The bias is justified. The left is correct. Markets don't create wealth without necessarily simultaneously creating poverty
Socialists don't hate markets, they hate workers not having any power or democratic choice in how they interact in the market.
Workers owning the means of production just means the workers are doing the same work but they are in ownership of the factory and the profits. They will still sell the products they produce in a marketplace.
Within the context of one person's career, socialism on its own can do quite a bit to transform people's relationship to their workplace. No longer would your job be at risk because you've all done too well and it's to "cut labor costs" while profits soar. No longer would you be worried about automating away your job, instead you'd gladly automate your job away and then the whole organization could lower how much work needs to be done as things get more and more automated.
Democracy would massively improve work-life balance.
Of course this comes with problems, all of which exist in capitalism (how do we care for people outside of these organizations who won't have access to work, for example). But if I had to choose between market socialism and capitalism, the choice is pretty clear, and it's something much easier for liberals to stomach.
Not saying I'm in favor of it, but there's still market socialism out there as a political stance
I think the better way would be a centrally planned economy for some goods (electricity, "normal" food, health, ...) and something more "free" for the rest of the market. Bread has a marked price but a PS5 doesn't.
The idea of centrally planned economy ignores the lessons of the past. Bronze Age empires and recent examples all display universal inability to adjust to changes.
It’s the same magical thinking as the blind belief in market forces exhibits.
Priests of “invisible hand of market” ignore information exchange speed limits and market inertia, believing that markets will just magically fix everything in time for it to matter.
Preachers of central planning ignore information exchange speed limits and market inertia (and yes, there is a market, as long as there is goods and services exchange, however indirect) by believing they will have all the relevant information and the capacity to process it in time for it to matter.Neither is true. Neither school of thought even attempted to show itself to be true.
I, a socialist, hate markets. They are simplistic and functional artifacts of the available way to pass information.
So, you would never trade with someone else something you have for something they have? You want to be entirely self sufficient?
If this isn't true, why do think markets serve no purpose?
No because I don't give you a gift only if you give me one. It's not a transaction. They are gifts.
...but you turned it into a semantic point. If I farm sheep and you bake bread, it's a market when I trade you wool for bread. If trade even as basic as this can't occur then you're relying on everyone to be self-sufficient.
The alternative is you're expecting everyone to put everything they produce into a kitty which is distributed to all, and I think that is a sure fire recipe for everyone to go hungry and for society to stagnate. There's little incentive to be productive, and no incentive to be inventive.
They will still sell the products they produce in a marketplace.
There is no rule that states they have to sell squat in a marketplace. They could, but they also couldn't. That's the whole point of the workers owning the means of production - the workers involved makes those deicisions, not a capitalist or bureaucratic parasite class.
Do they actually trust their coworkers to run the company without tanking it almost immediatly? Most of my coworkers can barely make it through their own tasks without fucking something up, let alone actually having input on how the business is run.
Most of my coworkers can barely make it through their own tasks without fucking something up
This is a problem with the company you work for, not your coworkers. I'm sure if they were paid more, were given more agency, and received better training, they'd be better elployees
Either that or the reason they purposefully hire meth-addled freaks is because they want desperate people who won't fight for any of those things.
Source: Friend who works in a warehouse and has coworkers who are obviously there to get a paycheck to afford their fix and then move on. It's the company culture. They could choose to hire better people, or mentor the people who could grow, they don't.
thats because they want addicts (of any variety, not just drugs) cuz their labor is cheap. its a form of exploitation
No, they're just idiots. Myself and others have had the same training and responsibilities and do fine. It's not that difficult of a job.
i shall surely reap the rewards of working at the same level as these irredeemably dumb people. then i will prove my point online or something
I'm several levels up from them. But I have to deal with the problems they cause constantly. I did start at their level though.
I didn't say all I said most. It's really probably not even most just a large enough portion of them that there's always some issue going on caused by their negligence.
Most of my coworkers can barely make it through their own tasks
I guess you haven't met many CEOs, then.
if you dont raise your children to be adults, they won't act like adults when they grow up. A revolution would mean people learning entirely new skills, like making decisions in the workplace. Most workers have no agency, theyre treated like machines, so I dont expect people raised in that society to know how to run a completely different one from scratch. Revolution is a process, it has to be built. Keep shitting on your coworkers tho, im sure its a productive activity
They can't even learn to do the tasks they are expected to do now. Even with frequent coaching. How the fuck can you expect them to learn to make business decisions?
You've clearly never worked close with anyone making business decisions in the real world.
I used to work for a food type company and the way they decided to import and sell stuff locally was if the board of directors (the CEO who inherited the company from daddy + his siblings) liked the item. They hired someone, my coworker, to actually run the market tests and everything and then promptly ignored any suggestion she had to make about the viability of this product on the local market, instead relegating her to a busser that was in charge of ordering the samples they decided they wanted.
I remember one item nobody liked (they would give us the remaining samples in the break room like some dogs getting the leftovers), but one of the siblings liked it and they got that close to putting it on the market because of it.
I have so many stories from there. At the end of the year they would sell the soon to be expired stock to the employees for like half the price. On paper it was half (you're just giving money back to your employer so fuck them I stole as much food as I could), but the person who actually took the money was super nice and often gave us further discounts. For them the difference was like a decimal in accounting.
They announced these sales by email with the time and date. And in 2020, the year of covid, when half the workforce was working from home, they made the sale as usual. I learned afterwards that on that morning, the siblings who owned the company went and parked their cars right in front of the warehouse where the sale took place, and filled the trunk with as much stuff as they could. Then 2 hours later the sale happened and there was almost nothing left.
Technically legal but a fucking shitty thing to do lol, your job is to have a blurry monitor and pretend to do Excel sheets and you drive a Porsche, I think you have the means to load up your car at the store like a grown adult if you need to.
same way we expect students in 9th grade to be capable of more complicated tasks once they're in 12th grade. The nature of labor in capitalist countries is to sort out wheat from chaffe. "Good" workers become managers (although this is theoretical, ive had plenty of shitty managers), leaving the "bad" workers down at the bottom. This how the economy works right now, but it doesnt always have to. For example, unions sometimes have a probation period where you work as a temp, then join the union after a month or two. This gives you time to learn the job, before you have a say in how things are organized.
I have more thoughts, but im working rn 😝
You must need a better job. I've had plenty of workplaces where I could count on everyone around me.
You know, the hiring manager usually has something to do with the quality of people hired. Maybe you could talk to them instead?
If I made my hiring manager worried more about quality I wouldn't be hired
Most of my coworkers can barely make it through their own tasks without fucking something up, let alone actually having input on how the business is run.
Your coworkers aren't incompetent. Your coworkers are just half-assing at work because they correctly realize they're not going to get paid more if they actually tried.
So they're just selfish assholes that don't mind creating more work for everyone else and potentially putting people's safety at risk? That doesn't do anything to convince me that they should have a say in how the business is run. If they're not happy with their pay they can go elsewhere.
It's not selfish to not go above and beyond what you need to do to help a business that doesn't care about you.
Where did I say anything about helping the business? I don't expect them to go above and beyond, when they don't do their assigned tasks correctly their coworkers then have to deal with the problems this causes getting bitched at by angry customers and such. On top of that some things if not done properly can create a safety issue. We have safeguards in place for this but again it's just extra work for someone else to redo it. This attitude is causing far more problems for their coworkers than it is for the business.
I don't expect them to go above and beyond
Yes you do, they are doing enough to get paid, and you want them to do more.
They're on track to get fired so they're not going to get paid for long. You totally ignored what I said about making all their coworkers suffer for their laziness. I thought all us workers were supposed to be in this together?
If most of the workers are on track to get fired, that sounds like a structural problem with management
It's not. Management gave them an extra 6 month freeze on any corrective action for not meeting their metrics while we gave them dozens of hours of extra training to try and help them get their shit together. A handful of them actually listened and are now doing okay. The rest didn't give a fuck and are doing as bad as ever.
If the majority of your employees are on track to be fired, that's your fault as a company.
Yea, maybe we shouldn't have been soft on them and built up so many shitty ones but they were trying to go easy due to covid. Won't happen again after these ones are gone.
You were saying that these workers were representative of workers in general.
Nothing in America stops the workers from owning the factory or the profits.
Fully stop? No, not technically. But our society makes it as close to impossible as it can be without being illegal
Bezos had to start off somewhere.
Just a small loan of a quarter million dollars from his parents to bail out his failing company, which one would be hard-pressed to imagine he would have even had that much success in founding if not for his wealthy parents supporting his upbringing as they did.
This is ironically a poor sales pitch, unless you believe that networking, marketing, and familial wealth should be what orders society.
And I never said that 250k was all they had, and in fact being able to throw that much money at something is going to be less and less of a concern the more money you have, though I don't think his family was "poor as hell" to start with. Unfortunately for this point, their finances at the time are not publicized that I can find.
It’s all part of how society works.
I said should, not does.
But he didn’t steal profits.
Back then, he used a considerable amount of money to run at a loss. Nowadays, he does steal a remarkable level of profits in the unpaid wages of the employees who keep winding up in the news for being forced to piss in bottles or drive to work in a hurricane.
Now days he’s not part of the company.
I don't think this all happened right when he retired in 2021
He started out with a small loan of $250,000 from his parents, in 90s $s if memory serves.
You're just a
aren't you? Lazy workers could be billionaires if they just tried250k is a lot of money. It was more even more money in the 90s. Its an exceptionally large amount of money to recieve for free straight from your parents.
People don't become billionaires from working. They become billionaires by taking profit from the surplus value of other peoples work.
But you believe in a propagandized version of capitaliam where everyone could equally become a billionaire, its a meritocracy, you're all jealous and lazy of our deserving overlords
250K isn't that much money. Maybe to you but to the average person it isn't.
Completely out-of-touch.
$250,000 isn't a lot of money to the average person
Thats literally 5-6x the median annual income what the hell are you smoking. That is a life changing amount of money to most of the country.
they didn't take the profit from anyone
They took that profit from the people working there. Profit is the difference between expenses and income. In order to turn a profit companies cannot pay workers what their work earns the company, there has to be a difference. In economic parlance this difference is referred to as surplus value being generated by the workers for the company. If workers were paid what they were worth then the profit margin of that company would be 0% but those people would all be paid more than they are now. Whether you think the workers are entitled to the full value of what they create is an ideological determination that I will judge you for.
1: didn't touch that for some reason
2: I am aware they ran on venture capital. You didn't address where they take their profit from now that they've achieved their dream near-monopoly status. That status that would have been impossible without their thousands of employees to begin with.
The average US worker has a salary of $46,800 (in 2018) before taxes. Assuming they saved everything and spent nothing, it would take over 5 years for them to make 250k. Again, this is before taxes, and without spending anything. For the vast majority of people, 250k is a lot of money.
Assuming you earned a million dollars every year, it would take 1000 years to earn your first billion dollars.
It's not possible to become a billionaire simply through working, as humans do not live that long.
Exactly. So you agree that it's impossible to earn and save a billion dollars just by working hard. It requires either exploiting your workers by stealing their surplus value, or by using the market by short-selling, using hedge funds, trading through illegal offshore numbered accounts, derivatives, etc.
or by using the market by short-selling, using hedge funds, trading through illegal offshore numbered accounts, derivatives, etc.
Which is also just stealing surplus value by proxy, since return on investment is simply a share of the company's profits, which is itself just surplus value, or unpaid labor.
If I don't take what my boss offers I will starve to death and die. That is not what I would consider a strong bargaining position. I can go to the other company that I could work at but they both work together to keep wages low. I have no power to improve my status because the system is rigged against me and every worker like me
So you are saying that as black people on average don't earn as much as white people they just aren't as good as them? It is their fault for the way the system treats them? I would hope that is obvious ridiculous to you. However the average person has just as much control over the capitalist system as black people have over the police state.
When you're old enough to work you'll sell it to whoever you can at whatever price they offer and you'll be lucky to get annual raises that match inflation.
i wonder if the nature and specialization of your professional work is what allows you to be like that with employers, i imagine the local cashier at mcdonalds doesn't have that kind of bargaining power
Like selling enterprise tech services? Like a fucking Salesforce account rep or salesperson? Lmao
Sales people fucking suck. They have the skill set of a con artist (apologies to any comrades who are forced to work sales to make a living).
they said they were in tech sales, their background was in cybersecurity but they made more in sales. that's the gist of it.
If wealth were actually distributed in the US equally that might be true, but as it is it's more than double what most Americans have, even ignoring inflation.
The average net worth of all American families was $746,820, according to the Federal Reserve’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, while the median figure was $121,760.
— The Average Net Worth Of Americans—By Age, Education And Ethnicity
Ok then go ahead and lend me $250k right now. I promise I'll pay it back.
I'm not telling you my business plan before I receive the money
Their wealth is based on the value of the company which is truly arbitrary
And this was supposed to be an argument for billionaires deserving their wealth?
I'm legit trying to figure out the logic that determined which of his posts he should delete and which ones he shouldn't. Seems like it's whatever was getting a lot of replies, but also some other random ones for fun?
Where do they get the business owner who wants to do that? Can it happen? Sure, it has. But thats not going to happen for most bussiness operation in capitalist countries. Can workers get the money to buy out their owners? Sure. But that's not super likely in most situations either.
Cool. Thats several people. Thats not the majority of the capitalist system.
I'm sure this dude is bullshitting literally every single thing he's saying. Anytime someone makes a reasonable reply his immediate response is to demand proof. I would not be surprised if everything this person has said is a lie.
Especially since they've said that 250k is not a lot of money, I'm inclined to agree lol
If they actually had that kind of money they would understand that unemployment is used to violently force people to take jobs that they don't want to do. It keeps their entire system afloat and they somehow have no knowledge of it? Yeah, dude is a
On their labor? Right. The bourgeois are known best as the class that does labor
Nothing stops them! except shitty wages that are not enough to pay your absurdly high bills for housing, utility and shitty food plus competition which does not treat their eorkers fair and is therefore much more profitable and can easily destroy your worker-friendly cooperative, which they totally will do because CAPITALISM
Those lazy commies with their limp wristed excuses like: "The reality of living under a capitalist society". Why don't they just eat some bootstrap stew like my pa did and die of preventable illness generating labor value for someone else?
Massive inefficient redundancies that ended up making rich people money and hurting the poor? Yeah, fuck that.
Wait...so these are your examples of people who "did something"
Do you realize that the edge every single one of these companies had over the others is the willingness to do whatever it takes to extract as much value from labor for the least amount of money, right?
You are just making the case for the complete destruction of capitalism. Only soulless psychopaths are rewarded here. Winning is not beating these people at the same psychotic game that they're playing.
This is the reasoning that leads to "if you think medicines are too expensive, stop buying them" with much the same problem of it not being quite that simple for the majority of humanity, whose "choices" are not as unconstrained as the ones you're familiar with.
I know you deleted your earlier nonsense, but I saw some of it first, so I know how out of touch you are. You were wrong about how much wealth people have, but even after having that corrected, here you are with "It's just how the world works", another incorrect assertion that might describe your experience of the world, but is unrepresentative for humanity as a whole.
Most people don't have the luxuries you so clearly take for granted. Turning down exploitative employment is only an option for those with money in reserve. Most people do not have that. Going somewhere else means separation from family and friends—easy enough for the thoroughly unlikable, but community is important to most members of a social species. And, anyway, that's assuming there aren't legal restrictions like immigration controls. As I said before, most lives are more constrained than yours, and that isn't because those people are any less deserving. That is how the world works.
I'm going to suggest you read the article "Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future" by Edward Luttwak. Don't worry, it's just a warning, and it starts:—
That capitalism unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth is an old-hat truth
so it's not commie propaganda. But it might relieve you of some of your misconceptions, since you clearly aren't listening to us here. Of course, you could just carry on regardless, but then it'll be just far too clear that you're not acting in good faith.
We don't allow slave labor like communism does.
You might want to recheck that constitution.
Oh, no, what am I saying? You don't want to do that, because that would once more point out that you're clueless in your assertions. Now I don't want to read any more of them. And I'm free to turn you down, right?
Oh you don’t like being exploited? Well, you’re free to starve and die instead! Freedom!
We don't allow slave labor
Huh, really? Someone should let Nestle know.
The rich and the poor are equally free to sleep under a bridge at night.
Everybody is equally free to turn down a job when they need money for food, housing, medical care and other necessities of basic life.
No one cares if you "buy into" anything. It exists whether you believe it or not.
The entire point of keeping unemployment at certain levels is so capitalists can dictate wages and responsibilities. It's not a secret. Bourgeois media openly panics whenever unemployment levels get too low.
Right sure you do. I definitely believe you.
You can believe whatever you want but that doesn't change how the real world works outside your head.
Sure, if that's even true, then good for you.
Again, you can believe whatever you want but that doesn't change how the real world works outside your head.
Cool good for you (if that's even true)
Anyway, in the very real world that we live in, unemployment is kept at certain levels so capitalists can dictate wages and responsibilities. It's not a secret. Bourgeois media openly panics whenever unemployment levels get too low.
Yes, they are panicking because people have bargaining power to get higher wages. Are you still not connecting the dots there?
I have a skill and I am not struggling like some of my other comrades are. That does not make me blind to the purpose of unemployment or to the fact that if everyone in the world had my skill set then that would mean there are a lot of important jobs that aren't getting done, a fact that, curiously, has completely escaped you.
No, they are concerned about having to pay people more, because that cuts directly into their own profits. They are not more concerned about inflation then they are about their own loss of profit from having to pay workers more, unless they require so few laborers to run their business that inflation does actually cut into their profits more.
Feds are increasing interest rates to increase unemployment. They directly stated that. You can Google it if you don't believe me.
Quite a bit has escaped you and it is endlessly entertaining to me.
Labor is the largest expense of a business wtf do you mean a wage increase "doesn't cut into profits" lmao
Businesses had an excuse to raise prices so they did, end of story. That's not complicated in the slightest.
The Fed is doing what they said they're trying to do, increase unemployment rates.
Have a good one.
I try to tell myself that most of the people bought into capitalism can be rehabilitated, maybe some just need to spend a few years breaking rocks to get it through their heads that other people fucking exist on this planet.
Reading your comments has made me re-evaluate that
I already know you're an insufferable lib you don't need to dig the hole any deeper
The problem with notable examples is that they're pretty much never representative examples.
Tesla is not close to bigger than GM. They only make consumer vehicles and maybe a model of semi truck but I don't think that's being produced yet, while GM has been making consumer cars in addition to commercial and military vehicles for decades. They might be valued as more but that doesn't really say anything in practical terms.
The system actively discourages that. It was tried in the 70s. Banks wouldn't work with coops because they were diffrent. Other companies wouldn't work with them because they didn't being as high a ROI. They were more efficient and stable, but under capitalism none of that matters.
Did... did I say they couldn't? I think this continues to be a misunderstanding of what socialists believe.
The hell of capitalism is the firm, not the fact that it has a boss
How would that even work.
It's very very easy to do something like have a capitalist system where business and the rich are taxed. But you aren't on about that.
You could divide everything up today. But with change and new business ideas that system will never work. You think the people would want to invest in new automation, new ways of working, new industries. If it means growth and job losses? No never. Just look at the western car industry, or any big government owned industry. People don't want change, even things like running a factory 24/7 instead of a nice 9-5 is difficult.
Then Japan's comes along and does all this new stuff and puts most of the western workforce out of business.
Under capitalism automation benefits the owners (on a small timescale, they worsen the totroptf) under socialism time saving just means the population has more time.
That is why workers currently push against automation under capitalism.
Not a market socialist though, just a socialist.
Are people investing in new automation currently because I've been using the same crappy tools for over 10 years now and they keep getting crappier.
Oh yeah we automate creative work now, the one thing that could still be a cheap hobby.
Marxists do hate Markets though, that's part of why Marx advocated for abolition of Money. Over time, of course, but that's the entire point of Labor-Vouchers.
To paraphrase this cool guy named Ernesto: Its not our fault reality is marxist
You'll be happy to know there's a social media site just like lemmy run by capitalists. It has all the benefits that capitalist ownership provides.
middle class between what class and what class? the rich class and the having a great time class?
I know Hexbear skews very, very liberal. I haven't spent much time in other lemmy places.
"Me saying that if I had a genie in a bottle I could marginally improve the world"
uncorrupt government
I think you meant "free real estate for the CIA and their a puppet dictators".
It's what happens every time another country doesn't want to sell their natural resources for pennies.
I think you will find any place thats well moderated and cracks down on bigotry and hatespeech will skew left.
Weird how that is, huh?
All types of governance and economic systems are susceptible to despotism.
It takes a constantly educated and involved population to fight it.
Exactly. We could also eliminate carbon emissions by moving everything via unicorns and fairy dust.
yes
in here
