It should be illegal to do layoffs or pay freezes to save money unless the CEO’s compensation is at or below a threshold set proportionally to the lowest paid employee.
Bob’s Red Mill did something of the sort and is 100% employee-owned as of 2020. The stated intent was to avoid the investor-driven abuse of employees and customers for profit. It’s not a workers’ co-op, to be clear, but runs under an ESOP.
Employees don’t risk anything except their career, livelihoods, and homes.
Investors take enormous risks, like a small amount of their vast wealth, and maybe even risk losing a controlling interest in the board. If they really fuck up, they might even risk not being allowed to be a CEO again for a few years.
But go on, try to convince me again that employees deserve a bigger share…
You know, it always amazes me how people equate layoffs with losing livelihoods here. Is that how it is in America? Seems so alien, when where I live, being fired (without cause) would be somewhere between a non-event and a pleasant break using the severance pay.
Depends. I’m an experienced programmer. It has never taken me more than a month of casual searching to land the next gig, no relocation.
But if you’re a factory worker in bum fuck nowhere, where the factory is the town, well, layoffs are going to be catastrophic for most, particularly since relocating would almost certainly be to a more expensive area.
Often, yes. Outside of more senior level white collar careers, severance is often not guaranteed upon separation here. In many states, “Right to Work” labor laws enable an employer to terminate an employee for nearly any reason. To make matters worse, our health insurance is provided as a benefit by our employers, so losing your job not only means you lose your source of income, but also your means of keeping yourself healthy and getting care should you need it.
And in many cases, even if you do receive severance, the company determines what your separation package includes, and the calculations used to determine the value is kept behind closed doors and obscured from the employee. The packages are presented as non-negotiable, even though they aren’t, and employees being let go are often pressured to sign the agreement in a very short window or risk having the offer of severance rescinded. Often what is offered is a pittance, but generally Americans don’t push back against it. It’s a “better than nothing, I guess” situation.
So yeah - being laid off is a tremendously stressful and life altering experience here for the vast majority of the working and middle class.
Really sounds like you should be focusing on having legislated 3 months salary severance like we do instead of thinking about communist revolutions that have zero chance to succeed in the short and medium term (sorry if you don’t think about that, but feels like two thirds of Lemmy do).
Note that we do have a 3 month probationary period where you can be fired for any reason without severance to ensure employers are not afraid to hire people and often the first employment contract is only for a year so the employer has the option to let you go after a year without severance. An extension has to be indefinite though, so it is like an extended probation.
Of course, health insurance is paid by the state while you are involuntarily unemployed and you get unemployment benefits for a limited time after being fired (though that may only be after 3 months when the severance runs out, I am not quite sure how exactly that works).
The problem is, is that our legislation system was built with the intention of stability and to make any changes, all sides would have to somewhat agree. At some point it unfortunately has drifted off course and with everyone polarized other over whose side is right or wrong, it became a game of endless tic-tac-toe of keeping the other side from “winning”
Smallest of corrections because the bastards are multiple flavors of bastards: ’
‘At will employment’ is the "fire you for any or no reason so long as we don’t transparently enough do it for/to the small list of protected reasons or qualifying personal attributes for protected class status.
The sick joke is that you can terminate your employment ‘At will’ too, unlike those other work contract places isn’t that liberating!
That one is in all of the US.
‘Right to work’ would be the anti-union version which applies to some states that have gone extra harder than the other ones to prevent the evil evil unions. Plenty of folks better suited than me to explain more around Lemmy.
The sick joke with that one is that you have “the right to work” even when that evil evil union is doing collective bargaining outside with funky signs!
Person who replied to who I replied to; the list of shit Americans ought to be focusing on legislating for is intentionally multi-faceted and obtuse; do you really think such simple insight beyond what you would consider obvious? Our great thinkers aren’t dumb, they’re oppressed.
I don’t think that your great thinkers are dumb. I think they are ignored by the masses. As dumb as your voting system is, it is still a functioning voting system. And yet the only change it seems to bring is what the level of intolerance and hate is in your country.
Right to work laws guarantee the benefits of a union while also removing the requirement to pay for that union. The goal is to have enough people try to get a free ride with the union that it collapses under it’s own weight.
Still mad that a coworker got fired because a different, unrelated department lost a sale. Sales keeps their bonuses but socialized their loss. Fuck them.
Last month we had our AGM where they announced record profits, like our company has literally never done better. Just in the difference in profits from last year they could give every employee in the company a $15k bonus.
Then a week later we had a department meeting where they announced 6 people being made redundant as part of a larger wave of lay-off to “keep the company competitive in a challenging market”
The shareholders could go poor while labor gets all the money and I still won’t be happy. The shareholders have more power than the workers. Fixing wealth doesn’t magically summon democracy and fix power imbalances.
Power imbalance is the sickness, wealth inequality is a symptom.
the workers can be shareholders though. some companies even pay a bit in stock or options. however, dividends are usually very low and most shareholders make their money with gambling the stock market, which has little to do with labor at all.
Sure but giving employees a tiny fraction of the company is not democracy. All workers must collectively own the company. And nobody who doesn’t work there should get a say.
Also the whole thing I just said, it’s not about wealth it’s fundamentally about power.
this is also true for customers - imo customers also need a stake in businesses especially ones that have anything approaching a monopoly.
The obvious solution would be a law that any company of a certain size should have 25% of its board nominated and elected by non managerial workers and 25% appointed by public election or appointed by an elected official.
Most importantly social media. Social media is run by users, and they should have a majority representation. The social media company is just doing an IT service, really.
Sounds like a lawn care business. If I had to bet, lawn care. Probably worked three jobs one as a gas station manager, one mowing lawns, and the third… ?? Uber?
It’s prob a good racket. We can’t ALL mow lawns tho.
Nope - restaurants take too much start up capital and I only cook for friends and family. Learning curve is too steep for my taste and most start with significant loans - I never saw the appeal to be honest. Turn key are franchises, and im a strong believer that franchises don’t belong in the service industry.
90% of restaurants do fail, but 50% of all businesses fail in the first year, 90% by 5. The numbers are the same across the board - many of that first 50% never make a sale.
Don’t wanna dox myself, but to answer the second question working three jobs then 80-100 hour weeks for 4 years, missing out on birthdays, time with kids, weekends and three years without a single day off.
I then have staff turn around and expect a bonus for doing an extra 4 hour shift they were paid for.
Unfortunate thing about the internet - no one ever actually knows for sure. Good thing is that other opinions and internet strangers don’t actually matter - I know where I am, and you know where you are.
I’ll tell you now my staff make 25% more than the industry average with a number of non-standard perks, that last time I put a job advertisement up describing my company I had over 250 applications in a week, most saying they were sick of how they were treated and we sound much better, that my staff have flexibility and understanding that would get them fired at most other businesses. But that means shit in an internet conversation and most have already made their mind up about me.
Sounds to me like I made an investment in my time and effort to give my family the best chance of financial success. Like I made a huge amount of sacrifice to get to where I am just for people who never tried or have any idea to tell me I only care about money and treat my staff like shit.
Almost like its possible to get ahead without exploiting your staff, or being born into money, and no matter what you do people will always accuse you if being and asshole. Great thing about it is that no matter what people may accused me of - their opinions actually mean shit.
If you’re happy that way and don’t look back regretful, good for you.
However, it shouldn’t be necessary to work 100 h weeks, miss birthdays, quality time with family and friends etc. just for the chance of success. Needless to say how high the stakes are regarding mental and physical health and thinking about the effects on your social environment. The latter not just for you but especially for your kids.
It’s a critical problem within the system we live in, if that’s what it takes for someone who doesn’t come from money.
On the other matter:
Almost like its possible to get ahead without exploiting your staff
I think, as long as someone is profiting of someone else, and that relationship is not equally balanced, the one profiting more is exploiting the other. That’s a general opinion, not restricted to you.
Regretful, no. Do I wish I didn’t have to - absolutely, but I’m also aware that no one said I had to enjoy what it took. I lost ~5 years of events, but it gives me soo many more options for the rest of my life and that of my kids. I’m also aware that many others make these sacrifices just to stay where they are so yeah, worth it.
In that case - clarification. 0 entry cost to start and do, the additional investment was to grow to where I no longer need to be the person on site. I could fire my whole team, shut down the office, sell vehicles, only work the contracts that suit me on 40 hours and sit on 100k a year. But that is all I will ever do and get to. I won’t be able to try anything new, take time away or create the change i want in the world.
But like… what amount of your employees’ generated profit is your sacrifice worth?
When you look at the day to day, you’re not still sacrificing like you did those first couple of years. How do you decide when you’ve reached your return on investment?
Like the meme conveys, employees are taking a risk on you as an employer, spending their time working up the ranks at your company, working in this career path instead of another.
Bleh, nvm…. It’s almost always eat or be eaten w entrepreneur types. If the employees think they are worth more, then they should fight for it, if they don’t then it’s the employers duty to squeeze them for every penny of profit as can be extracted from their dumb lazy worthless asses.
I think what it boils down is to the agreement in place - agreement, not contract. My team are paid at a competitive rate, and in exchange I expect a certain amount of profitable work completed in that time. Expanding out of that general agreement is where much of these issues lie - my team expect secure work, but I also expect secure staff, and everyone needs to understand that isn’t always going to be the case.
Why can my team decide to stop showing up one day without repercussions (because its illegal) yet I can’t drop them when we have a strong downturn? Why can’t I ask my team to increase productivity (because its too hard) yet expect pay increases when cost of living changes? Why can employees expect returns without risk?
For the record, none of my team are dumb lazy asses and anyone who thinks they are shouldn’t be in business - they either aren’t and your a prick, or they are and you’re a useless boss for keeping them.
Found the nepobaby. There’s so much opportunity to be had if you just have lots of money lying around and don’t need investors to start a company. Damn everyone is so stupid. Why doesn’t everyone just start their own business? Everyone else is just so lazy.
I had a near zero cost business. Basically I needed a computer, phone (already had that) and M365. It was $60 to create the biz myself. Any professional services company falls into this category. So they do exist, even if in small numbers.
Business consulting. Theoretically, anyone can do it without training and experience (although unlikely due to client expectations). But graphic design falls into this category and is more likely to be possible with a portfolio rather than education. Also, I got paid for all of my experience that allowed me to become a consultant, which in turn covered the cost of my schooling - so I don’t really count that. Basically, you can create this kind of business with some elbow grease.
Sorry to say but graphic design clients are dwindling extremely fast. People will constantly have arguments about the value/ethics of AI under capitalism (less work means more suffering in a capitalist society, broken system but that’s what we have). However, in the real world AI exists, and capitalists have access to what they need, even if you don’t want to call what DALLE produces art.
Same goes for videography, programming, essentially anything that requires the development of skill on a computer/digitally has the potential to be massively automated. Even if you believe AI can never match human intellect because of some special sauce inside of our organic sacks, it’s already producing content at the level of professionals. Not the highest level professionals, usually the lowest level ones actually, but without low-level jobs people don’t have clear paths to develop their resumes/careers.
Yeah, I agree we are in a big economic shift (akin to the invention of the tractor that displaced hundreds of thousands of people - side note, why does no one talk about the ethics of the tractor?). I expect AI drive new business models, and some people will lose their jobs or have them greatly changed. But I’m not totally sure that any of that negates the possibility of some (albeit few) low startup cost businesses. They may just look different that they did 10 years ago.
You are right, btw, about a 20 year training gap/issue. Businesses have to figure out how to rapidly develop their people, or they will have no experts standing at the end of the AI machine - risking the overall quality of their work and products.
Here’s how I try to wrap my mind around the changes coming (I know it isn’t exactly the same, but it does put the scope of AI into perspective): Amazon started as an online bookstore out of a garage. People actually laughed at them. Today, they are responsible for huge shifts in the retail and book publishing industries. Lots of jobs were lost, but other jobs and opportunities were created (such as self publishing for low cost). AI is like this, but amplified.
The comparison to the industrial revolution ignores a qualitative difference between this and that; we’re in an age where automation can fully automate away jobs. When the industrial revolution happened, it absolutely did deteriorate working and living conditions for essentially everyone, however humans were still needed. It should be noted that having a system where less work leads to worse outcomes is a fundamentally toxic and broken economic system, but that’s what capitalism is.
This next thought makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but we might actually not have special sauce in our organic sacks. It’s possible that human-level intelligence/expertise is achievable from AI (even if it’s not LLMs that get there), and it’s also possible that robotics becomes as versatile as humans at movement.
Yes, AI and robots are expensive, but you want to know what else is insanely expensive? Humans. I cost my employer $150,000 a year. If they could subscribe to a future GPT6 that out performed me and my coworkers for $1000 a month that would save them a metric fuckload of money. Same thing with buying a super versatile robot, sure it might be like $100,000 for a single robot, but if it lasts 10 years it’s $10,000 a year and can work far longer hours and much more consistently than a human.
What we’re talking about with any non-dysfunctional economic system is utopia, a world where nobody needs to work and everything is maintained, developed, and expanded without human intervention. Under capitalism this utopia becomes a dystopia, it leads to mass starvation, lack of resource distribution, and death.
You boomers have no idea how life actually works now. You did half the work and put in half the time it would take to get the same results today. You’re privileged and you didn’t work nearly as hard as you pretend you did and you know it. Which is why you’re on the internet trying to prove your fantasy story is real. I know where I’m at and I know where you’re at.
Really now? Wanna become a nanny pimp? Maybe organize a life couch group? Give me a break. All actual service jobs (jobs that don’t require renting or owning an office/place of some kind) require specialized equipment or a degree, and you’ll be hard pressed to find such a business opportunity without strong competition. Most people can’t afford to start a business, nor have the knowhow.
If you’re bad at accounting, your business will fail. If you’re bad at marketing, your business will fail. If you mess up one thing early on that sours your reputation with customers, your business will fail. If you have a chronic health problem that prevents you from focusing on your business, your business will fail. If a bunch of other people try to enter the market, but don’t price their product at a livable level, they will drag you down with them and your business will fail.
Avoiding these problems is more about luck than skill. This is not a real solution.
You’re kind of proving their point. Labor takes no risk of loss entering a job because generally speaking there is zero entry cost for starting a job. This is not true for starting a business.
I’m all for more equitable distribution of wealth, but OPs meme exposes a profound ignorance, not some kind of clever exposing of a contradiction.
Not really. Workers are dropped before the owner loses out. The risk is not balanced after a certain startup cost. Certainly not for mega corporations, where the owner who took the original risk is often long gone. It’s now run by MBAs who’s only skill is increasing shareholder value at the expense of all else.
The risk is not balanced after a certain startup cost.
This isn’t even quite true because even established companies can fail after taking additional (or even by not doing so), but you’re basically arguing “once you’ve gotten past the initial risk, there is no risk!” Of course if you discount the risk people take, there is no risk.
And don’t get me wrong, I agree that there is a big imbalance now and laborers are generally getting screwed. But there is a reason I decided to take the path of becoming a skilled laborer instead of s business owner: I don’t want to take that risk.
I can and do easily jump from one job to another, with little worry at all.
once you’ve gotten past the initial risk, there is no risk!”
No, that’s a strawman. The risk is far reduced, not zero. To get to zero, you have to be Too Big To Fail and have the government bail you out.
The reduction in risk is obvious when you see how layoffs work. The CEO gets a big bonus for walking a whole lot of people out the door.
Libertarian types want to start with stories about farmers selling corn by the side of the road, and then expect you to believe the argument still holds when scaled up to Fortune 500s.
You’re nit picking. Whether the risk goes to zero or just very low, that doesn’t change the point that there is generally significant risk to start up, which does not exist with labor. Labor is almost always a zero startup risk, a business is almost always the opposite.
You keep saying the word risk, and liberal capitalists do this all the time. Companies limit personal liability, so risk goes to zero there for a bunch of legal issues.
What most people are talking about is money, but not everyone has access to money. If you take two people, one born into a rich family, and another born into a homeless family, the rich kid gets a massive inheritance and “risks” 30% of it starting a business. Let’s say he hires the person born into a homeless family.
The liberal conception here is that the rich person, handed a massive amount of cash for absolutely nothing, deserves the surplus value of labor from the poor person because he “risked” a small part of his inheritance that the poor person never had access to. It’s a wild assertion.
This might seem fabricated, but in the real world this is how it goes, people with capital accumulate more capital. Jeff Bezos “built Amazon” with a $245,000 loan from his parents, and worked out of their garage. He then used that loan and later capital investments to hire people to actually build Amazon.
His parents could’ve just as easily gone the standard capitalist route, and instead of loaning the money instead valuated the company at $300,000 and assumed ~80% ownership for the company. The only reason this isn’t how it played out is because parents don’t like exploiting their kids, there was a biological component at play that disallowed the standard capitalist exploitation from taking place. So they offered him a deal that no capitalist in their “right mind” would offer, because it left Jeff with far too much and the capitalist with far less.
Sure, they can limit it, and you can shield yourself personally from losses taken by the company, but there is a still (generally speaking, again) a significant financial risk to starting a company at all. You can’t “shield” yourself from start up costs.
If the argument is that “rich people are financially more secure so it’s easier for them to take risk” I 100% agree. There’s no question that rich people start off with a massive head start. I fully recognize “the uterine lottery.”
But the meme is about this risk being equal to the “risk” taken by people just being paid to do labor. Don’t get my position wrong, I believe labor deserves way more of a share right now. But there is no risk in it. Sure, you can lose your job which sucks, but (again generally speaking, there are exceptions e.g. people might move across the country to take a job) you didn’t invest any money into starting the job. So now you are out a job and need to find a new one. You are not in the negative.
And we need this. We need to incentivize risking capitol to make capitol, as that helps labor too. It’s just that this isn’t infinite and doesn’t mean people should be able to amass any and all wealth they can. There is a middle ground and that is where the discussion needs to be. Not in this silly “well, labor is really involved in the risk of losses too!!”
It’s not, and this is specifically why I’ve avoided multiple opportunities to risk shit to start a new company: I would rather be a skilled laborer as I can just jump from job to job when I want, than to risk what seems to me to be a lot of money on trying to start a company. Too much pressure. It’s easy for me to not give a shit.
You misunderstood my argument slightly, it’s not that it’s “easier” for rich people, it’s that it’s literally impossible to risk money you don’t have, and as a result of that you have exploitation of labor; stealing the surplus value of labor from a class that has no option other than to participate in wage labor.
Also the idea that there’s no risk in labor but there is risk in being a capitalist is a liberal lens that fails to actually account for material reality. What’s the absolute worst case for both the capitalist and laborer? That they lose all access to their money, and have to rent themselves out to a capitalist.
Put another way, the risk capitalists engage in is being demoted from the owner class to the working class. That risk doesn’t justify them taking the surplus value of labor to accumulate vast hoards of wealth.
Left liberals view this as a quantitative issue, but it’s a qualitative one. Profit is definitionally surplus value of labor, so no matter how small you make the capitalist’s profit, it’s always theft.
We need to incentivize risking capital
Absolutely, without capital injection the economy couldn’t function. Capitalism by definition requires exploitation of labor, and theft of the surplus value of labor is what incentivizes capitalists to not hoard all their wealth.
It’s a fundamentally broken system. Private entities shouldn’t be the ones handling investment, nor handling direction of development. Those should be handled democratically by worker syndicates, the capital should be injected from the state/communities.
Essentially anytime private corporations are involved in an industry (housing, healthcare, capital injection, governance, etc.) it breaks the system. Liberals are slowly seeing these material realities unfold, and so the propaganda being fed to them is harder to buy. You don’t find many people in support of private healthcare or governance anymore, and some are starting to learn about the others too.
it’s that it’s literally impossible to risk money you don’t have, and as a result of that you have exploitation of labor;
Except this isn’t true. You can go and find investors, or get a loan if you are willing/capable of putting up something as collateral. Is it easier for rich people? Yes, we both agree it is.
But the risk does not get “demoted” to the working class. The working class did not take a risk (again, all generally speaking, I hope I don’t have to keep repeating that). They applied for a job, someone offered them money for their labor, and they accepted. If the job disappears, they’ve lost nothing. They can go apply for another job and have another person pay them for their labor. At the end of the day, the worst they can be is back to zero.
While someone who puts millions of dollars into starting a business or expanding one can lose all of that money, and be net negative one million dollars. Might this not hurt them much because they have a lot? Sure. But they were the ones who took the risk.
That risk doesn’t justify them taking the surplus value of labor to accumulate vast hoards of wealth.
What is justified is kind of besides the point, because that is a subjective question. If one does not benefit from risking their capital, then you are simply going to see fewer, if anyone, actually risking their capitol. I’m trying to argue within what I believe to be the frame of reality: someone has to take the risk and I think the only way to incentivize that is to reward them disproportionately for doing so. Is the current balance off? Absolutely, we both agree on that.
Capitalism by definition requires exploitation of labor, and theft of the surplus value of labor is what incentivizes capitalists to not hoard all their wealth.
You’re using too strong of words that is just going to turn off many rational people. It’s not theft if you and I agree that you’ll do something and I’ll pay you for it. It’s not exploitation, in and of itself, if you and I both agree upon the terms of our relationship, but I benefit more from it financially.
It’s a fundamentally broken system.
In theory every pure system works, in practice none of them does. Certainly, capitalism is no exception. But from just looking around, it seems to me that as a starting point, capitalism is unquestionably the best. I’m not some anachro-capitalists, it’s clear that we need to socialize things, and I think healthcare is one of the most obvious that falls into that system, and it is also obvious that labor should have a larger share of the pie. But this idea that everything breaks because of capitalism, seems to be the opposite of what is most often the reality.
But I feel like we are getting off the point. What the meme is about is how labor is “risking” something because they can lose their job and end up back at zero. It’s simply not comparable to a capitalist with their potential of actually losing money.
You can go and find investors, or get a loan if you are willing/capable of putting up something as collateral.
This isn’t universally true. You have to be exact in this conversation, especially when you disagree with someone, or else all your points come across as not fully thought out, and I can’t really trust anything you’re saying, which makes this a lot harder.
Some people can go and find investors. Some people (not everyone) can try, but investors aren’t charities, they’re looking for a return on their profits, not something that is good for humanity. If you’re trying to run a cooperative food bank, you won’t get investors, even though this has a vast amount more humanitarian value than tobacco investment.
But the risk does not get “demoted” to the working class.
Again, you misread what I said (realized what I said was almost ambiguous, the way you interpreted it is a valid way to parse the syntax of my statement if I slightly misused the word “demoted”, but there’s another way to parse it and that’s the way I intended it). It’s not the risk getting demoted, it’s the people. The risk for the bourgeois is becoming part of the proletariat. The risk itself isn’t changing class, the person is.
I think you read the word “demoted” as “delegated”, which is not the same word (or assumed I misused the word demoted slightly).
What is justified is kind of besides the point, because that is a subjective question.
Hand waving is uninteresting. Even if you’re a moral subjectivist (you shouldn’t be, but that’s orthogonal to this), you still operate with some level of moral understanding (see next response for an example). Even though this is antithetical to the nature of moral subjectivism, and moral subjectivists will pretend like they don’t operate with a moral understanding, in the real world they do. The hand waving away any moral question is an incredibly powerful technique, modernized by Nietzsche and utilized by some incredibly terrible actors, like slave owners and nazis. It’s not a practice you want to get into the habit of, even if you don’t understand the philosophical ground for truth-apt morality.
The rest of your paragraph ignores what I already responded with. Your general point being “capitalism doesn’t work without private capital investment which only works with the existence of profit”, and my counter is “exactly, that’s one of the many failings of capitalism, it requires this exploitative relationship between capital and labor”.
While someone who puts millions of dollars into starting a business or expanding one can lose all of that money, and be net negative one million dollars. Might this not hurt them much because they have a lot? Sure. But they were the ones who took the risk.
There’s an implication here that hides the moral statement you’re making, but it’s still being made. I’ll make it explicit: “Might this not hurt them much because they have a lot? Sure. But they were the ones who took the risk [therefore it’s justified for them to take the surplus value of labor created by the workers]”
Not saying the quiet part out loud, and then hand waving away any explicit claims I make about what is justified is just a rhetorical tactic, one that would be best left unused if you’re actually interested in truth-seeking.
You’re using too strong of words that is just going to turn off many rational people
I’m using words by their definitions, maybe they’re definitions you’re unaware of, but I’ll share some wikipedia links because it’s a good aggregator of resources, and you can easily get a broadstrokes idea of what I’m saying. I can suggest essays and books if you prefer too, but I figured this is easier: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_is_theft! & en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour
If saying the word “theft” and “exploitation” gives you an icky feeling, then just replace it with “yunktee” and “ufurghle” or words of your choosing, I don’t really care. We just need words to describe the concepts elucidated by Proudhon and Marx, and those are the words they chose, not me.
But from just looking around, it seems to me that as a starting point, capitalism is unquestionably the best.
Christian theocracy/monarchies were “unquestionably” the best prior to any democratic experiment. If you can point to actual socialist failed experiments that you dislike, go for it. However, Revolutionary Catolonia, the early days of the Bolshevik revolution before Lenin’s dismantling of worker syndicates, and a half a dozen other large real world examples of socialism exist where the oppressive capitalists were taken out of power. In most of these examples, either conservative Marxists or fascists dismantled socialism either by invasion/war or policy backed by state violence. They didn’t just suddenly collapse without external force and revert into an earlier stage of production (e.g capitalism).
This isn’t universally true. You have to be exact in this conversation, especially when you disagree with someone, or else all your points come across as not fully thought out, and I can’t really trust anything you’re saying, which makes this a lot harder.
This is hypocritical. You claimed that you can’t risk money you don’t have, and I gave multiple examples that contradict this. At no point did I say any investor is just going to give you money out of charity.
ealized what I said was almost ambiguous, the way you interpreted it is a valid way to parse the syntax of my statement if I slightly misused the word “demoted”, but there’s another way to parse it and that’s the way I intended it
It’s all good. On re-read I feel like I probably should have interpreted it properly. However, I think the reason I misinterpreted it is because it’s agreeing with my point. They run the risk of being “demoted.” They are the ones taking a risk. The labor is still going to be exactly where they started if they take a job and they get laid off.
Hand waving is uninteresting.
I didn’t handwave it away, I pointed out how you used a subjective term - where we could argue forever and never come to an agreement on what is justified - and how it’s besides the point. The point had literally nothing to do with morals, but understanding subjectivity.
As to the rest of my point, you keep losing what we are talking about. At this point, I almost feel like you’re trying to avoid the point. I disagree with you that this is a “failure” as I think it leverages what is typically human - in times of peace we tend to compete within a society - while many other systems ignore this part of human nature.
But, again, I’m coming from the angle that the meme doesn’t make sense because the labor doesn’t risk like the capitalist does. You’re basically agreeing with me again.
“Might this not hurt them much because they have a lot? Sure. But they were the ones who took the risk [therefore it’s justified for them to take the surplus value of labor created by the workers]”
Please don’t put words in my mouth. Again, this all comes in reference to the meme. You are projecting your “morals” and attempts to label things as “justified” onto me. If we want to talk about it, I’m a “proof is in the pudding” type of guy, and it has nothing to do with the subjective “justified” but what works.
And you’re sitting here, typing to me on a computer that was the result of capitalism, presumably with a western education that was funded by a capitalist system, and probably benefiting a lot from that capitalist system. It works. It’s not without flaws. It’s not perfect. But this attempt to paint it as some failed system requires me to reject what I can see with my own two eyes. It requires me to reject what I can clearly see is in the pudding.
We just need words to describe the concepts elucidated by Proudhon and Marx, and those are the words they chose, not me.
And I’m just telling you you attract more flies with honey than vinegar.
If you can point to actual socialist failed experiments that you dislike, go for it.
Again, putting words in my mouth. You seemingly can’t help yourself. As I said earlier, I’m a proof is in the pudding type of guy. You’ve pointed out multiple cases where socialist experiments have failed, and none that have succeeded. Of course, this isn’t the fault of the system. No. It’s external forces.
The central theme of my point is that those “external forces” are simply the result of human nature, which is why capitalism as come out on top time and time again. It’s leverages human nature, it doesn’t try to oppress it.
I said “if you can”, that’s not putting words in your mouth. The other example of me “putting words in your mouth” I already addressed in two other comments.
You are projecting your “morals” and attempts to label things as “justified” onto me
Again, like I said earlier, if you’re not actually defending capitalism because you think it’s fair, I have no idea why we’re having this conversation.
Nope, what I said was correct. It’s literally impossible to risk money you don’t have. It’s possible to get money sometimes, for some people. You can have a job, get investment, get government welfare or subsidies, get money from a charity, etc. These aren’t all universally available options to everyone, and if they’re unavailable to you, you don’t have access to money, and it’s literally impossible to spend it if you don’t have it. What I said was tautologically true, and supposed to be a simple premise to the actual point I made. It wasn’t something you were supposed to disagree with, because it’s literally true just by the construction of the statement.
They are the ones taking a risk. The labor is still going to be exactly where they started if they take a job and they get laid off.
Yup, the risk is becoming part of the class that’s being exploited (or ufurghled; you never gave your own word that you wanted to use). You have to remember, you’re the one defending capitalism, I’m the one arguing against it. So my position is that it’s unfair for the capitalist to exploit workers for the surplus value of their labor on the premise that they risk being brought down to the level of a worker, your premise is that this is fair. It’s important to note, if that’s not your premise, then you’re not defending capitalism, and I have no idea why we’re having this conversation.
If we want to talk about it, I’m a “proof is in the pudding” type of guy, and it has nothing to do with the subjective “justified” but what works.
Capitalists have been violently surpressing socialism for over 100 years at this point. The CIA has literally admitted to forcing regime changes when they adopt socialist policies via democratic elections, they’ll actually overthrow democratically elected socialists and install pro-U.S fascist dictators. Companies like Coca Cola hire death squads in south america to kill union organizers.
Capitalism works because of systemic violence. The examples I gave were of working socialist examples, they worked for years or even decades before violent interference from capitalists. Capitalists need the violence of the state to maintain order, so if you’re defending capitalism because it “works”, what you’re really doing is defending capitalism because it exists as a result of violent suppression of socialism.
Might doesn’t imply right, you shouldn’t defend a system just because one side is better at using violence than the other.
I disagree with you that this is a “failure” as I think it leverages what is typically human
Requiring exploitation is a failure. Even capitalists tend to admit this, so I wouldn’t try to hang onto this point. The real position capitalists tend to take here is that “the ends justify the means”, not that the means themselves are inherently justified, because they’re obviously not. If exploitation of workers and alienation of labor were done in isolation, without any other considerations, they’d be obviously wrong to anyone.
The argument is what you laid out in your other responses, so I’d stick to that. Not that exploitation is inherently justified because it’s human nature. First of all, human nature is complex, trying to tie it down to something as simple as “exploitation through competition” is just simply reductive, but furthermore even if you could reduce human nature to that statement, it’s still committing a naturalistic fallacy (it’s not right just because it’s natural).
And you’re sitting here, typing to me on a computer that was the result of capitalism, presumably with a western education that was funded by a capitalist system, and probably benefiting a lot from that capitalist system
Western (U.S) education is failing on essentially every metric imaginable. It’s either insanely expensive, or astronomically worse than any other country (vast majority of EU countries, China, Cuba, etc.). That said, this is even orthogonal to your point, as none of my education was funded by capitalism, it was publicly funded. Publicly funded education has nothing to do with private enterprise or private ownership of the means of production. Publicly funded education existed long before capitalism.
My computer wasn’t developed by capitalism. Most individual parts, and even the network we’re using to communicate (both the internet broadly and lemmy more specifically) exist despite natural capitalist tendencies. The internet for example is built on ARPANET, which was funded by the DoD. It’s not something a capitalist envisioned and came up with. Another example is the microprocessor, again backed heavily by government funding, because private enterprise/companies/capitalists would not fund research with payout decades later.
Private capital could not have, and more importantly didn’t, develop the vast majority of technology we use today. Private enterprise tends to take already researched and developed technologies and combine them for products that can yield short term profits. It’s extraordinarily rare in the real world for private capital to research and develop technology that will yield profits in 20+ years.
Essentially the only times you see private enterprise take on long term research is when the capital is public, e.g the DoD funding some private contractor to do some research. Private investors/capital have very little interest in profits that long term, compared to the normal months or years they’re looking at. It would be just as easy for the government to fund a worker cooperative instead of a private firm, it’s just our government prefers private capitalist ventures over cooperative worker ones, so that’s what they choose to fund. Once you have public money funding worker cooperatives, the means of production are owned by the workers and the capital is provided by the state, and there’s no definition of capitalism that that falls under.
But this attempt to paint it as some failed system requires me to reject what I can see with my own two eyes.
Slavery was a system that worked, and yet I would call it a failed system. Not because it failed to produce products, but because it failed to be morally justified. It was immoral.
It might sound like an absolutely insane comparison to a 21st century westerner, but you want to know who didn’t think the comparison was insane? Literal slaves. Frederick Douglass for example wrote about how we should abolish wage labor along with chattel slavery, and how wage labor was only “a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other”
And I’m just telling you you attract more flies with honey than vinegar.
This is a deflection. You don’t actually care about my tactics for getting people onboard with socialism. Proudhon and Marx described real social phenomena, and used the words theft and exploitation to describe them. I’m not attached to the words, if you want to use different words go for it, but we need words to describe it.
Annihilating the language that socialists use to critique capitalism is a common tactic, but it’s also uninteresting because the sound or shape of the word is actually irrelevant to any point being made. Choose your own words, or adopt the words that are already used to describe the concepts. I chose the latter because it’s easier, but if you have a major qualm with the words I’m unbothered if we choose different ones.
You’ve pointed out multiple cases where socialist experiments have failed, and none that have succeeded.
Each example I illustrated was a success. They were just conquered. Having a worse military is not a failure of a system, it’s a result of capitalist interests having the backing of the state, and said states having trained military forces, while workers are untrained in how to use violence to achieve the means they want, so they’re generally less effective at it. Being effective at using violence is not the mark of a good system, usually the opposite actually.
my point is that those “external forces” are simply the result of human nature, which is why capitalism as come out on top time and time again
Those “external forces” are literally violent fascists murdering workers and seizing the means of production on behalf of private enterprise. Even in the case of the U.S, Britian, France, etc. Enclosure was a violent process by capitalists to seize the commons. They often used liberal framings like “the tragedy of the commons” to justify seizing common land and handing it off the private enterprise. In Europe this was done with some physical violence, but not nearly as much as the U.S. The U.S literally genocided the native americans over hundreds of years to seize the commons here and sell it off to private enterprise.
Either your point I quoted is:
Capitalism is ahead because of its effective use of violence (enclosure of the commons, suppression of socialism, etc.)
Capitalism should be ahead because of its effective use of violence (enclosure of the commons, suppression of socialism, etc.)
If it’s 1, that’s obviously correct, that’s just a recount of history. If it’s 2, that’s ridiculous, and we can go into it, but I honestly have no idea which one of these is your position. At first you made it seem like you were defending capitalism, but you’ve repeatedly rejected any framing of your positions as one towards “justification”, so I honestly have no idea if you’re even defending capitalism, or if you just think I don’t understand that the world is capitalist, and you’re trying to teach me that the world is capitalist.
I can assure you, I understand violent capitalism dominates the international stage. I don’t know what would give you the impression that I don’t see this
Access to capital isn’t universal, some people aren’t able to work out of their parents’ garage with a $245,000 loan from them (Jeff Bezos if you’re unfamiliar with his “self-made” story).
Without access to capital, you don’t have access to food or shelter, let alone labor. You’d have to work a full time job (or more), plus create the entire business yourself with no access to any substantial means of production.
It’s not an equal playing field, and it’s not supposed to be. Capitalism is a system setup for capitalists to accumulate capital. Labor and people more generally are commodities to be exploited. The system is functioning exactly as it should, and the working class is miserable because of it.
Thanks, but I already did that 8 years ago when I moved to UK from a poor Eastern European country. You should ask yourself how migrants without money, friends and language skills manage to live a better life than locals who have all the privileges and rights. Maybe it’s not about “means of production”, maybe it’s about YOU.
The last place I worked at sent an email of “congratulations” to the staff for a new annual profit record, and instituted a pay freeze later in the same month because they were trying and eventually did sell to a publically traded company and low payroll looks better in the sale, that proceeded to fire everyone because they were only interested in killing local competition in the market.
Workers working too hard for the owner literally cost us our jobs.
The owners have no bravery and take no risks that labor doesn’t bear the biggest brunt of. This entire economy is a scam that stands on pillars of lies/propaganda.
Side note, who the fuck celebrates their employer making record profits if they aren’t in a super rare in the US cooperative or generous stock dispersment program? The whole point of employment is to provide the least labor for the most reward while they try to get the most labor for the least reward, record profits means I’m working too hard for them.
AdaptHealth was the national conglomerate that swalllowed us and a hundred other local homecare/dme providers for overt competition slaughter btw. Their whole goal was/is to enshittify home healthcare/dme for private profit, and the original ceo had to step down because he committed tax evasion in a European country that actually gives a shit. If they’re in charge of your grandmother’s homecare/dme, say your goodbyes to grandma and make sure they didn’t triple bill.
Add comment