this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
652 points (96.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43948 readers
1144 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sure; nothing is ever set in stone, the future is always the future, and none of us can know what's in it.
Still, in the context of the current political climate, I think the "fuck capitalism" crowd leaves something to be desired. For instance, I'm all for nationalizing medical insurance as other capitalist countries have done.
However, the "no more private business ownership" crowd I think is asking for serious trouble. The preface is that if you get rid of capitalist influences democracy will not be as malleable and will always serve public interest without powerful capitalists to corrupt it... I think the case made by history is the opposite, without capitalistic forces the concentration of power in government leads to the destruction of consumer choice and inevitable corruption. In either system, the sticking point is an actively engaged and educated (and even more so, well informed -- degrees are not the goal, it's the information) public keeping an eye on the system, and I think that's where the 20th century United States failed itself leading to 21st century problems.
The problem is that current companies are authoritarian organizations as seen from the inside, there can still be competing companies and media without this internally authoritarian structure. Imagine every company was 51+% owned by it's workers, and they elected their senior/management staff. That would for what I understand capitalism as end it, but obviously would be vastly different from the few socialist attempts in history.
Here's the problem I have with that argument... Anyone arguing for this can go make such a company, but nobody has (or maybe few people have and it worked or didn't and I missed the memo). It's not a problem of large corporations or government suppression either. There are new successful small companies all the time, but they're not "51% owned by their workers."
So like... If you want any buy in outside of the bubble that already supports the idea, go actually do it. AFAIK, it's not illegal, there's nothing stopping such a company from existing other than A) nobody has sufficiently tried or B) it doesn't actually work.