I’ve debated people at length on this topic and have concluded that this is a half-baked idea that is impossible to implement without destroying society in any form that has been presented to date.
We can have the perpetual pain of subsistence and servitude to the oligarch club until it collapses under the weight of its own manipulation and propaganda after generations of needless suffering of our children and children’s children necessitating the painful work of rebuilding, or we can destroy the society built from the ground up as a capitalist exploitation trap and do the painful work of rebuilding.
This society perpetuates the misery and exploitation of the many to serve the whims and desires of the few. You act as if it’s worth saving. Go to one of your local tent cities, where we throw our fellow humans, aka defective capital batteries, to die of exposure and police harassment. This system is rotten to its core and will have to be torn down and rebuilt, the only question, just with climate change, is do we let the gaping wound continue fester, hoping it will be the next generation’s problem to amputate? Or do we take on the painful necessity of repairing the boomer’s greed plague for the future they didnt care about at all?
I’d rather our species be destroyed than continue to commit itself further and further to greed and greed worship. I consider greed far worse than hate. At least people that kill out of hate cared about who they killed, in that they want them dead. A capitalist that poisons children’s drinking water to make private shareholders a few extra dollars doesn’t even care to know those children’s names, they were just speedbumps to glorious profit. To me it is the darkest we can go to hurt others for profit. And our society’s core value above all others is greed. That’s worth saving?
Your opinion is all feelings and no solutions. Morally, I can’t contend that it would be nice to help people who can’t help themselves and that we should definitely fix the human impact on the environment. I also agree that the Boomers caused a ton of shitty issues with poor policy choices stemming from greed. However, I don’t think that your solution is well thought out. It seems juvenile to simply say that the workers should assume the means of production. That in itself does not equate to a full working solution. Here’s an example of potential incremental changes that would help your cause: 1) Put term limits on all legislators. 2) Allow only one Supreme Court nomination per presidential term, adding a new judge to the pool. A retiring judge is replaced by a vote of the judiciary themselves. 3) Campaign finance reform with capped election funding. High salaries for politicians and steep penalties for kickbacks and bribery. Politicians with financial interests in a vote must recuse. 4) UBI. 5) Strict enforcement of antitrust laws. 6) Caps on higher education costs at public institutions. Federal loans only for public schools with capped interest rates. Your UBI will be tapped instead of a reliance on salary. 7) Reinstate a modernized Fairness Doctrine in order to ensure that people aren’t pigeon-holed into a narrow understanding of current affairs. 8) Create a pathways to citizenship for all with roots in the country then close the borders. Make a transparent immigration system with many more types of work visas. Strictly enforce the new policies. 9) Eliminate the electoral college in favor of direct ranked choice voting.
See, real changes. Not, “Let’s eat people and steal shit!”
So try actually reading the Communist Manifesto - get it from the horse’s mouth, it’s very short. Then, if you still feel like there isn’t enough detail and that the reasoning isn’t detailed enough, try Kapital. And then, how about the decades and decades of theory that came after? You can keep claiming that socialists “don’t have any solutions”, but please realise that this is an absurd claim when the field of socialism has so, so many detailed and comprehensive theories based on observation, experimentation and further research - scientifically so.
Literally everything you just proposed is beyond a pipe dream under the current rigged system. The owners bribe the Republicans and Neoliberals to dictate their preferred economic policy as they stoke social issues to keep the peasants divided. The oligarchs that bribe both major parties will never permit UBI, they spent decades systematically legalizing political bribery culminating in citizens united, they are the reason Antitrust laws on the books aren’t enforced, they are the reason the fairness doctrine was abandoned for private profit, and they like us fighting over abortion, immigration, guns, etc because it stops us from uniting against them.
Also the idea that even without the oligarchs that politicians would regulate their own term limits is absurd. Why do you think they exempt their pay from government shutdowns and have lifetime universal healthcare just for themselves?
The last, last, last chance to do any of what you suggest using the constitutional tools of the system would have been to soundly and firmly reject the Reagan grift, trickle down economics, and the Jack Welch dehumanization of the economy 50 years ago. Instead they convinced their “opposition” party to take the bribes and the peasants not to engage in “unseemly” class war as they won without a fight. We’ve lived under class occupation ever since. This system is beyond all salvation.
Don’t worry though, the half of the peasants that have been indoctrinated from childhood to believe what you believe will protect that occupation against their own interests to the bitter end, so you have nothing to fear from us tankies.
Unfortunately for you, the sycophants, and capitalists, and everyone else including me, climate change is the physical reaction to our careless actions, and is completely immune to any and all pathetic attempts to obfuscate, blackmail, bribe, assassinate, or otherwise con it into backing down, despite all the vaporware like clean coal, corn ethanol, hydrogen, and planet scale carbon filter the capitalists try to make another buck on before last call. But oowee, they’re trying to bullshit their way out of it to darkly hilarious effect.
You can’t call an idea with 200 years of history and hundreds of books on the subject “half-baked” without explaining what about it you think is unfeasible. Either you have never actually talked to a socialist, or you’ve simply never listened.
The factory has owners. It would be unfair to not compensate them for their capital investment. You are describing a situation where you disallow private enterprise, but all systems describing this type of agreement to date have resulted in terrible outcomes. It will destroy competition. I am reminded of hearing about my brother’s visit to the Soviet Union when he was younger. He went with his group to an ice cream shop and asked what flavors they have and they said vanilla. As in, this limits options and provides a shitty quality of life. It also leads to issues where people who are able to provide a high value to society are not rewarded at a higher rate than a lazy or dumb person. The incentive is gone. These are issues that no text has reconciled. Even Plato’s dreamed Utopia, he knew that such a thing only would work if you brainwashed people generationally to value the idea of communal ownership. He basically left it at the leaders not being able to own things, but having all that they need while other classes under them could still own things. In essence, his utopian society was totally unrealistic in any meaningful timeline and still formed different classes of people.
It destroys society to take away people’s possessions because we built a system where property ownership is a central component. Having possessions is such a basic human construct that your are living in a pipe dream if you feel that you can remove that. The idea that people would share with one another and not get what they are worth to society is salient in describing why socialism as a whole crumbles. You can have socialized policies, but destroying the whole economic system doesn’t work. See my reply later in this thread for examples of real incremental changes.
Let’s start with your first assumption. Why must a factory have individual owners? Why not instead have it owned by the workers who are the ones actually producing?
Also, don’t conflate private and personal property. If you are indeed talking about private property, it is very unlikely you have any to begin with. The vast majority of private property is owned by a few billionaires.
Lastly, people do not need money to incentivise work. Boredom, creativity and the desire to help and or contribute to society does that well enough. Given a stable level of comfort, people will seek work that matters to them.
I own private property and am not a billionaire, so not sure what you are on about with that statement. I got educated and have a decent living situation with a nice corporate remote job. I’ll have my student loan paid off around 40. These things were all easy to do. The people with issues do this to themselves. Sorry you are lazy and want to leach off my success.
It’s like you’re ignoring everything I say. Unless you’re a landlord or the owner of some business, you probably don’t own private property. If you can sit back and let other people make money for you without your input, you own private property.
Your comment reads like a copypasta. Why are you callibg me lazy? Did I say I don’t want to work? Of course I want to work. You’re not paying attention. There are huge barriers to people being able to succeed, and getting past thrm requires immense effort, luck or privilege. And the last one is the only guaranteed win.
I learned ro code from handmedown computers at a young age and worked my way up the corporate ladder. I own a nice big home and am a millennial. I completed a part time MBA while working and am able to take vacation every three months or so. Nothing is stopping you all from being successful, but yourselves. I agree that the system has massive flaws, but destroying capitalism isn’t the answer. The risk-reward system works.
Even if we ignore the artificially increased transaction costs and hold out problems associated with private ownership that make acquiring means of production more expensive, this point only justifies some sort of compensation from the workers as part of the negative fruits of their labor in production. It does not justify the capitalist appropriating 100% of the positive (legal right to produced outputs) and negative (legal liability for the used-up inputs) fruits of the workers’ joint labor
Property’s moral basis is getting the positive and negative fruits of your labor. Capitalism denies the workers this as the employer solely appropriates the positive and negative fruits of their labor. The core of property’s moral basis is the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. Receiving wages is not sufficient because the workers remain de facto responsible for the whole (positive and negative) product of the enterprise and are entitled to it on that basis
And what system do you think is keeping the workers too poor to do that?
What system makes it so that work must involve the buying of private property in the first place?
Also, here’s a perspective you might not hear often: why should the owner bear that burden and risk alone? That seems like too much pressure for one person. Poor capitalist. Doesn’t he realise he needs help?
Under postcapitalism, the factory would be commonly-owned. The company that operates the factory would worker-controlled. That being said, there is nothing wrong with the holder of the building even in common ownership setup being compensated. What is unfair is to demand control rights over the firm for this capital and make the workers at the company your employees. Not everyone against capitalism is a communist. There can still be economic incentives for productive activity
It doesn’t have to work like that. Instead of capital hiring labor, labor can jointly hire capital and structure the firm as a worker coop. There are good ethical reasons for organizing production in a worker coop as well
I’ve debated people at length on this topic and have concluded that this is a half-baked idea that is impossible to implement without destroying society in any form that has been presented to date.
Let’s eat this guy, too
We can have the perpetual pain of subsistence and servitude to the oligarch club until it collapses under the weight of its own manipulation and propaganda after generations of needless suffering of our children and children’s children necessitating the painful work of rebuilding, or we can destroy the society built from the ground up as a capitalist exploitation trap and do the painful work of rebuilding.
This society perpetuates the misery and exploitation of the many to serve the whims and desires of the few. You act as if it’s worth saving. Go to one of your local tent cities, where we throw our fellow humans, aka defective capital batteries, to die of exposure and police harassment. This system is rotten to its core and will have to be torn down and rebuilt, the only question, just with climate change, is do we let the gaping wound continue fester, hoping it will be the next generation’s problem to amputate? Or do we take on the painful necessity of repairing the boomer’s greed plague for the future they didnt care about at all?
I’d rather our species be destroyed than continue to commit itself further and further to greed and greed worship. I consider greed far worse than hate. At least people that kill out of hate cared about who they killed, in that they want them dead. A capitalist that poisons children’s drinking water to make private shareholders a few extra dollars doesn’t even care to know those children’s names, they were just speedbumps to glorious profit. To me it is the darkest we can go to hurt others for profit. And our society’s core value above all others is greed. That’s worth saving?
Your opinion is all feelings and no solutions. Morally, I can’t contend that it would be nice to help people who can’t help themselves and that we should definitely fix the human impact on the environment. I also agree that the Boomers caused a ton of shitty issues with poor policy choices stemming from greed. However, I don’t think that your solution is well thought out. It seems juvenile to simply say that the workers should assume the means of production. That in itself does not equate to a full working solution. Here’s an example of potential incremental changes that would help your cause: 1) Put term limits on all legislators. 2) Allow only one Supreme Court nomination per presidential term, adding a new judge to the pool. A retiring judge is replaced by a vote of the judiciary themselves. 3) Campaign finance reform with capped election funding. High salaries for politicians and steep penalties for kickbacks and bribery. Politicians with financial interests in a vote must recuse. 4) UBI. 5) Strict enforcement of antitrust laws. 6) Caps on higher education costs at public institutions. Federal loans only for public schools with capped interest rates. Your UBI will be tapped instead of a reliance on salary. 7) Reinstate a modernized Fairness Doctrine in order to ensure that people aren’t pigeon-holed into a narrow understanding of current affairs. 8) Create a pathways to citizenship for all with roots in the country then close the borders. Make a transparent immigration system with many more types of work visas. Strictly enforce the new policies. 9) Eliminate the electoral college in favor of direct ranked choice voting.
See, real changes. Not, “Let’s eat people and steal shit!”
So try actually reading the Communist Manifesto - get it from the horse’s mouth, it’s very short. Then, if you still feel like there isn’t enough detail and that the reasoning isn’t detailed enough, try Kapital. And then, how about the decades and decades of theory that came after? You can keep claiming that socialists “don’t have any solutions”, but please realise that this is an absurd claim when the field of socialism has so, so many detailed and comprehensive theories based on observation, experimentation and further research - scientifically so.
Literally everything you just proposed is beyond a pipe dream under the current rigged system. The owners bribe the Republicans and Neoliberals to dictate their preferred economic policy as they stoke social issues to keep the peasants divided. The oligarchs that bribe both major parties will never permit UBI, they spent decades systematically legalizing political bribery culminating in citizens united, they are the reason Antitrust laws on the books aren’t enforced, they are the reason the fairness doctrine was abandoned for private profit, and they like us fighting over abortion, immigration, guns, etc because it stops us from uniting against them.
Also the idea that even without the oligarchs that politicians would regulate their own term limits is absurd. Why do you think they exempt their pay from government shutdowns and have lifetime universal healthcare just for themselves?
The last, last, last chance to do any of what you suggest using the constitutional tools of the system would have been to soundly and firmly reject the Reagan grift, trickle down economics, and the Jack Welch dehumanization of the economy 50 years ago. Instead they convinced their “opposition” party to take the bribes and the peasants not to engage in “unseemly” class war as they won without a fight. We’ve lived under class occupation ever since. This system is beyond all salvation.
Don’t worry though, the half of the peasants that have been indoctrinated from childhood to believe what you believe will protect that occupation against their own interests to the bitter end, so you have nothing to fear from us tankies.
Unfortunately for you, the sycophants, and capitalists, and everyone else including me, climate change is the physical reaction to our careless actions, and is completely immune to any and all pathetic attempts to obfuscate, blackmail, bribe, assassinate, or otherwise con it into backing down, despite all the vaporware like clean coal, corn ethanol, hydrogen, and planet scale carbon filter the capitalists try to make another buck on before last call. But oowee, they’re trying to bullshit their way out of it to darkly hilarious effect.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxdxa/1500-scientists-warn-society-could-collapse-this-century-in-dire-climate-report
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02669-8
Why have you concluded that?
You can’t call an idea with 200 years of history and hundreds of books on the subject “half-baked” without explaining what about it you think is unfeasible. Either you have never actually talked to a socialist, or you’ve simply never listened.
So, a few questions:
The factory has owners. It would be unfair to not compensate them for their capital investment. You are describing a situation where you disallow private enterprise, but all systems describing this type of agreement to date have resulted in terrible outcomes. It will destroy competition. I am reminded of hearing about my brother’s visit to the Soviet Union when he was younger. He went with his group to an ice cream shop and asked what flavors they have and they said vanilla. As in, this limits options and provides a shitty quality of life. It also leads to issues where people who are able to provide a high value to society are not rewarded at a higher rate than a lazy or dumb person. The incentive is gone. These are issues that no text has reconciled. Even Plato’s dreamed Utopia, he knew that such a thing only would work if you brainwashed people generationally to value the idea of communal ownership. He basically left it at the leaders not being able to own things, but having all that they need while other classes under them could still own things. In essence, his utopian society was totally unrealistic in any meaningful timeline and still formed different classes of people.
It destroys society to take away people’s possessions because we built a system where property ownership is a central component. Having possessions is such a basic human construct that your are living in a pipe dream if you feel that you can remove that. The idea that people would share with one another and not get what they are worth to society is salient in describing why socialism as a whole crumbles. You can have socialized policies, but destroying the whole economic system doesn’t work. See my reply later in this thread for examples of real incremental changes.
Let’s start with your first assumption. Why must a factory have individual owners? Why not instead have it owned by the workers who are the ones actually producing?
Also, don’t conflate private and personal property. If you are indeed talking about private property, it is very unlikely you have any to begin with. The vast majority of private property is owned by a few billionaires.
Lastly, people do not need money to incentivise work. Boredom, creativity and the desire to help and or contribute to society does that well enough. Given a stable level of comfort, people will seek work that matters to them.
I own private property and am not a billionaire, so not sure what you are on about with that statement. I got educated and have a decent living situation with a nice corporate remote job. I’ll have my student loan paid off around 40. These things were all easy to do. The people with issues do this to themselves. Sorry you are lazy and want to leach off my success.
It’s like you’re ignoring everything I say. Unless you’re a landlord or the owner of some business, you probably don’t own private property. If you can sit back and let other people make money for you without your input, you own private property.
Your comment reads like a copypasta. Why are you callibg me lazy? Did I say I don’t want to work? Of course I want to work. You’re not paying attention. There are huge barriers to people being able to succeed, and getting past thrm requires immense effort, luck or privilege. And the last one is the only guaranteed win.
I learned ro code from handmedown computers at a young age and worked my way up the corporate ladder. I own a nice big home and am a millennial. I completed a part time MBA while working and am able to take vacation every three months or so. Nothing is stopping you all from being successful, but yourselves. I agree that the system has massive flaws, but destroying capitalism isn’t the answer. The risk-reward system works.
Sounds like you don’t own any private property, then.
I own an acre AMA.
Because the workers didn’t find the money to buy a whole factory…
Even if we ignore the artificially increased transaction costs and hold out problems associated with private ownership that make acquiring means of production more expensive, this point only justifies some sort of compensation from the workers as part of the negative fruits of their labor in production. It does not justify the capitalist appropriating 100% of the positive (legal right to produced outputs) and negative (legal liability for the used-up inputs) fruits of the workers’ joint labor
The workers get money for their labor…
Property’s moral basis is getting the positive and negative fruits of your labor. Capitalism denies the workers this as the employer solely appropriates the positive and negative fruits of their labor. The core of property’s moral basis is the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. Receiving wages is not sufficient because the workers remain de facto responsible for the whole (positive and negative) product of the enterprise and are entitled to it on that basis
And what system do you think is keeping the workers too poor to do that?
What system makes it so that work must involve the buying of private property in the first place?
Also, here’s a perspective you might not hear often: why should the owner bear that burden and risk alone? That seems like too much pressure for one person. Poor capitalist. Doesn’t he realise he needs help?
Under postcapitalism, the factory would be commonly-owned. The company that operates the factory would worker-controlled. That being said, there is nothing wrong with the holder of the building even in common ownership setup being compensated. What is unfair is to demand control rights over the firm for this capital and make the workers at the company your employees. Not everyone against capitalism is a communist. There can still be economic incentives for productive activity
That’s kind of how a business works though. People show up at the entity that you’ve orchestrated, work via your guidelines, and get paid.
It doesn’t have to work like that. Instead of capital hiring labor, labor can jointly hire capital and structure the firm as a worker coop. There are good ethical reasons for organizing production in a worker coop as well