Comment on If you want communism, you can start a commune
redempt@lemmy.world 2 months agoco-ops get outcompeted by corporations. this is a capitalist economy we have, and so it’s very geared towards competitive profit seeking. co-ops provide better worker protections, better working conditions, better stability and resilience, and better products. corporations are better at being single-mindedly profit driven, which is what our economic structure rewards.
communism is not a vague concept, but I’m not an expert and it’s not my ideology; I’m a democratic socialist.
it’s important to remember that under capitalism a company is very much motivated to curtail workers’ rights and anything that would threaten the status quo. I find “just start a commune” to be an unhelpful argument because the system is rigged against it, which is why they tend to fail.
capitalism is not markets, nor is it free trade. capitalism is the specific system where there is an owning class that dictates how the economy is run (CEOs / shareholders), thereby holding that power away from the working class, whose lives are dictated by their decisions. I see no reason for the economy to be organized this way, which is why I believe democratic organization (either central planning or a more bottom-up approach) is an improvement.
if you’re genuinely interested in finding a system better than what we have, I don’t think arguing with strangers on the Internet will accomplish what you want. I think Second Thought makes some very good videos on these topics, though he seems to have some authoritarian leanings I don’t agree with.
DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Remember that profit and created value go hand in hand, or at least, our legislation should make sure it does.
True, but corporations have to generate profit for shareholders. This is the profit that should be used for improving worker conditions etc. by communes. Also, some worker protections should be legislated leveling the playing field even more.
At least here on Lemmy it seems to be. Kinda makes no difference to me if someone has the secrets to successful communism if I can’t see them.
Within the company, sure. Outside, it has motivation to hinder any competition and this has to be prevented by govt. regardless of whether the competition is a co-op or a corp.
I am not accepting this without concrete examples. How is it rigged?
That is a misconception. Any individual CEO/shareholder have very little control of how the economy is run. And while they may cooperate in some areas and situations, they are ultimately competitors most of the time. If you make the simple assumption that they chase profit, than they have even less control. I think they are far closer to just another cog in the machine then to any dictators. That is the appeal of capitalism, as long as you align your goals with profit for corporations, they will fulfill your goals with ruthless efficiency.
redempt@lemmy.world 2 months ago
anticompetitive and anti labor practices are fundamental to capitalism - you can regulate them all you want, companies will always find ways around it. wage theft (overtime violations, unpaid or underpaid wages, off the clock violations, etc) significantly outweigh all other forms of theft (larceny, robbery, vehicle theft, etc) combined.
in addition, something like planned obsolescence (companies intentionally making their products less long-lived so you have to buy more of them) cannot be completely prevented with regulation, since companies can always choose not to make their product better in a particular way, or no better than the absolute minimum requirement.
profit measures value extracted, not value generated. providing a service to people (postal service, healthcare) produces a measurable amount of value which is not directly profit. you can always increase profit by paying workers less and charging more for your product, and these both get more effective the more you have cornered the market. a high amount of profit tends to mean a huge amount of money being extracted from communities and working individuals.
capitalism is competitive, and competitions have winners. you can make all the regulations you want, but even when everyone “plays fair” someone will eventually emerge on top.
competition is massively inefficient; you have no incentive to share anything, so huge amounts of redundant research and work gets done without public benefit. I see collaboration as the far greater social force, since it prevents us from undermining each other. an economy which is based on and rewards collaboration rather than competition would be better able to provide for everyone’s needs and ensure nobody is left behind.
DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 2 months ago
In my experience, these anti labor practices are not a thing where I live.
Funnily enough, the corp I work for is quite obsessed with making products last longer. How is that possible? Simple. We provide service contracts together with purchases, so customers pay monthly service fee and we have to keep the products functional. So it saves us money (and increases profit) to make repair costs low. You just need to think a bit outside the box.
Profit is a function of the value created vs resources consumed to produce the value. As long as there are worker protections legislated, that is just efficiency.
What are you even talking about? Yes, the most efficient companies emerge on top which is exactly what we want.
That is true.
The issue is building such an economy. Most people will always pursue their selfish gains. Capitalism channels this by making “creating valuable things we can sell to people for minimal cost” result in large profits. Where the selfishness would show up in a cooperation based system you describe would be much more difficult to predict since it depends on the details of your system. But the results are likely to be worse exactly because it is hard to predict and therefore regulate.
redempt@lemmy.world 2 months ago
as always, this boils down to mistrust of your fellow man. capitalism makes us more selfish, it rewards greed, that is what it incentivizes and so of course people act greedier. people want to help each other, they want to make the world a better place to live, and nobody should be forced to work how someone else says they should with no say in it. without competition, people have to pick up the slack with altruism and actual passion and care. if we reward collaboration, if we incentivize kindness and caring and actual benefit, those are the things we will see more of. as it stands, we subsidize everything that is killing us.
the goal of an economy is not to produce endlessly, as much as possible. capitalism is extremely growth oriented. that’s about all it’s good for: rapid growth, at the expense of equity and workers’ autonomy. we no longer need this growth and competition; we need to downscale and produce less. the goal of an economy should be to provide what people need, as seamlessly as possible.
everything you’re saying speaks to a lack of understanding of the world around us. I think you can describe this “ideal” form of capitalism, but it’s nothing like what we actually see in the real world. companies are extremely exploitative, they do ignore or lobby against regulations as much as possible, they exploit workers as much as they can get away with.
the fundamental problem is that ethics are not profitable. ethics are a luxury, and you can always find a way to cut costs if you’re willing to be unethical. an economy is not a machine to squeeze optimum efficiency out of, it is made of people with thoughts and feelings and ambitions, and all of its externalities come back to these same people.
if we want to have an ethical society, ruthless pursuit of efficiency is about the worst possible way to get there, but it is the ultimate goal of capitalism. this efficiency is not for us, though; it is efficiency of accruing as much wealth (and thereby power) as possible.
I don’t believe any strict power hierarchy (like the employer-employee relationship or the parent-child relationship) can ever be fully ethical. we may sometimes deem them necessary, but I think we really need to think twice about making someone subject to another person’s will. workers in a corporation have no say at all in how their workplace is run, what their duties are, or how they carry them out. for eight or more hours per day, people do not control their own decisions, and I think this is the most egregious effect of capitalism.
this is again going to come down to lack of faith in human nature. I believe that people are fundamentally good, that they care about the world around them and want to improve it for themselves and the people they love. they can sometimes be selfish, but they are far more giving than we ever give them credit for. there is immense trauma throughout the world from war and abuse, but there is even greater capacity for kindness. it’s easy to believe that people are fundamentally cruel when the world around us is cruel, but the average person has no say in how it operates; this system of incentives rewards whoever is most willing to act immorally to undercut their competitors, essentially guaranteeing that the least ethical individuals end up in charge of everything. you can see this in the leadership of virtually every major corporation.
I believe the average person is far more hardworking, caring, loving, and kind than the people who run our economy, and if all of us collaborated and organized together, we could be far more efficient and beneficial to one another than our current system allows. the more we do this, the easier it becomes to be kind. after all, we know that the leading causes of crime and abuse are all situational. we will need unprecedented solidarity, and only by uplifting everyone out of poverty can we get there.