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 agoWorkers 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 9 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 9 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.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
Workers will act in their own self interests, only this time everyone is a Worker.
Direct ownership can look like a co-op, yes, that’s a Socialist entity. It can also look like state run industry, or a network of Mutual Aid, or a structure like FOSS.
aesc@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
It’s a socialist model of organization, but if it’s operating in a capitalist economy, it benefits capitalism as a model to run an economy, not socialism.
Also no, not everyone is a worker. Not everyone is equal. Someone (or a group of someones) has the power to hire/fire, or dock pay to discourage poor performance, or grant promotions to incentivize superior performance. Someone has the power to alter the distribution of resources, because once a group of humans reaches over 150 or so they form hierarchies because it’s just too difficult to keep peer relationships with more than about 150 people. So someone is given power to speak for more than oneself, they speak for the group, and therefore have more power than a person who speaks for only oneself. That person is not a worker, now they are a politician, or a bureaucrat, or a manager, or a chieftain, or something, they are not like the others, they have more power.