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Kidplayer_666 @lemm.ee

1y ago

Lemmy might, MIGHT have a small bias towards the left

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Socialists don't hate markets, they hate workers not having any power or democratic choice in how they interact in the market.
Workers owning the means of production just means the workers are doing the same work but they are in ownership of the factory and the profits. They will still sell the products they produce in a marketplace.
- Market forces on their own produce many if not all of the perverse incentives of capitalism. Only a centrally planned economy, built on a foundation of grassroots democracy, can hope to overcome those incentives by doing economic planning with an eye towards future sustainability and quality of life, rather than towards profitability.
  
  Within the context of one person's career, socialism on its own can do quite a bit to transform people's relationship to their workplace. No longer would your job be at risk because you've all done too well and it's to "cut labor costs" while profits soar. No longer would you be worried about automating away your job, instead you'd gladly automate your job away and then the whole organization could lower how much work needs to be done as things get more and more automated.
  Democracy would massively improve work-life balance.
  Of course this comes with problems, all of which exist in capitalism (how do we care for people outside of these organizations who won't have access to work, for example). But if I had to choose between market socialism and capitalism, the choice is pretty clear, and it's something much easier for liberals to stomach.
  
  Not saying I'm in favor of it, but there's still market socialism out there as a political stance
  
  The idea of centrally planned economy ignores the lessons of the past. Bronze Age empires and recent examples all display universal inability to adjust to changes.
  It’s the same magical thinking as the blind belief in market forces exhibits.
  Priests of “invisible hand of market” ignore information exchange speed limits and market inertia, believing that markets will just magically fix everything in time for it to matter.
  Preachers of central planning ignore information exchange speed limits and market inertia (and yes, there is a market, as long as there is goods and services exchange, however indirect) by believing they will have all the relevant information and the capacity to process it in time for it to matter.
  Neither is true. Neither school of thought even attempted to show itself to be true.
  
  I think the better way would be a centrally planned economy for some goods (electricity, "normal" food, health, ...) and something more "free" for the rest of the market. Bread has a marked price but a PS5 doesn't.
- They will still sell the products they produce in a marketplace.
  There is no rule that states they have to sell squat in a marketplace. They could, but they also couldn't. That's the whole point of the workers owning the means of production - the workers involved makes those deicisions, not a capitalist or bureaucratic parasite class.
- I, a socialist, hate markets. They are simplistic and functional artifacts of the available way to pass information.
  
  Cool, what is your preferred replacement and does everyone in this thread agree? You have managed to continue criticism but not offer a replacement yet again.
  
  The ole can have criticism without perfect solutions response. Cool, how useless and pointless of you.
  
  I'm confused, isn't criticism without alternatives itself useless and pointless?
  
  No, it broadens and deepens understanding.
  Alternatives come from that understanding. Criticism is the fundamental step towards alternatives.
  
  No, it broadens and deepens understanding
  How exactly do you come to that conclusion?
  Edit: "Thing bad" doesn't broaden or deepen anything. "Thing has specific shortcomings which aren't present in specific alternative to thing" is a useful criticism. Criticism without alternatives is just called complaining.
  
  "thing has specific shortcomings" is a useful criticism.
  
  Not always, sometimes it's just an acknowledgement of insurmountable facts. Pointing out the inability of a particular engine to overcome the laws of thermodynamics to output more energy than is input is not useful criticism. Pointing out the mortality of individuals is not useful criticism. Those shortcomings are specific, but unless there's some alternative that doesn't have those shortcomings, those aren't useful observations, they're pointless complaints.
  
  youre wrong.
  if we're talking about the input requirements of some engine to drive its load and those don't match then "yells in thermodynamics" is an incredibly useful criticism.
  if we're talking about a project that relies on one person then discussing their mortality is an incredibly useful criticism.
  in this case, the thing we're talking about is markets and the comment youre accusing of being a pointless complaint is
  I, a socialist, hate markets. They are simplistic and functional artifacts of the available way to pass information.
  which is an absolutely useful criticism. relying on markets to pass information is a holdover from before we had better methods to do so. the most profitable companies now use data outside the marketplace to make decisions to the point of developing enormous networks to collect, store, parse, interpret and disseminate that information. Cybersyn, the socialist version of this technology, allowed such powerful subversion of american plots against Chile that the only alternative was a fascist military coup.
  so it's not a pointless complaint, but an accurate distillation of criticism most recently offered up to the american public eye as the book The Peoples Republic of Walmart.
  
  My response was to the implicit irony of
  The ole can have criticism without perfect solutions response. Cool, how useless and pointless of you.
  Everything else is opinion, and I'm not really invested in opinions.
  
  I, a socialist don't. I think however they should be tightly regulated. And kept away from basic necessitys.
  Markets have proven time and again to only serve oligarchs, or create oligarchs to serve. When left to their own wont. If we can choose to participate or not in the markets. Then there is no issue with markets. When we're slaves to the markets as we currently are however. No one is free.
  
  Markets have lots of issues; you just named a bunch. Markets are subject to all kinds of hidden information manipulation contrary to prompting non cooperation and solving for individual maximums via exploitation like you literally outlined. Your wish to magically regulate them is just going to be corrupted.
  
  Which is why I specifically mentioned decoupling from necessities. Regardless it seems like we are both blocked from the community LOL. But it's not like I expected more from the community based around memes
  
  So, you would never trade with someone else something you have for something they have? You want to be entirely self sufficient?
  If this isn't true, why do think markets serve no purpose?
  
  Do you really think all exchange of goods is a market?
  
  Yes. Do you not?
  
  So Christmas gifts are a market?
  
  No because I don't give you a gift only if you give me one. It's not a transaction. They are gifts.
  ...but you turned it into a semantic point. If I farm sheep and you bake bread, it's a market when I trade you wool for bread. If trade even as basic as this can't occur then you're relying on everyone to be self-sufficient.
  The alternative is you're expecting everyone to put everything they produce into a kitty which is distributed to all, and I think that is a sure fire recipe for everyone to go hungry and for society to stagnate. There's little incentive to be productive, and no incentive to be inventive.
  
  Hunger is such a poor motivator.
- The hell of capitalism is the firm, not the fact that it has a boss
- So every company remodeled after REI, got it.
- Do they actually trust their coworkers to run the company without tanking it almost immediatly? Most of my coworkers can barely make it through their own tasks without fucking something up, let alone actually having input on how the business is run.
  
  I trust my average coworker much more than the average CEO.
  
  Highly depends on your coworkers. My current coworkers? Yeah they're great, we have two electrical engineers on my team, buncha geniuses.
  My last job? Oh man I wouldn't trust those guys as far as I could throw em.
  
  And how did you feel about upper management at that job?
  
  Untrustworthy but at least smart.
  
  Most of my coworkers can barely make it through their own tasks without fucking something up
  This is a problem with the company you work for, not your coworkers. I'm sure if they were paid more, were given more agency, and received better training, they'd be better elployees
  
  Either that or the reason they purposefully hire meth-addled freaks is because they want desperate people who won't fight for any of those things.
  Source: Friend who works in a warehouse and has coworkers who are obviously there to get a paycheck to afford their fix and then move on. It's the company culture. They could choose to hire better people, or mentor the people who could grow, they don't.
  
  thats because they want addicts (of any variety, not just drugs) cuz their labor is cheap. its a form of exploitation
  
  No, they're just idiots. Myself and others have had the same training and responsibilities and do fine. It's not that difficult of a job.
  
  i shall surely reap the rewards of working at the same level as these irredeemably dumb people. then i will prove my point online or something
  
  I'm several levels up from them. But I have to deal with the problems they cause constantly. I did start at their level though.
  
  thank you for your service i guess
  
  Sounds like you’re a duct-taper. That’s also indicative of a procedural issue with the company you work for. Shit sucks. Hyper competent duct taper usually ends up being a pretty thankless job as well. Never getting to actually fix underlying problems. Always putting out fires. And everyone just learns to expect it from you, from above and below. And it sounds like you’ve learned to expect it as well. I know all workplaces have their dysfunction, but I hope you can either come to find this one more tolerable or find a better environment soon.
  
  Sounds like you're just an extra special boy. Surely that's the only explanation to literally all of your coworkers doing their job badly.
  
  I didn't say all I said most. It's really probably not even most just a large enough portion of them that there's always some issue going on caused by their negligence.
  
  Sounds like you're just a mostly special boy then. Surely that's the only explanation to literally most of your coworkers doing their job badly.
  
  It's not just about treating current employees well. It's also about offering enough at the hiring stage to attract more good workers. Higher starting pay and a better reputation as a place to work means more people applying, means that Methface Matt can't compete with TypeA Teresa to get hired in the first place.
  
  People lie in their interviews all the time. The amount of conversations I've had with my boss regarding people he's hired that turned out be idiots that have started with "I don't know what happened with that dude, he seemed totally normal in the hiring process". We're also restricted in what questions we can ask during interviews because asking people probing questions is apparently not fair according to our HR dept which makes it pretty easy for them to BS their way in. Then we're stuck with their dumb asses for months before HR lets us fire them.
  
  Most of my coworkers can barely make it through their own tasks
  I guess you haven't met many CEOs, then.
  
  You must need a better job. I've had plenty of workplaces where I could count on everyone around me.
  You know, the hiring manager usually has something to do with the quality of people hired. Maybe you could talk to them instead?
  
  If I made my hiring manager worried more about quality I wouldn't be hired
  
  That doesn't really change the overall point. People are stupid. It's the single biggest sticking point in democracy, socialism, communism, really anything except dictatorship/technocracy/oligarchy/etc. Any system where you cede power to the masses runs the risk of the masses being utterly stupid.
  I think it's worth it, because stupid is better than evil, but it's still a point worth considering.
  
  if you dont raise your children to be adults, they won't act like adults when they grow up. A revolution would mean people learning entirely new skills, like making decisions in the workplace. Most workers have no agency, theyre treated like machines, so I dont expect people raised in that society to know how to run a completely different one from scratch. Revolution is a process, it has to be built. Keep shitting on your coworkers tho, im sure its a productive activity
  
  They can't even learn to do the tasks they are expected to do now. Even with frequent coaching. How the fuck can you expect them to learn to make business decisions?
  
  You've clearly never worked close with anyone making business decisions in the real world.
  
  I used to work for a food type company and the way they decided to import and sell stuff locally was if the board of directors (the CEO who inherited the company from daddy + his siblings) liked the item. They hired someone, my coworker, to actually run the market tests and everything and then promptly ignored any suggestion she had to make about the viability of this product on the local market, instead relegating her to a busser that was in charge of ordering the samples they decided they wanted.
  I remember one item nobody liked (they would give us the remaining samples in the break room like some dogs getting the leftovers), but one of the siblings liked it and they got that close to putting it on the market because of it.
  
  That all tracks
  
  I have so many stories from there. At the end of the year they would sell the soon to be expired stock to the employees for like half the price. On paper it was half (you're just giving money back to your employer so fuck them I stole as much food as I could), but the person who actually took the money was super nice and often gave us further discounts. For them the difference was like a decimal in accounting.
  They announced these sales by email with the time and date. And in 2020, the year of covid, when half the workforce was working from home, they made the sale as usual. I learned afterwards that on that morning, the siblings who owned the company went and parked their cars right in front of the warehouse where the sale took place, and filled the trunk with as much stuff as they could. Then 2 hours later the sale happened and there was almost nothing left.
  Technically legal but a fucking shitty thing to do lol, your job is to have a blurry monitor and pretend to do Excel sheets and you drive a Porsche, I think you have the means to load up your car at the store like a grown adult if you need to.
  
  same way we expect students in 9th grade to be capable of more complicated tasks once they're in 12th grade. The nature of labor in capitalist countries is to sort out wheat from chaffe. "Good" workers become managers (although this is theoretical, ive had plenty of shitty managers), leaving the "bad" workers down at the bottom. This how the economy works right now, but it doesnt always have to. For example, unions sometimes have a probation period where you work as a temp, then join the union after a month or two. This gives you time to learn the job, before you have a say in how things are organized.
  I have more thoughts, but im working rn 😝
  
  Good" workers become managers.
  These days it's mainly external hires, but it used to be you got promoted to incompetence. You do a job well, you get promoted. You don't do it well and you don't get promoted. Thus you get stuck doing something you're bad at
  
  Sounds like you’ve just got some shitty coworkers, m8. Or are you talk about your direct reports?
  
  Sounds like a structural issue. Your coworkers are overworked or underpaid or not informed correctly for the job they're given. Maybe they know they're not skilled, but the job is the only one available to them and since they need the money they're stuck doing something theyre unskilled at. These are but a few systemic problems that might lie to reason.
  Ask yourself this: If all your coworkers are bad at their job, are you just an extra special boy, or might there be something wrong going on?
  
  yes
  
  Most of my coworkers can barely make it through their own tasks without fucking something up, let alone actually having input on how the business is run.
  Your coworkers aren't incompetent. Your coworkers are just half-assing at work because they correctly realize they're not going to get paid more if they actually tried.
  
  So they're just selfish assholes that don't mind creating more work for everyone else and potentially putting people's safety at risk? That doesn't do anything to convince me that they should have a say in how the business is run. If they're not happy with their pay they can go elsewhere.
  
  It's not selfish to not go above and beyond what you need to do to help a business that doesn't care about you.
  
  Where did I say anything about helping the business? I don't expect them to go above and beyond, when they don't do their assigned tasks correctly their coworkers then have to deal with the problems this causes getting removeded at by angry customers and such. On top of that some things if not done properly can create a safety issue. We have safeguards in place for this but again it's just extra work for someone else to redo it. This attitude is causing far more problems for their coworkers than it is for the business.
  
  I don't expect them to go above and beyond
  Yes you do, they are doing enough to get paid, and you want them to do more.
  
  They're on track to get fired so they're not going to get paid for long. You totally ignored what I said about making all their coworkers suffer for their laziness. I thought all us workers were supposed to be in this together?
  
  If most of the workers are on track to get fired, that sounds like a structural problem with management
  
  It's not. Management gave them an extra 6 month freeze on any corrective action for not meeting their metrics while we gave them dozens of hours of extra training to try and help them get their shit together. A handful of them actually listened and are now doing okay. The rest didn't give a fuck and are doing as bad as ever.
  
  If the majority of your employees are on track to be fired, that's your fault as a company.
  
  Some of the workers may be managerial. But the managerial workers don't own a disproportionate amount of the company, and they're not considered the "superior" of any other workers.
  
  Didn't say they run it. The person who runs it can be simply another employee. It's just there are no outside investors and everyone has a vote on the board. You put someone in charge you trust but everyone as a whole has a say in big picture stuff with the person at the top being day to day and being held accountable to employees and not investors.
  Capitalism fundamentally changes the relationship between workers and their work. One takes the value they create and gives it to someone else. One doesn't.
  
  But why would this employee put in that more work than anybody else? Just to get the same amount of compensation as anybody else? I certainly wouldn't put up with all the complications of leading a bunch of people without being paid extra.
  
  But why would this employee put in that more work than anybody else? Just to get the same amount of compensation as anybody else?
  Who said that's the case?
  
  Than I don't really get the idea. Could you elaborate?
  As far as I understood, the company's shares belong to the employees ("everyone gets a seat on the board") and those elect a director which in turn organises the work structure, assigns roles etc. Correct?
  Can he be replaced at all times?
  How is the compensation of the employees determined?
  How are employees handled which are not performing their duties?
  Can employees be fired?
  How can employees join and leave the company?
  Do they return their shares on leaving?
  Can they buy and sell their shares?
  How do new employees get their shares? Are they assigned or bought?
  How is capital raised for large long-term investments like a new machine?
  If the employees bring up the capital, do they get interest?
  What if no capital can be raised? Is the company terminated?
  Can some employees put in more capital than others?
  Is the financial gain distributed equally between the employees?
  
  ඞ
  
  @lightnsfw @dingus
  You really think the people currently running your company are any different from those other coworkers?
  
  Yes I think so, because the people running the company have no interest in listening to the positions of the workers, especially if it makes them less money.
  When the people working in the company have a democratic vote, they at least have a choice and don't have big mistakes dictated from upon high.
  At least then, the workers can agree they all made a shitty mistake together. It doesn't mean workers are infallible. All humans are fallible. All humans make mistakes. The difference is the power dynamic, nothing else.
  
  I think they have education related to the running of a large company whereas most of my coworkers barely made it through their IT certs and have some of the stupidest takes regarding how things should be done I've ever heard in my life.
  
  Education related to the exploitation of their workers
  Ftfy
  
  You must be a joy to work with.
  
  I'm great to work with. No one has to worry if the task they assign me is going to be done right and on time.
  
  Every single job I've had was made worse by management. Not just worse for us, but worse for customers/clients as well. I have zero faith in management, I have complete faith in the people actually working on the floor knowing what would be best to do on the floor.
  Now you ask about "not making it fail immediately" which to me gives me an impression of thinking it is still a business that needs to be grown.
  I imagine a lot of shop floors would agree their time and resources were better spent elsewhere. No one needs Funko pops, I don't doubt those workers would find something better to do

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