Pity, you have to defend your ideas in a free market of thought.
Market ain’t correctly regulated. Monopolistic practices are being used to suppress non conforming thoughts. :P
Reform VS revolution is basically always the debate in a movement.
Yes there is evidence that welfare for the people was able to provide the middle class in the US with wealth. And democratic socialism seems to be working well in Europe.
But the threat of the rich coming back and taking it is very really. Reagan in the 80s. Brexit. Other “populist” movements in other countries.
Half hearted reform barely works for the poor and we’re always an election or two away from shit.
So I kind of get both sides.
Europe doesn’t have socialism and a lot of countries would be super pissed at you if you called them that. People died trying to get out of socialism and they don’t want it now.
Honestly, as a European, there is no such thing as democratic socialism here. There a handful of countries with a decent welfare system, others who used to have a decent one but which are demolishing it bit-by-bit since the 80s/90s.
There are way less differences between the US system and European systems than between European system and what a Democratic socialism looks like.
And a very specific type of left, too. I’m a democratic socialist who doesn’t believe in centrally planned economies and thinks market mechanisms can be useful in many cases (but can also be extremely harmful if done wrong or utilized wrong, eg healthcare is a terrible place for market mechanisms and profit motives), but I might as well be a reich-winger based on how many subs seem to look at democratic socialism (let alone market socialism)
That sounds like you aren’t a socialist at all.
Just sounds like the majority of capitalist countries. Especially the ones in Europe.
Wtf is an uncorrupt government?
All types of governance and economic systems are susceptible to despotism.
It takes a constantly educated and involved population to fight it.
Serious question. Is it possible to do this with very large populations? It seems like it might get inherently more complicated with several tiers of government (federal, state, county, city, etc…)
It definitely feels like Dunbar’s Number is a gate to keep this from being effective in large communities.
If we can’t view more than a finite amount of other humans as being “real,” how do we begin to get massively large groups of humans to care for one another? This is a question I don’t have the answer to.
Honestly I believe this to be a way more important issue to discuss than the whole capitalism vs socialism vs communism vs whatever else argument. If your ideas can easily be perverted by corruption then it won’t work.
I have some ideas but I’m just some idiot on the internet. I think you need checks and balances. Have at least two groups with similar power at odds with one another. One example is corporation vs government. But I don’t think just 2 groups is good enough. Ideally you probably want 3 groups at the very least. I know many governments around the world already uses this sort of structure internally (eg different branches of government), but I don’t think these solutions take into account the existence of mega corporations that can act across country borders.
The problem is how do we get there? In a market there will always be actors powerful enough to corrupt the governmenta and influence regulation in an undemocratic way.
Even in a market dominated by socialist companies where workers have power. Workers having ownership isn’t some panacea against corruption and willingness to dominate others. You can still end up with a company full of terrible people who have no qualms cornering a market and then committing to rent-extraction. They can even commit to those horrible practices in an internally democratic way!
It’s impossible, as has been demonstrated throughout the last few centuries of history. Even in cases where a government makes a massive shift towards a pro-worker position (i.e. the New Deal), over time the country will fall back into regulatory capture and devolve to an oligarchy.
Socialists don’t hate markets, they hate workers not having any power or democratic choice in how they interact in the market.
Workers owning the means of production just means the workers are doing the same work but they are in ownership of the factory and the profits. They will still sell the products they produce in a marketplace.
Did… did I say they couldn’t? I think this continues to be a misunderstanding of what socialists believe.
So ah… What’s the issue then? You can have what you want under capitalism. Attacking the system is forcing your own on others. This is unironically what makes socialism unpopular in the context of history.
Nothing stops them! except shitty wages that are not enough to pay your absurdly high bills for housing, utility and shitty food plus competition which does not treat their eorkers fair and is therefore much more profitable and can easily destroy your worker-friendly cooperative, which they totally will do because CAPITALISM
Nothing in America stops the workers from owning the factory or the profits.
Fully stop? No, not technically. But our society makes it as close to impossible as it can be without being illegal
Only in the most technical of technical senses. Much like “there’s nothing stopping someone who’s born poor from becoming a millionaire”. Legally? No. Practically? Yes, there’s so freakin many barriers to such a thing happening, it’s almost statistically impossible. It’s so rare that when it happens it makes national headlines.
The system actively discourages that. It was tried in the 70s. Banks wouldn’t work with coops because they were diffrent. Other companies wouldn’t work with them because they didn’t being as high a ROI. They were more efficient and stable, but under capitalism none of that matters.
Do they actually trust their coworkers to run the company without tanking it almost immediatly? Most of my coworkers can barely make it through their own tasks without fucking something up, let alone actually having input on how the business is run.
Highly depends on your coworkers. My current coworkers? Yeah they’re great, we have two electrical engineers on my team, buncha geniuses.
My last job? Oh man I wouldn’t trust those guys as far as I could throw em.
You must need a better job. I’ve had plenty of workplaces where I could count on everyone around me.
You know, the hiring manager usually has something to do with the quality of people hired. Maybe you could talk to them instead?
That doesn’t really change the overall point. People are stupid. It’s the single biggest sticking point in democracy, socialism, communism, really anything except dictatorship/technocracy/oligarchy/etc. Any system where you cede power to the masses runs the risk of the masses being utterly stupid.
I think it’s worth it, because stupid is better than evil, but it’s still a point worth considering.
Most of my coworkers can barely make it through their own tasks without fucking something up
This is a problem with the company you work for, not your coworkers. I’m sure if they were paid more, were given more agency, and received better training, they’d be better elployees
Either that or the reason they purposefully hire meth-addled freaks is because they want desperate people who won’t fight for any of those things.
Source: Friend who works in a warehouse and has coworkers who are obviously there to get a paycheck to afford their fix and then move on. It’s the company culture. They could choose to hire better people, or mentor the people who could grow, they don’t.
No, they’re just idiots. Myself and others have had the same training and responsibilities and do fine. It’s not that difficult of a job.
Didn’t say they run it. The person who runs it can be simply another employee. It’s just there are no outside investors and everyone has a vote on the board. You put someone in charge you trust but everyone as a whole has a say in big picture stuff with the person at the top being day to day and being held accountable to employees and not investors.
Capitalism fundamentally changes the relationship between workers and their work. One takes the value they create and gives it to someone else. One doesn’t.
But why would this employee put in that more work than anybody else? Just to get the same amount of compensation as anybody else? I certainly wouldn’t put up with all the complications of leading a bunch of people without being paid extra.
@lightnsfw @dingus
You really think the people currently running your company are any different from those other coworkers?
Yes I think so, because the people running the company have no interest in listening to the positions of the workers, especially if it makes them less money.
When the people working in the company have a democratic vote, they at least have a choice and don’t have big mistakes dictated from upon high.
At least then, the workers can agree they all made a shitty mistake together. It doesn’t mean workers are infallible. All humans are fallible. All humans make mistakes. The difference is the power dynamic, nothing else.
I think they have education related to the running of a large company whereas most of my coworkers barely made it through their IT certs and have some of the stupidest takes regarding how things should be done I’ve ever heard in my life.
if you dont raise your children to be adults, they won’t act like adults when they grow up. A revolution would mean people learning entirely new skills, like making decisions in the workplace. Most workers have no agency, theyre treated like machines, so I dont expect people raised in that society to know how to run a completely different one from scratch. Revolution is a process, it has to be built. Keep shitting on your coworkers tho, im sure its a productive activity
They can’t even learn to do the tasks they are expected to do now. Even with frequent coaching. How the fuck can you expect them to learn to make business decisions?
Most of my coworkers can barely make it through their own tasks without fucking something up, let alone actually having input on how the business is run.
Your coworkers aren’t incompetent. Your coworkers are just half-assing at work because they correctly realize they’re not going to get paid more if they actually tried.
So they’re just selfish assholes that don’t mind creating more work for everyone else and potentially putting people’s safety at risk? That doesn’t do anything to convince me that they should have a say in how the business is run. If they’re not happy with their pay they can go elsewhere.
Every single job I’ve had was made worse by management. Not just worse for us, but worse for customers/clients as well. I have zero faith in management, I have complete faith in the people actually working on the floor knowing what would be best to do on the floor.
Now you ask about “not making it fail immediately” which to me gives me an impression of thinking it is still a business that needs to be grown.
I imagine a lot of shop floors would agree their time and resources were better spent elsewhere. No one needs Funko pops, I don’t doubt those workers would find something better to do
I, a socialist, hate markets. They are simplistic and functional artifacts of the available way to pass information.
Cool, what is your preferred replacement and does everyone in this thread agree? You have managed to continue criticism but not offer a replacement yet again.
The ole can have criticism without perfect solutions response. Cool, how useless and pointless of you.
I, a socialist don’t. I think however they should be tightly regulated. And kept away from basic necessitys.
Markets have proven time and again to only serve oligarchs, or create oligarchs to serve. When left to their own wont. If we can choose to participate or not in the markets. Then there is no issue with markets. When we’re slaves to the markets as we currently are however. No one is free.
Markets have lots of issues; you just named a bunch. Markets are subject to all kinds of hidden information manipulation contrary to prompting non cooperation and solving for individual maximums via exploitation like you literally outlined. Your wish to magically regulate them is just going to be corrupted.
So, you would never trade with someone else something you have for something they have? You want to be entirely self sufficient?
If this isn’t true, why do think markets serve no purpose?
Within the context of one person’s career, socialism on its own can do quite a bit to transform people’s relationship to their workplace. No longer would your job be at risk because you’ve all done too well and it’s to “cut labor costs” while profits soar. No longer would you be worried about automating away your job, instead you’d gladly automate your job away and then the whole organization could lower how much work needs to be done as things get more and more automated.
Democracy would massively improve work-life balance.
Of course this comes with problems, all of which exist in capitalism (how do we care for people outside of these organizations who won’t have access to work, for example). But if I had to choose between market socialism and capitalism, the choice is pretty clear, and it’s something much easier for liberals to stomach.
The idea of centrally planned economy ignores the lessons of the past. Bronze Age empires and recent examples all display universal inability to adjust to changes.
It’s the same magical thinking as the blind belief in market forces exhibits.
Priests of “invisible hand of market” ignore information exchange speed limits and market inertia, believing that markets will just magically fix everything in time for it to matter.
Preachers of central planning ignore information exchange speed limits and market inertia (and yes, there is a market, as long as there is goods and services exchange, however indirect) by believing they will have all the relevant information and the capacity to process it in time for it to matter.
Neither is true. Neither school of thought even attempted to show itself to be true.
They will still sell the products they produce in a marketplace.
There is no rule that states they have to sell squat in a marketplace. They could, but they also couldn’t. That’s the whole point of the workers owning the means of production - the workers involved makes those deicisions, not a capitalist or bureaucratic parasite class.
How would that even work.
It’s very very easy to do something like have a capitalist system where business and the rich are taxed. But you aren’t on about that.
You could divide everything up today. But with change and new business ideas that system will never work. You think the people would want to invest in new automation, new ways of working, new industries. If it means growth and job losses? No never. Just look at the western car industry, or any big government owned industry. People don’t want change, even things like running a factory 24/7 instead of a nice 9-5 is difficult.
Then Japan’s comes along and does all this new stuff and puts most of the western workforce out of business.
Under capitalism automation benefits the owners (on a small timescale, they worsen the totroptf) under socialism time saving just means the population has more time.
That is why workers currently push against automation under capitalism.
Not a market socialist though, just a socialist.
Marxists do hate Markets though
We love oversimplifying generalizations that make us look like absolute buffoons though.
At least according to trustworthy sources, i.e. your gut feeling.
/s
