Comment on Microsoft to lay off about 9,000 employees in latest round [Seattle Times]
theangriestbird@beehaw.org 2 days agoThis is how I think about socialism when arguing for it in a modern context. Capitalism is a game where we compete and there are winners and losers. Okay, I mean Americans love competition and games, so that’s all well and good. But games have RULES, and if we are playing football and someone gets hurt, we don’t just dump them in the trash and keep playing. We pause or stop the game, we make sure they are doing okay, we get them to medical care if they need it. Then and only then do we resume playing the game. This is what socialism is in my mind - we still have a free market and use competition to breed innovation, but we also make sure everyone is doing okay before we continue the game. As is, it seems like our fearless leaders think that if you lose at the game, you deserve to die.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Right, socialism doesn’t necessarily say that markets themselves are evil, but rather that the workers should have direct control over their own workplaces and reap the value of their labor instead of being siphoned off to a parasite class. A socialist business owned by the workers would still be selling their goods in the marketplace. It’s just a fairer distribution of control of the company through democracy and a fairer distribution of the value generated by the labor.
As I often say, it’s not like Jeff Bezos can deliver every Amazon package or manage every AWS server on his own. No, the value he has is leeched from all the workers who make his business function. Without the workers, he is effectively useless on his own.