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this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Showerthoughts
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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. In Socialist systems, you can absolutely choose where you want to work, explain the opposite, why you think they can't. That's an unfounded claim with nothing backing it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't matter what it benefits, it's still Socialism at work.
Secondly, you have no real concept of what constitutes a Worker vs an owner. Someone with power to give promotions is still a worker, the difference comes from unequal ownership. Even if they have more power as elected, the other workers can overturn them.
Is someone with the power to grant promotions or dock pay not a representative of the owner, who has all those powers? Sure if the workers all own shares then they are also owners, but hiring and firing are actions performed by owners or their representatives. Workers perform labor.
You're off.
In Capitalism, we refer to the managerial class as Labor Aristocrats, they often side with Capitalists to keep their lifestyle but are ultimately still laborers and not owners.
In Socialism, a democratically accountable manager or HR representative is just that, democratically accountable. Even though they are involved in managing, if they do a bad job, the Workers can oust them, or even do away with the position entirely.
Ownership entirely changes the power imbalance.