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This week’s Weekly discussion thread will be focused on Capitalism / Economic Systems. Here is the definition we will be using so everyone can use the same terminology. If your argument does not use that definition, we ask that you reframe so that it does so that everyone can work within the same framework.
Here are some questions that should help kickstart things:
- Is capitalism effective? Is it good, or as evil as some Lemmy instances will have you believe?
- Are there better alternatives, and why are they better?
- How could we realistically move toward those alternatives?
- Is there anything you do not understand or would like to discuss about Capitalism / Economic Systems?
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One of the tricky things with this is that for a lot of people capitalism is ideologically fused with democracy, human rights and freedom. Any talk of changing / reducing capitalism can be taken to mean a reduction in freedom, restrictions on human rights and limiting democracy. Some of that is cultural baggage and not based in reality but for some reason there hasn’t been a single case where an alternative was tried and people ended up better off on those metrics (maybe better off in other terms?). So there must be some connection there.
Correlation doesn’t imply causation. The reason past non-capitalist societies failed was they were based on an anti-market communist ideology. This led to them failing to apply market mechanisms in situations where they were useful and liberating. This feature is not inherent to opposing capitalism. Opposing the power of capital owners and workplace unfreedom of the undemocratic employment relationship is compatible with and enhances democracy, human rights and freedom
I agree, especially the last sentence.
In practice though, what has happened is capitalists use their money and power to push back against any popular social movement making a certain amount of state violence against them necessary. People end up in jail, disappeared, fall out of high windows, protests get responded to with tanks, etc. It’s either crush the capitalists as a class or have constant civil strife. Neither are great.
Sure, the worker’s human rights could be the same or better but the capitalists ‘human rights’ (as they see them) get reduced. And there’s not a sharp delineation between who is a worker and who is a capitalist. When who gets rights and who doesn’t is determined by politicians, then effectively no one has rights they can count on.
So yeah it’s all a big ball of mud all mixed together with worldviews, values, politics and different priorities. Pretty hard to say what’s objectively better all of the time.
I am a liberal, so I support equality before the law. The difference between economic democracy and capitalism is that the legal system would protect the inalienable right to workers’ control (see other comments here). This would be an extension of the recognized inalienable right to democracy into the economy. All firms would be structured as democratic worker coops.
There is no right to deny others’ rights.How is anti-capitalism different from opposing other unjust power?
I like to advocate for more employee owned companies. I think we should look into policies that offer incentives to companies that voluntarily do this. We should also be looking at penalising companies that fail to offer a thriving wage to every worker. You can use capital markets as part of an economic system, but you have to really deliberately blur the lines between the classes intrinsic to that system for it to work - and I think the question there is how long can you keep it, before the more powerful party decides to assert itself.
It would be interesting to cap how much of a company must be owned by employees and not investors, but I think it gets really complicated (is the CEO an employee, can they be the only one owning shares, what happens when people quit, how do employees sell shares if they can’t sell to more investors?)
I am the C.E.O. of an I.T. firm I’ve created. The employees once they are here for a certain amount of time become shareholders and I am purposely the lowest-paid employee at my company. I do not take dividends.
We also have a “No Outside Shareholders” policy, so if an employee shareholder ever left (not that any have in the 8 years we’ve been running as we treat our people like gold) the company maintains a reserve of money to purchase shares for their current value. Current value is arrived at by getting a quick valuation done.
Presumably:
- The CEO is an employee.
- The CEO can’t be the only one owning shares, as all employees must own at least a fraction of a share.
- When someone leaves their job, whether quitting or being fired, they must give up their shares.
- Employees don’t sell shares, as shares are not bought or sold under this regime.
That’s awesome, I would love to be where you are, or just running am employee coop
Liquidity is overrated imo. Selling stuff for what people will pay is how things are supposed to work. Market making for liquiditys sake is a racket.
There are already employee ownership models that exist and work, so no point in hashing that all out here. It’s a good way to put more power into worker’s hands without going into actual communism, which you can work towards alongside this type of policy if you like imo
How do you incentive people to do things that they don’t want to do outside of a capitalist system, for example how do you incentive someone working retail or a garbage collector and so on
That or take risks. That’s actually one of the reasons I feel that the reward system needs to be in place, personally.
It doesn’t need to be as massive or horrible as it is now (I still don’t feel we need billionaires to exist), but see here for how I carry out my company while still keeping rewards intact.
That sounds like a good work environment, but how well would that work for a large company such as Microsoft?
I can scale without issue most times and have done so multiple times during acquisitions.
Once we hit a certain number of people, I’d make the Matrix org system a little more fleshed-out. Right now our projects are from 1-10 people, but it wouldn’t be hard to add an org-wide Scheduler role that can wrangle interested groups for projects. It’s all about putting a plan into place before you make a decision, not deciding and then trying to FORCE things to fit. With Microsoft, I imagine they’d have to implement larger teams of relevant staff on each project and divide them into overall pods with the Scheduler able to change who is needed in each pod. It’s doable, but without having been anywhere near that large, I’d have to see what was implemented along the way.
Also of interest, we don’t have an issue with The Peter Principle as you’re never forced to move out of a position of competence or interest. You’re not salary limited simply because you don’t want to be a manager; in fact, there are no managers.
Capitalism ≠ markets
Postcapitalist societies can just pay people. Capitalism is defined by the exploitative property relations embodied in the employer-employee contract and private ownership of land @actual_discussion
Capitalism can be effective at driving an economy up to a certain point. After a certain threshold, wealth immediately becomes concentrated among smaller and smaller groups of people until the entire system is controlled or manipulated by a small number of individuals. The system itself is not evil. The motivations and the way the system is built to have no upper limit basically encourages and rewards human greed. The majority of people are content with what they have but there is a small segment of pathological individuals who have an insatiable need to want to own and control everything and everyone. If we saw a person collecting an unbelievable amount of anything … cars, paper clips, cats, leaves or rocks … we would immediately assume they have a mental disorder. If they collect unfathomable amounts of money, wealth and finances that could never be used or appreciated in one human life time, somehow that is considered acceptable and we even look up to that person as a genius or someone with above average intelligence or ability.
The alternative is complicated which is how it should be. There will never be a simple answer to solving human wants and needs balanced with human greed. If we believe there is some magical solution that could solve all this then we are only fooling ourselves. The answer lies in educating, informing and giving control and knowledge to everyone equally and creating a system where everyone acts as a control or balance to everyone else. A possible solution is in creating a world and system where we constantly debate, discuss and negotiate on an ongoing basis to keep all of us in check and ensure that no one person or no one group gains total control over everyone else.
We will never achieve that level of equality in this current system. The only way to equalize the lives and influence of every individual person is to instill and enact a system of controlling and preventing run away wealth. In the system I envision, everyone would still have an opportunity to become as wealthy as they want to be but they would be stopped at an upper limit. Individuals for example would still have the opportunity to gain a combined fortune of $10 million. After that they would forced to retire from any businesses, corporations, groups or institutions they are connected to - they can still contribute to them if they wish but only on a voluntary level. Their forced removal would allow the next individuals to come in to have a chance at gaining wealth while at the same time continuing the management and work of the company or business.
After this, everyone would have more of an opportunity and ability to discuss all the issues affecting society, work places, employment, safety, environment and anything else. Human greed would be managed and controlled and instead of having a small group of individuals amassing unbelievable amounts of wealth from everyone below them, the people at the bottom would slowly grow some wealth for themselves and have more of an ability to speak, debate, argue and negotiate for the things they believe in or advocate for.
How do you solve for money laundering though?
The system I propose wouldn’t solve things immediately. Things would more or less stay the same for a while with the same problems and situations we currently deal with.
The change would come over time as more and more people would gain wealth. As they gain wealth, they would become comfortable and as they become comfortable, they would be able to speak up and advocate for change.
Right now most people are worried about just getting by, having enough to eat and making payments … so they never have time to think about how to deal with the world’s problems. They are too busy surviving. If people are given more wealth, they would be less worried about their lives and would have time to think about how to deal with social problems like money laundering. And over time enough informed, motivated and creative people would be able to organize themselves to create groups or elect leaders that would actively do something about problems like money laundering … as well as a host of other social problems.
The workers in a firm are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the output. In capitalism, the employer solely holds the produced outputs and liabilities for used-up inputs. This violates the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. Here, there is an inalienable right, which means it cannot be given up even with consent, of workers. This right is only secured if all firms are worker coops where both types of responsibility match
I don’t believe that Capitalism is inherently evil, which I feel puts me at odds with much of the Lemmy userbase. They tend to rail against it, from what I’ve seen.
To my mind, however, capitalism is not the problem - human greed and power-mongering is the problem. Just like in systems that we have seen with communism (or what passes for it in real-world terms), greed corrupts every system that it is allowed to be a part of. Every single economic system from anarchy to feudalism can be massively corrupted by those in positions of power if there are not explicit and extremely punitive regulations in place to stop them from doing so. Those organizations that watch and manage those regulations should not be subject to lobbying, gifts, or industry work at any point after their term is complete.
We need income caps on the highest and minimums on the lowest in society. We need to remove external corporate shareholders. We need to penalize mon- du- and tri-opolies by allowing patent access to competitors in the same country.
I feel that we should absolutely reward those who excel, however excelling at corrupting or breaking systems and the public trust should be punished more harshly than nearly any other crime. If the power to corrupt grows, then the punishment for doing so should as well.
Any new system must be implemented with not simply laws laid out, but checks and balances built in to stop those that would seek to subvert things. And not simply “the letter of the law” like we have now, but also “the spirit of the law” to know if someone is just trying to work a loophole. This involves describing what the law is intended to do in plain wording that can be interpreted by laymen (because there’s no reason you should need a degree to know if you’re breaking a law).
To sum things up, capitalism isn’t evil. It can work just like any system if you have the proper framework around it. I don’t believe the form we have now in North America is the best system, however. Not by a long shot.
Simply swapping in a new system doesn’t fix simple human greed.
Capitalism is a problem even if some social problems could in principle be addressed with reforms. Even in an idealized capitalism, there would still be one major human rights violation at the heart of it, the employer-employee contract. The mismatch between legal and factual responsibility inherent in this contract necessitates abolishing it, which would be an abolition of capitalism.
A maximum income would disincentivize investment from the wealthiest. Minimum wage is good
Hrm. I don’t know if I agree. I am the C.E.O. (and an Economist) of a medium-sized I.T. firm in Canada and designed the company to be as ethical as it could possibly be from the ground up.
- All employees have equal votes after their initial 3 months is up in any part of the company that they are engaged in. I can (and have) been outvoted.
- After employees are here long enough (3 years), they can purchase shares if they like.
- I am the lowest paid full-time employee at the company by design. I do not take dividends.
- We operate on a Matrix org chart meaning that the “boss” on every project changes based on who is best suited to lead it and who has experience in that area.
- We have it in our charter that there are never any outside shareholders allowed. If you leave the company, your shares are purchased by the company for current market value. This includes myself.
- We have acquired other companies. We have never had to pay for one. Our procedures and ticket counts are astronomically low compared with other I.T. companies (which are called MSPs) because we’re exceptionally thorough that they literally give themselves to us.
- We are as environmentally conscious as we can be. We redo and donate old systems to nonprofits and schools where we can. The only waste we put out is literally dead hardware - no forced upgrade cycle. Electricity bills also drop dramatically at clients we take over due to more efficient machine use.
- During COVID, we gave away over $500k in free support. I figured it was more important that our nonprofit clients stay open than we stay open.
- We have a full FOSS stack that we can deploy if a company is open to it (and would like to save a bit of cash to boot).
- In nearly ten years, we’ve never had an employee leave, and never had a client leave (well, we had one restaurant client close during COVID, but I don’t count that).
- We have full benefits.
- We have zero interest in “infinite growth” as it’s not a functional model. We have turned down clients because they don’t “get” us and would be a headache for our staff.
All that being said, I’m not bragging, I’m genuinely asking… what if other companies were run the way I run my company? What’s the ethical issue? And no, this isn’t theoretical, this is how we actually operate. There’s no hidden evil.
I understand that not every business owner is “good.” With proper regulation, however, we can make them at least behave way, way the fuck better. It’s a form of Social Capitalism and it’s exceedingly functional from my experience.
Our major difference is terminological.
What I mean by abolishing the employer-employee relationship is the legal system protecting workers’ inalienable rights and mandating worker coops. In a worker coop, all workers are jointly self-employed. Your firm sounds more ethical than the norm under capitalism.If I were starting a firm, all workers would have equal voting shares. These shares would be inalienable. Non-voting preferred stock would be treated as tradable property @actual_discussion
Which I understand. It’s why I called the company a “firm” as I feel it’s a more accurate descriptor. The main difference is that we don’t let employees just starting their trial period vote or lead a team yet until they get a feel for how we operate. We’re quite a large swing from what normal companies do and it takes time to adjust and understand, not to mention that our processes are a complete rethink of how it is anywhere else.
The shares can be sold to other shareholders, but not to anyone outside the company. Unlike most corporations, we don’t want solely financially invested shareholders as they’re in business to extract value. They are parasites.
I’ve built this model out in hopes it will catch on. I feel that if most companies operated under Social Capitalism that we’d be substantially better off. Certain aspects of it are so important and such a step up from the norm that I don’t understand how they weren’t obvious to other owners. But… greed I guess. Greed hurts every system it’s in.
