It’s a meme
You already have a mean of production in your hand. But the only thing you produce is stupid memes.
Even if they did produce something, Jeff Bezos would steal it as soon as it started making a buck.
Seizing the means of production made sense when that was the leverage the owners used to strip the surplus value from you.
Today, they use gatekept platform and a captive audience with AI manipulation to insert themselves between you and the customers and strip you of your surplus value.
Now pay Bezos’ 40% tax until Amazon basic is ready to outcompete out of the platform entirely. Welcome to the second page of Google !
Lolwut? You’re delusional, mate.
bread 👍
Directly seizing I don’t think would end well. I think it’s one of the short comings of communism.
Encouraging employee owned companies is where it’s at. But to be honest I’m not sure how you would incentivize that.
You incentivize the same way unions are growing now. Just show people the benefits and constantly shout it from the highest mountain tops.
So bb, tell me more about those sweet, sweet employee-owned companies for other readers’ benefit.
Tell me more about how employee owned companies are better at long term planning. Tell me more about how they’re concerned about balancing profit for survival’s sake with societal good. Tell me more about how they participate in the benefits of the free market via competition while not becoming all-consuming, profit-driven monsters. Tell me more about how they avoid stakeholder-chosen, sociopathic leadership in favor of leaders wanting the best for the company’s mission and its employees. Tell me more about the coffee shop branch that was shut down by its company and reopened as an employee-owned cafe. Tell me more about AAA. Tell me sweet nothings, bb
(And yes, I’m explicitly not talking about communism because it’s an emotionally charged concept, and i want to focus on things maybe people don’t know so much about)
A better case for worker cooperatives is just pointing out they satisfy the moral principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. The workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs, but in a capitalist firm, the employer holds sole legally responsible for 100% the corresponding legal claim to the positive and negative result of the enterprise while employees receive 0%. In a worker coop, this mismatch is corrected
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
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:
- Why is it “half-baked”?
- What ideas does it propose?
- What is wrong with those ideas?
- How is it “impossible to implement”?
- What methods are proposed?
- What prevents those methods from working?
- What do you mean by “destroy society”?
- What exactly do you define as society?
- How would socialism “destroy” that?
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.
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
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.
Because the workers didn’t find the money to buy a whole factory…
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?
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
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.
- Why is it “half-baked”?
Why have you concluded that?
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!”
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.
Your opinion is all feelings and no solutions
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.
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Look there, Zach, a message on the toast!
And in the coffee? Revolution.
Not 100% sure why, but i love this. Thank you
Here a nice example what happenes when you give the means of production to “the people”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1gpQV57doM
Because it worked to well in Zimbabwe, Sowjetunion 1, Sowjetunion 2, China, and many more
Literally sharing nazi propaganda from Hearst press lol
Anyway, capitalism is known for never having famines or economic crises, especially not cyclical ones
Well, actually I am sharing “Wikipedia Propaganda” but if you want to call Wikipedia Nazi-Propaganda…
And yes, the only pro-Western nation ever falling into a serious Food-Crisis was… Haiti.
See, I know we are doing something right. I am not sure what we do right and there is enough things we don’t do right but… the right things we do amazingly right. If that is because the Ghosts of Hitler are possessing us all or that we are just not a bunch of utter idiots - you call.
And yes, the only pro-Western nation ever falling into a serious Food-Crisis was… Haiti.
Read Late Victorian Holocausts if you want to be less wrong.
Well, actually I am sharing “Wikipedia Propaganda” but if you want to call Wikipedia Nazi-Propaganda…
The holodomor was originally fabricated by a hearst press associate at a time when Mr Hearst and the third Reich were openly collaborating on spreading nazi propaganda in the US. The famine was bad but the myth that it was a genocide needs to die as it is literally nazi propaganda and was used as a justification for collaborating with the holocaust in Eastern Europe
This is in fact the mainstream academic position. You may look to Conquest, Davies, and Wheatcroft, who are genuinely anticommunist historians, for their analysis (they all say it wasn’t a genocide)
In what way is the Late Victorian Age “Pro-Western”? In the same way Dschengis Khan was “Pro-Western”? Besides, ONE book is quite vague for such an assumption as your claim isn’t even listed in the list of great famines.
Oh, and you claim the Holodomor didn’t happen? Well, let me guess, Stalin also didn’t got 30 million sowiet people killed?
Tovarishch, your lies gave away whose bread you eat.
Late Victorian Age
It is literally a book about western liberal democracies committing genocide, including through intentionally creating famines.
Oh, and you claim the Holodomor didn’t happen? Well, let me guess, Stalin also didn’t got 30 million sowiet people killed?
Listen if you want to believe nazi propaganda that was used to justify collaborating with the holocaust you can be my guest. You just won’t be in line with the mainstream academic concensus on the subject.
Suuure… Stalin was an agent of the West, send to kill Russians. Just like Dschingis Khan and Mohammed. All Agents of the West.
Thank you for making me aware of everything.
I will repeat:
Listen if you want to believe nazi propaganda that was used to justify collaborating with the holocaust you can be my guest. You just won’t be in line with the mainstream academic concensus on the subject.
but capitalism still has issues mabye ecofashisim is the way for as minimized issues as possible?
Oof, too real
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=u1gpQV57doM
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
How exactly? Other than excessive bloodshed, which - other than edgelord tankies - most people would neither want, nor have the stomach to pursue.
General strike (like the writers guild, except everyone) until the distribution of (a part of the) dividends to the workers is enshrined into law.
Sounds pretty doable to me.
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
i’d do some intellectual property reform.
some banking reform - more local / peer group/long term lending requirements, less fickle international finance. (and less fucking mortgage bubbles!)
some small business support / starter initiatives - link that in with how banks work.i’d consider lobbying for some government sposored work to generate open source plans and enable production processes for useful tools - Okay that isn’t going to happen , , ,
but it’s not all or nothing, but you can do things to help some more workers control and access more of their tooling even if its not outright ownership of the end to end production process.
(By the way i’m basically arguing for a more “free” market in the ecnomic sense (easy access for a large number of small scale producers). . . which is exactly not what large-scale capitalists want.
They want a market “free” from any thing that might regulate their attempts to secure economic power and their abiity to use it to generate supernormal prices/profits.)Progress doesnt happen in 4-5 year political cycles thats a hard one to improve without an electorate capable (any maybe secure enough) to thing about the longer term. Odd that it was extreme econmic and political uncertainty that brought out the likes of FDR and other post-war that people were most willing to think long term when it came to their governemnts - I guess it brought out all sorts of “crazies”.
The big one in terms of bloodshed is land reform - and it has been done in a few places - sort of post-colonial type situations - but granted it does ususally have blooodshed. It’s a personal judgment what degree is “excessive bloodshed”.
What does bank reform mean? Banks already give loans to small bussinesses.
You can start a company that does what you want them to do. You can create all the innovative processes you want and open source them in the existing system.
Revolutions have happened and will continue to happen regardless of how much smug liberals will bloviate about edgelord tankies.
And they will continue to become stuck in the dictatorship phase until you acknowledge that you cannot create political agency via mass murder of innocents.
Creating political agency via mass murder of innocents is the basis for the western system of government buddy.
This doesn’t make any sense
Western society is built on genocide and slavery. Latest example of that is the war on terror where US regime massacred over 6 million innocent people to maintain its hegemony in the Middle East.
Be me. Swedish. Wake up and go to genocide factory. Get home from genocide factory. Make chicken potstickers.
not far from the truth really https://www.corpwatch.org/article/swedish-paper-manufacturing-giant-blacklisted-child-labor-practices
Read “riding the wave” fo learn about how Scandinavian countries are beneficiaries of the imperialist system
Okay sure, so what examples do you have of a successful modern revolution?
Bonus points if you can name one where the winners didn’t just immediately change the rules and continue fucking over the little guy.
Another bonus point if you can name an example where a revolution didn’t result in disproportionate civilian deaths relative to the ‘bad guys’.
Then again, maybe you’re one of those ‘the end justifies the means’ kind of guys, who fantasizes about saving the rest of us by way of firing squad. If that’s the case, I’ll expect you to be on the front line to fight the government funded military force that shows up.
Or maybe, just maybe you’re another lame ass tankie who talks a big game, but would piss their pants if someone so much as gave you a dirty look IRL.
Soviet revolution in Russia, Revolution in China, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in Laos, in Nicaragua, just to name a few.
Bonus points if you can name one where the winners didn’t just immediately change the rules and continue fucking over the little guy.
None of the above examples did anything of the sort as anybody with even a modicum of historical literacy knows.
Another bonus point if you can name an example where a revolution didn’t result in disproportionate civilian deaths relative to the ‘bad guys’.
Define what’s disproportionate and how you decide on what’s proportionate.
Then again, maybe you’re one of those ‘the end justifies the means’ kind of guys, who fantasizes about saving the rest of us by way of firing squad. If that’s the case, I’ll expect you to be on the front line to fight the government funded military force that shows up.
Then again, maybe you’re one of those people who are benefiting from capitalism and don’t care about the suffering of other people as long as you got yours.
Or maybe, just maybe you’re another lame ass tankie who talks a big game, but would piss their pants if someone so much as gave you a dirty look IRL.
Or maybe, just maybe you’re an ignorant dronie who is as illiterate as you’re ignorant.
The women of Iceland went on strike in 1975, they stopped doing literally everything, walked out of the home, left the kids, to demonstrate how much the system would crumble without them, how important they are to everything being able to function, and ask for equal pay. They flipped everything overnight.
The current system is all the workers do all the work, and the profits from that work go almost entirely to some douvhe who won birth lotto. The system is already rigged. Unrigging the system would look like walking off the job, but globally. It’s going to happen. Society is squeezed too tightly, there’s going to be havoc.
Take the route California is taking and educate the kids about worker’s rights. Teach them it’s not okay to be exploited at the work place and encourage them to tell their parents about it. Civics classes should also be taught to learn how the government works and what people’s rights are under the Constitution. Encourage people to unionize now that they know how the system works.
Once the basics have been taught, elect people who care about government reform for social policies by paying for them with higher corporate and personal wealth taxes. Reform the tax system the wealthy have been using to hide their money. All their money is tied up in stocks and they’re living off of multimillion dollar loans? Fuck them, tax a big percentage of the loan. All these things can be done to indirectly seize the fruits of their production at least.
Honestly the whole “eat the rich” thing is pretty offensive if you know your Chinese history, considering ritualistic torture cannibalism actually happened during the cultural revolution and is pretty well documented from actual CCP sources. In this case “the rich” were actually teachers and scientists.
So they didn’t eat the rich.
Start by taking about your wages. Most people won’t even do that, for fear of reprisals. Even though it’s protected federally.
Casually bringing up support for unions, and those on strike.
This is base level, and in many places, will take a long time to see movement.
Agreed, lets just keep doing whatever the capitalists demand until their insatiable greed destroys them and us.
It’s not like it’s gonna take that long. And if not climate change, the AI they don’t fully understand but are trying to monetize. And if not AI, CRISPR derived vectors they don’t fully understand but are trying to monetize, etc.
Lets just stay the course. It will all work out in the end, at least for the planet, and that’s ultimately what matters.
I understand the bitterness, but whoever said the commenter wanted to do what capitalists demand? They just wanted to avoid bloodshed.
There are always options like general strikes, massive voting movements, etc. It’s just a matter of figuring out what will work and how to do it.
If you’re arguing that capitalists will respond with violence, that’s fair, but then the blame is on them, not the workers
These people don’t actually care about statecraft or political science. It’s all about fan service for them.
The severe, civilization scale consequences of the damage we have done, are presently doing, and will continue to do for private profit to our only habitat we all depemd on for survival from one moment to the next also doesn’t care about
statecraft or political scienceattempts to minimize/ignore/discredit it through self-serving rhetoric of those in political power attempting to maintain that power.Sorry. No bullshitting our way out of this one like it’s just another human on human genocide we can rebrand and massage the messaging of. The physics are determinate, and no amount our patented human extracted snake oil will change that.
Try to spin the greed vice, failing, and personality deficit as a positive like “rational self-interest” all day. Humanity sanctioning and even encouraging that darkest of impulses did this.
That isn’t what I said and I think you know it. Next time just say you don’t know the answer either and save yourself the effort.
I know what humans are going to do by our track record. Kick the can until there is a physical obstruction preventing it.
We will talk the biggest of games claiming otherwise the whole time, though. Surely rhetoric will save the day this time!
You seem to know a lot for a guy who hasn’t been able to suggest any kind of realistic solution.
I believe humanity has passed the point where we can. We lack the will. We’re monkeys just barely smart enough with concerted effort to create technologies we lack the impulse control to wield responsibly. We figured out gun powder, and proceeded to use it to commit genocides, for example.
This wasn’t a problem for the planet, only one another, until industrialization. Now we’re addicted to technologies that make wealthy people wealthier while poisoning our only shared habitat. Now we’re monkeys with multiple, competing self-destructive but potentially profitable technologies all vying to blow up in our face in the quest to enrich those that hold their patents, and they answer to no one. World governments instead seem to answer to them.
So yeah, I don’t see a non-violent solution where you put a big red nuclear button in an orangutan sanctuary that looks like their food dispenser button, and taking thr big red nuclear button away from them, even by force, is off the table.
I can only control myself, I can’t force my fellow peasants to stop digging their own graves to further enrich a few thousand sociopath families who’ve convinced them this is the only way. There’s peace in acceptance I suppose.
Cause, you know, it’s always worked soo well in the past…
What’s the other option? Continue to be fucked by a system the privatizes everything and destroys our environment? Continue to be fucked harder by the billionaire class?
So you think when the state owns the means of production things are gonna be better?
Nah but When the workers do it will be.
This dude must be trolling.
or maybe doesn’t have a very broad experience of assets, ownership or work.
Surely you don’t want to suggest that environmental protection has worked better in socialist countries?
It has, and anybody who has even a bare minimum of historical literacy knows this.
Which past is this that you speak of? And how is the present a better option than anything at all, really?
The Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam. Are these countries you want us to model ourselves after?
Yes. All of those countries had more civil rights and longer life expectancy after the revolution
Oh yeah that makes sense. Because a revolution automatically means that your life expectancy increases. At this point, let’s just have continuous revoltuions back to back. We’ll live forever.
No, overthrowing capitalism and beginning a transition to a more rational economic system increases your life expectancy. You can literally look up graphs.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041395/life-expectancy-russia-all-time/
You mean apart from not getting shot if you want to leave the country or being sent to be worked to death in a prison labor camp for a dissenting opinion?
Still don’t know what you’re talking about. Anyway, in capitalist free America people are shot for knocking in the neighbour’s door, is that better? Lest we talk about the private jail system that demands prisoners, in order to be sustainable.
Have you never heard about the USSR, the GDR or communist China?
I made a bunch of Dalle pics on this topic last night:
That’s it? That’s the meme? That’s just a piece of toast with the words “The workers should seize the means of production” written on in it.
There’s a meme of a frog puppet drinking tea, and a meme of a pootoo, and a meme of some beans. It can be literally anything.
That’s not toast? It’s bread.
What sort of bread is it?
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What does that even mean? Give us some practical advice
Make your own bread I guess.
It means they want to shit on anyone who suggests any mechanism for social change that might actually work instead of wanking about some glorious revolution that’ll never happen. Just another way of maintaining the status quo while pretending to be a revolutionary.
Because it worked to well in Zimbabwe, Sowjetunion 1, Sowjetunion 2, China, and many more
Needs to be more like the women of Iceland in 1975
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try, try, try, try, try again, and also blame everyone else that you had to kill your own people for the good of the whole…
Classic communist tactics, Tovarishch, and if it fails you just didn’t believe hard enough…
“Seize the means of production” is a communist’s rallying cry because they know that they can’t build anything on their own
used so many words to tell us that you’re an ignoramus
The workers built the means, they just never owned them.
Let me guess, you think Steve Jobs made the iPhone because he pulled it out of his pocket on a stage and took the credit of engineers standing on the shoulders of publically funded basic research? Steve jobs couldn’t engineer his way out of a wet paper bag, and that is well documented.
I think Steve Jobs made the iphone by coordinating and funding a team of engineers to develop and produce the phone, then marketed it using his own name for brand recognition.
He could not have done it without those engineers and workers, and they would not have made the phone without Jobs.
Who do you think built the means of production in the first place? I’ve never seen a rich guy in a suit laying down bricks all day to build a factory.
It was a group effort
Yeah, a group effort, lol
The laborers planned and built the stuff, and the owners took the profits. Good job team!
On the part of labor. No matter how causally efficacious capital is. It can never be de facto responsible for anything because responsibility is imputed through the tools back to the workers using them.
Which group?
yeah you call it a meme and put it on the meme community but I don’t see a meme here
Seems to be to serious for this community.
i think the meme is the lazily edited stock photo
Genuinely speaking, do you really think Amazon will continue to operate if the “workers” took it over from the (evil) executives and owned all the power?
In my opinion, it’ll fall apart in no time, because not a single decision will be made to progress work and to solve problems, and every problem will be a vote to people who don’t understand the consequences and will prefer to serve their personal needs. Am I wrong?
It is a straw man that democracy means every problem is put to a vote. Workers can jointly decide to delegate decision-making to executives and managers. The difference in worker coops is that these executives and managers are ultimately democratically accountable to the people doing the work
So you’re saying someone will want to act as an executive, but without getting the executive pay?
Why would anyone want to do that stressful job and responsibility, instead of just being a cog in the wheel and typing on a computer or moving boxes? Who decides who does what? And what happens if the managers disagree with half the “workers/owners” when a decision has to be made that benefits a part but hurts another? Who has the authority to put their foot down for the “greater good” even though half the workers don’t like their decision?
This is all stuff you hash out when you create a co-op. But normally you create a co-op, you don’t convert a giant multinational into one.
I’m not sure I understand… are you saying that your plans don’t work on giant corporations, so maybe you shouldn’t propose things like OP did?
Well, according to the post, you want to seize the means of production and eat the rich. Sounds delicious! I would love to know whether you’re just a bunch of guys having wet dreams or whether there’s a framework where this can really work. Tell me how you’re gonna seize Amazon and keep it running like it does now.
It depends on the material conditions what specific action would be required. For example, the legal system could abolish the employer-employee contract that violates workers inalienable rights to democracy and to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor. Then, the contract could be reversed so that labor jointly hires capital rather than capital hiring labor. Amazon, in particular, has other issues that should be addressed, but we can ignore that for now
My original questions aren’t answered. You’re just talking about the temporary procedure, not the long term plan, as in the questions I asked.
Even giant multinationals have to be eventually converted to worker coops or federations of worker coops because the workers that work in these companies are having their inalienable rights violated as well
The executives can be paid more. In a system where all firms are worker coops, it would be a much more compressed difference between the least paid and most paid worker in a firm than the absurd pay differences we see today.
A manger in a worker coop has the same decision-making rights as in any company. The difference is that they are democratically accountable to the workers instead of being accountable to the employer, an alien legal party. Essentially, workers hold all voting shares
You said a bunch of nice things, but you ignored the core of the problem. If workers hold all voting shares, what happens when they’re split on an issue? Who can tell them to STFU for the better of the company?
Another similar question: What if there’s an issue that will lead to half of them getting fired? Like, say, a technological advancement? So if work can be optimized by 200% by adding computers, but then 50% of the people are useless then. Wouldn’t the workers vote to stay employed/paid instead of saving the company that can be destroyed in a competitive market where better, faster companies can emerge if this company doesn’t adopt the newer tech? Who will make that decision?
Better to have them making the decision than capitalists, who make more money for paying employees less
Also who says half of them have to be fired? Can’t everyone just work less?
“Better” is in your opinion. I need answers based on concerns and problems that happens in the real world. A fast-paced world.
Assuming the revenue of the company doesn’t have massive growth (which is the normal situation unless a breakthrough happened), we need to hire more people who have the skills needed to keep up with the market. So, assuming we want to keep everyone (including useless people who’d rather have beer instead of reading a book to learn the new stuff), the income of everyone will just go down over time. Eventually, with no one getting fire there won’t be enough money to go around to feed them. What am I missing here?
See you’re still trapped within the logic of capitalism which maximizes profits and expansion over other concerns.
So, assuming we want to keep everyone (including useless people who’d rather have beer instead of reading a book to learn the new stuff), the income of everyone will just go down over time. Eventually, with no one getting fire there won’t be enough money to go around to feed them. What am I missing here?
These are all massive assumptions
Worker coops are better ethically not just based on opinion. The workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs. By the usual ethical principle that legal responsibility should be assigned to the de facto responsible party, the workers should jointly be legally responsible for the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs.
- Worker coops can fire people.
- Worker coops can charge initial membership fee when a new worker joins.
Like I said, its like workers hold all the voting shares in the company, so these issues would resolved the same way that they are resolve in corporations owned by shareholders.
The rational action would be to adopt the new tech and instead of firing half of the workers, which is socially irrational due to the social costs of unemployment, dividing the remaining work among the existing workers. The extra time that each worker has could be used for producing something else
Like I said, its like workers hold all the voting shares in the company, so these issues would resolved the same way that they are resolve in corporations owned by shareholders.
You’re ignoring a key point I’m trying to make: The workers have a conflict of interest, unlike shareholders. The workers want to minimize their work and maximize their gain, which is mutually exclusive in one company. While shareholders in the current system just want to maximize their gain (regardless of whether that’s good or bad). So why would the worker strive to learn new things instead of keeping the status quo? Most people don’t see the big picture and don’t want to read a book to learn a new thing. How many people around you come from work and spend their evenings reading new things to stay up in their job? This is one problem.
Like I said before to another guy, if you keep dividing the extra without firing anyone, given a limited growth, eventually there won’t be enough money to go around. Everyone will go bankrupt. How do you solve that problem too?
Do you think the shareholders are active in problem solving? Workers include basically everyone but the shareholders. The tech guys, the executives, the managers.
I think your worries are misplaced. I work for an employee owned cooperative with about 60 employees. I think half of the employees are also owners. There’s still a CEO, chosen by the board of directors, who are elected by the employee-owners. Day to day operational decisions are made by whoever is in charge of the relevant department, just like a shareholder-owned corporation. Bigger decisions, like long term strategy or how to distribute profits among employees, are voted on by all of the employee owners instead of shareholders. It’s been in business for about 20 years and makes enough money to share profits with all employees regardless of their ownership status. So essentially this business operates like any other, but the profits are shared with the employee-owners and employees instead of going to shareholders or insane CEO salaries (compressed pay structure).
This is exactly the problem with such discussion. We end up with anecdotes. Yeah, I gotta see that company’s financial statements, their business model, and their growth, to decide whether this is a good thing. In fact, the idea that it makes “enough money” doesn’t sound good good. This kind of “stability” (I’ll call it) is either due to a niche field or a dying company that sooner or later will become irrelevant. It’s not how the real world works.
And even with this model you proposed, someone eventually can put their foot down. Those employees can sell their shares if they want, and we’re all the way back to the (evil) capitalist model you don’t like.
Worker coops are a good thing because unlike employer-employee-based firms they don’t violate workers’ inalienable rights. The justification is a principled ethical argument.
The workers’ voting shares should be inalienable and attached to the functional role of working in the firm. The employer-employee contract would be abolished, so there would be no mechanism within the legal system for having a capitalist firm.
An inalienable right is one that the holder cannot give up even with consent
Until everyone fights what “rights” are, which is kind of the problem everywhere. You have a picture of these rights, which are pink and rosy. I believe you have good intention. But you have to imagine an contentious environment where everyone will disagree with you to maximize their gain, and minimize their effort. Any system you put in place and anything you define as rights will be malleable and will be up for thousands of debates, and eventually you’ll be the dictator for setting up a system that you think will work. Back to square one.
This is why I said it’s opinion. I got my answer. You agree with firing people. Good enough for me for now. Others don’t.
That’s every bureaucracy that ever existed.
