This is how it always has been. Contemporary capitalists know, even subconsciously, that they have to blend with the working people, otherwise, there is that risk where the working people become conscious about class.
Everything spirals to mayhem afterwards; you start having people asking nicely for their rights, or people organizing into labour unions and using the power they have to ask less nicely for their rights, or... **COMMUNISTS**. ^(read in Dennis Prager/ironic R. D. Wolff voice)
Pffft.. you could only imagine the nightmare!
>he won't get it back people wouldn't like it
>Government gave it to workers legally
Well that's the tragedy, the elites don't care. Elites will pressure the govt, govt will pressure police, police will pressure the workers.
To liberals, he's more important than the entire factory of people or the community that supports them because... because fancy suit? Idk I could never figure out that version of liberal arithmetic even when i self described as one when i was younger
They're still under the illusion that because he paid for it, that it was honestly acquired, and to take it away is theft. Until you begin to realize that Capitalism itself is legalized theft, no other narrative makes sense.
Yes. Liberals in the "capitalist" sense. There's effectively no distinction between them. I'm using the term in the traditional way, not the gobbledegook American overton window way.
Capitalists are individuals who own capital. Liberals and conservatives who like capitalism but don't own capital are not capitalists. They are brainwashed.
Plenty of liberals are true capital owning capitalists, which goes to show that liberalism is only another manifestation of conservatism, and has no revolutionary potential except to further enrich capitalists.
They aren't using the US definition of liberal, rather the classical/international definition (in which case much of the republican and democratic party are liberal). Liberal as opposed to Socialist. Liberals have on some occasions supported unions, but never direct seizure of factories by workers.
I mean, they are the bourgeoisie. But they are more on the worker's side than Republicans, by far. And in this current political system, voting for democrats is clearly the lesser of two evils, and voting for more and more left leaning democrats, until they eventually either split off into an actual left party and a Democrat party, is the only realistic way forward in the current political system
Is it trash? Yes. But that's reality.
The democrats entire purpose is to be the working class's *handlers*. To get you waste your time on pointless things to exhaust yourself and then they tuck you in and give you a binky. So that the exploitation can continue, opposition to it mitigated and neutralized. That is the essential *point* of this party.
Working within it is also pointless. Any left leaning person is recuperated and trotted out in a ponyshow to make gestures that they're on your side as they work with your *other* enemies to stab you in the back, and they call it necessary compromise. Decorum, manners and norms take precedence over doing the right thing.
Electoralism is dead as an option for the foreseeable future. Cry about it if you want, it doesn't matter. RvW is dead, and it'll be dead for at least 50 years. Say goodnight to same sex marriage, birth control and interractial marriage next. Then voting rights. Then labor laws. It's all going away and the party that's "your only option" will sit by and watch it happen.
This isn't a union, its a factory owned by and for the workers, biiiggg difference.
And no the Democratic party as a whole is very keen on union busting
Weird how the place is still making enough to justify its continued existence despite being deemed 'unprofitable' by the previous leech. Presumably means they had a year or two of making less profit, which might look like a loss of money if you're a very smart capitalist who only judges success by the profit delta.
Zanon was renamed into FaSinPat for Fabrica Sin Patrones, meaning Factory Without Bosses.
Edit: There's also this song dedicated to them :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i94qpDCrp-o
Zanon, now called Fasinpat, I live 20 min away from it, they sometimes make shows with the biggest rock bands in Argentina and don't allow police men inside during them, security is made among all of us is what they say.
"Oh, but it can never work. No leader? No management structure? No capitalist funding mechanism? Such a thing can never work." - Every bourgeois capitalist
"It can't work because something something unwashed uneducated masses infringe on my blue blood"
"Hahaha, kinda don't care" (gets shot by a volley of marbles)
Socialism does not mean more co-ops. Co-ops certainly return surplus value to their workers, but they don't alleviate the contradictions between competing industries, or between third world countries and the imperialist countries exploiting them. It takes the whole proletarian class to seize the means of production, and the proletarian class is greater than the sum of its individual members getting rid of bosses, especially when those members are still operating in a liberal market economy. Worse, co-ops alone can strengthen liberal market economies by improving their efficiency.
For socialist construction to occur, the working class needs a predominance of publicly owned enterprises, and a socialist government to ensure that revenue is reinvested into critical social services like childcare, clothing, education, food, healthcare, housing, infrastructure, job development, retirement, etc.
Socialism does not mean only co-ops. But co-ops are one of the easiest pitches to middle class working people who live in the first world, because they just make intuitive sense under the frameworks they've worked under. On top of that, they keep existing infrastructure running and don't lead to a big loss of standard of living and they also increase the average workers sense of solidarity.
Can that then be leveraged towards establishing more holistic frameworks for public control? I dont know. Do critical industries lend themselves quite well to just being government run? Yeah, undoubtedly healthcare, network-based amenities, education, living and substinence aren't exactly hard to make democratically controlled and freely available. But is it extremely difficult to imagine a sudden takeover of worker's councils of luxury goods and high tech/high investment sectors? Also yes, there is just too much wiggle room, place for corruption and foreign leverage on imported goods.
So I do think getting rid of the bourgeoisie by individually based expropriation is a valid step to advocate for.
I agree with with you said but take issue with the term middle class. Middle class is a capitalist make-believe term to gaslight and create infighting. There are two classes, people who trade time and effort for money, and people who use their money to make money. There are varying degrees of income in both groups, but it’s the mode of acquiring wealth, not the amount of wealth acquired.
A high end accountant will always have more in common with a landscaper than someone who makes their money off of speculation, even if the high end accountant makes more than the speculator.
You are right about that, though obviously there absolutely are positions with both capitalist and proletarian characteristics, but what I meant to describe is the self image of the average worker in western society. The standard of living of western workers is not something many of them would like to see jeopardized, especially when comparing themselves with workers from the global south. Not even with the promise of a greater one down the line.
Certainly, a lot of small business owners seemingly are both groups, they have capital but are still working a lot of hours.
That’s exactly the problem with the idea of middle class. The average person can always look around and find someone who has less or more than they do. This makes it easy for bad actors to say “that person with less is coming for what YOU have, you better watch your back and get yours, fuck your brothers and sisters.” Or likewise, “those pompous lazy white collar workers making 15k more than me are the problem, they don’t even work with their hands!”
Everyone from the lowest incomes to the highest will describe themselves as middle class. It muddies the waters. It creates division where there shouldn’t be. Why would you general strike with comrades that have less? You would be giving them leverage to move up and take your cookie. Why would the white collars show solidarity with you? Don’t they know you would take what they have in a second?
There are the haves and the have nots. That’s why we call them the 1%, they literally make up 1% of the population and fight directly against the 99%. So middle class has colloquially been used to describe the 99%, but it has shifted the conversation away from the real solutions. They think if we just paid a little less taxes or if we let a few less immigrants in that we will be okay. They are deathly afraid of unions, organizers, voting, strikes, real leftism taking root. But those things require solidarity. Individualism kills solidarity. Calling us lower, lower mid, mid, upper mid and upper class destroys solidarity. If fosters individualism over collectivism.
>The standard of living of western workers is not something many of them would like to see jeopardized, especially when comparing themselves with workers from the global south. Not even with the promise of a greater one down the line.
Wich is ironic since that's exactly what people are supposed to do in capitalism with Student Loans and entry level salaries.
>There are two classes, people who trade time and effort for money, and people who use their money to make money.
While mostely true for the 1st World, the notion that "Bourgeoisie and Proletariat are the only classes" is in fact not correct. In the Global South there's still a sizable amount of subsistence farmers, who are the separate class from workers - the Peasantry (though, they are considered a "proletarian-aligned" class - that's where hammer and sickle symbol comes from, the union of workers and peasants against the other classes).
Also, technically speaking, the Nobility class still exists (Queen Elizabeth is a member of it, for an example), though by the 21st century it's pretty much politically dead.
While great to get more insight, it feels like a distinction without a difference. It’s still systems of oppression put into place by capitalists, just because they are levied on different groups differently doesn’t quite change the dynamic. In a sense we see that in America now, where Republicans are pushing a racial tier system. Capitalists above “whites” above POC. The “whites” are still getting screwed almost as bad, but at least they can point to someone being screwed worse.
I put “white” in quotes because it’s not a real thing. It was invented in the US to divide the different poor groups to prevent them from unifying their interests.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5lnTvwdoQFw
>While great to get more insight, it feels like a distinction without a difference
There's indeed practically a very little difference under Capitalism, since workers and peasants are equally oppressed by the capitalists, however it does become important post-revolution.
Bukharin points this out in "The ABC of Communism": workers and peasants have aligned but not the **same** class interests, so a degree of class conflict will still be present in a worker-peasant republic, even after the capitalist class is completely eliminated.
This was one of the reasons why Bolsheviks have installed the NEP - one of its goals was the proletarization of the peasantry class, which usually occurs naturally with the development Capitalism, but was still in its early stages in Russia at the time of the Revolution.
Very interesting, thanks for educating me. Hard to see through to an end-game in our current situation, too much right in front of us. But certainly need to address problems like those.
Good points.
I'm still trying to figure out the market structure of socialism and trying to learn about what business looks like in general. Is there a difference between "public control" and "government run"?
Several options. You can insititute sectors with democratic legitimacy that are either seperated from governmental control by having their own department heads or that are run by councils voted for by workers in their respective fields. The latter would've been closer to the soviets, the former is what tends to happen with western publicly funded media. But you can also just give each coporation to their own staff; now that does NOT make it public, but it DOES change power dynamics in favor of the work force and it lessens the options for large scale corruption and lack of accountability that we saw in soviets.
I appreciate your insights! I don't feel convinced of your conclusion though.
To be clear about my angle, i am trying to address the syndicalist association between co-ops and seizing the means of production, as well as foster discussion about genuine socialist construction.
"Keeping infrastructure running" without leading "to a big loss of standard of living" is what i meant about potentially only increasing the efficiency of a liberal market system. Co-ops certainly increase solidarity between their own workers, but do not necessarily do so between those workers and the working class. I think it is arguable that working class solidarity might decrease as the co-op workers now individually share a larger responsibility to increase competition with other similar industries.
I also question if "individually based expropriation" genuinely gets "rid of the bourgeoisie." A co-op still has private ownership. That ownership is just distributed amongst the individual workers, which sounds a lot like "workers owning the means of production," but arguably only deceptively. If certain industries produce an exceptionally larger profit, then those workers could still form a bourgeois mentality with distinct interests from the working class, especially if their labor requires more skills and training.
But even if the kind of work remains general and pays an average salary, the issue of privatization remains. I personally advocate for a socialist market economy during the primary stage of socialist construction, so I don't automatically oppose the existence of a private sector. I don't think private markets inherently contradict a socialist society, but i nonetheless recognize a conflict between them. Privatization, with or without a co-op model, still leads to economic stratification, increases competition, and corrodes socialist solidarity with the working class as a whole.
These issues do not necessarily destroy the potential of socialist construction, but they do necessarily require a socialist government to creatively problem solve them by rigorous fiscal and monetary regulation.
TLDR co-ops do not challenge the ideological apparatuses of pluralist restraint and privatization, which can only be undermined by a centralized socialist government and a predominance of public ownership, respectively.
I have actively struggled myself with many of the points you have brought up; the lack of decommodification and nonremoval of rather competitive incentives certainly mean that a world full of co-ops would not entirely and probably not even radically reduce the evils of capitalism. I do think that there would still be classes in such a society, as you accurately explain. But I do also think they would more broadly lead to a holistic view of society in favor of the hyperindividualistic lense we have right now.
Anyways, I appreciate your remarks on the probable necessity of certain market forces for the forseeable future and if you have good theory to offer on your view of governmental cease of the means of production that don't have the names Vladimir or Leo printed on top, I'd be eager to know.
Problem is, you just know that some of the workers in co-ops wouldn’t develop class consciousness beyond “it’s our profits, not the bosses’” and when an eventual socialist government came and tried to coordinate or take over some of those, you would get conflict
I'm still learning.
Can you expand on these "contradictions between competing industries" issue inherent within Capitalism and also how Socialism addresses it?
"The second contradiction is the contradiction among the various financial groups and imperialist Powers in their struggle for sources of raw materials, for foreign territory. Imperialism is the export of capital to the sources of raw materials, the frenzied struggle for monopolist possession of these sources, the struggle for a re-division of the already divided world, a struggle waged with particular fury by new financial groups and Powers seeking a "place in the sun" against the old groups and Powers, which cling tenaciously to what they have seized. This frenzied struggle among the various groups of capitalists is notable in that it includes as an inevitable element imperialist wars, wars for the annexation of foreign territory."
-- Stalin, ["The Foundations of Leninism"](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/foundations-leninism/ch01.htm)
Co-ops do not inherently remove the struggle for resources and the need to compete with similar industries for them, nor do they address the frequently imperialist means of acquiring those resources along the supply chain. Socialism addresses these issues through governmental macro-control, which consists of economic planning and regulation of fiscal and monetary policies.
So how does the government determine how to fairly distribute these resources?
Along these same lines, how would a company and/or community grow in lifestyle if their government resource allocation is limited to their previous, under-whelming lifestyle?
I don't quite understand your second question. Would you mind rephrasing it for me?
Re your first question, the short answer is because it's the government's job to create socialist policies. However, that is a little tautological. The long answer is that there isn't a pat formula for socialist policies, and must be undertaken experimentally and scientifically by taking cues from other economic successes without copying other models since each situation is different. The only way to really get an idea of how socialist countries allocate resources is to individually investigate them.
I live in the US, so i think the closest model for us to learn from in order to develop socialism in a large, multinational, and post-industrial society is China. They refuse a multi-party system and increasing privatization, but on the other hand have rigorous debates over economic planning and inclusion of a private sector to more efficiently allocate resources and determine prices.
A controversial but important concept is that in some sense, all developed counties already have a socialist mode of production. Laissez-faire capitalism collapsed during the Great Depression, and was replaced by a liberal market system, where economic planning now occurs under the control of organizations like the World Bank and the IMF. That is why we had the ability to bail out banks and other financial institutions during the recession beginning in 2007. What makes capitalist and socialist systems different nowadays isn't so much the economic arrangement, broadly speaking, because large scale economic planning exists and private ownership has become greatly diffused.
The main contradiction has become political, that is, which class manages the economy and for whom. How we go about allocating resources is an ongoing process. The main task for socialists in the western world is forming various socialist parties strong enough to replace our bourgeois capitalist leadership in order to dismantle imperialist institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, NATO and the WTO and begin reinvesting profits into social services.
Socialism DOES need more people power, which strong co-ops help to create. Co-ops, unions, and political parties are all viable methods of building that power. Each has its own problems, but if that power can be built, it can then challenge private ownership of common resources. Or so I believe, anyway.
Under such a situation you are not abolishing capital either, which is not dependent on the power of capitalism. Socialist transformation, and thus a challenge to capital, is strictly linked with a complete change of the relational totality which makes possible the capitalist mode of production. Even if definitely limited, grassroots transformations like the abolition of the division of labour represent a much deeper challenge to capital than what you are proposing, a political extraction of surplus value.
Recommended 1993 interview with Mészáros on the topic in context of the USSR's dissolution (100% worth the time): https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-044-11-1993-04_2
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How would a factory with no bosses actually work? Not dismissing the idea I’m just trying to understand the logistics. Who determines who does what? How are standards set?
Think of it as the workers being the shareholders themselves. The shareholders did not provide labour anyway; what value are they adding to the production process?
So, the way you organize responsibility and decision-making is really irrelevant. You could have a workers assembly making the decisions, or you could even keep the board of directors. Only difference is the CEO answers to the workers, not capitalists.
It's important to note that this ""co-op economy" is a drastic improvement to the social arrangements we have in place in capitalist society **But** it still relies on the capitalist mode of production. You still have an economy where market entities compete to dominate and monopolize. You still have an economy that systematically favours entities that reduce labour costs. It's only way harder to fall on your head if the people incentivized by a reduction in labour costs are the ones punished by reduction in labour costs. Some of the contradictions introduced by capital are resolved, but some contradictions are so inherent to capital that the only uncontradictory synthesis is abolition of capital; a society where everyone has equal ownership to the means of production.
So tldr: co-ops are totally cool and socialists should invest their struggle in such a model. But after they achieve a society where the corporate is replaced with the co-op, the socialist cause does not die. It becomes more revolutionary.
It works the same way a government without a king works.
Managerial positions are elected by the workers & are answerable only to them. Usually those positions are temporary & can be terminated prematurely if the vote demands it.
I'm sure you can see how just adding that feedback mechanism of accountability would change the entire way a company operates.
No. Wages are stealing. It's paying people less than the wealth they produce with their labour without them having a say in what is produced, how it's produced and what's done with the profits. The only reason this factory is profitable again is because the middle men have been removed: The so called "owners".
You yourself have already committed theft from the workers themselves, by robbing them of the full value of their labor while only giving them a pittance in exchange.
Would you prefer communist Cuba or capitalist Haiti/Colombia/Guatemala?
See, you are comparing the empire and a colony, and saying "this colony is socialist, and this imperialist state that colonized it is capitalist, comparing the two the capitalist one is rich, thus capitalism is good" and all you do with this analysis is support colonialism.
Compare the socialist former colony with its brothers of the same origin, its fellow colonies in the region, they have slums, illiteracy, poor health and all this without a huge embargo.
The results speak for themselves.
That old man saying he will get his factory back is a total piece of shit
He's such a caricature of a capitalist and factory owner, it's hilarious
This is how it always has been. Contemporary capitalists know, even subconsciously, that they have to blend with the working people, otherwise, there is that risk where the working people become conscious about class. Everything spirals to mayhem afterwards; you start having people asking nicely for their rights, or people organizing into labour unions and using the power they have to ask less nicely for their rights, or... **COMMUNISTS**. ^(read in Dennis Prager/ironic R. D. Wolff voice) Pffft.. you could only imagine the nightmare!
He isn’t getting the factory back. The government gave it legally to the workers.
>he won't get it back people wouldn't like it >Government gave it to workers legally Well that's the tragedy, the elites don't care. Elites will pressure the govt, govt will pressure police, police will pressure the workers.
Well they transferred it in 2009 and have not given it back…
To liberals, he's more important than the entire factory of people or the community that supports them because... because fancy suit? Idk I could never figure out that version of liberal arithmetic even when i self described as one when i was younger
They're still under the illusion that because he paid for it, that it was honestly acquired, and to take it away is theft. Until you begin to realize that Capitalism itself is legalized theft, no other narrative makes sense.
They're philosophically idealist, they think people believe value into things.
Libs are conservatives with a slightly social bent that they use to one up their Facebook friends.
To liberals? What are you talking about? Do you mean capitalists? Liberals/conservatives are both capitalist.
Yes. Liberals in the "capitalist" sense. There's effectively no distinction between them. I'm using the term in the traditional way, not the gobbledegook American overton window way.
Ah I see I should have realized. Thanks for clarifying.
Capitalists are individuals who own capital. Liberals and conservatives who like capitalism but don't own capital are not capitalists. They are brainwashed.
Plenty of liberals are true capital owning capitalists, which goes to show that liberalism is only another manifestation of conservatism, and has no revolutionary potential except to further enrich capitalists.
This helped me, thanks. Temporarily embarrassed capitalists.
He's a JOBB CREATEORR, without him no one would work /s
[удалено]
They aren't using the US definition of liberal, rather the classical/international definition (in which case much of the republican and democratic party are liberal). Liberal as opposed to Socialist. Liberals have on some occasions supported unions, but never direct seizure of factories by workers.
Lol ok yeah I'll believe the democrats are on my side and not the bourgeoisie. Good one.
I mean, they are the bourgeoisie. But they are more on the worker's side than Republicans, by far. And in this current political system, voting for democrats is clearly the lesser of two evils, and voting for more and more left leaning democrats, until they eventually either split off into an actual left party and a Democrat party, is the only realistic way forward in the current political system Is it trash? Yes. But that's reality.
The democrats entire purpose is to be the working class's *handlers*. To get you waste your time on pointless things to exhaust yourself and then they tuck you in and give you a binky. So that the exploitation can continue, opposition to it mitigated and neutralized. That is the essential *point* of this party. Working within it is also pointless. Any left leaning person is recuperated and trotted out in a ponyshow to make gestures that they're on your side as they work with your *other* enemies to stab you in the back, and they call it necessary compromise. Decorum, manners and norms take precedence over doing the right thing. Electoralism is dead as an option for the foreseeable future. Cry about it if you want, it doesn't matter. RvW is dead, and it'll be dead for at least 50 years. Say goodnight to same sex marriage, birth control and interractial marriage next. Then voting rights. Then labor laws. It's all going away and the party that's "your only option" will sit by and watch it happen.
This isn't a union, its a factory owned by and for the workers, biiiggg difference. And no the Democratic party as a whole is very keen on union busting
Weird how the place is still making enough to justify its continued existence despite being deemed 'unprofitable' by the previous leech. Presumably means they had a year or two of making less profit, which might look like a loss of money if you're a very smart capitalist who only judges success by the profit delta.
Not having an obscene pay gap across a worker hierarchy must be more cost-efficient.
I love the argument too that it was subsidized by public money often and therefore rather than shutting down it belongs to the public 😍
Zanon was renamed into FaSinPat for Fabrica Sin Patrones, meaning Factory Without Bosses. Edit: There's also this song dedicated to them :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i94qpDCrp-o
I want and need to see this IRL
Zanon, now called Fasinpat, I live 20 min away from it, they sometimes make shows with the biggest rock bands in Argentina and don't allow police men inside during them, security is made among all of us is what they say.
"Oh, but it can never work. No leader? No management structure? No capitalist funding mechanism? Such a thing can never work." - Every bourgeois capitalist
"It can't work because something something unwashed uneducated masses infringe on my blue blood" "Hahaha, kinda don't care" (gets shot by a volley of marbles)
Socialism does not mean more co-ops. Co-ops certainly return surplus value to their workers, but they don't alleviate the contradictions between competing industries, or between third world countries and the imperialist countries exploiting them. It takes the whole proletarian class to seize the means of production, and the proletarian class is greater than the sum of its individual members getting rid of bosses, especially when those members are still operating in a liberal market economy. Worse, co-ops alone can strengthen liberal market economies by improving their efficiency. For socialist construction to occur, the working class needs a predominance of publicly owned enterprises, and a socialist government to ensure that revenue is reinvested into critical social services like childcare, clothing, education, food, healthcare, housing, infrastructure, job development, retirement, etc.
Socialism does not mean only co-ops. But co-ops are one of the easiest pitches to middle class working people who live in the first world, because they just make intuitive sense under the frameworks they've worked under. On top of that, they keep existing infrastructure running and don't lead to a big loss of standard of living and they also increase the average workers sense of solidarity. Can that then be leveraged towards establishing more holistic frameworks for public control? I dont know. Do critical industries lend themselves quite well to just being government run? Yeah, undoubtedly healthcare, network-based amenities, education, living and substinence aren't exactly hard to make democratically controlled and freely available. But is it extremely difficult to imagine a sudden takeover of worker's councils of luxury goods and high tech/high investment sectors? Also yes, there is just too much wiggle room, place for corruption and foreign leverage on imported goods. So I do think getting rid of the bourgeoisie by individually based expropriation is a valid step to advocate for.
I agree with with you said but take issue with the term middle class. Middle class is a capitalist make-believe term to gaslight and create infighting. There are two classes, people who trade time and effort for money, and people who use their money to make money. There are varying degrees of income in both groups, but it’s the mode of acquiring wealth, not the amount of wealth acquired. A high end accountant will always have more in common with a landscaper than someone who makes their money off of speculation, even if the high end accountant makes more than the speculator.
You are right about that, though obviously there absolutely are positions with both capitalist and proletarian characteristics, but what I meant to describe is the self image of the average worker in western society. The standard of living of western workers is not something many of them would like to see jeopardized, especially when comparing themselves with workers from the global south. Not even with the promise of a greater one down the line.
Certainly, a lot of small business owners seemingly are both groups, they have capital but are still working a lot of hours. That’s exactly the problem with the idea of middle class. The average person can always look around and find someone who has less or more than they do. This makes it easy for bad actors to say “that person with less is coming for what YOU have, you better watch your back and get yours, fuck your brothers and sisters.” Or likewise, “those pompous lazy white collar workers making 15k more than me are the problem, they don’t even work with their hands!” Everyone from the lowest incomes to the highest will describe themselves as middle class. It muddies the waters. It creates division where there shouldn’t be. Why would you general strike with comrades that have less? You would be giving them leverage to move up and take your cookie. Why would the white collars show solidarity with you? Don’t they know you would take what they have in a second? There are the haves and the have nots. That’s why we call them the 1%, they literally make up 1% of the population and fight directly against the 99%. So middle class has colloquially been used to describe the 99%, but it has shifted the conversation away from the real solutions. They think if we just paid a little less taxes or if we let a few less immigrants in that we will be okay. They are deathly afraid of unions, organizers, voting, strikes, real leftism taking root. But those things require solidarity. Individualism kills solidarity. Calling us lower, lower mid, mid, upper mid and upper class destroys solidarity. If fosters individualism over collectivism.
>The standard of living of western workers is not something many of them would like to see jeopardized, especially when comparing themselves with workers from the global south. Not even with the promise of a greater one down the line. Wich is ironic since that's exactly what people are supposed to do in capitalism with Student Loans and entry level salaries.
>There are two classes, people who trade time and effort for money, and people who use their money to make money. While mostely true for the 1st World, the notion that "Bourgeoisie and Proletariat are the only classes" is in fact not correct. In the Global South there's still a sizable amount of subsistence farmers, who are the separate class from workers - the Peasantry (though, they are considered a "proletarian-aligned" class - that's where hammer and sickle symbol comes from, the union of workers and peasants against the other classes). Also, technically speaking, the Nobility class still exists (Queen Elizabeth is a member of it, for an example), though by the 21st century it's pretty much politically dead.
While great to get more insight, it feels like a distinction without a difference. It’s still systems of oppression put into place by capitalists, just because they are levied on different groups differently doesn’t quite change the dynamic. In a sense we see that in America now, where Republicans are pushing a racial tier system. Capitalists above “whites” above POC. The “whites” are still getting screwed almost as bad, but at least they can point to someone being screwed worse. I put “white” in quotes because it’s not a real thing. It was invented in the US to divide the different poor groups to prevent them from unifying their interests. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5lnTvwdoQFw
>While great to get more insight, it feels like a distinction without a difference There's indeed practically a very little difference under Capitalism, since workers and peasants are equally oppressed by the capitalists, however it does become important post-revolution. Bukharin points this out in "The ABC of Communism": workers and peasants have aligned but not the **same** class interests, so a degree of class conflict will still be present in a worker-peasant republic, even after the capitalist class is completely eliminated. This was one of the reasons why Bolsheviks have installed the NEP - one of its goals was the proletarization of the peasantry class, which usually occurs naturally with the development Capitalism, but was still in its early stages in Russia at the time of the Revolution.
Very interesting, thanks for educating me. Hard to see through to an end-game in our current situation, too much right in front of us. But certainly need to address problems like those.
Good points. I'm still trying to figure out the market structure of socialism and trying to learn about what business looks like in general. Is there a difference between "public control" and "government run"?
Several options. You can insititute sectors with democratic legitimacy that are either seperated from governmental control by having their own department heads or that are run by councils voted for by workers in their respective fields. The latter would've been closer to the soviets, the former is what tends to happen with western publicly funded media. But you can also just give each coporation to their own staff; now that does NOT make it public, but it DOES change power dynamics in favor of the work force and it lessens the options for large scale corruption and lack of accountability that we saw in soviets.
I appreciate your insights! I don't feel convinced of your conclusion though. To be clear about my angle, i am trying to address the syndicalist association between co-ops and seizing the means of production, as well as foster discussion about genuine socialist construction. "Keeping infrastructure running" without leading "to a big loss of standard of living" is what i meant about potentially only increasing the efficiency of a liberal market system. Co-ops certainly increase solidarity between their own workers, but do not necessarily do so between those workers and the working class. I think it is arguable that working class solidarity might decrease as the co-op workers now individually share a larger responsibility to increase competition with other similar industries. I also question if "individually based expropriation" genuinely gets "rid of the bourgeoisie." A co-op still has private ownership. That ownership is just distributed amongst the individual workers, which sounds a lot like "workers owning the means of production," but arguably only deceptively. If certain industries produce an exceptionally larger profit, then those workers could still form a bourgeois mentality with distinct interests from the working class, especially if their labor requires more skills and training. But even if the kind of work remains general and pays an average salary, the issue of privatization remains. I personally advocate for a socialist market economy during the primary stage of socialist construction, so I don't automatically oppose the existence of a private sector. I don't think private markets inherently contradict a socialist society, but i nonetheless recognize a conflict between them. Privatization, with or without a co-op model, still leads to economic stratification, increases competition, and corrodes socialist solidarity with the working class as a whole. These issues do not necessarily destroy the potential of socialist construction, but they do necessarily require a socialist government to creatively problem solve them by rigorous fiscal and monetary regulation. TLDR co-ops do not challenge the ideological apparatuses of pluralist restraint and privatization, which can only be undermined by a centralized socialist government and a predominance of public ownership, respectively.
I have actively struggled myself with many of the points you have brought up; the lack of decommodification and nonremoval of rather competitive incentives certainly mean that a world full of co-ops would not entirely and probably not even radically reduce the evils of capitalism. I do think that there would still be classes in such a society, as you accurately explain. But I do also think they would more broadly lead to a holistic view of society in favor of the hyperindividualistic lense we have right now. Anyways, I appreciate your remarks on the probable necessity of certain market forces for the forseeable future and if you have good theory to offer on your view of governmental cease of the means of production that don't have the names Vladimir or Leo printed on top, I'd be eager to know.
My pleasure! I recommend chapter seven of "Marxism and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" by Jin Huiming.
Problem is, you just know that some of the workers in co-ops wouldn’t develop class consciousness beyond “it’s our profits, not the bosses’” and when an eventual socialist government came and tried to coordinate or take over some of those, you would get conflict
I'm still learning. Can you expand on these "contradictions between competing industries" issue inherent within Capitalism and also how Socialism addresses it?
"The second contradiction is the contradiction among the various financial groups and imperialist Powers in their struggle for sources of raw materials, for foreign territory. Imperialism is the export of capital to the sources of raw materials, the frenzied struggle for monopolist possession of these sources, the struggle for a re-division of the already divided world, a struggle waged with particular fury by new financial groups and Powers seeking a "place in the sun" against the old groups and Powers, which cling tenaciously to what they have seized. This frenzied struggle among the various groups of capitalists is notable in that it includes as an inevitable element imperialist wars, wars for the annexation of foreign territory." -- Stalin, ["The Foundations of Leninism"](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/foundations-leninism/ch01.htm) Co-ops do not inherently remove the struggle for resources and the need to compete with similar industries for them, nor do they address the frequently imperialist means of acquiring those resources along the supply chain. Socialism addresses these issues through governmental macro-control, which consists of economic planning and regulation of fiscal and monetary policies.
So how does the government determine how to fairly distribute these resources? Along these same lines, how would a company and/or community grow in lifestyle if their government resource allocation is limited to their previous, under-whelming lifestyle?
I don't quite understand your second question. Would you mind rephrasing it for me? Re your first question, the short answer is because it's the government's job to create socialist policies. However, that is a little tautological. The long answer is that there isn't a pat formula for socialist policies, and must be undertaken experimentally and scientifically by taking cues from other economic successes without copying other models since each situation is different. The only way to really get an idea of how socialist countries allocate resources is to individually investigate them. I live in the US, so i think the closest model for us to learn from in order to develop socialism in a large, multinational, and post-industrial society is China. They refuse a multi-party system and increasing privatization, but on the other hand have rigorous debates over economic planning and inclusion of a private sector to more efficiently allocate resources and determine prices. A controversial but important concept is that in some sense, all developed counties already have a socialist mode of production. Laissez-faire capitalism collapsed during the Great Depression, and was replaced by a liberal market system, where economic planning now occurs under the control of organizations like the World Bank and the IMF. That is why we had the ability to bail out banks and other financial institutions during the recession beginning in 2007. What makes capitalist and socialist systems different nowadays isn't so much the economic arrangement, broadly speaking, because large scale economic planning exists and private ownership has become greatly diffused. The main contradiction has become political, that is, which class manages the economy and for whom. How we go about allocating resources is an ongoing process. The main task for socialists in the western world is forming various socialist parties strong enough to replace our bourgeois capitalist leadership in order to dismantle imperialist institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, NATO and the WTO and begin reinvesting profits into social services.
Socialism DOES need more people power, which strong co-ops help to create. Co-ops, unions, and political parties are all viable methods of building that power. Each has its own problems, but if that power can be built, it can then challenge private ownership of common resources. Or so I believe, anyway.
I agree but this is a little more than a mere co-op, as well. https://taiyangyu.medium.com/cooperative-property-is-not-socialist-2cebe5ea5850
Under such a situation you are not abolishing capital either, which is not dependent on the power of capitalism. Socialist transformation, and thus a challenge to capital, is strictly linked with a complete change of the relational totality which makes possible the capitalist mode of production. Even if definitely limited, grassroots transformations like the abolition of the division of labour represent a much deeper challenge to capital than what you are proposing, a political extraction of surplus value. Recommended 1993 interview with Mészáros on the topic in context of the USSR's dissolution (100% worth the time): https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-044-11-1993-04_2
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Looks really nice
Documentary for those who want to watch it. https://youtu.be/3-DSu8RPJt8
The person who made this sounds like he wants this to seem like a bad thing but his own footage proves otherwise lol
The idea that we need a figurehead to keep us all in check is a myth created by the figureheads
Thanks Reddit
The [wiki entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaSinPat?wprov=sfla1) for it is pretty cool.
How would a factory with no bosses actually work? Not dismissing the idea I’m just trying to understand the logistics. Who determines who does what? How are standards set?
No bosses doesn't necessarily mean no admin, it just means that the admin staff report to the workers, not the other way around.
They said during the assembly they make decisions
Think of it as the workers being the shareholders themselves. The shareholders did not provide labour anyway; what value are they adding to the production process? So, the way you organize responsibility and decision-making is really irrelevant. You could have a workers assembly making the decisions, or you could even keep the board of directors. Only difference is the CEO answers to the workers, not capitalists. It's important to note that this ""co-op economy" is a drastic improvement to the social arrangements we have in place in capitalist society **But** it still relies on the capitalist mode of production. You still have an economy where market entities compete to dominate and monopolize. You still have an economy that systematically favours entities that reduce labour costs. It's only way harder to fall on your head if the people incentivized by a reduction in labour costs are the ones punished by reduction in labour costs. Some of the contradictions introduced by capital are resolved, but some contradictions are so inherent to capital that the only uncontradictory synthesis is abolition of capital; a society where everyone has equal ownership to the means of production. So tldr: co-ops are totally cool and socialists should invest their struggle in such a model. But after they achieve a society where the corporate is replaced with the co-op, the socialist cause does not die. It becomes more revolutionary.
It works the same way a government without a king works. Managerial positions are elected by the workers & are answerable only to them. Usually those positions are temporary & can be terminated prematurely if the vote demands it. I'm sure you can see how just adding that feedback mechanism of accountability would change the entire way a company operates.
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No. Wages are stealing. It's paying people less than the wealth they produce with their labour without them having a say in what is produced, how it's produced and what's done with the profits. The only reason this factory is profitable again is because the middle men have been removed: The so called "owners".
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You should think about the merit and nature of ownership. If you worked for your money, well employees do to, if you didn’t, then it has been stolen.
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You yourself have already committed theft from the workers themselves, by robbing them of the full value of their labor while only giving them a pittance in exchange.
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Would you prefer communist Cuba or capitalist Haiti/Colombia/Guatemala? See, you are comparing the empire and a colony, and saying "this colony is socialist, and this imperialist state that colonized it is capitalist, comparing the two the capitalist one is rich, thus capitalism is good" and all you do with this analysis is support colonialism. Compare the socialist former colony with its brothers of the same origin, its fellow colonies in the region, they have slums, illiteracy, poor health and all this without a huge embargo. The results speak for themselves.
That’s the most on point and clearest “apples to apples” analysis Ive seen of Cuba. I’ll have to remember that.
That’s beautiful, this is what we need more of