gonzomax:
I haven’t yet read those links… but this seems to be a convenient example where not much capital investment is required, since the machinery/factory was already in place?
In building a factory from scratch, someone needs to take a very large risk/investment. That’s why owners get compesated huge amounts of money - not because of their “leadership skills” but because they are the ones that took the financial risk.
Well, go out and start a cooperative. Nobody’s stopping you. What’s the holdup?
If it works better, then you’ll be off to the races in no time, pounding the old school corporations into the dust with your happier workers.
Au contraire. Absent a strong government, the capitalist oligarchs have even MORE power and they simply warp the marketplace to their own advantage by fiat. Only a strong government that is also very attuned to the dangers posed by the capitalist oligarchs and focused on counteracting them, even in the face of all that lovely, lovely money that pleads for them to look the other way. Historically, a very rare phenomenon.
How is that supposed to work? Employee owned companies are occasionally effective. Usually however, they require a nurturing government. Employee owned companies can work when a company is growing and profitable. Unfortunately they are at a disadvantage when they are losing money because employees are unlikely to vote for being laid off.
The problem with the concept, however is that during the twentieth century Communist dictators like Lenin declared that they spoke for “the proletariat,” and that state run industry controlled by them was therefore by definition owned by the workers.
Eric Hoffer, “the longshoreman philosopher” wrote, “We workers have no defense against those who tell us that we own everything in sight, and that they are prodding us forward for our own good.”
For socialism I see no alternative to government owned property. I also think a dictatorship is an unacceptable government for a socialist economy. Look at North Korea for an example of what that can lead to. There must be contested elections where anti socialist political parties compete with full equality with socialist parties.
The same way it is today - a combination of education and mass media influences.
Me, obviously, since you’re asking me how I’d do it.
We’re naked subtropical apes with a weakness for meat and ripe fruit, and a small-scale extended family social structure. Everything else is society’s doing.
You make a judgement call. You render economics subservient to morality.
Is this a serious question? Unless you’ve opted out, profit drives everything in modern Western society. Generally most of the developing world, too.
Lots of societies have. Just not national ones. But smaller groupings like intentional communities and the like certainly have.
I think you’re misusing the term “empirical evidence” here. What you mean is “my past experience”. Generally, though, I agree with you, humanity en masse isn’t currently striving to altruism. But no, I don’t think it will need anything as drastic as DNA rewrites.
A boss does not build a factory from scratch. They raise money and workers do it.
The workers in Argentina had to rebuild and remake the equipment that was sold off or let go into disrepair. The investor had determined that the factory was a losing proposition That is why he abandoned it. The workers did all the work and management on their own. They made profit and did all the work. The workers took all the risk and did all the work. If the factory failed, they had nothing to show for ll their work. that is pretty risky.
How do the workers get the money to build the factory and get it running in Dio-land?
Why are whites always blamed for black inadequacies? 
“The US administration…made massive improvements to infrastructure: 1700 km of roads were made usable; 189 bridges were built; many irrigation canals were rehabilitated, hospitals, schools, and public buildings were constructed, and drinking water was brought to the main cities.”
Most blacks need to be lead by the equivalent of kindly plantations owners who treat them like irresponsible children from whom little should be expected, and much forgiven. White liberals in positions of responsibility perform that role reasonably well. Unfortunately white liberals forget that irresponsible children require discipline.
Yes, but there’s no “unfairness” to it. Capitalism is fairness-free. It is not about ethics. Slaves may be sold under capitalism like any other good. Any ethics we impose on capitalism are imposed from outside. About the only ethic involved in capitalism is that an individual is entitled to keep his property acquired through trade, as markets don’t work well if you can steal goods rather than trade for them. It’s been argued that this implies a strong government, since a strong government is needed to prevent people from stealing.
Yes, you are at a considerable disadvantage with the wealthy in a capitalist system. A capitalist might say that you are not competing with the wealthy but only with others who have labor to sell. you may have, or be able to create, an advantage over the others who have labor to sell and perhaps down the road bootleg that into enough economic or social clout to start a small business. You would have a much longer, tougher road than a wealthy person, and your chances of failing and getting nowhere are much higher, but capitalists will assure you that their system is not about equality.
Yes, superficially and in depth as well, that’s the case. It is the exceptional poor person who gets ahead, and most rich people manage to stay that way.
Depends on what you mean by “risk.” Your $100 may be money scrupulously saved, denying yourself various comforts and pleasures while working long hours for many months or years, while the rich man’s $1,000,000 may be a tiny portion of a fortune of say, $50,000,000 whose loss will have little or no effect on his life. If you lose it, you are back at square one, facing many more months/years of privation. If the investment goes south for the rich guy, he is a $49 millionaire, in short, no big deal. So who has really risked more, in terms of their life and efforts?
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Even if me and him are equally skilled in investing, he still gets more return, because he had more to invest. This doesn’t necessarily lead to polarization though, does it? He can easily lose all his “riches” and end up where I have always been.
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Not as easily as you can, as I believe I just demonstrated.
Yes, it is intrinsic. Capitalism as it is now constitued acts as a filter. It tends to filter out those whose greatest concern in life is making lots of money/growing their businesses, by whatever means works. Ethics and concerns about quality/affordabilty/sustainability are only useful if they make things more profitable. Our recent economic debacle is a glaring demonstration that most capitalists see this quite clearly.
I am disappointed that you characterize my post in direct response to your OP as useless.
Can you direct me to a post, thread, or website, where your views are articulated in more detail? It can’t be argued that some Blacks have broken out of this stereotype, yet some portion of their general/average population seems to have some issues with crime, motivation, and economic self-sufficiency. Do you believe this is a result of something inherent in Black culture, or do you believe it is genetic? Are there other possible factors other than culture or genetics, in your opinion? You seem to suggest that the optimal way to deal with the inferiority of Black people, as you call it, is greater supervision and greater discipline. How did you come to this optimal solution?
Sorry - didn’t get a chance to reply to this until now. Actually, my favourite thing about parecon is that it doesn’t assume people will get less selfish. Well, I realise that some of its proponents do think that, but the model itself doesn’t require it. It tries to create a system in which the only way to further your own interests is by furthering the whole. If the balance of duties in each job is roughly equal - some more repetitive duties, and others comprising actual responsibility or talent - and is kept roughly equal by tweaking job descriptions as technological advancements are made - and if on top of this, your pay is equal to the effort you put in (measured by how many hours you work, as roles should require the same average effort if they’re well-balanced), then there’s no way to be selfish and come out ahead.
I admit that the decision-making process has the potential to be a bureaucratic nightmare, but I think that especially utilising modern technology to keep track of different variables and to keep people informed (cutting down on, say, meetings), it could be manageable.
Why do you think power companies will give away power dirt cheap just because it is dirt cheap to make? Most likely they will find some excuse to jack the price up.
I have no power to implment anything, but why is that required in order to have an opinion about it? Nobody in this thread has the pwoer to implement anything. We’re talking about philospohocal ideals. Practical implementation is beside the point. In point of fact, I don’t think anything can be forced. I think people just have to evolve towards things. The capitalist bubble has to pop before any real reforms start happening.
Everywhere in the world that blacks live they have high crime rates.
In The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, Gregory Cochran argue that the longer a racial group has practiced agriculture and urban civilization the lower its crime rate and the higher its average intelligence are likely to be. This is because agriculture and urban living exert different population pressures than a hunter gatherer existence.
Whites in the Near East invented agriculture 10,000 years ago. They began building cities 5,000 years ago. Agriculture entered Europe about six or seven thousand years ago. Cities began to appear in Greece over three thousand years ago. By two thousand years ago the Romans had extended civilization to most of Europe. Beyond the borders of the Roman Empire the Celts, the Nordics, and the Slavs were practicing agriculture, and had been for several thousand years.
Agriculture only began to spread in sub Saharan Africa about 2,500 years ago. Large numbers of Negroes only began living in cities during the twentieth century. Blacks in the rural American South seem to have fewer social problems than blacks in urban areas.
Australian aborigines practiced a paleolithic existence into the twentieth century. Information like this is difficult to find because of the constrictions of political correctness, but Australian aborigines seem to have even higher crime rates and lower average IQs than African Negroes.
Thank you for the info. I’ll look into it as soon as I get a chance.
You didn’t answer my question, however, as to whether this is genetic, cultural, or something else? Does he go into detail as to which of these might be responsible for differences in crime and “intelligence”?
I would like to address just this part of our exchange because I think it is fundamental to our disagreement. I know you’re pretty well read on the subject of anthropology, so I’m surprised to see you arguing on the basis of Behavioralism. Seriously, that theory of human psychology has been dead for decades.
Are you really saying that we can “engineer” people to conform to pretty much any society we want to? And that the society will be stable over some extended period of time?
I thought I made it clear that racial differences in crime and intelligence are genetic and based on different population pressures lasting for hundreds and thousands of years.
In the Soviet Union the Communist Party tried to engineer people and achieved indifferent success.
I opened this thread primarily to evaluate what people who are opposed to capitalism have as viable alternatives. Since Dio is not one to explain his ideas in this thread at length, nothing he has said has really persuaded me at all.
I mean, we started with him saying laborers should own part of the business, and then he switched to mandatory profit sharing. I said that realistically under such a system the investor that right now pony up investment and venture capital that creates jobs would no longer do so. If they’re only going to get bank interest, they’re going to want absolute security. Business ventures don’t offer that, so under such a system private investors would no longer engage in angel investment, venture capital and et cetera to the degree they do now.
That means that the only realistic way for business to form is through some cooperative system whereby lots of workers all get together and form a business that they are all part owners in; or business would form via smaller partnerships of high net worth individuals or professionals such as doctors and lawyers.
I don’t necessarily think such a system would have enough free capital flow to sustain very healthy growth. Which is why I said such an emaciated form of capitalism would actually probably produce less wealth and provide less employment than universal collective ownership.