I’d rather work for the money I can negotiate than whatever some communist official says I need. I’d rather have real labor unions representing me than unions populated entirely by Party officials.
Capitalism isn’t perfect. But capitalism with good social safety nets is a better economic system than anything else we have developed. “We have nothing to lose but our chains?” Sure, if you want some tyrant replacing fair work for fair pay with work at the barrel of a gun and labor under the eye of the secret police.
The professional class already can negotiate for pay and working conditions because they’re hard to replace. For example, I negotiated my salary up by 5k at the start and receive good annual raises because my skillset/expertise is hard to replace.
We also saw during the great resignation how employers were forced to pay better because they were having trouble finding people.
If employers have a credible threat of not being able to find people, they will have no choice but to offer better pay and better working conditions. As for how we achieve that, I’m personally in favor of a few policies:
YIMBYism and land value taxes to solve the housing crisis, so that average folks aren’t so squeezed on cost of housing
Universal basic income to decouple paying rent and putting food on that table from jobs
Public works/employment programs for activities that produce positive externalities, e.g., subsidies for FOSS software, more public research grants, subsidies for rewilding efforts, etc.
The general idea being that if you don’t desperately need your employer to maintain a basic level of existence, they will have much less leverage over you. If you can credibly threaten to leave and go plant trees or write FOSS software or pursue higher education, your boss will need to offer you more.
Bonus point as, once housing is cheaper and once jobs pay better, people can have more in their savings accounts. This alone makes them less dependent as well, because they can survive longer and more comfortably without a job. For instance, if my boss mistreated me today, I could quit and coast on savings for a while until I found a new job. Those living paycheck-to-paycheck are living in a constant state of exploitation that is extremely ripe for exploitation. Destroy the desperation and you destroy the exploitability.
Is it fair pay though? Ofc nobody wants a tyrant. but we should have unions fighting for the rights of workers in all spaces, shouldn’t we? Just a thought. (Assuming they’re not employer-controlled ofc)
Even in a right to work for less state, it’s easier to negotiate with employers for fair pay than it is to do so in a communist society. Communist societies may generally be more equal, but they’re equal at a far lower level of income, and in reality it just means trapping everyone at the subsistence level of work drudgery instead of offering many a way to gain greater affluence.
Your description matches the current situation more than the system socialists imagine. Most of the people wishing for communism don’t wish for what you describe. Those people usually wish for a system where the working class wields the power in a way Marx wrote about.
So many peoples view on communism is shaped by the same populist propaganda we had since the 40ies.
Yes, but that wish for Marx’s vision fails when it hits reality, where in reality, institution of communism or socialism essentially requires a totalitarian form of government
No, communism is a problem. There is an inherent flaw in the entire concept, which is entrusting the peoples needs to a select, “temporarily” empowered few. History has proven, over and over again that hierarchy is the problem. People don’t obtain obscene amounts of power and then…use it for good and then give it up. They use the power to be powerful. And the people surrounding the powerful start catering to the whims of that powerful person in the hopes that they can benefit from that power, which encourages unjust thinking and behavior. Look at any billionaire and see how people treat them. People come out of the woodwork to tell them they’re geniuses, pretend they’re right all the time, and indulge their every whim. It warps their brains. Communism relies on this incredibly flawed concept to…benefit the people?
It’s the problem in politics, it’s the problem in policing, it’s the problem in capitalism, it’s the problem in people. Any system based and reliant on hierarchy is doomed to fail, especially when that hierarchy is “temporary” and meant to establish “the people’s” will and best suit their needs. There is no top down solution, the only solution is bottom up.
Communism does work on a communal level - it’s no coincidence they’re rooted in the same word - but it absolutely needs a level of accountability at the top that can only come from actually knowing the people they’re responsible for. Once you get beyond a couple of hundred people in a community at most, and it stops being an “everyone knows everyone” kind of thing, communism is just far too susceptible to corruption.
My gaming group takes a somewhat communist approach to starting out in survival games - Minecraft, ARK, etc - and it works well. No-one’s going to destroy any friendships over half a stack of stone and two bits of cooked food so corruption isn’t an issue. Plus it’s more efficient for us to work together at that point rather than all try to individually collect everything we need. Sure, it’s just video games, but it shows the system can work and have benefits. It just doesn’t scale up at all.
Exactly. In the context of a small tribe, a family structure, a friend group, or a small commune, communism works. Why? Because there are social methods of enforcement. That is, if you’re a greedy dick, everyone else will know and ostracize you for it. Thus, you have an incentive to play along fairly.
But once you get to a larger society — past Dunbar’s number — you can no longer keep track of everyone and whether they’re trustworthy or not. This allows bad actors to not play fairly with minimal consequence, breaking the system of relationships and trust that had allowed the system to work in the first place.
anarchism is dope of course but we basically need to evolve as a society before it could happen. you can’t really impose anarchism top-down like you can with statism. so i think a majority of people would have to want it first. and that’s the hard part, because most people seem to be incapable of imagining living without masters.
I’d rather work for the money I can negotiate than whatever some communist official says I need. I’d rather have real labor unions representing me than unions populated entirely by Party officials.
Capitalism isn’t perfect. But capitalism with good social safety nets is a better economic system than anything else we have developed. “We have nothing to lose but our chains?” Sure, if you want some tyrant replacing fair work for fair pay with work at the barrel of a gun and labor under the eye of the secret police.
You have a union job?
The professional class already can negotiate for pay and working conditions because they’re hard to replace. For example, I negotiated my salary up by 5k at the start and receive good annual raises because my skillset/expertise is hard to replace.
We also saw during the great resignation how employers were forced to pay better because they were having trouble finding people.
If employers have a credible threat of not being able to find people, they will have no choice but to offer better pay and better working conditions. As for how we achieve that, I’m personally in favor of a few policies:
The general idea being that if you don’t desperately need your employer to maintain a basic level of existence, they will have much less leverage over you. If you can credibly threaten to leave and go plant trees or write FOSS software or pursue higher education, your boss will need to offer you more.
Bonus point as, once housing is cheaper and once jobs pay better, people can have more in their savings accounts. This alone makes them less dependent as well, because they can survive longer and more comfortably without a job. For instance, if my boss mistreated me today, I could quit and coast on savings for a while until I found a new job. Those living paycheck-to-paycheck are living in a constant state of exploitation that is extremely ripe for exploitation. Destroy the desperation and you destroy the exploitability.
Is it fair pay though? Ofc nobody wants a tyrant. but we should have unions fighting for the rights of workers in all spaces, shouldn’t we? Just a thought. (Assuming they’re not employer-controlled ofc)
Even in a right to work for less state, it’s easier to negotiate with employers for fair pay than it is to do so in a communist society. Communist societies may generally be more equal, but they’re equal at a far lower level of income, and in reality it just means trapping everyone at the subsistence level of work drudgery instead of offering many a way to gain greater affluence.
You don’t need to be a communist society to have unions tho. Negotiating with a tyrant owned business like Amazon is still very hard.
Yes, that’s my point. In fact, real unions die under communism and come to represent the party rather than the workers.
Then we’re on exactly the same page.
I believe you assumed I’m arguing from a communist perspective, however I’m not.
Your description matches the current situation more than the system socialists imagine. Most of the people wishing for communism don’t wish for what you describe. Those people usually wish for a system where the working class wields the power in a way Marx wrote about.
So many peoples view on communism is shaped by the same populist propaganda we had since the 40ies.
Yes, but that wish for Marx’s vision fails when it hits reality, where in reality, institution of communism or socialism essentially requires a totalitarian form of government
You’re in this meme
No, communism is a problem. There is an inherent flaw in the entire concept, which is entrusting the peoples needs to a select, “temporarily” empowered few. History has proven, over and over again that hierarchy is the problem. People don’t obtain obscene amounts of power and then…use it for good and then give it up. They use the power to be powerful. And the people surrounding the powerful start catering to the whims of that powerful person in the hopes that they can benefit from that power, which encourages unjust thinking and behavior. Look at any billionaire and see how people treat them. People come out of the woodwork to tell them they’re geniuses, pretend they’re right all the time, and indulge their every whim. It warps their brains. Communism relies on this incredibly flawed concept to…benefit the people?
It’s the problem in politics, it’s the problem in policing, it’s the problem in capitalism, it’s the problem in people. Any system based and reliant on hierarchy is doomed to fail, especially when that hierarchy is “temporary” and meant to establish “the people’s” will and best suit their needs. There is no top down solution, the only solution is bottom up.
Communism does work on a communal level - it’s no coincidence they’re rooted in the same word - but it absolutely needs a level of accountability at the top that can only come from actually knowing the people they’re responsible for. Once you get beyond a couple of hundred people in a community at most, and it stops being an “everyone knows everyone” kind of thing, communism is just far too susceptible to corruption.
My gaming group takes a somewhat communist approach to starting out in survival games - Minecraft, ARK, etc - and it works well. No-one’s going to destroy any friendships over half a stack of stone and two bits of cooked food so corruption isn’t an issue. Plus it’s more efficient for us to work together at that point rather than all try to individually collect everything we need. Sure, it’s just video games, but it shows the system can work and have benefits. It just doesn’t scale up at all.
Exactly. In the context of a small tribe, a family structure, a friend group, or a small commune, communism works. Why? Because there are social methods of enforcement. That is, if you’re a greedy dick, everyone else will know and ostracize you for it. Thus, you have an incentive to play along fairly.
But once you get to a larger society — past Dunbar’s number — you can no longer keep track of everyone and whether they’re trustworthy or not. This allows bad actors to not play fairly with minimal consequence, breaking the system of relationships and trust that had allowed the system to work in the first place.
🤡
I know you are
deleted by creator
anarchism is dope of course but we basically need to evolve as a society before it could happen. you can’t really impose anarchism top-down like you can with statism. so i think a majority of people would have to want it first. and that’s the hard part, because most people seem to be incapable of imagining living without masters.
How about anarcho-syndicalism