-op where workers decide on the IT policy democratically, for example. Imagine: a world where everyone has the same power over security and infrastructure as execs... That's a nightmare.
Like I said, the bare minimum here.
Formulate the democratic arrangement of the workplace in question to your discretion, so long as it maintains a democratic and equitable character for all those working under it.
Lanz, this seems to be the "magic box" answer that others don't like. Because there are a lot of very important details that if you get even one wrong would cause the system to be non-democratic, and you can't just say "it must be democratic and fair". Let me give some examples.
Let's say that we have a peaceful worker revolution in which all employees of a corporation are given 1,000 voting shares in their company, and all other voting shares are made null and void. This would, on paper, appear to be a fair system for the workers; but it's not.
Firstly, not all companies are equal in value.
Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company has assets of $404.4B and ~80-82,000 employees. Let's make their asset value per employee a nice round number, so $400,000M / 80,000 employees = $5M USD per employee.
Tyson Foods has an asset value of $36.3B and 139,000 employees, for an asset value per employee of $0.26M USD per employee.
And this doesn't even address contractors, self-employed, and the like.
Secondly, you have to address how these new stocks will be transferred. You haven't eliminated the capitalist trading of current value for increased future value, such as forgoing luxuries now to trade my peers for their shares, so I have greater voting power in the company. You also have to address how these stocks will be inherited, as if you have multiple children then the voting power of your family won't change, but the individual voting power will go down over time.
Thirdly, you'd need a way to address new employees. People won't stay in the same job forever, and you can't just issue each new hire 1,000 shares or people would just hop jobs. You could require that when someone leaves any shares they have are turned over to the company, to be distributed to new employees. But that will create a seniority system in addition to limiting the companies growth to the current number of employees.
Fourthly, you have the power of incumbency to address, as the current leadership will fight to retain their position and influence (and probably fight harder under communism as that's all you have). And it would be very easy for current employees to retain the same management as they know these people and how they work.
And certainly my entire premise could be founded on poor principles, as I only have experience on democratic capitalism. If it is, please let me know!
I mean you’re gonna have to be happy with it, because I’m not going to be the dictator of what every permissible form of worker self-management and self governance is
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
I just don't see how this definition is useful or worth respecting. Of course capitalism would define itself extremely broadly, since that works to its benefit. Any system that works is ultimately capitalism, and only systems that fail are not capitalist. But there are alternatives to both capitalism and state communism!
Your definition of capitalism sounds like it would include anarchocommunism. Why wouldn't it? A stateless society, so it can't be publicly owned, and the owners of the capital are all worker collectives made up of private individuals.
Social ownership is a common, accepted, well-understood concept distinct from private ownership in almost every dimension — purpose, organization, control, source of capital, distribution of surplus, etc. It's bizarre to essentially reject it.
A capitalist might say that anarchocmmunism produces capitalism. But only because they think anarchocommunism will fail. Under anarcho communism if it were to actually exist then no it is not capitalism. Because anarcho communism does not have any private ownership of capital property (personal property is respected but private property in the marxist sense is not) despite their being no state. Nor does it have markets or currency. Capitalists might think this is dumb and will produce an anarchocapitalist hellscape. But "it will fail" is different than "its capitalist"
You could maybe get away with dropping a few things there and still be considered capitalist*. But if you don't have markets and you don't have private property (again, in the marxist sense), it ain't capitalism.
But i do not see why you would not respect it. My definition is only broad because Smith had a lot of ideological off shoots and because the marxists want to argue against all of them all at once. Their solution is to end private property(in the marxist sense). So more or less anyone whose got private property(in the marxist sense) in their idealized policy structure is a capitalist. And more or less this, and the construction of markets (you can see my longer definition earlier in the thread), is the actual working definition of capitalism as practiced by governments today.
Furthermore a definition that excludes me as a capitalist would make no sense in this binary argument. The marxists here want you to think marxism is good because capitalism is bad(one reason why they brought up the whole "the USSR was actually capitalist" thing). As if there were only two ideologies that could exist. I understand why this dichotomy exists rhetorically and know that feeding it by saying "capitalism is bad but other things which we also still capitalism that also contain capitalist ideas are good" neither contains the problem nor is honest about the ideological structure and pitfalls of capitalism.
Is capitalism a broad structure? Yes. But so is communism a broad structure. This is one of the reasons we spent so much time attempting to figure out what the hypothetical communist state would look like. How it would distribute goods etc. Because without those communism was a nebulous concept that ascribed to no common structure of governance or choices that the governance made. It was just "not capitalism" until it failed and then once it failed it was capitalism again.
This is why I have given examples of policies that capitalist governments might institute in order to solve problems. The fact of those policies not always being implemented them is not necessarily a problem of capitalism because capitalism is not about how choices are made in society. If the US abolished private property tomorrow the US would not still be capitalist but it would still be a democracy. But i can tell you the types of choices that different types of capitalists would want a government to make regardless of what their governance structure is. I can tell you for what reason the various capitalists believe this, for why they think it would work or be better, and the thread that unites those aspects. And notably, i have done so
markets aren't the same thing as capitalism
huge fucking flaw in all your analysis if you're approaching things from that angle
do you not imagine that communist countries would engage in trade with each other?
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
Boy, I am sure glad to know my living conditions, in communism, will be dictated by how charismatic I am, and how good I am at negotiation, and public speaking. That sounds great and not at all like a way to create an authoritarian system.
just curious, how do you think interviewing works for most people currently? 👀
Because people keep telling me in this thread that a better, more equitable world isn’t possible, and cite as their reasons Van Gogh’s artistic output, the Beatles, and apparently that not everyone can live in New York City, Seattle or the Grand Canyon.
Literally nobody in the thread has said a better world isn't possible.
Please don't strawman us.
"We are skeptical of your utopia" is not the same as "what we have is the theoretical optimum."
okay, but i've been following along in this thread and it's pretty literally where a handful of y'all end up
incenjecuar's whole argument is that because his family has suffered personal hardship (but not enough hardship to prevent them from having enough intergenerational wealth and community to build a petit bourgeoisie collective) a collectivist society just can't work
spool literally said we have to force people to do shitty jobs, with the example of modern sweatshop shoe production, for society
but those labor conditions wouldn't even exist without capitalists in a country on the other side of the planet manipulating local markets to create conditions in which they can exploit workers
The bolded never happened. Spool responded to a post from another forumer who was at the time advocating for slavery, and I misread that as being his stance. The person who advocated for slavery has also recanted that position. So I think we can move on from the idea that communism or socialism has to be built on the back of slave labor.
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
I just don't see how this definition is useful or worth respecting. Of course capitalism would define itself extremely broadly, since that works to its benefit. Any system that works is ultimately capitalism, and only systems that fail are not capitalist. But there are alternatives to both capitalism and state communism!
Your definition of capitalism sounds like it would include anarchocommunism. Why wouldn't it? A stateless society, so it can't be publicly owned, and the owners of the capital are all worker collectives made up of private individuals.
Social ownership is a common, accepted, well-understood concept distinct from private ownership in almost every dimension — purpose, organization, control, source of capital, distribution of surplus, etc. It's bizarre to essentially reject it.
A capitalist might say that anarchocmmunism produces capitalism. But only because they think anarchocommunism will fail. Under anarcho communism if it were to actually exist then no it is not capitalism. Because anarcho communism does not have any private ownership of capital property (personal property is respected but private property in the marxist sense is not) despite their being no state. Nor does it have markets or currency. Capitalists might think this is dumb and will produce an anarchocapitalist hellscape. But "it will fail" is different than "its capitalist"
You could maybe get away with dropping a few things there and still be considered capitalist*. But if you don't have markets and you don't have private property (again, in the marxist sense), it ain't capitalism.
But i do not see why you would not respect it. My definition is only broad because Smith had a lot of ideological off shoots and because the marxists want to argue against all of them all at once. Their solution is to end private property(in the marxist sense). So more or less anyone whose got private property(in the marxist sense) in their idealized policy structure is a capitalist. And more or less this, and the construction of markets (you can see my longer definition earlier in the thread), is the actual working definition of capitalism as practiced by governments today.
Furthermore a definition that excludes me as a capitalist would make no sense in this binary argument. The marxists here want you to think marxism is good because capitalism is bad(one reason why they brought up the whole "the USSR was actually capitalist" thing). As if there were only two ideologies that could exist. I understand why this dichotomy exists rhetorically and know that feeding it by saying "capitalism is bad but other things which we also still capitalism that also contain capitalist ideas are good" neither contains the problem nor is honest about the ideological structure and pitfalls of capitalism.
Is capitalism a broad structure? Yes. But so is communism a broad structure. This is one of the reasons we spent so much time attempting to figure out what the hypothetical communist state would look like. How it would distribute goods etc. Because without those communism was a nebulous concept that ascribed to no common structure of governance or choices that the governance made. It was just "not capitalism" until it failed and then once it failed it was capitalism again.
This is why I have given examples of policies that capitalist governments might institute in order to solve problems. The fact of those policies not always being implemented them is not necessarily a problem of capitalism because capitalism is not about how choices are made in society. If the US abolished private property tomorrow the US would not still be capitalist but it would still be a democracy. But i can tell you the types of choices that different types of capitalists would want a government to make regardless of what their governance structure is. I can tell you for what reason the various capitalists believe this, for why they think it would work or be better, and the thread that unites those aspects. And notably, i have done so
markets aren't the same thing as capitalism
huge fucking flaw in all your analysis if you're approaching things from that angle
do you not imagine that communist countries would engage in trade with each other?
I do not see why they would not. But that doesn't mean they have markets. The Soviet Union as an example traded, but it did not have markets. Prices and production levels were set by committee.
But yea. Markets, their utilization, and existence, are a central tenet of "capitalism". Moreso inviolate than even private property in some instances. Though there are definitely levels of restriction on either that would probably make you "not capitalist". You can say its a "flaw in my reasoning" but you're just wrong. That is what capitalists think. Its a fundamental aspect of capitalism since Smith defined it.
I agree with the notion that a coop-based economy doesn't fit the bill for anarcho-communism. Exchange value and profit aren't compatible with my understanding of communism. My understanding of anarcho-communism entails that society has free access to the goods produced by social labor, so ownership in the sense of a coop which sells goods and makes a profit doesn't fit. Markets, more generally, seem incompatible with anarcho-communism or communism generally.
However if instead of communism we use a broader term and describe the coop-based model as some form of socialism then I would agree with that.
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I think that something important is missing, and that's my fault for not articulating it well enough
I think that the interests that Jose has, as a laborer are informed by his race, such that Jime lacks THAT set of interests. I don't think one can abstract away to this thing, economic class in some easy way. I don't know that I believe that there are any interests that any worker has anywhere that are only due to wealth and are not informed by any other groups to which that person belongs. In a sense, I think that it is an invented class, one that is not based on anything in nature but rather something invented as the basis for a theory.
Trends and tendencies are of course what we can operate on, and we can even say that something might be good or bad for workers based on what contributes to some notion of their well being. I think that the problem is understanding that interests=well being. I can have real interests in things that are not beneficial to me. So to say that a class has some interest, is to say that the members of that class do, and that just seems to fundamentally make a mistake about humans and their interests. That you can organize people into a set and call it "workers" is only of as much interest as that you can organize the group of people who are in this room right now into a set. It doesn't tell you much that we ought to be basing our society on.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
“Change planes in Dallas, you’re a Texan.”
Also I’d note it’s not just me, sammich, et al calling the Soviet Union and China state capitalist. There’s plenty of academia and historical analysis on the functioning of these states and their relationship with labor
https://www.umass.edu/pubaffs/chronicle/archives/02/10-11/economics.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-china-clings-to-state-capitalism/2019/01/09/5137c6d4-141e-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html
https://www.npr.org/2010/05/17/126835124/the-rise-of-state-controlled-capitalism
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/06/tiananmen-square-worker-organization-socialist-democracy
I do not understand what this has to do with anything? Do a group of people fucking own it? Do they have exclusive rights to the property as defined by their governance structure? Are they able, within the bounds of the structure they decided on, able to prevent others from utilizing their property?
Because if it meets those AND its not owned by the state then its capitalist. I don't know how to tell you this better. I have done it many time and in many, quite in depth.
Like. If you start a business and buy(or make!) all the capital for the business and are the only one who works the machines. You're not a communist business because the worker owns the means of production. Well... i mean ok i will accept that you can call it that. But its sure as shit still a capitalist business.
A coop is just that business model but with more people. Doing the explicitly capitalist thing (even in fucking Marx's time) of pooling their capital in order to achieve better results.
i do think it's fairly important to define what a coop is more tightly tho, because legally, any company with majority "worker" owned shares is a coop, even if it's not any more equitable or democratic than wal-mart in the distribution of those shares
the way some companies are doing it's goddamned labor washing, and i worry about similar capture of the nascent labor movement push towards unionizing when people like reggie fils-aimé are coming out saying companies need to get used to unions
there's a lot of ways to ratfuck the structure of collective ownership and bargaining that mean it does nothing to challenge the power dynamics created by established capital
probably still better than a standard corp but still quite capable of shitting all over their workers, like with REI's union busting
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Then Capital, perchance, can mine its own ore and build its own machines. If, indeed, labor is so secondary in this relationship.
i can see why capitalists want to frame it this way when their accrued capital was mostly extracted via genocidal white supremacist policy, but that doesn't make the capital any less derived from slave labor
It is at odds with marxist social ownership thought to consider it capitalist. But it is not at odds with capital private ownership thought to consider it capitalist. Marxists do not get to define capitalism.
This is because capitalists do not care from what class or background a person is that owns. They care about the legal structure of that ownership. And coops fit within the legal structure of that ownership that capitalists consider capitalist. Its privately owned. The private owner operates the equipment themselves. The number of owners does not fucking matter. Is a family business not capitalist if they only "hire" people inside the family? Is your marriage not capitalist if you live in a community property state?
Thus a coop is not "anti-capitalist" or "not capitalist". It is. Its workers being the capitalists now.
This is why few capitalists consider the USSR "capitalist" even though they fit the marxist definition of "state capitalist". State capitalism isn't capitalism because no capital property is privately owned and there are no markets through which to efficiently price it. Just because Marx put the moniker "capitalist" on it doesn't make it so.
i think this is ideal for utilities tbh
a worker's coop utility in a capitalist society would have the same perverse incentives as PG&E
they should definitely have a place at the bargaining table, but consumers whose very lives rely on a utility they're paying to upkeep deserve at least as much of a vote as the workers
I will try my best to engage with this hypothetical in the terms of my own employment, which is a loose fit at best.
I work for an architecture/engineering firm that was created in the mid-1980s. I'm going to ignore the literal machines that we use (computers, phones, ipads, etc.) and focus on the useful thing that ownership actually provides us. Each fully trained A/E is able to perform our job either on our own or collectively. We don't need the company in order to do our job. Theoretically each of us could branch off and set up our own firms. In fact, that is how this firm started. The specific work we do does not include a couple of big projects per year, but rather multiple smaller projects per month. If I were to branch off and try and start my own firm performing the exact same job, I would almost certainly be unable to secure enough projects to earn my current salary for a very long time (if ever). The primary owner of our company did take that risk on and eventually grew his company to a modest side.
The portfolio and contacts are the primary "machine" initially provided by ownership of the company. He also does the same work as us and earns money for the company and provides a significant level of expertise, but it's the ability to continually provide new contracts that has the most value. Does taking on the risk to create the company and expanding it to what it is today deserve no additional financial compensation beyond that earned by the other employees? I understand that there is a line where the additional financial compensation is clearly too much, but if I thought his share was too much and that my share was too little I would leave.
I don't want my argument to be twisted to state that I think the market will regulate itself. I understand that it's a lot easier for me to leave for greener pastures than it is for someone who works at the shoe sweatshop we keep discussing. I think that enough money needs to be taken from the wealthy to create a large enough safety net that everyone can walk away from their jobs to find better employment if the pay and benefit are not adequate. I think we saw wages rise in retail and restaurant jobs during the pandemic for this very reason.
if you look at it technically in the american system's legal framework as it stands i guess
sure seems like a muddling of the term if you're sharing it equally with your coworkers tho
I agree that I think Marx's class analysis is outdated
Although I will say that as a landlord you probably won't find Marxism and the subsequent theories it formed to be overly friendly
Motherfuckers dropped leftover WWI munitions cobbled into bombs on miners back in Blair Mountain! That was barely a century ago!
I just don't see how this definition is useful or worth respecting. Of course capitalism would define itself extremely broadly, since that works to its benefit. Any system that works is ultimately capitalism, and only systems that fail are not capitalist. But there are alternatives to both capitalism and state communism!
Your definition of capitalism sounds like it would include anarchocommunism. Why wouldn't it? A stateless society, so it can't be publicly owned, and the owners of the capital are all worker collectives made up of private individuals.
Social ownership is a common, accepted, well-understood concept distinct from private ownership in almost every dimension — purpose, organization, control, source of capital, distribution of surplus, etc. It's bizarre to essentially reject it.
I won't argue with that.
That being that rent is basically exploitation, and rent seeking actors are bad. If I had my way nobody would be a landlord renting out the homes other people need to live. You can give whatever name with an -ism on the end you like to my dream of cheerfully abolishing landlords en masse
As a constructive suggestion, maybe we can first talk about power, since that's usually the thing people are trying to grapple with as part of economics and governance. There are a lot of aspects of power, even just narrowing it down to just "political power". Where do the currently acknowledged forms of government locate the source of political power, and how is it framed? Here's my quick stab at identifying this:
Autocracy:
It should be noted that there are many "monarchies" extant today that don't fit this description, but functionally when the power is no longer specifically in the hands of a monarch it's hard to argue the term "monarchy" isn't ornamental.
Aristocracy:
No government tends to use "aristocracy" as part of its own branding that I know of.
Democracy:
In the same way as a monarchy, once the power is no longer coming from the people, "democracy" is more PR than a real governmental identity.
Okay so
Having lined up where political power is situated and how it is framed in these forms of government, it's useful to remember the framing and sourcing of political power can easily change without massive modifications to the infrastructure and organization of the government- the shotcallers just get moved around. The reason this happens is there's nothing inherent about where the power is coming from. The balance of power - actionable power, not just theoretical - is decided by the material circumstances of the systems involved.
Political power comes from the ability to enforce the will that it represents. This can be an incentive system ("I have resources, I will give you some if you agree to follow my rule") or a disincentive system ("I have weapons, I will use them against you if you do not agree to follow my rule"), or some blend of the two. Violence is the first place many people go to in their heads for this- there's a reason why "the last argument of kings" (or "Ultima Ratio Regum") was engraved on the side of Louis XIV's cannons- but it's not the only form. Economic or resource based enforcement is pretty well known and it is often the deciding factor for who might have more capacity to enforce their will through violence anyway. Social and cultural enforcement is also effective: creating a social system that rewards certain behaviors with greater prestige and punishes other behaviors with shame and disassociation is essentially how you establish what Gramsci called "cultural hegemony".
From here, we get to some of these other, not-really-governments "isms" that are talked about in the OP.
Authoritarianism
Capitalism
Colonialism
Communism
As a brief aside, the communist society imagined above would only be possible in a society that guaranteed everyone in the society equal power- so, a democracy. The enforcement mechanisms available to the people in this society are a big part of the debate in the associated ideology, but the general agreement is that it would not be economic or violent incentivization. Anarcho communist thought generally tends towards social and cultural incentivization/disincentivization. The dedicated contributer would be rewarded with prestige, praise, social standing, cultural enshrinement- the saboteur or non-participant member of society might retain access to resources, but they would be regarded as socially and cultural unacceptable, resulting in them being shunned or exiled in extreme instances.
Fascism
Nationalism
which is a political ideology that sees political power as being derived from the nation itself. This means nothing, as the nation doesn't actually have any will to enforce- it's just an organizing factor for power, similar to Capitalism but distinct in that its enforcement system is more varied across social and cultural lines. It relies on creating a National Identity that requires an outgroup to contrast against- which outwardly manifests as violence and enforcement of political will on people outside the nation in the form of colonialism and war, or internally manifests as finding members of its population to mark as outgroups and violently oppress. If the Nationalist government manages to focus its ire solely on those outside the nation, it might be charitably be considered a democracy, but mostly Nationalism tends towards stratifying its own population and developing an aristocracy or a blended autocracy with a parallel elite class (like, y'know, the Nazis).
Feudalism
Reaganism
Liberalism
As a segue to the next topic: Classical (and neo) liberalism advocates only for intefering with free trade as much as is absolutely necessary to keep it free- preventing monopolies or artificial scarcity- as it contends that more regulation would be more harmful to freedom than not. Accounting for the economic power creep that is a result of unchecked Capitalism was a source of much debate amongst liberal philosophers- this lead naturally to the development of the concept of modern liberalism (or social liberalism), social democracy, and the next topic from the OP:
Socialism
It's worth noting that Socialism is not really related to social liberalism or social democracy- the general "social" term gets used to refer to any situation where general "society" is given some form of power to redistribute or allocate resources. It's similar, but Socialism itself is concerned specifically with how capital and labor interact.
Also jeez I have been working on this post and y'all have gone like 18 pages of back and forth with this communist/anti-communist bit, maybe this is a hopeless endeavor.
Just because Capitalism isn't able to properly address a problem doesn't mean some alternative isn't going to fail to address the problem as well.
One of the main differences between Capitalism and Communism to me is specifically how they address markets. In Communism, a market is the answer the question "How do we allocate scarce resources in a fair manner?" In Capitalism, it's the answer to every question. So, I don't think it's too surprising that markets become associated with Capitalism, fair or not.
And I think it's also worth noting that a market has been a part of every socioeconomic system we've used since the invention of agriculture.
Edit - energy should definitely be wholly socialized too, both as a commodity and a service, not just cooperatively owned
I'd generally say that the capitalist part of those systems tends to turn that dial up so I'd go the opposite way on most things.
I don't need an -ism to tell me that poverty wages, massive shareholder bonuses, failing public services, useless privatised services, rising inequality and falling class mobility and so on are all bad. And they're all practically the consequence of unrestrained capitalism. And I'd like to get rid of them all. Resulting in a less capitalist state, happy days.
I'm well aware of what would be in store for me if some of the posters here had their say.
I personally don't feel I'm exploiting the person on the other side of the wall and I don't believe she feels that way either, but should the vanguard come I will certainly put a door between the two 2-bedroom units and create a 4-bedroom single family home.
My post was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. There's definitely an exploitation in rent-seeking at certain scales, but I don't feel that's necessarily true on a small scale.
This is a good and classic question.
There are several orthodox responses:
- Risk assumed is usually short-term, or at least limited. When an enterprise achieves stability, and is no longer risky, why does the owner continue to receive a greater share? We can assess risk quantitatively with any number of tools; should there not be a threshold when that risk is "paid off"? When owners have not only greater compensation but also greater control over the enterprise, sometimes sole control, it's pretty hard to get them to give up that compensation, though.
- How much of a risk is it, really, relative to the wealth of the owner? Sometimes it's legitimately a very significant risk. But capital accumulates and coheres; the best way to obtain capital is to have capital you can leverage. So often, an investor or owner is not taking a significant risk relative to their wealth, but they are making a significant gain off a successful venture. Combine this with primitive accumulation — the notion that capital was not originally, historically accumulated by virtuosic decision-making or expert business acumen, but by violent seizure and exploitation which formed the basis of class division — and you construct a scenario in which you are rewarding low or negligible risk with consistent centralization of capital resources. As we know, excessive centralization of wealth and power and control is dangerous.
- We often talk about the owner or the investor taking a risk, but what about the workers who decide to take a job there, especially early on? They are risking their income and stability and security on the success of this venture, too. And we do see this risk compensated for employees sometimes, to be fair, but almost exclusively in high-paying, highly desirable professional fields where employees have a lot of power and must be lured in. But all labour involves a great sacrifice of time and effort, and sometimes bodily risk; the common argument is that we dramatically undervalue the risks taken by workers in an enterprise.
- More broadly, why is this system of risk assumption necessary? One of the appeals of worker co-operatives is that the risk is distributed, just as are the dividends. There are more radically alternative systems for the creation and administration of enterprise, too, of course.
Lanz, this seems to be the "magic box" answer that others don't like. Because there are a lot of very important details that if you get even one wrong would cause the system to be non-democratic, and you can't just say "it must be democratic and fair". Let me give some examples.
Let's say that we have a peaceful worker revolution in which all employees of a corporation are given 1,000 voting shares in their company, and all other voting shares are made null and void. This would, on paper, appear to be a fair system for the workers; but it's not.
Firstly, not all companies are equal in value.
Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company has assets of $404.4B and ~80-82,000 employees. Let's make their asset value per employee a nice round number, so $400,000M / 80,000 employees = $5M USD per employee.
Tyson Foods has an asset value of $36.3B and 139,000 employees, for an asset value per employee of $0.26M USD per employee.
And this doesn't even address contractors, self-employed, and the like.
Secondly, you have to address how these new stocks will be transferred. You haven't eliminated the capitalist trading of current value for increased future value, such as forgoing luxuries now to trade my peers for their shares, so I have greater voting power in the company. You also have to address how these stocks will be inherited, as if you have multiple children then the voting power of your family won't change, but the individual voting power will go down over time.
Thirdly, you'd need a way to address new employees. People won't stay in the same job forever, and you can't just issue each new hire 1,000 shares or people would just hop jobs. You could require that when someone leaves any shares they have are turned over to the company, to be distributed to new employees. But that will create a seniority system in addition to limiting the companies growth to the current number of employees.
Fourthly, you have the power of incumbency to address, as the current leadership will fight to retain their position and influence (and probably fight harder under communism as that's all you have). And it would be very easy for current employees to retain the same management as they know these people and how they work.
And certainly my entire premise could be founded on poor principles, as I only have experience on democratic capitalism. If it is, please let me know!
There's a reason even Adam Smith, the so-called father of capitalism, talked about landlords as stupid lazy parasites.
Thanks for the reply. I want to reply to this, but tomorrow (probably 20 pages from now)
Lots of ways. Sometimes they just stole it! It doesn't make current exchanges between labor and capital theft.
Intergenerational wealth is a more complicated issues than a lot of the discussion here acknowledges. People generally do not like hereditary aristocracies much anymore but they also do want to be able to give their children a better life and build generational wealth. The US could certainly do a lot better on striking the right balance on this issue like so many others.
The bolded never happened. Spool responded to a post from another forumer who was at the time advocating for slavery, and I misread that as being his stance. The person who advocated for slavery has also recanted that position. So I think we can move on from the idea that communism or socialism has to be built on the back of slave labor.
extending my previous comment about individual landlording being shitassed business
why are you doing that on your own? when if you got together with your friends and leveraged your equity as a collective, you can get the same benefits of economies of scale as a larger company, and outgrow them because you aren't siphoning profit in a way that degrades your portfolio
A capitalist might say that anarchocmmunism produces capitalism. But only because they think anarchocommunism will fail. Under anarcho communism if it were to actually exist then no it is not capitalism. Because anarcho communism does not have any private ownership of capital property (personal property is respected but private property in the marxist sense is not) despite their being no state. Nor does it have markets or currency. Capitalists might think this is dumb and will produce an anarchocapitalist hellscape. But "it will fail" is different than "its capitalist"
You could maybe get away with dropping a few things there and still be considered capitalist*. But if you don't have markets and you don't have private property (again, in the marxist sense), it ain't capitalism.
But i do not see why you would not respect it. My definition is only broad because Smith had a lot of ideological off shoots and because the marxists want to argue against all of them all at once. Their solution is to end private property(in the marxist sense). So more or less anyone whose got private property(in the marxist sense) in their idealized policy structure is a capitalist. And more or less this, and the construction of markets (you can see my longer definition earlier in the thread), is the actual working definition of capitalism as practiced by governments today.
Furthermore a definition that excludes me as a capitalist would make no sense in this binary argument. The marxists here want you to think marxism is good because capitalism is bad(one reason why they brought up the whole "the USSR was actually capitalist" thing). As if there were only two ideologies that could exist. I understand why this dichotomy exists rhetorically and know that feeding it by saying "capitalism is bad but other things which we also still capitalism that also contain capitalist ideas are good" neither contains the problem nor is honest about the ideological structure and pitfalls of capitalism.
Is capitalism a broad structure? Yes. But so is communism a broad structure. This is one of the reasons we spent so much time attempting to figure out what the hypothetical communist state would look like. How it would distribute goods etc. Because without those communism was a nebulous concept that ascribed to no common structure of governance or choices that the governance made. It was just "not capitalism" until it failed and then once it failed it was capitalism again.
This is why I have given examples of policies that capitalist governments might institute in order to solve problems. The fact of those policies not always being implemented them is not necessarily a problem of capitalism because capitalism is not about how choices are made in society. If the US abolished private property tomorrow the US would not still be capitalist but it would still be a democracy. But i can tell you the types of choices that different types of capitalists would want a government to make regardless of what their governance structure is. I can tell you for what reason the various capitalists believe this, for why they think it would work or be better, and the thread that unites those aspects. And notably, i have done so
I mean you’re gonna have to be happy with it, because I’m not going to be the dictator of what every permissible form of worker self-management and self governance is
markets aren't the same thing as capitalism
huge fucking flaw in all your analysis if you're approaching things from that angle
do you not imagine that communist countries would engage in trade with each other?
lmfao tf we can
I do not see why they would not. But that doesn't mean they have markets. The Soviet Union as an example traded, but it did not have markets. Prices and production levels were set by committee.
But yea. Markets, their utilization, and existence, are a central tenet of "capitalism". Moreso inviolate than even private property in some instances. Though there are definitely levels of restriction on either that would probably make you "not capitalist". You can say its a "flaw in my reasoning" but you're just wrong. That is what capitalists think. Its a fundamental aspect of capitalism since Smith defined it.
However if instead of communism we use a broader term and describe the coop-based model as some form of socialism then I would agree with that.
But Adam Smith?
Adam Smith, he is eternal.