Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism.
aesc@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months agoFine. Factories are capital. If you want manufactured goods and the freedom to get a job you want more than you want to work in a factory then you want capitalism.
No.
All tools are Capital. If Workers collectively share ownership of industry, there is a free flow of labor to where you wish to apply it. Are you under the mistaken impression that Socialism is when someone picks where you can work? You sure you aren’t talking about Capitalism?
I’m quite sure we’ve outlawed the direct ownership of people so, yeah, in capitalism no one tells you where to work, they pay you to work. There is a job market. In planned economies, someone tells you where to work. Planned economies are an expression of socialism. On the scale of individual firms, capitalism doesn’t require them to be organized in any particular way. If you want to run a business as a cooperative, where the workers own the company, you can certainly do that in the United States if you want. But if a collective tells you where to work, then someone is still telling you where to work. Please explain how you’d do socialism without anyone telling anyone else where to work.
In Capitalism, Capitalists ultimately decide where you can work, as opposed to being democratically decided by the Workers. Pointing to something that can happen in both Socialism and in Capitalism, ie Planning from a state, is not the dig against workers collectively owning the Means of Production that you think it is.
Why do you think it’s better that Workers have no say, as opposed to having democratic ownership of industry? I personally value freedom and power to the people, not to people focused on enriching their own personal lives well beyond that of normalcy, so I support leftist organization.
Workers do have a say. They own their labor. If they are educated and organized enough they can bring a corporation to its knees, because corporations can’t do anything with their capital without labor. Just because I’m arguing capitalism has merits doesn’t mean I don’t think there should be strong unions, or shared ownership of companies, or regulation of markets.
I don’t want to do a job I don’t want to do just because the majority voted that I should do it either, really. I can count on people to vote for their own self-interest, but I can’t count on them to vote for mine.
Eldritch@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Capitalism keeps people from the jobs they want. Literally. If the job you want can’t meet your basic needs. Capitalism falsely posits that it’s because the job has no value. Rather than the value of it not being generally understood or valued by others.
Capitalism is still good at making menial valueless work to under pay you for however.
aesc@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
I’m not saying it gets you the job you want, I’m saying no one can make you do a job you don’t want to do. People can incentivize you, with money. And I think collective organizing and bargaining is important to make things fair. I hear German firms have a union representative on the board, that seems pretty smart.
And it needs to be regulated. The government needs to force firms to pay to mitigate harmful externalities as well as incentivize positive externalities. And there should be social programs to take some of the edge off market fluctuations, like free or cheap training, help finding employment, cushioning some of the effects of market fluctuations for the average person.
gerryflap@feddit.nl 9 months ago
I’m struggling to see what alternative you are envisioning here, but maybe I’m misunderstanding you. People and companies pay for the work they need done. When not enough people do that work, the salaries paid for it will increase. When there’s a large pool of people willing to do a job but not enough people and companies who need that job done, the salaries drop. The capitalist job market, from a theoretical perspective, seems to regulate the job market such that people choose jobs that are desired by society.
Now there’s obviously some downsides to this, because the gap between income levels is way too large in my opinion. Regulation is required so the CEO’s don’t earn like 200 times as much as the cleaning people. But in the end any system that exists needs to make sure that people do work that benefits society. And certain jobs are just more desired by society than others. Not everyone who likes drawing can become an artist, because in the end society just doesn’t need many artists. So any system should penalize people who try to do a job that society simply doesn’t need at that moment and incentivize jobs that have shortages.
Eldritch@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The alternative is simple. But again obscured by saturation of capitalist propaganda. To start we, in the US especially, need to move towards social democracy. Single player health care, Austrian style public housing, etc.
If we provide people with a basic level of food and shelter. They will be free to work or not. And if you aren’t free enough to be able to choose not to work, you aren’t actually free. And here’s the kicker. Even though people wouldn’t have to work, they still would. Only now capitalist wouldn’t be able to use starvation and homelessness as a stick to beat people over the head with. In order to get them to accept traditionally bad capitalist deals.
Better still, entrepreneurs would be able to chase any business ideas they had. Artists would be able to persue their art. Musicians able to persue their music. If you wanted to spend your days gardening and landscaping a public plot. That capitalist deemed had no value. Just for your own enjoyment and the enjoyment of others. You can do that.
Pretty simple actually. Capitalists have pushed for the better part of a century to stop or demonize any progress towards communist evolution. And the other group, the revolutionaries have done nothing but give it a bad name.