Sooo… the working class should own the means of production?
Yes, but let’s try to achieve that without state ownership of the means.
How can the working class own something if the state owns it?
It’s very simple.
Nationalists nationalize.
Socialists socialize.
If one is doing the other it means somebody is lying to you.
That’s just nonsense there’s plenty of reasons certain resources should be nationalized. Why do I care if the company that owns all the clean water is owned by one asshole or a group of them? Certain things in a nation belong to the people of the nation as a whole. Namely the national resources. No one company deserves to own that.
I like the idea of having just a cool government we trust and who do the right thing. Imagine that. Making parks and stuff. But also cool citizens who also sometimes disagree with the government. Like at their core. Without having a big ass conniption every time like the sky is about to fall.
That’s just nonsense
No. It isn’t. If nationalism is your game, fine… but just be honest about it. Don’t confuse it with socialism (unknowingly or otherwise) - the two aren’t compatible in any way whatsoever.
If you’re a nationalist, you believe that all resources should be controlled for the benefit of the people living inside the territory demarcated by imaginary lines drawn on a map - that is a very distinct thing from capitalism, which holds that resources must be privately owned and fuck the people living inside (or outside) said territory.
You have completely and utterly misused the term nationalized and nationalist here and are applying a meaning that they do not have. Nationalists don’t nationalize resources and Industry. You can say it as much as you want but it’s just complete fiction what you’re talking about. The historic link between nationalism and capitalism is so incredibly ingrained and strong that you saying otherwise is simply put unbelievable. This is simply nonsense and drivel that you have created from nothing.
I’m honestly not sure if this is the most intellectually dishonest comment I’ve ever seen or if you’re having some kind of fever dream where the meaning of words are different to you and you’re going to wake up in 2 days and be like oh shit what did I say?
You have completely and utterly misused
Lol! No Clyde - I haven’t. Nationalism is a very simple thing - it’s not my fault you associate nationalism with fascism (which is always just false nationalism) or capitalism (which is perfectly incompatible with the beliefs of anyone who actually fetishizes a given nation state - even fascists like Francisco Franco understood that). The US has spent more resources combating nationalism in the middle-east than socialism - do you think they did that because nationalism is so “compatible” with capitalism?
I hate to be the one to break it to you - but Fidel Castro was far more of a nationalist than Adolf Hitler was. In fact, the majority of the anti-imperialist campaigns waged against colonial power during the (so-called) “Cold War” was nationalist in nature - not socialist.
The historic link between nationalism and capitalism
There are those who will pretend that there are “historic links” between liberalism and democracy, too - even though they are violently incompatible concepts. “Historic links” doesn’t mean anything.
You can call the US “democratic” and the USSR “socialist” all you want - but that does not make any of it reality.
Fidel Castro and Adolf Hitler were both nationalists, Hitler was also fascist. I think you might have a inaccurate definition of nationalism.
Nationalism is more about elevating a certain ethnic group and creating a nation in the process if needed. WW2 Germany was all about elevating Germans at the cost of everyone else. It rose to prominence in 18th century Europe when nations in Europe declared themselves as independent.
Nationalizing is about taking a resource or a company and putting it into the hands of the state for the people.
These are two completely different concepts with a small overlap.
Nationalism is more about elevating a certain ethnic group
No it isn’t - that is so distinct from garden-variety nationalism that we call it ethno-nationalism. There are plenty of nationalist projects that doesn’t have an ethno-nationalist aspect to them - there are plenty of them outside the imperial core in the (so-called) “third-world.” You wanna be the one to tell them they are doing nationalism wrong?
WW2 Germany was all about elevating Germans at the cost of everyone else.
Violently building an alt-fantasy empire has nothing to do with “elevating” a people - that’s imperialism, not nationalism. You can argue that the two concepts may be related - but you can’t argue that nationalism inherently requires genocidal imperialism.
Nationalizing is about taking a resource or a company and putting it into the hands of the state for the people.
In other words… the only possible benefit that nationalism has ever presented as a justification for it’s own existence?
Fancy that.
Here’s a link that with a definition. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism
Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, it presupposes the existence and tends to promote the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining its sovereignty (self-governance) over its perceived homeland to create a nation-state. It holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity, and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power. It further aims to build and maintain a single national identity, based on a combination of shared social characteristics such as culture, ethnicity, geographic location, language, politics (or the government), religion, traditions and belief in a shared singular history, and to promote national unity or solidarity. There are various definitions of a “nation”, which leads to different types of nationalism. The two main divergent forms are ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism.
And here is another one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalization
Nationalization (nationalisation in British English) is the process of transforming privately-owned assets into public assets by bringing them under the public ownership of a national government or state.[1] Nationalization contrasts with privatization and with demutualization. When previously nationalized assets are privatized and subsequently returned to public ownership at a later stage, they are said to have undergone renationalization. Industries often subject to nationalization include telecommunications, electric power, fossil fuels, railways, airlines, iron ore, media, postal services, banks, and water (sometimes called the commanding heights of the economy), and in many jurisdictions such entities have no history of private ownership.
Nationalization may occur with or without financial compensation to the former owners. Nationalization is distinguished from property redistribution in that the government retains control of nationalized property. Some nationalizations take place when a government seizes property acquired illegally. For example, in 1945 the French government seized the car-maker Renault because its owners had collaborated with the 1940–1944 Nazi occupiers of France.[2] In September 2021, Berliners voted to expropriate over 240,000 housing units, many of which were being held unoccupied as investment property.[3][4]
Governance, government and states are all different and nebulous within themselves. You can achieve governance models that better resist the consolidation of power while still operating towards the goal of the collective good. That alone does not denote nationalization, which is a particular form of statehood (often referred to as a sovereign state). Watershed governance is managed across existing levels of international, regional and local governing bodies, often with a high level of success to best ensure sufficient water is available for the communities within.
That seems like an awfully swell nice ideal there, the reality though is where I live and people like me live where local governments just sells your water to private corporations and now you don’t have enough water.
Definitely not saying it works pervasively, lots of jurisdictions work as plutocracies and have vacated any sense of public good. That some jurisdictions suck doesn’t nullify the possibilities of cooperation and public good being the foundations of good governance.
I’d say it does. Because it’s not an aberration. That’s how capitalism works. If a corporation can Corner the market on a natural resource and screw the people over it will. That’s by Design. That’s why I don’t trust any situation in which private ownership can own a natural resource that people rely upon. It will happen every single time.
Simple if you understand the theory and history. The main difference between Communists and anarchists is the involvement of the state.
Main difference between anarchism and everything else is a state
…what? Have you just assumed that words are the same because they sound similar?
Nationalisation of industries and resources refers to public ownership vs private ownership
Nationalism is an ideology that became widespread in the late 19th Century, that emphasises the codification of States on ethnic grounds
Nachos are a type of corn or potato chip, often combined with cheese and guacomole
Holup. Nachos cannot be potato. That’s cursed.
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The problem isn’t usually nationalization but the utter lack of democratic control of what is owned by the state
I’d say that before that your problem is that if a state has the power to nationalize something it also has the power to privatize it again… all it takes is one Reagan or Thatcher. Or hell, an Obama - who essentially nationalized General Motors after the 2008 crash and then handed it all straight back to the capitalists again.
It’s important to consider the conditions in which state ownership was deemed necessary. Countries with a starving and illiterate working class isn’t as capable at a true worker owned economy as one that already has a well fed and educated working class. A true socialist society needs basic infrastructure and fulfillment of the basic needs of its people before it can be properly implemented.
Lenin’s concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was intended to be a temporary system intended on rapid development and growth of the economy. It was more important to try and stop starvation and establish railroads than build worker co-ops. The mistake was when the leaders that came after decided to never cede power back to the working class.
I have a new working theory. We reward assholes and no system we can ever hope for will ever overcome the asshole engorgement paradox therefore all systems will always turn to shit.
Lenin’s concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was intended to be a temporary system intended on rapid development and growth of the economy. It was more important to try and stop starvation and establish railroads than build worker co-ops. The mistake was when the leaders that came after decided to never cede power back to the working class.
Marx came up with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, not Lenin, and it didn’t mean Dictatorship over the Proletariat, but of the Proletariat, as a contrast to the Capitalist Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie.
The DotP is not to stop starvation or anything, it’s to protect against the resurgance of Capitalism. It additionally wasn’t meant to be “ceded back to the working class,” but become unnecessary as the mechanisms for Capitalism to come back were erased.
Neither Marx nor Lenin were advocating for literal modern conceptions of dictatorship, but consolidating all power away from the bourgeoisie and into the hands of the Proletariat.
Marx coined the term, sure. But he didn’t come up with much more than that and a very rudimentary theory on how it would work. Lenin put it into practice and actually created it as an economic model. Everything else you’re arguing is theoretical semantics. How the thing works is how the thing works.
Certainly Lenin and good compatriots has the best of intentions with their vanguard approach to intention. But, as you noted, that concentration of power ultimately corrupted in the hands of a nefarious few. These ideas were not Lenin’s alone and even Marx promoted the idea of a Vanguard long before the Bolshevik revolution, which Bakunin (an early anarchist) was opposed due to the likelihood of the vanguard becoming entrenched within that power. That concentration of power by a class of elite was the mistake. To argue there wasn’t time to educate the masses is to ignore the fallout of that approach. These are important lessons to remember, even should the future approach to revolution be focused on the establishment of worker co-ops. Positions of power and power between cooperatives are likely to remain and we will need systems of control to mediate these types of emergent hierarchies.
No, that would be socialism!!1!!! No socialism in 'Murica!!1!!!1!
I work in an esop. It’s pretty cool in that we own the company in shares based on tenure, it’s not like a union though.
We don’t vote on the CEO or the board, we have third party trustees that manage the esop account.
We aren’t beholden to external shareholders, which is the absolute best part. Line doesn’t go up, it really just affects our retirement accounts, but even then our valuation takes into account stuff like cash on hand and contract stability. So… We have pretty fiscally conservative management, which is a great thing for us.
I work at an ESOP as well. Honestly I’m glad I fell into this. I have a feeling that I may actually be able to retire. If not early. Probably one of my best moves in my career.
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This sounds like a worker cooperative which is a classic socialist concept that could be applied to modern social democrat capitalism.
Since I straddle the line in my political views between Marxism and social democracy I’d like to share an approach.
Mandatory profit sharing and workers always have a certain proportion of the board elected democratically. Simple as that. CEO bonuses should be made illegal and all of those profits should be funneled to the workers. People will be a lot more involved in the corporate governance and it will align the will of the workers with that of the shareholders.
Economists say that in the long run productivity is everything and worker’s having a for-profit voice that will make arguments like “we’re losing our best workers because of low pay” to increase salaries is important. This will make each person higher paid and more productive.
You guys know about Walmart, that one rose to success by profit sharing but capitalism got the better of it and now so many workers both time and money poor because they work there.
If the original owner can do it better on their own they should go into business for themselves rather than create an LLC, once LLC it should be mutually beneficial, not just there to protect the owners private assets
I mean, I’m a single-member LLC (electrician). I’m not sure what you mean.
In the UK we have the designation of Sole Trader for that. Is there not something similar where you are?
This was my opinion. Any company that wants to go public should be required to restructure as a cooperative. Stay private means you get to be the man running the show. But the benefits the market gives business also means those business usually impact people at a scale that no individual or handful of individuals should be making decisions especially when those decisions are " increase profits at all costs". Cooperatives bring locals to the decision making and helps regulate some choices that are made at the executive level
So I get the idea that companies shouldn’t be slaves to shareholders or the whims of a few people, but would the employees owning the company mean they are shouldering financial risk? Like if my company goes bankrupt I just lose my job, I am not responsible for covering their losses.
I think the liability would still be limited. If a company goes bankrupt it’s not like they’re going after shareholders’ personal assets to pay creditors.
Are you under the impression that private business owners have to cover losses…? Like that’s what a LLC is, a limited liability company. If it goes bankrupt the private owners are only liable for a part of it.
If a private business owners goes bankrupt, he just has to, gasp, find a job.
If a worker loses their job they might go fucking homeless.
I think what he’s getting at is you lose both your job and your shares (which are presumably part of your retirement) if the co-op goes tits up. It’s more risk.
You also make a lot more money 🤷♂️
Insurance FTW; investors defeat the whole purpose.
Do investors not own part of the company? They can hold the company hostage in exchange for their capital, even if they can’t vote.
btw you seem to be outputting
[@general](https://lemmy.world/c/general)at the bottom of your posts.Can you give an example in the case where investors hold non-voting preferred shares?
I’m not sure how cross posting works from Mastodon to Lemmy. I thought I had to do that to get boosted by the group
They are. It also means that if the company goes under or starts doing poorly, they’ll lose it all.
Imagine if you told people you put half of all your savings into the stock market. “Good job. That can really work for you”
Now imagine telling them you only put it in a single stock, with no diversification, you won’t be able to sell until you’re 59 1/2 years old, amd when you do sell, you have to spread the sale out over 6 years. “Wut?”
Like the article says. This company is a unicorn. Very few companies end up doing so well compared to the ones that start out. Employees that have been there over 15 years have over a million dollars in the stock options account (article claims). That’s of course far from typical of a company structured this way. I’d imagine that if anyone just bought $20,000 of their stock 15 or 20 years ago and left it there until now, they may also have over a million dollars worth by now. You could sell it all whenever you’d like doing it that way.
There are 2 risk reduction strategies commitment-based and diversification based. The diversification-based strategy is the usual spread your eggs across many baskets strategy, but there is also a commitment-based dual strategy where you put your eggs in a few baskets and watch over them carefully.
Workers in coops can share risks with investors with non-voting preferred shares and other financial instruments. They can diversify by investing in other worker coops non-voting shares
Ok but now you’ve just reinvented the regular stock market. Line must go up.
Yes, but in the same way that proportional representation is just reinventing democratic process.
A lot of problems in our world today is created by shareholder model. People in Dubai owning and voting on the future of a company that sells drinks is more likely to be okay if that company drains a lake in Missouri than the people in Missouri would. They’re ok to stagnate wages if profits are returned to share holders. They’re ok if benefits are cut. It all stems from the idea that the people who make those decisions are making them as technical employees of the share holders. Because that’s essentially what these companies become when they go public. The executives work for share holders. Those share holders have no connection to the way the company runs or makes choices. It’s like a sociopath there no moral decion making by design.
By making companies employee owned you bring the local people to the table to help make decision. You place the executives and board ina position where they have to appease share holders and if a portion of those are employees you will begin to solve a lot of our current issues. Pay, workers rights, health benefits.
Likewise the employees also are more invested in the profits of the company. It goes both ways.
I think you’re focusing too much on voting rights. Even if investors don’t vote on the actions of a company, they have a financial interest in seeing that company grow, which incentivises unethical but profitable actions by the company. Worker owned or not.
It’s actually at the heart of this. I haven’t said it but think about ethical business decision making. How does a business make decisions. How are the decision makers working for. Why do they not make ethical choices.
Share holders do not care about the workers getting higher wages. They are not impacted if a company cuts corners and destroys the environment in someone else’s backyard. They don’t care if Nestle drains a lake in Missouri. The people who care about that are locals.
What if the executives who make the choices to do all those unethical actions actually are answering to locals. That’s what these cooperatives and other models do. They include locals and put them in those relationship with the executive level where the executives need to make locals happy along with other shareholders. It injects more ethical decision making into business decision making. More than exist now.
This model works in place like Spain where it has led to decade’s success during even economic downturns and is reflected in how happy the people are in areas that use this type of model.
This is a purely hypothetical concern that may have already been addressed…
Is there any mechanism that can align local co-op incentives with global problems? So would the factory worker in Missouri care just as little about climate change as the investor in Dubai?
What if the executives who make the choices to do all those unethical actions actually are answering to locals.
That’s what I’m saying, dude. Sure, the locals have the voting rights. But there’s also a huge pool of external investors who want to see the company make more money. They act as a leveraging effect on the value of the stock, for voters (employees) and non voters alike.
If the company decides to do something good like switch to 100% renewable energy, investors sell and everyone’s stock loses value. The employees see their retirement fund tank.
If the company decides to do something bad like outsource all their labor to children in the 3rd world, investors buy and everyone’s stock rises a lot.
Every decision that the company makes, they’ll have the investors in mind.
Not quite. Voting rights over firm governance are non-transferable/inalienable. The employer-employee contract is abolished, and everyone is always individually or jointly self-employed.
Incorporating social objectives should be done at the level of associations of worker coops
Ok, but you’ve still introduced a profit motive, which is inevitably corrupting. Most extant shares of most companies today are non voting shares.
Lots of ways to do this. But overall the idea isn’t that the only investment you can ever make is in the company you work for. What could happen is some shares are public and the rest are held by employees. Employees would own enough to reserve more power in decision making so that the employees have greater say in direction of the company. It also means private Business can also be private. Just make it so that if any company wants to go public they should be employee owned or similar.
By 2030, you will own nothing and be happy!
Please elaborate
DAVOS rich idiot bullshit about a future world where everyone important is a jet setting lease nomad with no personal property that just travels around and stays at airbnbs while having subscriptions to food prep services and clothing replacement services and leases for appliances and devices.
It’s like a corporate hellscape version of the Star Trek universe replacing replicators with the bottom 80% of society struggling behind the scenes in gig work jobs to support the careless greed of the ultra wealthy for a pittance, unable to afford the very goods and services they gig work to distribute.
It’s the wealthy’s wet dream and they have been pushing it in one form or another for 15 years at least.
The fucking dream
Combine an ESOP with a Public Benefit or B-corp and you get a pretty spicy variation on how a business can be organized.
this is the least someone should get for devoting their whole life to a company
Or… What if we just stopped working? https://youtu.be/2i0RrGx_GrE
Haven’t watched the video yet, will do somlatwr, but if no one worked, we would over amshort time literally return to the stone age.
Who would make for for all? Would we have to scour for our own food again, each on their own? There is a reason we do farming, it is MUCH more efficient. A hand full people can make grain, beef, flour, and bread for hundreds of thousands, if not millions. It liberates all those other people to work on other things and make society grow.
If we all do our own food then in no time growth will stagnate, loads of people will fail to make their own food and decide to get it from others, and since there is no police anymore either (they’re busy making and finding their own food) there is no protection either.
We would to have time to keep up infrastructure. More fertilizer would mean that there wouldn’t be enough food produced for everyone, the world would go back to about 2-3billion humans. In on itself not a bad thing, there are too many humans, but 5-6 billion humans starving to death sucks.
No more modern medicine, no ody is working anymore, remember? Sucks to be a diabetic, bye bye. If you’re trans, you’re outta luck, you got bigger fish to fry.
We CAN’T stop working, we’d die out. If that video means something else, then the title is wrong.
What we can do is redistribute wealth. Nobody should need to work two jobs and still not be able to meet rent, that is absurd.
I also haven’t watched the video, but also allow me to weigh in with some stuff I’ve heard.
The way I’ve heard it is that if people stopped going to their jobs they would very quickly take up necessary and actually productive work required by them and their communities.
I’ve heard it more in the context of bullshit jobs. For instance if I didn’t have a job to go to then of course I’d pitch in on real work, like working some rows at the local farms, or covering some shifts at the local shops.
The way I’ve heard it is that if people stopped going to their jobs they would very quickly take up necessary and actually productive work required by them and their communities.
So they stood going to their job to…do another… Job? Like, really?
I know there are ahitty jobs out there, loads.of them, but they still have to be done. Do you think a supermarket magically restocks itself? People seem to want all the perks of, you know, the results of jobs, but nobody wants to do them. That’s not how that works, that’s not how anything works
And you’re saying that if you didn’t have a job them you’d do real work? That doesn’t make any sense, do you hear yourself talking? If I didn’t have a job then of course I’d get a job… wut?
A job is a job. If someone is willing to pay you money to do something tmfor him, then that’s a job. It may appear useless to you but likely it’s not because someone is paying money for what you’re doing. If you don’t like what you’re doing, get a different job. if you don’t qualify due to low skill set, then work on that, get more skills, trian yourself in something, take free courses on the internet, whatever it takes.
But stop with this “we don’t want to work so that we can work in our community” shit.
I think you’ve got stuck on a semantic point. The distinction is between working for money and working for utility.
Both rely on incentives, just different ones. Money doesn’t have to be tied to actual value or utility.
Dude, what are you even talking about?
You still work. You’ll still have a boss because work still needs to be coordinated or group output would fall to single digit percentages of what’s actually possible. You will still have to pick upshitty tasks because somebody has to…
Taking money out of that equation is the semantic, that is the least of the issue, but also the issue that actually makes things easier, you get a generic interchangeable good that you can use to purchase whatever it is that you need. You want to get rid of the one thing that makes things actually easier.
Thanks for your reply. You could even still use money in the process as long as accumulating more of it (or capital more specifically) wasn’t the goal of the work. You see a kind of diet version of this for example with public benefit corporations. Obviously, working for one of those would definitely be a job, though.
Anyway I’m getting way off the original point (which I actually don’t remember), but I think you get the picture I’m painting.
Look, like it or not, but capitalism is absolutely the most powerful system for people to improve and grow. We need to use it in a limited and controlled fashion (very strict laws against monopoly, etc) to fund a socialist network on too of that that uses the funds to ensure everyone had free healthcare, free education, housing where needed, etc. make sure no-one can brote than 10 times richer than the poorest person out there by applying taxes as needed, more money,ore taxes.
This is the Centerpoint strategy for maintaining the Houston electric grid
What if there was just a law to cap the compensation in that the highest compensation must be at most 10x (Or whatever a reasonable number may be). If your lowest paid salary is 50k, the max salary for CEO would be 500k. If the CEO wants more money, everyone needs to get more money.
That’s what some cooperatives have voted on. Mondragon is an example.
So as with everything I feel like the best solution is to have a system that gives people the incentive to place these restrictions on ourselves rather than force it through laws.
We don’t appreciate opinion and perspective enough. We all seem to accept how it is as the default. But if you have a corporation where all employees hold a bit of power collectively as if the business is the sum of all parts, then it would be insane for someone like Musk or Bezos to exist with their wealth. It would be considered stealing
So you now need to buy shares first before you can get any job?
Usually, in co-operative businesses, the members have to agree to hire someone.
Uh… no. This is exactly how people with that mentality cause companies to find ways to hire less humans and depend more on technologies.
Keep it up, you’re only asking for really bad consequences.
“if we keep talking about freedom, our masters will have even more reason to abuse us!”
Coward.
I’m thinking like a business owner. If my employees are going to demand to own my company, I’m going to fire them and find a way to permanently replace humans.
Coward, more like a realist.
Here’s a thought though, start thinking about creating your own business and stop being a wage slave.
Oh you think your the master and this it’s okay. My bad, your not a coward. Your scum. Literal human rot. Embodiment of greed and selfishness. A person like you has no place holding power over others, and in a just world you would be punished for it. Unfortunately we don’t live in a just world. We live in a world where not only are you rewarded for your greed but to the point you consider it a virtue.
Consider the morality of yourself for a moment.
As for “creating my own business”, you silly billy, I’m going into teaching. Ya know, a selfless job ment to benefit all. I live by my morals, instead of looking for ways to profit off my lack of them.
Keep on rubbing your coins together mr scrooge. See if it warms your grave someday.
You’re going into teaching? haha… Good grief.
This person is going into, “teaching”. Can’t even decipher between, “your” and “you’re”.
You’re a joke. Thanks for further solidifying why public education is complete and utter shit.
I ain’t an English teacher, and I’m actually working on that exact grammatical deficit. My bad I didn’t approach your dumbass with the same rigor I approach an essay or will with my future students. You ain’t exactly worth that time bub.
What do you think corporate shareholders expect of a publicly traded company? Especially when in most industries, labor is their number 1 expense?
