| ▲ | martin-t 3 days ago |
| How about instead abolishing privately owned companies? Most western countries are democracies because people got fed up of being exploited by dictators (sometimes called "kings"), removed them and setup a system in which they elect who makes the decisions. This system has issues but is less bad than dictatorship. Yet, companies kept their hierarchical power structures. Workers should decide who makes the decisions. If they don't wanna invest time into selling their product, they hire a salesman. If they want somebody to make long term projections, plan what gets worked on and communicates with other teams, they hire an assistant. And they decide how much he gets paid according to how much value he actually brings them. Managers should be assistants. |
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| ▲ | zahlman 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Hierarchy is not dictatorship, and most small groups of people doing productive (in the literal sense of creating a marketable product) work would never get off the ground like this for a wide variety of reasons. |
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| ▲ | martin-t 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Hierarchy is not dictatorship Sure, the difference if whether the hierarchy is determined from the top or bottom. Top leads to unfair benefits for the top layer. This is called exploitation. > wide variety of reasons Can you give me examples? |
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| ▲ | ThrowawayR2 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Anyone is free to create a worker-controlled, worker-owned business anytime they want. There are plenty of examples anytime the question comes up. In light of this, where is the need to abolish privately owned companies? |
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| ▲ | martin-t 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Same reason we have laws against slavery and indentured servitude. | | |
| ▲ | sershe 3 days ago | parent [-] | | One is very much not like the other. If I create a piece of software then hire a helper to expand under a defined contract, if anything is at all like slavery, it is taking away my ownership so we could "share" |
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| ▲ | sekai 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > How about instead abolishing privately owned companies? We tried that in my country for about 50 years, it didn’t work out. |
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| ▲ | martin-t 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Are you referring to communism? Because that was all about central control - the exact opposite. It was about as cooperative as countries with "democratic" in name are actually democratic. Don't let a bad implementation ruin a good idea. Instead, look at what specific ways the implementation fails to learn for next time. | | |
| ▲ | whobre 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Don't let a bad implementation ruin a good idea. It would certainly help to see at least one good implementation of the “good idea” | | |
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| ▲ | majormajor 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you're a worker with a bad boss you need other options to leave for and go to. Let's have MORE companies, not fewer. Put in strong escalating taxes to incentivize cooperation between small companies instead of bowing to the math that encourages consolidation otherwise. But if there's no private ownership, how would the different companies in the market get created and exist? |
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| ▲ | martin-t 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > bad boss It's not (just) about a bad boss. It's about somebody being in a position of power who captures the entire value you produce (sales, IP, patents) and decided what fraction out of it you deserve. > But if there's no private ownership, how would the different companies in the market get created and exist? I don't see the problem. Every company starts with just a few people, maybe some machines, maybe some real estate. The issue starts when these people call themselves "founders" and everybody else becomes an "employee"[0]. Even though they are all doing the same work, employees get paid per unit of work, founders capture the remaining value produced. And then they hire "managers" who should be there to help workers be more productive but instead end up serving their own goals (see the Gervais principle). And yes: 1) the founders took some risk in starting the business. They should get rewarded based on the amount of risk and their investment. Not in perpetuity. 2) some companies need a large up-front investment. Similarly, the investory should get rewarded based on invested amount and risk, not by owning a large chunk of the company in perpetuity. Key point: as time goes on, the amount of work done by regular "working class" people completely outstrips the initial investment. The reward should go to people doing the actual work. [0]: literally meaning "person being used" | | |
| ▲ | simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-] | | >It's not (just) about a bad boss. It's about somebody being in a position of power who captures the entire value you produce (sales, IP, patents) and decided what fraction out of it you deserve. Wrong on many levels. They don't capture your entire value. They don't decide what fraction you deserve - that's what the market decides. >Even though they are all doing the same work, employees get paid per unit of work, founders capture the remaining value produced. And then they hire "managers" who should be there to help workers be more productive but instead end up serving their own goals (see the Gervais principle). False, they don't all do the same work. Some people do more valuable work than others. | | |
| ▲ | martin-t 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > They don't capture your entire value. Explain. > They don't decide what fraction you deserve - that's what the market decides. No, they decide based on what they can get away with given the market situation. Do they pay the maximum the company can afford? No, they pay based on a negotiation in which they have more power and more information. > False, they don't all do the same work. You open a shop, you do the restocking, you man the cash register. Then you hire your first employee. He does the same thing. You own the entire company, he doesn't even a fraction. You start a software company with a few friends. You write code, do marketing, talk to customers. You hire your first employee. He does one or more of those things. You own 100% of the company, he owns 0%. > Some people do more valuable work than others. Yeah, sure, how many times more productive can one person be than others doing the same job? Jobs doing real positive-sum productive work are typically within low multiples, maybe one order of magnitude. Jobs of people who are in positions of power which allow them to capture a percentage of their "underlings" output pay orders of magnitude more. |
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| ▲ | nkrisc 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think there are worthwhile, incremental steps to take before it comes to that. |
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| ▲ | martin-t 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Can you expand on that? | | |
| ▲ | nkrisc 2 days ago | parent [-] | | We could start by abolishing overtime exemptions so workers are fairly compensated for working hours beyond reasonable amounts. |
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| ▲ | AngryData 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I agree, but the problem is that is actually socialism by definition and as soon as people hear the word socialism or communism they freak the fuck out because capital owners has made people believe that socialism or communism is the end-times and all will starve and die under a dictatorship. Yeah it doesn't really make sense that worker owned and/or controlled and straight up dictatorship control are mutually exclusive, but you aren't going to have too great of luck convincing people that they, and likely most of their family and friends, were completely duped for the last 90+ years and completely bought into the lie. All that said, co-op businesses have seen slow but steady growth for decades now. |
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| ▲ | OJFord 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Companies didn't 'keep' hierarchical power structures, companies emerged exactly from that separation of industry and state. |
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| ▲ | martin-t 3 days ago | parent [-] | | One theory I read is that historically states got bigger only up to the limit of their ability to manage the land and force people to pay taxes. I don't know if it's right or wrong (and to what extent, most natural systems are complex with a multitude of factors influencing them) but I can easily imagine a similar principle applying to companies. If you wanna expand by starting an office in the next town over, you need a way to communicate with it, otherwise it's just a separate business with a cash injection to start. So you have a point. But the core issue stands - the power hire/fire people, determine their salary and also capture their entire economic output leads to a power imbalance. |
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| ▲ | nicbou 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This has been attempted multiple times and the results were disastrous. |
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| ▲ | martin-t 3 days ago | parent [-] | | A dictator deciding that every village needs to produce X amount of steel instead of actually harvesting their crops and them millions of people dying is exactly the opposite of what I described. RMS said whenever he promoted software freedom in the US, everybody pattern matched on communism and he had to explain the difference between voluntary and compulsory. This is the same problem. This is related: https://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-a... | | |
| ▲ | nicbou 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I meant cooperatives and other structures at a lower scale. Stalinism was not the only attempts at collectivisation. |
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| ▲ | geor9e 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There should be a name for this sort of communal economic system |
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| ▲ | sokoloff 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I wonder if it’s ever been tried and, if so, how those economies and populations are doing as compared to the exploitive systems that Microsoft and FAANG workers are forced to endure. | | |
| ▲ | 9rx 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, communalism (that's the name, for those who were wondering) has been tried. In the USA, the Hutterites are one such example. They are generally regarded as doing very well economically. The more interesting question is: Can communalism work without the community having a deep attachment to the idea? The Hutterites achieve that through religion, but if you threw a group of random people together into a similar economic situation without some kind of strong belief system would they endure or would it quickly devolve back to what we see in the broader economy? |
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| ▲ | martin-t 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Did you notice how communism was always about central control with only superficial or absolutely no elections? Did you notice I specifically said decisions should be made democratically? Are those two not in direct conflict? Please, stop pattern matching, and actually consider what I wrote. | | |
| ▲ | 9rx 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The name you are looking for is communalism, not communism. You can tell we're not talking about communism because the previous commenter said "economic system", whereas the whole concept of an economic system vanishes with communism. It does not imagine an economic system would serve a purpose when scarcity is no longer a constraint. Hence the whole no state, money, or class thing. You, yourself, literally wrote the original description of what we are talking about. How did you manage to end up so confused? > Did you notice how communism was always about central control with only superficial or absolutely no elections? And no. That sounds like you are thinking of a dictatorship. Probably a dictatorship at the hands of a political party that includes "Communist" in the name, granted, but thinking of that as communism is like thinking the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic. Communism is science fiction that is imagined on the same basic premise as Star Trek. It is not about central control. As before, it rejects the idea that a central control (the state) would even remain. Marx and Engels hypothesized that the proletariat would have to temporarily seize control from the capitalist elite in order to usher in communism, but even if you somehow managed to confuse communism with their work, that isn't really central control either. What they pictured is still closer to being a democracy, except one that that excludes the bourgeoisie, similar to how women were historically excluded from democracy. | |
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| ▲ | martin-t 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I am not from the US but this comment is rude and not constructive. |
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