What are you doing trolling on this site then?

I took a look at history and see nothing but downside of capitalism: environmental crisis, homelessness, wealth inequality

Shitty people always ended up in charge and found a way to enrich themselves. Maybe in the far future once we have a true artificial intelligence, communism can truly work after they elect some unbiased AI (no skynet please) to be their leader.

What’s your definition of socialiam

Using socialism as a boogeyman by definition, is a poor argument. There are merits to many different economic systems, many of which have pros and cons, capitalism and socialism included.

The laugh, and “listen” while providing absolutely no reasoning demonstrates a certain level of arrogance, while at the same time demonstrating a lack of knowledge on the subject

Thank you for providing a great example of being confidently incorrect.

You must think that humans are inherently greedy and/or are projecting what you would do in a scenario where you’re part of a worker co-op. Most workplaces aren’t worth millions. Most folks who round themselves in a worker co-op would most likely try to better the operation for everyone.

Yeah I’m not sure why it’s nowadays common to simplify socialism as “workers owning the means of production”. It’s not exactly wrong, but it is often misunderstood.

A company being owned by it’s employees is not necessarily “socialism”. In today’s global capitalist economy, there are worker-cooperatives as well, but they too exist within the capitalist economy and have to follow its rules, which is above all the profit motive. If you don’t orient yourself based on profit, you will be out-competed eventually.

Traditionally, when socialists talk about “workers owning/seizing the means of production”, they are not talking about individual workers or individual businesses.

Workers means “the working class”, which would be pretty much everyone (“the 99%”). Means of production means industry and the economy overall, not individual factories and businesses.

What makes FOSS special is that the software is not privately owned by anyone, not by the devs, not by a couple of programmers, not by a company. It is commonly owned, anyone can use, copy and alter the code however they want without any artificial barriers. This of course makes it a lot harder to extract money from users.

In publicly-traded corporations, long term wealth extraction isn’t the goal. Getting sales up next quarter is. Employee-owned cooperatives are more likely to think long term. Plus, I’d vastly prefer to trust the average worker to do the right thing in a coop situation vs a manager doing it in a situation where they’re legally required (as standard publicly-traded corporations are) to prioritize the financial gains of shareholders above all other interests. Maybe you’ve lost so much faith in people that you think no one would ever choose to be slightly less rich for any reason. But plenty of people know there’s such a thing as enough, that there are interests as important as next quarter’s profits. They just don’t usually get MBAs.

Ah, yes, we can see it with all the communities running their own Mastodon servers and extracting the maximum of wealth from their users. /s

Yah, if workers own a tiny portion of the means of production, as they do now in various co-ops around the globe, they will be either (1) required to operate on the basis of profit in order to outcompete entities that are not worker-owned, or (2) cease to exist because they get outcompeted by those who operate on the basis of profit.

This forces all existing co-ops to behave in line with capitalism as a whole. The point is to overcome that system of socio-economic relations: When calls are made for workers to own and operate production, as in this meme, they mean that the class constituted by workers — the proletariat — should be in control of all productive means. Not just that some workers should start co-ops, for this primary reason.

The idea that owners would sacrifice their profits if their business were merely a co-op is, I agree, not necessarily true. (Though workers in co-ops who are directly connected to the point of value production would definitely be more willing to sacrifice profits for decisions that enhance social value.) The point, however, is to move beyond an economy owned and operated for profit and forge a society in which profit is not the basis for operation in the first place. If, for example, workers’ needs were guaranteed, the impetus for profit-seeking would evaporate, though will not be absent, at least while the artifacts of capitalist society persist in us and our institutions.

Look, they’re just temporary inconvenienced billionaires.

What I learned from observation is that they tend to believe that, one day, they will be part of the “small minority”. The American Dream!!!1

I’m reminded by that guy on TikTok

“You just lost a customer”

“Good”

Unsurprisingly, those who manage their own small business and aren’t at mercy of a giant corporation do. So…🙄

Workers don’t give a shit about customers because that’s how the incentive system is set up. Give workers the profits, you give them a good reason to give a shit about how clients feel.

That would be an improvement actually, because the customers of these companies are not users, they are other companies looking to advertise or buy users personal data. The users of for profit social media are in fact the product, not the customers.

They do when they work in a cooperative and have a stake in the business being successful.

Allowing capitalist relations to persist, even if basic goods like food and homes were nationalized, enables a society in which capitalist profiteers continue to operate. History shows pretty explicitly that Capital will use the levers of power that exist, like The State, to eat away at or overturn any socialistic advances. E.g., suddenly the luxury capitalist corporation that sells idk, pearls, is lobbying (bribing) their way into privatizing beaches from which they operate. Slowly but surely the socioeconomic relations produced under capitalism foment and claw their way back to their former position. This requires a constant, indefinitely revolutionary society to keep capitalist relations at bay; that sort of momentum is not possible to sustain, certainly at the current moment.

It’s necessary to abolish capitalists as a class because leaving capitalist systems of relations alone enables them to continue to re-produce themselves.

That doesn’t preclude this sort of dual-economic setup from being a good thing, just insufficient.

I mean, we first need to define what a luxury and what a necessity is. For some things like food, shelter, water, healthcare it’s pretty straightforward. But for resources like energy or communications it’s less obvious.

I’d argue that the internet is now a necessity rather than a luxury, but many people to this day still don’t have or choose not to have internet access (due to geography or religion). Energy is the same way, if we take an obviously bad example, but say you’re socializing electricity for everyone, what’s to stop someone from mining cryptocurrency on everyone else’s dime ? That person would be profiting off of the social net. Where do we put the cursor between “luxurious” energy use and “necessary” energy use ? It’s a tough thing to figure out.

Furthermore, for most people you need an incentive to work, right now it’s survival, which is not great, but if all of your needs basic, and more are taken care of by the state, you only work for the luxuries, which would greatly reduce the available workforce. It’s again a tough balance to find.

Rise up! Seize the beans of production!