[bjackman]

I'm gonna copy paste a comment I wrote yesterday that I think fits perfectly here:

As an engineer if you are gonna be a rank and file employee you need to do it for your own reasons. I think the main good reasons to do it are:

1. It's relatively chill and you value the stability. You deliver competence from 9-5 then go home to your family or some other thing that's more important to you than work.

2. You really enjoy the pure engineering side and find meaning in the technical artifact you're creating. Probably it's open source and has some value/community outside of your employer.

3. You're gaining valuable experience that you can later leverage into something else. Probably you're in the first 5 years of your career.

If the main thing driving you is growing a business, and you don't directly own (not options or RSUs or whatever, actual real equity) a significant slice of it, you are very likely misdirecting your energy.

---

It sounds like the staff here thought they were in case 2, but they were not. I think that the article explains the reason why nicely: the thing they were building was not part of the commons.

[A_Duck]

This is a shame though. We should work towards a world where most people can find meaning in what they do.

For now it can work better to be a contractor and have your 'meaning' be a positive reputation in your industry.

More like being a medieval blacksmith. You don't mind what you're making, but you're known in your village by the quality of your work.

[bjackman]

You can be in case 1 and find meaning in what you do. That's where the blacksmith is.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing a good job for 40 hours a week in return for a salary. Being a competent professional who does quality work is rewarding!

I just think if you're doing work of that nature (which _most of us are_, BTW) you need to recognise it for what it is. Don't burn yourself out trying to squeeze every drop of initiative/creativity/productivity out of yourself. Definitely don't answer emails at the weekend. Don't tolerate under-payment. Don't accept non-legally-binding promises from the boss.

Just deliver the best work you can in the time you get paid for, then stop.

[pydry]

At the same time we can maaaaaaaybe start pushing back on all of the "capitalism is not the problem" and "capitalism is the least worst of all available options" memes?

Or is it too soon already?

[hansvm]

The problem with capitalism is that something like it (concentrated power begetting additional power at the expense of most of the populace) is nearly guaranteed to crop up in a society which doesn't burn resources actively fighting against it. When fishing for alternatives then, you have to consider:

1. What fraction of our resources do we want to burn while eliminating which of the worst parts of capitalistic tendencies?

2. How do we preserve diffuse power distributions in the face of actors who will actively work against that goal?

Not to trivialize it too much, (1) is just a policy decision. Being completely hands-off is probably sub-optimal. Burning 100% of resources fighting fraud and other abuses isn't ideal either. It's a reasonable framing though for comparing strategies. There's no free lunch, so if somebody sells you a governmental structure which eliminates the worst parts of capitalism without _some_ cost, it's likely snake oil.

Point (2) is the harder one. The majority of people wouldn't mind a little extra power and a few extra resources. If that's possible, it's also (usually) possible to create sub-populations which together have much more power than other groups and thus subvert the goals of your anti-capitalist strategy. How do you create a system that's robust against most individual participants (potentially inadvertently) working against it?

So, sure, let's do away with capitalism. What do you replace it with that's both better and won't revert back?

[appreciatorBus]

Yes this is the key point imo - power begets power in any system.

However diffuse power distributions aren’t a panacea either imo. As an example, I hold no particular power over the other tenants in my building, and they hold none over me, the building owner has significant power over all of us. It’s easy to imagine a future with no landlord, and the power over the plot of land being diffused among the current tenants. But then I would have some degree of power over my neighbours, and they over me, and all sorts of abuses and nastiness are possible there.

An uncomfortable possibility we should take seriously is that there might not be a perfect distribution of power in human societies. That whether power is concentrated or diffuse, it will be used for good and for ill.

I am not claiming that I know the answer, or that today is just the best that we can do, but I am pretty sceptical that we can wave away these fundamentals, or that we can design or plan societies like this.

[pydry]

This isnt really about using "resources" to fight fraud. None of this was illegal and it was all very profitable - it was encouraged.

This is about us consenting to capital being put at the very heart of society's locus of control, which is what drove this kind of parasitism to be encouraged rather than discouraged.

It is a unique feature of western (especially American) society - something which actually isnt represented in other power centers.

China has "private equity" for instance, but it's not really private - it operates like all financial institutions as an arm of the state (not run by capital) and has no real incentive to destroy healthy and valuable companies for profit.

[appreciatorBus]

All of the same human dynamics will be present under socialism or communism or whatever you prefer.

Under capitalism, a boss might try to persuade you to work hard harder than you might otherwise for dubious or illusionary future reward.

Under some form of collectivism, there will still be pressure to attend some sort of goal, even if it is non-financial in nature. That pressure will ultimately come in the form of a leader of some form, and one of the tools they will have to achieve that (possibly collective) goal will be to persuade you to work longer and harder than you might otherwise for some dubious or illusionary future reward. Perhaps this future reward won’t be in money, but that won’t change the underlying dynamic.

[pydry]

You could equally argue that there is no point making murder illegal because "all the same dynamics leading to murder" will still happen. They will. Society exists to either curtail or encourage our instincts for a collective purpose.

This is not about that.

This about an institution being rewarded and operating entirely within the law which takes a valuable asset, systematically disenfranchises the people who made it valuable before parasitically sucking it dry for material gain.

That is a pretty unique capitalist dynamic, actually.

[appreciatorBus]

You’ve moved the goal posts.

First, we were talking about an outcome – exploitation of workers.

Your claim, if I understand you correctly is that this outcome is inevitable under capitalism, (perhaps solely possible under capitalism?) and then under some other system you prefer, it would no longer happen, or perhaps be impossible.

My contention is the incentive to exploit exists in all socioeconomic systems, even collective ones. This doesn’t mean there’s no better system, or that we should stop caring, or that we should have no laws regarding it. But if correct, it means the arguing that your preferred system cannot or will not have this outcome, is weak and unconvincing.

Instead of engaging directly with the claim, you pivoted to implying that my argument was that we should not have laws against bad things.

Under capitalism: Both murder and worker exploitation should be illegal. Both murder and worker exploitation will likely occur to one degree or another.

Under collectivism: Both murder and worker exploitation should be illegal. Both murder and worker exploitation will likely occur to one degree or another.

If you want to argue that collectivism is better for other reasons - go nuts! But if your argument is that there will be no power hierarchy, no pressure to achieve goals, and no incentive to exploit then I just don’t think you’re serious.

[theamk]

It's not like there are good options out there. USSR showed what state-controlled socialism looks like, and the picture is not pretty. A most damning example is that it was impossible to leave USSR during the most of its existence, and people had to do crazy things like jump off cruise ship and swim many miles [0] just to get out of country.

If I have a choice between being jailed in the country and having VCs drive some companies into the ground, I'd choose the latter every time.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Kurilov

[dragonwriter]

> It's not like there are good options out there

Yes, there are.

> USSR showed what state-controlled socialism looks like, and the picture is not pretty. A

The USSR and other Leninist-derived regimes showed what one narrow set of models of authoritarian state “socialism” looks like, sure, and its not pretty just like the pure private capitalism that was generally abandoned netween the early and mid 20th century for the modern mixed economy was not.

OTOH, Leninism and its authoritarian state capitalism (that is, featuring a narrow elite that control society via control of the non-financial means of production, just as the private capitalist class does in private capitalism) is not the only option to to the presently dominant mixed economy that reduces or eliminates the private capitalist elements.

Democratic market-oriented socialisms where the private firms still exist but the non-financial means of production are controlled (either entirely in pure forms, or simply more than in the status quo systems in forms which are still mixed economies but with a different mix) by those working in the firms employing them are possible. In fact, variations along this dimension already exist among modern mixed economies, and the ones further along it are not the limit of how far that can go.

[nine_k]

I'd love to hear about examples.

Sweden tried to become more socialist in 1970s-80s, and it did not look pretty. (Then Mr. Palme was shot and killed.)

Venezuela... well, does not look like an enticing example either.

I would say that socialism as a state-imposed regime does not work, same as communism. BTW communism does work in communes of like-minded individuals, be it a bunch of hippies or a bunch of monks. The key is self-selecting people who subscribe to that way of living voluntarily. This can't work for a whole country.

OTOH what the TFA suggests does work, exactly because mission-driven open-source projects / foundations and non-profits attract the right kind of motivated people, while providing little to no incentive for entities seeking pure profit to take over. Debian is one example: it exists for decades in the normal capitalist economy, is going strong, and shows no signs (and no ways) of selling out.

This, to my mind, is the future. Maybe 50 years from now our grandchildren will be appalled by the fact that we kept giving our free labor and free time to for-profit entities which did not have our best interests aligned with theirs.

[smsm42]

Yeah, it's always "wrong socialism" when it's built. But the next one (after the next one, after the next one, after the next one) will be the right one and will not murder millions of people, despite the previous attempts doing exactly that. Please go away already, we had enough of suffering caused by ivory-tower theoreticians unable to perceive the reality.

[closewith]

There are many better options right now then US-style kleptocapitalism. Just look at the HDI index.

[MrGilbert]

How about good ol' morals? We don't need to get rid of capitalism, but how about getting the proportionality back on track? Does a single person need to make billions and billions of money? Should I, as a CEO, earn millions of dollars while my workforce can barely survive with one job?

I don’t think so. This is what needs to be fixed on a global scale.

[dragonwriter]

> How about good ol' morals? We don't need to get rid of capitalism,

Yes we do. Capitalism, even at the somewhat attenuated level it exists in the modern mixed economy compared to the original system of the same name, creates too strong of a reward system for immoral behavior to correct the moral problems while preserving the system.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” is a systemic, not isolated individual, problem with capitalism.

[BobaFloutist]

It depends. Is your theory of change to push a welfare state, gradually increase the welfare, raise taxes to redistribute wealth, achieve UBI, fully fund public healthcare, housing, food, water?

Or is it that any day now workers are going to reach unanimous consensus and go on a national strike, siezing power from the owners of capital? Or maybe a violent revolution in which the bourgeoisie and class traitors get guillotineed alongside the capitalist oppressors?

[terminalbraid]

What's your reasoning equating "a medieval blacksmith" serving a village directly with their own work and "a rank and file employee" which is how the post you're commenting on was intentionally framed?

[A_Duck]

I'm contrasting rather than equating them.

The medieval blacksmith / freelancer may be in a better position to feel meaning in their work, compared with an employee, because of the system of incentives around them.

[pjc50]

I'm reminded of the Vshojo collapse just recently, where a whole load of people were convinced that not getting paid on time was a temporary necessity for growing the business.

Which promptly imploded, taking stolen charity donations with it.

[valicord]

4. Golden handcuffs

[leokennis]

Or the combination of 1 and 4. If a company is willing to pay you a lot of money for “9 to 5”, there’s all the reasons in the world to just take it.