You must log in or register to comment.
I’m interested in anarchism, but the thing is, I have yet to get a satisfactory answer to, ‘‘is that even likely in this lifetime?’’. It’s just swiftly dismissed as ‘‘boo doomer’’.
If it’s not likely in my lifetime (which seems to be the case), I don’t see why I’d invest attention, even if I see it as ideal.
The ultimate reality is nothing is likely in your lifetime except societal collapse from climate change.
What you do next is up to you, there is no saviour or solution coming. There is doing the best you can today, and trying to build up local community, skills, and bonds that may help you.
The problem with this idea is that, while being obviously correct, it’s a lot easier to become a landlord than to overthrow a worldwide economic system.
When I was a kid, they drilled into me that I had to be nice and share. Entering adulthood was whiplash.
When I was a kid, they drilled into me that being academically successful will get you into the top schools, and get you the best jobs.
Cut to me now in my 30s, been job hunting for the past year after being laid off from my previous job for not meeting their standards three months after one of my parents died, and having the gall to try to set boundaries against doing installs back to back.
Grades don’t mean shit if you don’t have the following:
Interview skills (aka the ability to BS your way through an interview), Experience (sad that those who start working in high school are ahead of the game, when really kids shouldn’t have to be put in situations to start work that early), Connections (it’s not what you know, it’s who you know)
Barely had any of these when I graduated from college and spent close to 6 months trying to find a job from there.
Yeah as a former straight A student, entering the workforce was a rough transition. Suddenly smarts and hard work are nearly irrelevant and it’s all your ability to sell yourself, appease your bosses, etc. Turns out no one taught me these skills and in many cases taught me the opposite.
We are born anarchists taught the virtues of communism without naming it, and then have it all brutally stripped of all those ideals by adulthood under bourgeois “education” systems.
Anyway, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a great read.
This reminds me of a few rules of acquisition.
111: Treat people in your debt like family… exploit them.
211: Employees are the rungs on the ladder of success. Don’t hesitate to step on them.
SCAM ALERT!!!
Someone will hire you to “create wealth through hard work” but then take most of that wealth for themselves. This has happened to me and some of my friends too. Watch out!
Maybe if people stopped lying to each other?
You have to solve basic logic before you can cognitize the natural immunity to that which will never be real.
Just make soap instead of being a leaf in Serenity.
It’s so simple! Why didn’t anyone else think of this?!
Yeah! Why don’t we just switch to one of the other economic systems we’ve used in the past that was completely free of exploitation?
Wait…
“Ferengi workers don’t want to stop the exploitation. We want to find a way to become the exploiters.” – Rom
“Suit yourself. But I don’t see you exploiting anyone.” – Bashir
… And then Rom sets up the first Ferengi Workers Union, and wins.
Very sad. I’ve met people irl that have expressed as much.
“I would prefer not to step on anyone’s neck, but hey, at least the boot’s not on my neck”
Or end landlords and bosses
You can own a company with no employees other than yourself and only one house.
1 house, sure, but only companies with 1 employee? That’s just entirely impossible without reverting back to a straight global federation of luddite city states, which would be slim pickings to the first technologically superior predator state (which they will be, since making rockets and guns at a rate necessary for warfare generally requires companies with more than one employee).
The optimal system can’t just be an ideal spherical cow, it also has to compete with adversarial predatory nation states that don’t follow your ideals.
I am a financial/business advisor to a small law firm. They have the best secretarial/paralegal team in the county. They also pay the highest rates in the county, have damn good profit sharing and have for as long as I’ve advised them. I told them that it’s what would happen. They didn’t hire different people, just the folk there felt valued and (I didn’t tell the lawyers this bit) probably like they owned the means they were producing. A little woah. But I like to think I made some good bosses out of them.
Working isn’t necessarily being exploited though.
I have a great boss for a small company. Last year we got pay rises and a reduction in hours at the same time. Don’t feel I’m being exploited, it’s quite the opposite as works comes second to our health.
I’ve lost track of how much sick time I’ve had due to mental health etc. we are not giving targets or micromanaged or anything like that.
The problem is that under capitalism, which is a competitive ecosystem, over the short term those qualities are selected against, and it constantly, naturally, seeks continuous vertical integration which necessarily puts the wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands over time.
Now you can claim this can be prevented with regulation, but in practice that will only slow the process since even slow centralization of wealth leads to people with vastly disproportionate wealth, and therefore influence over regulatory policies, which they will degrade over time (once again because the corporations which do deregulate themselves will be more selected for in a naturally selective ecosystem than those which fail to do so).
Capitalism as a system basically rewards the most unethical practices in it’s ecosystem with more power.
Under capitalism, it is almost by definition. Glad you’re having a better time than the rest of us, but your personal anecdote is irrelevant to society at large.
You would not be employed if it wasn’t profitable. Which also means the surplus value of your labor, above and beyond what you’re being compensated for, is going to your employer. That’s exploitation. It’s mandatory in most employment under capitalist economics.
I understand the surplus value argument and I’m not dismissing it, within that framework you’re technically correct. But reducing all employment to exploitation by definition flattens a meaningful distinction between a worker being genuinely mistreated and one who isn’t.
My point wasn’t that capitalism is perfect or that my experience is universal. It was that employment isn’t inherently exploitative in the lived sense, conditions, power dynamics, and how surplus is distributed all matter. A framework that calls everything exploitation equally makes it harder to identify and fight actual exploitation where it’s causing real harm.
There is never going to be a 1:1 ratio between labour value and compensation. Even in a non-profit employee-owned cooperative, there will be external costs that will have to funded from somewhere.
It becomes exploitation when that ratio becomes disproportionate and the ownership starts extracting more than their fair share. Capitalism definitely does nothing to discourage this, but it’s not a mandatoy feature.
Even in a non-profit employee-owned cooperative, there will be external costs that will have to [be] funded from somewhere.
That somewhere being reduced labor compensation no matter what, meaning the labor is just worth that much less. That doesn’t entitle an “owner” to jack shit.
It becomes exploitation when that ratio becomes disproportionate and the ownership starts extracting more than their fair share.
Their fair share is nothing. A disproportionate ratio is any ratio greater than 0. No labor should be “owned” by anyone not performing it. There should not be “ownership” involved. Organizational leaders, sure. And they should also just be regular laborers, paid in the same manner.
It’s funny that these posts are blocking my Mullvad ip
What do you mean?
Altogether all together.
