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by rnosov 1207 days ago
What would alternative be? Worker run cooperatives have not been particularly successful so far. Serf had no choice of "changing a job" but a modern worker presumably has a lot more freedom to choose their employer.
3 comments

On personal level, I would say FU money is a must - this should be the retirement plan goal for everyone, have enough for your life stile in liquid investments, so you can move to another country quickly if need be… On corporate level, maybe breaking of those de facto monopolies is not a bad idea, like breaking Ma Bell, Standard Oil, etc… Please note, this is not a financial advice, as I can provide advice to accredited investors only….
The alternative would be to actually enforce antitrust laws and ensure that companies don't become as big and powerful as countries.

The basis of capitalism is competition. The theory depends on no single company having the power to move the whole market, but this theory is getting decimated by the empirical reality of consolidation and monopolization.

We all forget, because 9/11 happened literally a few days after it was announced, but the new Bush administration decided to give a wrist slap to Microsoft instead of breaking it up, which was the proposal of the Clinton administration. That's essentially when antitrust laws ceased to exist, and in the wake of the failure to do anything about Microsoft, mega-corporations and monopolies have thrived.

The basis of capitalism is private ownership of production, by definition.

The basis for why this is at all acceptable as a system to organize society is that competition, government restrictions, etc, whittle down private power to somewhat tolerable levels. There must surely be a better system which we haven't thought of yet though.

do you think capitalism would still be the base of that system?
It's complicated, but I think, no.

Many people, especially Americans seem to confuse capitalism with 'trade', 'competition', 'markets', etc, whereas I mean it as the private ownership of production, the profit from other people's work, etc. That seems fundamentally immoral in some ways from the very start.

Eg, I read an article about working with Elon Musk recently (https://www.businessinsider.com/working-for-elon-musk-spacex...), where they said "If there are employees not aligned with that vision, he will chew them out and he will do it in a vicious way, which is his right as owner.". I mean, no, we really should not be enshrining that, or even really tolerating it, in a decent society.

The question then is how should we allocate resources (capital), how should we incentivize risk, innovation, hard work, etc, What kinds of ownership are moral, etc.

I suspect we'll be stuck with some form of capitalism for a while though - like democracy, it's the worst system, except for all the others, for now.

interesting
>Worker run cooperatives have not been particularly successful so far.

Common != Successful.

The fact we don't have many Mondragons probably has less to do with its intrinsic efficiency and more to do with pre existing wealth distributions.

>What would alternative be?

One change that Jeremy Corbyn put in his manifesto in 2017 was a law mandating one worker board seat for companies over a certain size.

I didnt think it was a particularly drastic change but it drove the big business lobbies into a fit of white hot rage.

Even with an egalitarian wealth distribution, who would want to invest only in the company they work for? That'd be putting all their eggs in one basket for no good reason. There are sensible reasons for outside investment to be a thing.
do you think that would make an real difference? what about ending corporate lobbying and political donations?