We can all agree on that, right?

Rise up! Seize the beans of production!

Co-ops

Man socialism keeps sounding better and better they will even take those pesky wife and kids off my hands/s.

But in serious most Americans don't know shit about socialism our capitalism they live under. Dumb fucks look at you with surprise when you mention our highway system would be considered socialist program.

American here and fuck capitalism.

We are poor and our freedoms are exploited, but at least we're free!

Hey now, that's unfair!

As à Canadian, I can attest that we also blindly defend capitalism.

If I don't swallow the propaganda, I don't swallow anything. We're hungry, man.

Why complain when capitalism ruins something that it created? Isn't that how it works? Something else will come along and don't better or differently and people will flock to it until it sucks too.

Communism does not have a good track record in places like Poland. After the absolute shithole that the PRL was, I dont kniw how you except people to defend communism.

Depends on what you mean by socialism. All systems have upsides and downsides. Late stage capitalism in the US has a lot of downsides, but workers taking over the means of production does not have a good track record.

I like capitalism. It is cool sometimes.

(Comment gets downvoted to oblivion)

Edit: would someone care to explain why there are no cases in which capitalism is cool?

Is there a communism society that has succeeded? Lol

Finnish person here to say fuck socialism.

Capitalism generally allows for a range of ownership structures, including traditional privately owned businesses, publicly traded corporations, and worker-owned enterprises.

I guess an argument would be that privately owned companies are already too wealthy to allow for fair market competition, but in worker owned companies nothing is stopping them from becoming large corporations that can also do everything a private lobbyist company does. If you don't believe me, just look at your democratically elected capitalist government. Just because something is democratic doesn't mean it will be ethical or fair internally or externally.

KRUSTY KRAB IS UNFAIR!

MR. KRABS IS IN THERE!

STANDING AT THE CONCESSION!

PLOTTING HIS OPPRESSION!

Shitty people always ended up in charge and found a way to enrich themselves. Maybe in the far future once we have a true artificial intelligence, communism can truly work after they elect some unbiased AI (no skynet please) to be their leader.

What I learned from observation is that they tend to believe that, one day, they will be part of the "small minority". The American Dream!!!1

Look, they're just temporary inconvenienced billionaires.

Yah, if workers own a tiny portion of the means of production, as they do now in various co-ops around the globe, they will be either (1) required to operate on the basis of profit in order to outcompete entities that are not worker-owned, or (2) cease to exist because they get outcompeted by those who operate on the basis of profit.

This forces all existing co-ops to behave in line with capitalism as a whole. The point is to overcome that system of socio-economic relations: When calls are made for workers to own and operate production, as in this meme, they mean that the class constituted by workers — the proletariat — should be in control of all productive means. Not just that some workers should start co-ops, for this primary reason.

The idea that owners would sacrifice their profits if their business were merely a co-op is, I agree, not necessarily true. (Though workers in co-ops who are directly connected to the point of value production would definitely be more willing to sacrifice profits for decisions that enhance social value.) The point, however, is to move beyond an economy owned and operated for profit and forge a society in which profit is not the basis for operation in the first place. If, for example, workers' needs were guaranteed, the impetus for profit-seeking would evaporate, though will not be absent, at least while the artifacts of capitalist society persist in us and our institutions.

You must think that humans are inherently greedy and/or are projecting what you would do in a scenario where you're part of a worker co-op. Most workplaces aren't worth millions. Most folks who round themselves in a worker co-op would most likely try to better the operation for everyone.

Ah, yes, we can see it with all the communities running their own Mastodon servers and extracting the maximum of wealth from their users. /s

In the case of social media, the users are also the workers.

That's not exactly how things be.

If means of production were all owned by workers, then that means they are operating them for their own benefit and the benefit of their communities. Why? The profit motive is not quite as strong. You are no longer needing to amass wealth to live a happy life. Because those who control the local farms are part of the community. Those who control local factories are workers that are part of the community. Each of those operates the means of production to fulfill their own needs, and their community

Yeah I'm not sure why it's nowadays common to simplify socialism as "workers owning the means of production". It's not exactly wrong, but it is often misunderstood.

A company being owned by it's employees is not necessarily "socialism". In today's global capitalist economy, there are worker-cooperatives as well, but they too exist within the capitalist economy and have to follow its rules, which is above all the profit motive. If you don't orient yourself based on profit, you will be out-competed eventually.

Traditionally, when socialists talk about "workers owning/seizing the means of production", they are not talking about individual workers or individual businesses.

Workers means "the working class", which would be pretty much everyone ("the 99%"). Means of production means industry and the economy overall, not individual factories and businesses.

What makes FOSS special is that the software is not privately owned by anyone, not by the devs, not by a couple of programmers, not by a company. It is commonly owned, anyone can use, copy and alter the code however they want without any artificial barriers. This of course makes it a lot harder to extract money from users.

In publicly-traded corporations, long term wealth extraction isn’t the goal. Getting sales up next quarter is. Employee-owned cooperatives are more likely to think long term. Plus, I’d vastly prefer to trust the average worker to do the right thing in a coop situation vs a manager doing it in a situation where they’re legally required (as standard publicly-traded corporations are) to prioritize the financial gains of shareholders above all other interests. Maybe you’ve lost so much faith in people that you think no one would ever choose to be slightly less rich for any reason. But plenty of people know there’s such a thing as enough, that there are interests as important as next quarter’s profits. They just don’t usually get MBAs.

I took a look at history and see nothing but downside of capitalism: environmental crisis, homelessness, wealth inequality

They do when they work in a cooperative and have a stake in the business being successful.

I'm reminded by that guy on TikTok

"You just lost a customer"

"Good"

That would be an improvement actually, because the customers of these companies are not users, they are other companies looking to advertise or buy users personal data. The users of for profit social media are in fact the product, not the customers.

Workers don’t give a shit about customers because that’s how the incentive system is set up. Give workers the profits, you give them a good reason to give a shit about how clients feel.

Allowing capitalist relations to persist, even if basic goods like food and homes were nationalized, enables a society in which capitalist profiteers continue to operate. History shows pretty explicitly that Capital will use the levers of power that exist, like The State, to eat away at or overturn any socialistic advances. E.g., suddenly the luxury capitalist corporation that sells idk, pearls, is lobbying (bribing) their way into privatizing beaches from which they operate. Slowly but surely the socioeconomic relations produced under capitalism foment and claw their way back to their former position. This requires a constant, indefinitely revolutionary society to keep capitalist relations at bay; that sort of momentum is not possible to sustain, certainly at the current moment.

It's necessary to abolish capitalists as a class because leaving capitalist systems of relations alone enables them to continue to re-produce themselves.

That doesn't preclude this sort of dual-economic setup from being a good thing, just insufficient.

I mean, we first need to define what a luxury and what a necessity is. For some things like food, shelter, water, healthcare it's pretty straightforward. But for resources like energy or communications it's less obvious.

I'd argue that the internet is now a necessity rather than a luxury, but many people to this day still don't have or choose not to have internet access (due to geography or religion). Energy is the same way, if we take an obviously bad example, but say you're socializing electricity for everyone, what's to stop someone from mining cryptocurrency on everyone else's dime ? That person would be profiting off of the social net. Where do we put the cursor between "luxurious" energy use and "necessary" energy use ? It's a tough thing to figure out.

Furthermore, for most people you need an incentive to work, right now it's survival, which is not great, but if all of your needs basic, and more are taken care of by the state, you only work for the luxuries, which would greatly reduce the available workforce. It's again a tough balance to find.

Actual workers. If we made a society where people are taken care of, we'd find most folks would be enthusiastic about their work. Saying "people don't want to work" is often taken at face value when the reality is that most people do want to work, because it helps them feel a sense of purpose. They don't, however, want to be exploited/work under capitalism because that is soul crushing.

Obviously they meant the former since that's what we're literally doing here. But even the latter would do a better job managing Twitter/Reddit than what they have now.

Monetisation rules are a direct result of capitalism. Profits are what motivates the decision making. In a post-capitalism economy it would be the needs and wants that motivates the decision making. One of the failures of capitalism is that we assume wants/needs has a correlation with profits, when clearly the enshitification demonstrates otherwise.

Enshittification of those services is a direct symptom of capitalism.

No one is arguing that the fediverse exists because of workers owning the means of production.

You should really look into what "enshittification" means and how it's a direct result of capitalism.

the disastrous YouTube monetisation policy comes in part from a desire to keep the site “child friendly”

Sure, but the reason why they want to keep the site “child friendly” is because content for children is incredibly profitable and because advertisers don't want their ads getting related to "controversial" content.

Even if YouTube was run by a worker co-op, or was a state enterprise those two factors would likely still lead to stringent monetisation rules.

This is the reason why I don't like equating socialism with "workers owning the means of production". Worker-cooperatives can exist in a capitalist economy, which means they have to follow capitalist rules (including the drive to generate profits).

When leftists say "workers", they generally mean "the 99%" or "the working class", not individual workers. When leftists say "the means of production", they mean the economy/industry overall, not individual companies.

If youtube was owned and operated in common, it would not be bound to profitability, but to use.

We can also look at something like peertube, which is essentially a commonly owned version of youtube. Instead of being guided by profitability, it is used based on many different use-cases. There can be peertube instances that are completely private, there can be peertube instances that are used for a specific topic or community (for example kids) and there can be peertube instances which are not for children at all.

Tell me you don't know what communism is without telling me you don't know what communism is.

Using socialism as a boogeyman by definition, is a poor argument. There are merits to many different economic systems, many of which have pros and cons, capitalism and socialism included.

The laugh, and "listen" while providing absolutely no reasoning demonstrates a certain level of arrogance, while at the same time demonstrating a lack of knowledge on the subject

What's your definition of socialiam

Thank you for providing a great example of being confidently incorrect.

What are you doing trolling on this site then?