Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism.
aesc@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months agoI’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.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
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.
aesc@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
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.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Unions are inferior to direct ownership, and your only argument against direct ownership so far seems to be that you can’t count on people to vote on your interests, yet for some reason you ignore that Capitalists exclusively have their own interests at heart and don’t care about workers.
aesc@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
No, I completely acknowledge capitalists largely care about their investments in capital and don’t really care so much about workers as long as they are working. But at least I know where their incentives are, what they’re trying to do. It’s difficult to predict how people are going to act if you don’t know what their incentives are, and if you can’t predict how people are going to act then your life is less stable.
And “direct ownership” meaning like a co-op or whatever, nothing wrong with that. Collective ownership of a business is totally fine within a capitalist economy. There’s still a concept of ownership. I wish more businesses were run that way. Well, a lot of start-ups kinda are now that I think about it. People get some pay in stock options and the like. I think unions should own more shares in a company so the incentives of both the union and management are aligned to make the company money, but it’s hard to get the right balance.