yogthos

yogthos, 8 months ago

Simply believing in something doesn’t make it viable. You have to look at the history of cooperatives, how they operate under capitalism, and how they fare against capitalist companies. People have been trying to achieve what you’re proposing for many decades with little to show for it. You need to address why that is and why you’re so convinced that it can be different given all the evidence to the contrary.

The other aspect you need to consider is that capitalist companies will always have an advantage over cooperatives because they are much more willing to exploit the workers. The willingness to exploit allows the company to increase profit and market share, so competition fundamentally favors such companies. While you could argue that workers would prefer to join cooperatives, reserve army of labour ensures that there are always enough workers to go around. And of course, traditional companies can always temporarily improve their working conditions to run a cooperative out of business. We even see this dynamic with traditional companies competing.

Meanwhile, competition is perfectly possible under the communist model. For example, USSR had plenty of different design bureaus that would compete with each other. The difference was that it was friendly competition, and results were shared. The system was more efficient than capitalist competition as evidenced by USSR leading the space race.

Communism is prevented by people buying into the current capitalist model. Traditionally this has been the case because the standard of living in the west was relatively high due to the fact that most brutal exploitation was done in the countries the west subjugates. However, we are now reaching the stage of capitalism where exploitation is turning inward and people in the core of the empire are seeing their living standards deteriorate. As this process continues going forward, more and more people will reject the system.

Communists understand the inherent self destructive dynamic of capitalism and that you can’t just paper over these problems with cooperatives.

yogthos, 8 months ago

Every large organization needs management. When large groups of people organize to do complex tasks, then the work needs to be coordinated in some way. Highly recommend reading this short explanation of why management is needed www.marxists.org/archive/marx/…/authority.htm

yogthos, 8 months ago

Communist revolution has nothing to do with the level of industrialization. Cooperatives would not be taking over as the dominant form of labour organization as long as a country is ruled by the capital owning class because that wouldn’t be in the interest of the capital owning class. If capitalists were willing to give up their wealth and power without a struggle than revolutions wouldn’t be needed in the first place. It’s kind amazing that you don’t understand this basic fact.

yogthos, 8 months ago

What do you base your claim that this has not been tried in a convincing way on?

yogthos, 8 months ago

If you ever try starting a coop you’ll find out how hard it is to get investment in practice. It’s kind of hilarious that you think nobody thought of these obvious things to try before you.

yogthos, 8 months ago

A communist revolution would fundamentally restructure the way society operates which is a far more valuable goal than establishing a network of cooperatives which simply allows people lucky enough to work in these cooperatives to cope better with capitalist repression. These two things aren’t even remotely comparable, and abandoning freedom for all workers because it’s just too darn difficult is a cowardly position to take.

yogthos, 8 months ago

Unfortunately, it might also be the spring of fascism there.

yogthos, 8 months ago

Again, you’re not the first person to think of this. In practice, it turns out that it’s much easier for traditional companies to secure funding under the financial capitalist system. That’s the world we live in. Lots of people are trying to run cooperatives in all kinds of different ways. In some cases, like Mondragon, they do manage to grow big, but in general systemic pressures favor capitalist structure.

yogthos, 8 months ago

I recommend learning a bit about the subject before arguing about it. Cooperatives don’t issue bonds because nobody is going to buy these bonds.

yogthos, 8 months ago

The reality clearly demonstrates that investors don’t bother investing in coops. You’ve obviously never actually tried to get investors to invest in a coop.

yogthos, 8 months ago

That’s complete and utter nonsense. First of all, revolutions happen when significant parts of the military choose to side with the populous against the ruling class. Second, modern military runs on logistics. If the workers do not support the regime then fuel won’t be delivered for the tanks, food won’t be delivered to the troops, and so on. Fighting a civil war is completely different from invading other countries.

Meanwhile, this notion that cooperatives don’t have to be dominant is also nonsensical. As I’ve repeatedly explained to you here, the whole system is designed to make large scale cooperative movements a nonstarter. What you’re proposing here is a fantasy that’s based on your lack of understanding of how businesses actually work under capitalist system. You have this romanticized notion that’s completely divorced from the real world. I highly encourage you to educate yourself on the subject instead of arguing out of ignorance based on your made up idea of how things work.

There very much is a unified capital owning class, but it’s not unified in the simplistic way you seem to imagine it to be. The capital owning class is unified by their shared class interest. It’s not bunch of people in a room doing a conspiracy. It’s a bunch of individual actors acting in their own interest, and they all favor certain types of policies because it provides a common benefit for the capital owning class.

The relationship between a capitalist and a labourer is that the labourer sells their labour to the capitalist in return for a wage. The capitalist wishes to maximize their profit which means paying as low wage as they can while the worker wants to maximize their wage and get as much value out of their work as they can. This is the fundamental contradiction between the interests of the worker and the capitalist.

Under capitalist rule, it’s the capital owning class that holds power in society. This is precisely what analysis of many decades of policy in US shows:

What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States,

If the cooperative structure does not threaten class interests of the oligarchs then it’s not achieving anything of value. And if cooperatives actually started cutting into the profits of the capitalists then it would be in the shared class interests of the capitalists to fight cooperatives.

You continue to argue a subject that you have superficial understanding of. Perhaps spend a bit of time actually learning about how political economy works before trying to form ideas on how to improve it.

yogthos, 8 months ago

A communist revolution will abolish capitalist relations and allow creation of a government by the working class for its own benefit. If communist relations could be established via cooperatives without using violence then that would’ve happened already. People have tried doing this for over a century now with nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, communist revolutions have actually allowed workers to seize the means of production and turn them towards the benefit of the working masses. At this point I honestly can’t tell if you’re just trolling here.

yogthos, 8 months ago

The problem there is getting the initial seed funding. Investors put money into companies because they want to have control over the company, and they can’t do that with a cooperative. There is a systemic bias towards capitalist company structure because of that.

yogthos, 8 months ago

Cooperatives still need a management layer just like any other large organization. Meanwhile, the reason that cooperatives don’t have to pay owners is also the reason cooperatives are unable to get the initial investment.

You keep repeating here that the advantages of coops should overcome exploitation, but the reality is that they don’t. We have over a century of history showing this. You just keep ignoring the elephant in the room here and repeating over and over how you think this shouldn’t be the case, while it demonstrably is.

Ussr won space race and lost the microchip race. The availability of cad systems created a big advantage.

I’m not sure what this has to do with the point regarding competition and innovation under a communist system. USSR could demonstrably innovate, and was doing so better than the west in many areas.

Capitalism is not inherently self destructive. Exponential growth is only needed if all investors should succeed. That’s not necessary.

Yes, it actually is and many books have been written on this subject over the years. It’s not just the exponential growth that’s the problem, it’s the whole capitalist competition which leads to capital concentration and monopolies. Capitalism isn’t a stable system. Winners of competition grow, and they become harder to compete with because it takes increasingly more initial capital to do so. A scrappy startup isn’t going to take on Amazon for example. And even in cases where new companies do better, the established ones can simply buy them out.

Capitalism will thrive when times get tough because the majority will choose to compete instead of cooperate. Cooperatives could create space for those who want to cooperate.

Based on the actual history of capitalism it does not thrive in tough times. Once again, I implore you to learn some actual history instead of just making things up. Spend some time to educate yourself.

yogthos, 8 months ago

The reality is that it’s much more difficult to get the initial funding for a coop than a traditional company, and it’s not that lots of people haven’t been trying different approaches including the hare brained schemes you floated many times. The fact that you just keep repeating something that’s demonstrably false means that there’s no point continuing this discussion. Have a good day.

yogthos, 8 months ago

There is plenty of collaborating evidence to her claims and what you think she had to gain from chuds like you making her life hell as result I have no idea. You’ve exposed yourself as an utter piece of human garbage here.

yogthos, 8 months ago

Attacking the victim and defending the rapist is precisely what I’d expect from somebody like you.

yogthos, 8 months ago

He is a literal rapist, but people like you don’t want to acknowledge it because you have no morals. Go to your workplace and try touching shoulders like that on your coworkers, let me know how long before your rapist ass gets fired for sexual harassment.

yogthos, 8 months ago

I mean the most obvious piece slate.com/…/video-tara-reade-mother-joe-biden-lar…I just love how you keep carrying water for this pedo, this is what he does in public when he’s on camera

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/52cc2126-eb99-4876-be7f-bd6026e3776a.jpeg

You’re deplorable.

yogthos, 8 months ago

Car batteries last for around 10-20 years, so don’t think that would work out.

yogthos, 8 months ago

Would probably be easier to go back to using animals at that point. You can make crude batteries without high tech manufacturing, but they’re going to have low energy density and likely gonna be made out of toxic stuff. So not ideal for vehicles.

yogthos, 8 months ago

Mad Max world has an unreasonably robust gasoline production infrastructure.

yogthos, 8 months ago

I’m not saying we’re just going to abolish work, but we absolutely could be working far less if we structured our society differently. We’ve had an explosion of automation since the industrial revolution, yet people still work just as much as they ever did. A lot of the jobs we have are just make work jobs. There’s a whole book on the subject even.

Also, the way we do things under capitalism is dreadfully inefficient. Nearly half of the food produced is just thrown out, lots of new goods are sent directly to landfills to keep pries up, there’s shit like planned obsolescence. All to keep the consumerist society going so that a handful of oligarchs can keep raking it in. Not only does this create shitty living conditions for the majority, it’s also fundamentally unsustainable and what’s driving the current climate crisis.

The focus of a socialist government should be to ensure that the purpose of work is to produce things that we need collectively such as infrastructure, food, housing, healthcare, and so on. Producing things should be seen as a cost to society, and we should focus on making things that last and can be repaired. Consumerism needs to be abolished.

yogthos, 8 months ago

I work remotely, so I’m not affected by this personally, but I recognize that other people just aren’t lucky enough to be able to choose a job that’s close and convenient. Some people simply don’t have a choice in the matter and they take the job they can get.