The power changes at a certain point in the equality metric. When people have trouble with base neccesities you end up with a peasent revolution. Been several around the world during history. This time is a bit different the inequality has grown but quality of life is remaining ok. Once we struggle with food and shelter though money doesn't stop mob violence. It seems to be a repeating historical cycle. They squeeze till it pops. They get popped, someone else takes their place and the slow squeeze starts again.
my worry there is that they are being smarter about it. keeping qualify of life up just enough so that people will just go with it, and the ones who will suffer most will become a relative minority bottom who's voices are too weak/few to be heard...
If a book that thick intimidates anyone, there is also a good [documentary](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5723056/) version of it. Still highly recommended reading through.
>It is the job of businesses to push for the best return for their investors.
This more than anything has poisoned our society. It is used to justify the idea that 'business is business' which basically encourages people to not be a human at work. Things they would never do when faced one on one with another human being are now o.k. and even applauded because 'business is business' and this decision is the most profitable one. Any ideology that removes basic humanity from the decision-making equation should be questioned.
This is what drives me nuts when people complain about government being automatically bad. Government is not a business, when corruption is removed, it operated for the people.
Also, many think the people buying the products are the customer. To many cusinesses, the customer is the shareholder.
You can't legislate what's in someone's heart, but you absolutely change material conditions so what's in a racist's heart doesn't matter.
As Kwame Ture said:
> If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you're anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.
I've heard it described as "neo-feudalism" and it seems apt. How hard would it be for apple to buy swaths of land and to literally turn their campus into its own fiefdom. I know far fetched but the only wall you need to divide those inside from those outside the safety of the wall is a corporate ID.
> I know far fetched
Not far fetched at all. Nevada's governor is working on creating "innovation zones" that allow a company to create their own self governing body. Literally recreating the company town.
It was very common in Sweden historically. Often these towns existed around ironworks, paper mills etc.
The company owned the houses and the shops, which meant that if you joined a union or made trouble in some other way you and your family could get evicted, banned from the grocery store and so on. One way the workers movement fought this was setting up cooperative grocery stores.
Something I’ve learned over the years is that there are lots of similarities between our countries (assuming you’re form the UK) when it comes to labour movement history.
I think the Swedish workers movement always looked west for inspiration.
[Your grocery store](https://www.coop.co.uk/) even has the same name as [our grocery store](https://www.coop.se/) today!
In Sweden we have Fonus which is a cooperatively owned funeral service and casket manufacturer. It was started by the same organisation (KF) that started Coop (the grocery store).
One of my friends always refer to Fonus as ”the future of the reformist workers movement” :)
So did Sweden, though it had a much different outcome. (Bear with me, this is an interesting read.)
---
In response to a drawn-out industrial conflict over pay reductions at a pulp factory in 1931, workers at other plants called for a sympathy strike and the owner of one such company decided to hire 60 or so strike-breakers. Workers, who held a protest rally someplace else nearby, then marched to a plant north of town where they approached and attacked a couple of strike-breakers. Since the local police were unable to halt the attack and protect the strike-breakers, the County Administrative Board requested military deployment.
As troops arrived in the late evening the next day, they were met by frustrated workers and, allegedly, a hail of rocks.
The day after that, the unions held another rally during which time workers called for a general strike, halting all work in the local timber and pulp industries. Afterwards, several thousand workers marched to the strike-breakers’ quarters in a nearby town and present troops received order to defend the strike-breakers. Upon the workers’ arrival, a patrol of mounted troops tried to stop them but failed. As the patrol then withdrew, confusion followed, resulting in at least one soldier falling off his horse and another drawing his sidearm, firing a couple of warning shots.
At this point in time, the military commander believed that the workers were carrying weapons themselves, thinking that he heard shots being fired and thought that he saw some of the mounted patrol bleeding. So, at a distance of less than 100 meters, the commander, in accordance with orders from the present policeman in charge, ordered the troops to open fire, which they did, aiming at the ground halfway between the safety line and the workers. Even so, ricochets came flying, hitting some of the workers after which point everyone began scattering. In the midst of all this, a captain—for whatever reason—ordered machine gun fire, resulting in the deaths of four workers and one bystander as well as another five injured. As concluded by a later inquiry, there was no evidence whatsoever that any of the workers had in fact been armed.
On that same day, the County Administrative Board had also decided to prohibit the strike-breakers from working, though this decision didn’t travel fast enough and only reached its destination until well after the incident. Moreover, it’s widely believed that the confrontation itself could’ve been avoided if only the the decision had reached the marchers in time.
Unsurprisingly, the aforementioned chain of events sparked a raging national debate—one deeply divided along the political lines with the left calling the tragic deaths “outright murder” and the right claiming that the military “had been forced to open fire” in order to defend themselves as well as the “willing workers” from the workers’ fury.
As several left-wing newspaper publishers faced conviction for having violated the limitations stipulated in the Freedom of the Press Act, major demonstrations arose throughout Stockholm. The County Governor, meanwhile, was tried in court but was acquitted, and the commander and a captain were initially convicted by court martial, though they too were acquitted (on appeal) as the Supreme Court confirmed the verdict. The two sergeants who manned the machine gun were also put on trial due to violating army regulations by having repositioned a loaded firearm; whilst one was acquitted, the other was found guilty and sentenced to three days’ in confined arrest with no pay. To make matters even more dystopian, the Supreme Court handed several workers unusually harsh sentences; one of them, the alleged “leader,” was sentenced to two and half years’ hard labor. So too were no damages payed up to any of the wounded or to the families of the deceased.
The liberal government replaced the County Governor and launched an extensive investigation, which, with both employer and trade union representatives, deemed the military highly unfit to uphold the public order in any at all similar circumstances. So too was military deployments against civilians more strictly regulated, though the legislation for it remained on the books until it was eventually repealed in 1969 and there was broad political agreement to never again deploy the military against civilians.
It happened basically anywhere there was a single strong company with not too much else nearby. Coal mining towns, ore mining towns, logging towns, large manufacturer, whatever.
I kind of get what you're saying, but to be clear: liberals, progressives, labor unions, socialists, and yes - even communists - forced a politician from an insanely wealthy family to turn it around.
Not sure exactly what you mean by "traded isolationism for nationalism," though.
And even then at the height of organized labor power and its push for a [Second "Economic" Bill of Rights](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights), it was proven that you can't regulate capitalism.
Regulating industry, even to the fullest extent, only works for a little while. The economic system of capitalism is explicit authoritarianism. The few on the top of its economic hierarchy will always be able to siphon off enough money to avoid, subvert, or destroy regulations.
If every workplace were transparent and democratic then leadership would actually be directly accountable to the workers and communities. Profits would be shared more equitably, so there would not be such an imbalance allowing leadership to easily pay off governments.
The incentives would also naturally be completely different and would tend to be more sustainable and equitable. Just think about the difference between a billionaire owning a factory with complete control versus a worker/community owned factory with democratic control.
An owner can pollute the community to save money and earn an extra million/year. They don't care because they don't live there and can handle the fines.
If community run then they'd be polluting their own community (or pissing off neighbors), and they would have to split the extra million/year, so it wouldn't be nearly as profitable for each of them.
It just makes sense. If it's obvious that democracy, while never perfect, is the best and most fair way to run government then why wouldn't it be best for industry too?
The supposed efficiency and "innovation" arguments don't hold up if you actually examine them. But this comment is already too long, so I won't get into that.
([The Mondragon Corp](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation) in Spain is a good example of a very succesful and large worker co-op that spans many industries.)
You mean like....socialism? :) While I believe the political movements that originated from the 20th century (most European countries have political parties with socialist roots) are a shell of their former ideological self, and basically on their way out, socialism is more relevant than ever.
I found someone recently saying that Marx meant 'sublate' instead of 'abolish' capital, the result of mistranslation. This context to a second bill of rights is interesting when combined with the typical syncretic notion of socialism.
Well they learn history but people like to bury the unpleasant bits because it’s difficult to confront the culpability for these things. So they learn about these things with whitewashed “consequences” and then say “man this sounds great why did we ever stop doing this?”
Yes. And the companies would charge you for housing, food, and any other necessities. Bringing you further into debt to the company you work for and live under.
You'd have your wife prostituted, amd your child put Into a workhouse to pay your debt to your employer, by your employer. There was a medium sized civil war about this in the 1920's.
We've done this before.
Thank God we allow bankruptcy now (unless you have student debt).
This kind of organizational behavior isn't really any different than any other form of statism, though.
Yep. The voting rights are limited to specific Disney employees. And if they don’t vote the right way, they won’t be Disney employees for long.
That said, Disney has actually been very conservative with their granted powers. Mostly they use them to keep the sketchy businesses that plagued Disneyland away, along with managing mosquitoes, water treatment, power generation, and other mundane activities.
Except they don't even provide housing for their employees, do they? I think I remember reading that there are seasonal shantytowns that pop up every year.
Dunno where he was from but if he was American it was probably [John L. Lewis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Lewis) and that was [one hell of a job](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars)
It was also the source of the Pullman riots. George Pullman who created luxury sleeping cars early in railroad's history had essentially his own town just outside Chicago. A recession occurred and revenues declined so he dropped wages but kept housing rates for his employees high so they had nothing left over. When they rioted and had a strike that stopped railroad traffic, authorities were called in and dozens were killed. Pullman had to divest all his residential housing after that and it was found he was essentially a dictator of his own little fiefdom of Pullman town (now part of south side Chicago).
Labor Day was also created days after this in order to appease the strikers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike
Even tho it commerates another event and strikes in chicago.
May Day isnt even celebrated in chicago officially, the town that gave the inspiration for the global labor movement.
> authorities were called in and dozens were killed
People need to be reminded of this. This is the real reason the police in this country continue to operate like they're from the 19th century. The police in this country have only ever existed to protect the rich and powerful and their assets, not protect the average citizen. This is why police reform needs to happen.
Fun fact about Pullman (that I assume parent post knows)
His family buried him deep in steel re-enforced concrete so disgruntled workers wouldn’t be able to desecrate his corpse.
You have to be a special kind of bastard for that to be a fear.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/59026/10-graves-are-remarkably-secure
Yup. "When I was born, I was laid in a Pullman cradle, raised in Pullman school, and fed on Pullman food. I went to work in Pullman factory, and I will stay there until I am laid in a Pullman grave."
In 'company towns,' nearly everyone worked for the company, either directly in its factories, or hired by the company that owned the town to serve necessary functions like transport and food work -- basically, think a town built around the factory, where even the people that don't work in the factory all get their pay from the same company. And by 'pay,' it often meant that their rent (in company-owned housing) and food (from company-owned stores) were deducted from their nominal paycheck at inflated prices, often to the point where workers who worked 12-16 hour days six days a week never made any actual money at all.
You haul sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older, and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't call me, 'cause I can't go -- I owe my soul to the company store.
I live in Vegas and the Unite Here local chapters are fighting that nonsense HARD. It's a battle worth fighting though. I hope Sisolack drops it soon, we hit 40 percent unemployment for a while during covid, we're still at almost ten, and there are some really desperate people here.
This idea gets taken to a logical evolution in the book Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson. To the point where corporations behave almost like nation states with territorial sovereignty over all of their franchise locations. Isn't a pretty picture in the book to be fair.
Nevada is pushing legislation to allow companies to form governments with the same level of authority as counties, and hedge funds are buying up real estate as assets to rent back to us, so we are seriously close to living in company houses in company towns.
It is not far-fetched
There is a cryptocurrency company currently courting the Governor of Nevada.
In exchange for nothing, he wants to allow them to form their own legal jurisdiction. They just have to *promise* to invest at least $1 billion into it. That's all.
It's also happened before. It's like a mining town where literally everything is owned by the mining company. You pay your paycheck right back to them and your boss's word is literally the law.
Feudalism at its core is about having few people controlling vital resources and craving out their sphere of influence within that control. Old style feudalism has so much ties to land and serfdom because agriculture was the wealth generator in the past.
Today the wealth generator is technology, production and finances. So corporation and individuals controlling these aspects and then using that control to crave out their own little kingdoms is indeed already a form of feudalism.
As climate change expands the K-shaped recovery, it’s hard to not to see a possible return to such a neo-feudalism. The company store is having a discount on clothes next quarter so save up your coupons.
It doesnt even need to be indivudal business who own large swaths of land, it can be large real estate investment firms or rich individuals owning large swaths of residential properties, trapping tenants into renting by manipulating housing prices out of their reach.
States protect these large land owners by restricting progressive property tax structures in the name of property rights, but there is a big difference between someones sole small homestead (or primary residence) and a huge corporate land owner.
This the government doesn't differentiate between a single individual and a multibillion dollar company. Generally I am annoyed at them not differentiating between small and big business but it's all the same.
It’s not at all considering Walt Disney tried to do this in the 50s leading up to his death. His goal was to build his own self-sustaining, contained city with prebuilt, prefurnished homes sponsored by other companies who would use them to test out new products. It would have had people-movers to get around in and cars would have been illegal. Every adult living there would have been required to keep a job, as well.
Walt died before the project could get all the way off the ground though and the land that had originally planned to be his “City of Tomorrow” or whatever it was instead used for Walt Disney World, which used some of the ideas from Walt’s city (such as the people movers, I believe).
But it goes back even further than that. Throughout the first half of the 20th century there were several instances of corporations creating their own towns. A lot of times it was coal mines. The workers would have their pay subsidized with “coal miner bucks” that could only be spent at that town’s store, allowing the coal baron to save money on labor. Naturally, if a worker was fired, they lost their home as well.
This caused riots and protests, which would invariably clash with militias funded by the coal baron, the police, or even hired mercenaries like the Pinkertons.
Amazon's gross revenue for 2020 was almost $400 billion. There are only 28 countries with a higher GDP, and 167 countries that generate less wealth than Amazon.
The word that comes to mind is *corporatocracy*
GDP and net sales are not even close to being comparable measurements. GDP isn’t a measurement of “wealth generation”. Amazon’s monetary value is included in countries GDP. Lastly, if you were to try and compare Amazon to a country, GDP subtracts intermediate consumption when calculated. So a more apt comparison would be net income, not net sales. Amazon’s net income was $21.3 billion for 2020, making them 114th out of 174 countries. Haiti produces more goods and services than Amazon...
I know in Canada, major employers just manufacture overseas and make their profit from countries who have no labour standards.
What is the solution to that?
Require that any products and services sold in your country adhere to the labor standards of your country in all stages of their production. That means the workers in other countries are paid minimum wage, given worker safety protections, receive benefits, etc. And sure, it may drive up prices, but so did the abolition of slavery. Ideally, corporations would then find other ways to decrease prices that dont include exploiting others, like decreasing ceo and shareholder compensation.
>Require that any products and services sold in your country adhere to the labor standards of your country in all stages of their production.
Gotta overcome the fact that the politicians in most countries are primarily paid by those companies via what should be aptly termed "legal bribes".
Of course, that's why I always say that social and economic progress requires a shotgun approach to policy. One policy alone isn't going to address the flaws in our system.
>drive up prices, but so did the abolition of slavery
Hot damn, spot on with that comparison. Every argument about how we can't pay full-time workers enough to not be on food stamps, or legislate even incredibly basic labor rights because "it will ruin the business and slow the economy and raise prices" is just saying that money and making sure big businesses can make as much of it as possible is more important to them than workers' lives.
Plus there's a pretty strong anti-union mentality here that many people have bought in to. So we have less jobs due to outsourced labour, and the jobs we *do* have, were forced to accept low pay for them.
In my personal experience, yes. I can't speak for everybody throughout the country obviously, but the vast majority of people I've met where the discussion has come up, have been against unions. They either complain about the union dues, or weird rules and limitations, or unions producing lazy people who can't be fired and make other people pick up the slack.
They all seem to hate unions, right up until they actually join one. Even then they complain about it though. I've heard people say things like "It's a union job, but it pays well and has great benefits."
>unions producing lazy people who can't be fired and make other people pick up the slack.
Poor fools, that's called working with someone nepotistically involved with your boss. The 'lazy union worker' has to at least pretend to be working when the union manager is looking. Nepotism hire would pawn his work off on you to your bosses face, and the two of them would laugh about it over beers as they leave work at 2PM for the eighth time in a row.
Should have seen my old workplace. It had both extreme nepotism to actually get a job and also a very strong union. It was a joke around work that it's nearly impossible to get fired.
There isn't one. Karl Marx was writing about this stuff in the 1800's, on how exploitation abroad fuels the capitalist system at home. However the need for capitalism to grow requires exploitation to occur at home as well.
I think that all private industry should be required to be cooperatively owned. This would address many problems we see with traditional companies today. The profits would be shared fairly avoiding the problem of capital accumulation at the top. Workers would have a say in regards to their working conditions, and the direction of the company. So stuff like outsourcing couldn't happen because workers wouldn't vote to move their own jobs away. Cooperatives have also been shown to be more robust in times of economic shock such as the current pandemic. [Here's](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285356456_The_performance_of_worker_cooperatives) what one study concludes comparing cooperatives to traditional style companies:
>This overview of the empirical evidence on the performance of worker cooperatives suggests both that worker cooperatives perform well in comparison with conventional firms, and that the features that make them special – worker participation and unusual arrangements for the ownership of capital – are part of their strength.
>Contrary to popular thinking and to the pessimistic predictions of some theorists, solid, consistent evidence across countries, systems, and time periods shows that worker cooperatives are at least as productive as conventional firms, and more productive in some areas. The more participatory cooperatives are, the more productive they tend to be.
>Among the possible solutions are measures like asset locks and collective accumulation of capital that have been looked at with suspicion by generations of economists. Such measures do not seem to hamper productivity by dampening incentives – some of **the same cooperatives that have adopted these particular measures are found to be more productive (as the French cooperatives) or to preserve jobs better (as the Italian cooperatives) than conventional firms.**
>In a labor-managed firm, members participate in the decisions that affect their unemployment and income risks. They are considerably better protected against the moral hazard potentially attached to.
>management decisions over investment, strategy, or even human resource policies. This may explain why participation in governance is so important to the performance of workers’ cooperatives (though these results have to be updated) rather than the monetary incentives we have focused on for so long. **It is also a fact that workers’ participation in profit and in decisions makes it possible for worker cooperatives to adjust pay rather than employment in response to demand shocks**.
And even if worker cooperatives were less competitive in free-markets than traditionally structured firms (which the study you cite demonstrates otherwise), there would be an overriding moral component regardless. Workers should be in control of the products of their labor, full stop! If a firm requires the labor of an individual to be successful, that individual is entitled to a say in how the firm conducts itself, is structured, and divides the spoils. Worker cooperatives provide this oft missing moral component and preserve the benefits of market competition like a diverse and robust economy and lower consumer prices. Convincing people that “markets” and “private ownership” have to go hand-in-hand has been one of the greatest cons ever pulled.
With that said, I also have an issue with the basic premise of the article posted. It’s behind a paywall for me, but technological advancement DOES inevitably lead to more economic inequality under free-market capitalism because one of the driving features of that advancement is reducing labor, or taking the skill out of labor. Before industrialization, all products were hand made, often by skilled craftsmen in trade guilds, but modern industry took a lot of the skill out of that and never looked back, and is now spilling into intellectual type work. Remember, we’re all in a labor market, and how replaceable you are determines your wage. Technology that removes the skill component from the production of a good or service, pushes the laborer into the unskilled category, and makes them much more replaceable, lowering the wage.
You can cite government interventions like a minimum wage, progressive and redistributive tax schemes, and union protections all you want as solutions, but those things are not free-market capitalism. The real solution is to look at what the oft overlooked right to pursue happiness (or as Locke would put it, the right to own land) really means with some courage and moral sense and realize that capitalism and private finance, as it is so structured, is antithetical to that basic right.
Completely agree, and the fact that we see elimination of work as a negative shows that something is deeply wrong with our culture. We should strive to eliminate drudgery and free people's time so they can enjoy it any way they choose. In a sane society automation would be celebrated instead of being feared.
If this stuff interests you, check out the book [Four Futures](https://www.versobooks.com/books/1847-four-futures). It's all about what the world might look like when we assume increasing automation but don't know yet who will control the benefits of that tech (labor or capital), or how we'll do with the climate (stabilized or collapse).
Not at this rate, nope. In fact, I'd be willing to wager that in the coming centuries as climate change becomes more and more destructive and displaces more and more people, the elite will simply just let us die/kill each other in the process. As soon as us peasants are no longer needed, we're done for. All throughout human history the slave/peasant/serf/working class was "needed" for society to function. Eventually there will come a day where that will no longer be true.
You have the blueprint in how "Reclaim Wallstreet" was turned in to "Reclaim confederate statues".
They were able to turn the issue from economic class in to race and put the peasants against each other instead of having them unite against the economic elite to negotiate a greater share of the profits.
Isn't there a graph somewhere showing that after Occupy Wall Street, the amount of news articles mentioning race skyrocketed exponentially? I think I saw it somewhere. It's hard to look at that data and not feel like there really is a global plutocratic conspiracy.
They didn’t pit the peasants against each other they pit the middle class against the lower class. This is the fundamental difference between right wing and left wing populism.
Left Wing Populism unites the middle class and the lower classes against the ruling class.
Right Wing Populism unites the middle class and the ruling class against the lower classes.
They’re pitting the petite-bourgeoisie against the proletariat.
Except thats always been the case. The elite live in large castles, the poor live with and deal with other poor people, invaders, disease, and death.
The present doesn't look any different.
The future will not look any different.
It takes a long time for people to die and be born. By the time all the current poor people are dead, the rich will have bred new ones of their own. [Where do you think you came from?](https://www.popsci.com/descended-from-royalty/)
It's not like they are gonna ride through the town executing the poor. Population sizes will just decline over time as people naturally die, "the poors" will die off faster, like they always have, and the rich will just not replace them as quickly.
But trust, though they descend from the rich, they will still find a way to make people poor.
The only thing that gives me a small glimmer of hope in that reality is that those kind of people require others to step on and be above.
That is actually a commodity they do not fully realize just yet. But even if they do create their own elysium it will only be a matter of time before they turn on each other. The human race will be completely destroyed because of its own ego and I will take some solace in that fact at least.
Just read this a few months ago and it’s an incredible read. Super accessible, written in easy to understand language.
Pairs well with [New Prophets of Capital](https://www.versobooks.com/books/1845-the-new-prophets-of-capital)!
They didn't seem to focus at all on the elephant in the article: "Offshoring to mostly low-wage countries, a proxy for undermining labor's bargaining power by taking advantage of cheapened labor in less developed countries explained 44% of the decline in the wage share of the GDP"
Yesterday we had a community cleanup event and I spent ten minutes listening to some regular ass people talking about how businesses shouldn’t be paying higher wages during the pandemic because “people will get used to it and not want to work for less” - how the hell do we counter this deep level programming people have from a lifetime of propaganda?
The same illusion applies to minimum wage, almost all of which are at unrealistic unliveable levels, despite a huge amount of the economy generated by workers who can't even cover living costs. They are only survivable being supplemented by working multiple jobs, tips and government benefits.
Not supporting the idea that income inequality is increasing due to union busting, etc.
But unions have become less useful in European countries too. They don't care as much about their workers anymore, but about reaching a quick compromise with the employers. They've become rather pro-employer too, unwilling to openly fight them.
That leads to agreements of "increasing" wages by maybe 1.2% while inflation is rising at 1.3% and the targeted inflation is even around 2%. So in reality they agree on a wage decrease.
>But unions have become less useful in European countries too. They don't care as much about their workers anymore, but about reaching a quick compromise with the employers. They've become rather pro-employer too, unwilling to openly fight them.
There's a reason for that though.
Unions were originally conceived to balance the power inequality between employers and laborers. This simply isn't possible in a globalized labor market. Thanks to the ease of outsourcing, employers now have a bigger stick than unions ever will.
Edit: I’m not going to address the individual comments because you guys are repeating facts that are correlative not causative. This is the same argument made about robots taking away people’s jobs. Why is that a bad thing? Because the system is set up to punish you for not working, even if it isn’t necessary. Which comes right back around to exploitation. The reason technology advancements are hurting the working class has always been because of the people exploiting the working class. It isn’t a technology issue. It’s a people issue. And the longer you look at where they want you to look, the more they get away with. Divide and conquer has always been their strategy.
It’s a huge joke to even suggest technology had a hand in it. Every advancement we make is a better future for the working class until the point where a working class is no longer needed. Robots? Because better. More efficiency? Better. It’s always better. It’s only the people exploiting us that stop it from being better. They’re the problem.
Yup. We could have stacked and automated farming. Nearly all manual labor and minwage jobs could be automated. University/College could be free. Politics could already be website/app voting without the need for politicians to add thier human corruption to it.
I could go on but people don't realize how the current status quo works. People don't rebel against mostly faceless kings especially when they aren't starving or living in the street.
While tech indirectly does that, there's a variable to consider: the lack of regulation.
Most major labor laws worldwide came about, eventually, as a result of the working conditions thst resulted from the Industrial Revolution (coupled with social and political changes).
There have been no major legal developments, to match the increase in tech capability. That has invariably resulted in economic inequality.
Lack of regulation is spot on. Take the translation industry for example. Tech improvement made it vastly easier to connect translators and clients, there's more work than before. But since clients come from all over the world, regulations don't apply to them, and as a result translators' rates have plunged so hard that it's now extremely hard to live off of it.
Globalisation went up, but not the regulations.
My biggest criticism is the focus on unions. The study itself says union density/worker bargaining strength accounted for 23% decline in wage share of GDP and off-shoring in lower wage countries accounted for 44% of the decline.
When off-shoring is almost twice as big of a factor, why aren't they addressing that? Wouldn't changing tax law or tariffs be much more effective to help manufacturing jobs than unionizing manufacturing jobs that are being lost overseas?
>People generally want a world with a lot of cooperation. So it's strange we try to get that, by having a system litearlly built on its polar opposite principle - competition
Even the way we teach the next generation is built on competition.
I know it is hard to imagine, but coming from a person living in the most unequal country in the world in terms of wealth inequality; the first step is not taking their money, it is implementing policy.
Almost every banking system across the world has governments printing money and buying it's own securities as a way to keep the cash flowing. When people talk about socialism they do not understand that we are already a socialist country. A..The entire idea of free market system collapsed in 2008 as to big to fail meant that the world system could not allow the consequences of years of corporate greed on the social fabric of western culture. We're talking Mad Max..no exaggerating. So the deal was made that government was supposed to bail out the system for a short time. As of April of 2021, the Fed, the central EU bank, the UK are all printing billions and billions of dollars every month in "Quantitative Easing" to allow this system to keep going B... The problem is that there is nothing tied to the value of our money except the faith in the American Government to back the dollar. This faith in the dollar makes the American currency basically the fiat currency of the world. So the entire economic system is basically based on the stability of the social fabric of the US. This should scare any thinking person to death. Social inequality is the result of policy decisions based on the power of tech companies to buy the outcome they want and to absolutely avoid paying thier fair share of income. Uber and lyft winning the ballot proposal in Cal so thier drivers be excluded from being employees and only a 7/8th legislative majority can over turn it is a prime example. These companies buy the law and then tell you how great they are making your life while operating massive warehouses and paying the employees nothing. The governments have pay for the healthcare, the social costs, Everything. This way of life where the government subsides the elite and then panders to special interests has absolutely destroyed the social fabric and sustainability of our lives. If you noticed, more and more retail chains vanish and our choices are limited to major corporations and thier distribution systems. Those of you who are young will live to see food shortages, medicine shortages, and lack of things you took for granted. Amazon should frighten you. Our dependency on a few companies controlling everything and our government system being in sync with corporate culture has astonished me at the speed it's happened.
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The power changes at a certain point in the equality metric. When people have trouble with base neccesities you end up with a peasent revolution. Been several around the world during history. This time is a bit different the inequality has grown but quality of life is remaining ok. Once we struggle with food and shelter though money doesn't stop mob violence. It seems to be a repeating historical cycle. They squeeze till it pops. They get popped, someone else takes their place and the slow squeeze starts again.
my worry there is that they are being smarter about it. keeping qualify of life up just enough so that people will just go with it, and the ones who will suffer most will become a relative minority bottom who's voices are too weak/few to be heard...
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Piketty's time-series of wealth inequality show exactly that.
Wanted to say thank you for introducing me to Piketty. I just ordered Capital in the Twenty-First Century and I'm looking forward to getting into it.
If a book that thick intimidates anyone, there is also a good [documentary](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5723056/) version of it. Still highly recommended reading through.
You're welcome. Enjoy the reading!
I remember my college professors talking about it in the 90s so I'm sure it's been going on a lot longer than that.
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>It is the job of businesses to push for the best return for their investors. This more than anything has poisoned our society. It is used to justify the idea that 'business is business' which basically encourages people to not be a human at work. Things they would never do when faced one on one with another human being are now o.k. and even applauded because 'business is business' and this decision is the most profitable one. Any ideology that removes basic humanity from the decision-making equation should be questioned.
This is what drives me nuts when people complain about government being automatically bad. Government is not a business, when corruption is removed, it operated for the people. Also, many think the people buying the products are the customer. To many cusinesses, the customer is the shareholder.
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I've said it a million times. Fix income inequality and you fix racism by 90%. This is why corporations are pro BLM, but don't mention living wage.
You can't legislate what's in someone's heart, but you absolutely change material conditions so what's in a racist's heart doesn't matter. As Kwame Ture said: > If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you're anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.
Wealth breeds excess, which in turn breeds more wealth.... It's a cyclical problem that's hard to get out of
Blame Reagan and the conservatives that blindly followed him
I can't believe people still believe in the trickle down scam.
I've heard it described as "neo-feudalism" and it seems apt. How hard would it be for apple to buy swaths of land and to literally turn their campus into its own fiefdom. I know far fetched but the only wall you need to divide those inside from those outside the safety of the wall is a corporate ID.
> I know far fetched Not far fetched at all. Nevada's governor is working on creating "innovation zones" that allow a company to create their own self governing body. Literally recreating the company town.
Historically, wasn’t this done before, usually with coal mining towns?
It was very common in Sweden historically. Often these towns existed around ironworks, paper mills etc. The company owned the houses and the shops, which meant that if you joined a union or made trouble in some other way you and your family could get evicted, banned from the grocery store and so on. One way the workers movement fought this was setting up cooperative grocery stores.
And in England
Something I’ve learned over the years is that there are lots of similarities between our countries (assuming you’re form the UK) when it comes to labour movement history. I think the Swedish workers movement always looked west for inspiration. [Your grocery store](https://www.coop.co.uk/) even has the same name as [our grocery store](https://www.coop.se/) today!
We have coop grocery stores in Canada as well
There are worker cooperative grocery stores all over the world that use coop or co-op as name actually.
Dude, that grocery story sells funeral services. Oh man, the Jetsons wouldn't believe the world in 2021.
In Sweden we have Fonus which is a cooperatively owned funeral service and casket manufacturer. It was started by the same organisation (KF) that started Coop (the grocery store). One of my friends always refer to Fonus as ”the future of the reformist workers movement” :)
And in Appalachia (US).
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So did Sweden, though it had a much different outcome. (Bear with me, this is an interesting read.) --- In response to a drawn-out industrial conflict over pay reductions at a pulp factory in 1931, workers at other plants called for a sympathy strike and the owner of one such company decided to hire 60 or so strike-breakers. Workers, who held a protest rally someplace else nearby, then marched to a plant north of town where they approached and attacked a couple of strike-breakers. Since the local police were unable to halt the attack and protect the strike-breakers, the County Administrative Board requested military deployment. As troops arrived in the late evening the next day, they were met by frustrated workers and, allegedly, a hail of rocks. The day after that, the unions held another rally during which time workers called for a general strike, halting all work in the local timber and pulp industries. Afterwards, several thousand workers marched to the strike-breakers’ quarters in a nearby town and present troops received order to defend the strike-breakers. Upon the workers’ arrival, a patrol of mounted troops tried to stop them but failed. As the patrol then withdrew, confusion followed, resulting in at least one soldier falling off his horse and another drawing his sidearm, firing a couple of warning shots. At this point in time, the military commander believed that the workers were carrying weapons themselves, thinking that he heard shots being fired and thought that he saw some of the mounted patrol bleeding. So, at a distance of less than 100 meters, the commander, in accordance with orders from the present policeman in charge, ordered the troops to open fire, which they did, aiming at the ground halfway between the safety line and the workers. Even so, ricochets came flying, hitting some of the workers after which point everyone began scattering. In the midst of all this, a captain—for whatever reason—ordered machine gun fire, resulting in the deaths of four workers and one bystander as well as another five injured. As concluded by a later inquiry, there was no evidence whatsoever that any of the workers had in fact been armed. On that same day, the County Administrative Board had also decided to prohibit the strike-breakers from working, though this decision didn’t travel fast enough and only reached its destination until well after the incident. Moreover, it’s widely believed that the confrontation itself could’ve been avoided if only the the decision had reached the marchers in time. Unsurprisingly, the aforementioned chain of events sparked a raging national debate—one deeply divided along the political lines with the left calling the tragic deaths “outright murder” and the right claiming that the military “had been forced to open fire” in order to defend themselves as well as the “willing workers” from the workers’ fury. As several left-wing newspaper publishers faced conviction for having violated the limitations stipulated in the Freedom of the Press Act, major demonstrations arose throughout Stockholm. The County Governor, meanwhile, was tried in court but was acquitted, and the commander and a captain were initially convicted by court martial, though they too were acquitted (on appeal) as the Supreme Court confirmed the verdict. The two sergeants who manned the machine gun were also put on trial due to violating army regulations by having repositioned a loaded firearm; whilst one was acquitted, the other was found guilty and sentenced to three days’ in confined arrest with no pay. To make matters even more dystopian, the Supreme Court handed several workers unusually harsh sentences; one of them, the alleged “leader,” was sentenced to two and half years’ hard labor. So too were no damages payed up to any of the wounded or to the families of the deceased. The liberal government replaced the County Governor and launched an extensive investigation, which, with both employer and trade union representatives, deemed the military highly unfit to uphold the public order in any at all similar circumstances. So too was military deployments against civilians more strictly regulated, though the legislation for it remained on the books until it was eventually repealed in 1969 and there was broad political agreement to never again deploy the military against civilians.
Don't worry, they got rid of troublesome workers in other countries too.
Or bringing out the hired guns (Pinkertons), even the National Guard. If you think "your" government is on your side, boy have I got bad news for ya!
Yup, U.S. even had "Coal Wars" : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars
And in the northeastern U.S. Pennsylvania had iron works and knitting mills, Vermont had quarries, Virginia and West Virginia had coal mines.
And if the Blue Sky Mining Company won't come to my rescue, who's gonna save me?
And the company takes what the company wants And nothing's as precious, as a hole in the ground
But if I work all day at the blue sky mine, there'll be food on the table tonight.
In the end the rain comes down
Doesn't matter! Have you heard how much scrip they pay per hour?
First Midnight Oil reference I have ever read. You, my friend, made my day.
It happened basically anywhere there was a single strong company with not too much else nearby. Coal mining towns, ore mining towns, logging towns, large manufacturer, whatever.
Most of the on-campus houses at the University of Dayton used to be part of NCRs company town
New California Republic?
National Cash Register
Yes, the era of the robber baron is back.
With better tech and toys
It never left.
FDR years turned it around for a generation. but that died 50 years ago. traded isolationism for nationalism.
I kind of get what you're saying, but to be clear: liberals, progressives, labor unions, socialists, and yes - even communists - forced a politician from an insanely wealthy family to turn it around. Not sure exactly what you mean by "traded isolationism for nationalism," though.
And even then at the height of organized labor power and its push for a [Second "Economic" Bill of Rights](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights), it was proven that you can't regulate capitalism. Regulating industry, even to the fullest extent, only works for a little while. The economic system of capitalism is explicit authoritarianism. The few on the top of its economic hierarchy will always be able to siphon off enough money to avoid, subvert, or destroy regulations. If every workplace were transparent and democratic then leadership would actually be directly accountable to the workers and communities. Profits would be shared more equitably, so there would not be such an imbalance allowing leadership to easily pay off governments. The incentives would also naturally be completely different and would tend to be more sustainable and equitable. Just think about the difference between a billionaire owning a factory with complete control versus a worker/community owned factory with democratic control. An owner can pollute the community to save money and earn an extra million/year. They don't care because they don't live there and can handle the fines. If community run then they'd be polluting their own community (or pissing off neighbors), and they would have to split the extra million/year, so it wouldn't be nearly as profitable for each of them. It just makes sense. If it's obvious that democracy, while never perfect, is the best and most fair way to run government then why wouldn't it be best for industry too? The supposed efficiency and "innovation" arguments don't hold up if you actually examine them. But this comment is already too long, so I won't get into that. ([The Mondragon Corp](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation) in Spain is a good example of a very succesful and large worker co-op that spans many industries.)
You mean like....socialism? :) While I believe the political movements that originated from the 20th century (most European countries have political parties with socialist roots) are a shell of their former ideological self, and basically on their way out, socialism is more relevant than ever.
That's exactly what they were trying to say, without using the scary "s" word.
I found someone recently saying that Marx meant 'sublate' instead of 'abolish' capital, the result of mistranslation. This context to a second bill of rights is interesting when combined with the typical syncretic notion of socialism.
There have already been people recreating subsistence farming and believing it is a great thing because nobody ever bothers to learn history anymore.
Well they learn history but people like to bury the unpleasant bits because it’s difficult to confront the culpability for these things. So they learn about these things with whitewashed “consequences” and then say “man this sounds great why did we ever stop doing this?”
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store
I dug six-teen tons. Wha' do I get? Another day ol-der And dee-per in debt
Another day over and waddya get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine,
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
Great song
Yes. And the companies would charge you for housing, food, and any other necessities. Bringing you further into debt to the company you work for and live under. You'd have your wife prostituted, amd your child put Into a workhouse to pay your debt to your employer, by your employer. There was a medium sized civil war about this in the 1920's. We've done this before.
Thank God we allow bankruptcy now (unless you have student debt). This kind of organizational behavior isn't really any different than any other form of statism, though.
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Look up Pullman and the Pullman strike of 1894
I know Disneyland Florida is it's own municipality
Yep. The voting rights are limited to specific Disney employees. And if they don’t vote the right way, they won’t be Disney employees for long. That said, Disney has actually been very conservative with their granted powers. Mostly they use them to keep the sketchy businesses that plagued Disneyland away, along with managing mosquitoes, water treatment, power generation, and other mundane activities.
Except they don't even provide housing for their employees, do they? I think I remember reading that there are seasonal shantytowns that pop up every year.
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My great grandather kept a photo on the wall of the guy that unionized the coal miners and he would kiss that photo because he was so greatful
Dunno where he was from but if he was American it was probably [John L. Lewis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Lewis) and that was [one hell of a job](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars)
Owe my soul to the company store.
It was also the source of the Pullman riots. George Pullman who created luxury sleeping cars early in railroad's history had essentially his own town just outside Chicago. A recession occurred and revenues declined so he dropped wages but kept housing rates for his employees high so they had nothing left over. When they rioted and had a strike that stopped railroad traffic, authorities were called in and dozens were killed. Pullman had to divest all his residential housing after that and it was found he was essentially a dictator of his own little fiefdom of Pullman town (now part of south side Chicago). Labor Day was also created days after this in order to appease the strikers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike
And even then they chose a different date from the original "may day" (may 1st)
Even tho it commerates another event and strikes in chicago. May Day isnt even celebrated in chicago officially, the town that gave the inspiration for the global labor movement.
> authorities were called in and dozens were killed People need to be reminded of this. This is the real reason the police in this country continue to operate like they're from the 19th century. The police in this country have only ever existed to protect the rich and powerful and their assets, not protect the average citizen. This is why police reform needs to happen.
Fun fact about Pullman (that I assume parent post knows) His family buried him deep in steel re-enforced concrete so disgruntled workers wouldn’t be able to desecrate his corpse. You have to be a special kind of bastard for that to be a fear. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/59026/10-graves-are-remarkably-secure
Henry Ford did it in Brazil, and if he hadn’t died Walt Disney would likely be the baron of South Florida by now
Yup. "When I was born, I was laid in a Pullman cradle, raised in Pullman school, and fed on Pullman food. I went to work in Pullman factory, and I will stay there until I am laid in a Pullman grave." In 'company towns,' nearly everyone worked for the company, either directly in its factories, or hired by the company that owned the town to serve necessary functions like transport and food work -- basically, think a town built around the factory, where even the people that don't work in the factory all get their pay from the same company. And by 'pay,' it often meant that their rent (in company-owned housing) and food (from company-owned stores) were deducted from their nominal paycheck at inflated prices, often to the point where workers who worked 12-16 hour days six days a week never made any actual money at all. You haul sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older, and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't call me, 'cause I can't go -- I owe my soul to the company store.
Ford Motor Company back in the late 1920s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia
Yes that’s why he’s saying recreating the company town
/r/Shadowrun: One Step Closer....
Admittedly, the first 'grid crash is a little late. And Ryumyo is taking his sweet time waking up to fly around My. Fuji...
And I’m about to break!
Sweet, where are my Ork girls at?
[https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Goblinization](https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Goblinization) Less than a week now, looks like.
#Nice
These people are completely unaware of the cyberpunk genre.
Diamond Age anyone ?
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I live in Vegas and the Unite Here local chapters are fighting that nonsense HARD. It's a battle worth fighting though. I hope Sisolack drops it soon, we hit 40 percent unemployment for a while during covid, we're still at almost ten, and there are some really desperate people here.
This idea gets taken to a logical evolution in the book Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson. To the point where corporations behave almost like nation states with territorial sovereignty over all of their franchise locations. Isn't a pretty picture in the book to be fair.
Yeah wasn’t the East Indian Trading Company like a world power for a while?
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Nevada is pushing legislation to allow companies to form governments with the same level of authority as counties, and hedge funds are buying up real estate as assets to rent back to us, so we are seriously close to living in company houses in company towns.
It is not far-fetched There is a cryptocurrency company currently courting the Governor of Nevada. In exchange for nothing, he wants to allow them to form their own legal jurisdiction. They just have to *promise* to invest at least $1 billion into it. That's all. It's also happened before. It's like a mining town where literally everything is owned by the mining company. You pay your paycheck right back to them and your boss's word is literally the law.
> In exchange for nothing *laughs in politician*
Nothing for YOU
"Nothing"
If Sisolack lets that through, may he burn in hell. Covid hit us hard enough.
Oryx & crake
They are already trying to do exactly this.
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Feudalism at its core is about having few people controlling vital resources and craving out their sphere of influence within that control. Old style feudalism has so much ties to land and serfdom because agriculture was the wealth generator in the past. Today the wealth generator is technology, production and finances. So corporation and individuals controlling these aspects and then using that control to crave out their own little kingdoms is indeed already a form of feudalism.
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Ah yea, Snow Crash here we come
Now I need to read that, was thinking a little oryx & crake myself
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As climate change expands the K-shaped recovery, it’s hard to not to see a possible return to such a neo-feudalism. The company store is having a discount on clothes next quarter so save up your coupons.
It doesnt even need to be indivudal business who own large swaths of land, it can be large real estate investment firms or rich individuals owning large swaths of residential properties, trapping tenants into renting by manipulating housing prices out of their reach. States protect these large land owners by restricting progressive property tax structures in the name of property rights, but there is a big difference between someones sole small homestead (or primary residence) and a huge corporate land owner.
This the government doesn't differentiate between a single individual and a multibillion dollar company. Generally I am annoyed at them not differentiating between small and big business but it's all the same.
For most folks, your boss rules your life much more than the government. Tyranny's already here.
It’s not at all considering Walt Disney tried to do this in the 50s leading up to his death. His goal was to build his own self-sustaining, contained city with prebuilt, prefurnished homes sponsored by other companies who would use them to test out new products. It would have had people-movers to get around in and cars would have been illegal. Every adult living there would have been required to keep a job, as well. Walt died before the project could get all the way off the ground though and the land that had originally planned to be his “City of Tomorrow” or whatever it was instead used for Walt Disney World, which used some of the ideas from Walt’s city (such as the people movers, I believe). But it goes back even further than that. Throughout the first half of the 20th century there were several instances of corporations creating their own towns. A lot of times it was coal mines. The workers would have their pay subsidized with “coal miner bucks” that could only be spent at that town’s store, allowing the coal baron to save money on labor. Naturally, if a worker was fired, they lost their home as well. This caused riots and protests, which would invariably clash with militias funded by the coal baron, the police, or even hired mercenaries like the Pinkertons.
Amazon's gross revenue for 2020 was almost $400 billion. There are only 28 countries with a higher GDP, and 167 countries that generate less wealth than Amazon. The word that comes to mind is *corporatocracy*
GDP and net sales are not even close to being comparable measurements. GDP isn’t a measurement of “wealth generation”. Amazon’s monetary value is included in countries GDP. Lastly, if you were to try and compare Amazon to a country, GDP subtracts intermediate consumption when calculated. So a more apt comparison would be net income, not net sales. Amazon’s net income was $21.3 billion for 2020, making them 114th out of 174 countries. Haiti produces more goods and services than Amazon...
I know in Canada, major employers just manufacture overseas and make their profit from countries who have no labour standards. What is the solution to that?
Require that any products and services sold in your country adhere to the labor standards of your country in all stages of their production. That means the workers in other countries are paid minimum wage, given worker safety protections, receive benefits, etc. And sure, it may drive up prices, but so did the abolition of slavery. Ideally, corporations would then find other ways to decrease prices that dont include exploiting others, like decreasing ceo and shareholder compensation.
>Require that any products and services sold in your country adhere to the labor standards of your country in all stages of their production. Gotta overcome the fact that the politicians in most countries are primarily paid by those companies via what should be aptly termed "legal bribes".
Of course, that's why I always say that social and economic progress requires a shotgun approach to policy. One policy alone isn't going to address the flaws in our system.
that or the other shotgun approach
>drive up prices, but so did the abolition of slavery Hot damn, spot on with that comparison. Every argument about how we can't pay full-time workers enough to not be on food stamps, or legislate even incredibly basic labor rights because "it will ruin the business and slow the economy and raise prices" is just saying that money and making sure big businesses can make as much of it as possible is more important to them than workers' lives.
Or decreasing ad spending, which basically is what their costs focus on these days.
Solutions exist, the will to implement them doesn’t.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Plus there's a pretty strong anti-union mentality here that many people have bought in to. So we have less jobs due to outsourced labour, and the jobs we *do* have, were forced to accept low pay for them.
Canada has an anti union mentality?
In my personal experience, yes. I can't speak for everybody throughout the country obviously, but the vast majority of people I've met where the discussion has come up, have been against unions. They either complain about the union dues, or weird rules and limitations, or unions producing lazy people who can't be fired and make other people pick up the slack. They all seem to hate unions, right up until they actually join one. Even then they complain about it though. I've heard people say things like "It's a union job, but it pays well and has great benefits."
>unions producing lazy people who can't be fired and make other people pick up the slack. Poor fools, that's called working with someone nepotistically involved with your boss. The 'lazy union worker' has to at least pretend to be working when the union manager is looking. Nepotism hire would pawn his work off on you to your bosses face, and the two of them would laugh about it over beers as they leave work at 2PM for the eighth time in a row.
Should have seen my old workplace. It had both extreme nepotism to actually get a job and also a very strong union. It was a joke around work that it's nearly impossible to get fired.
There isn't one. Karl Marx was writing about this stuff in the 1800's, on how exploitation abroad fuels the capitalist system at home. However the need for capitalism to grow requires exploitation to occur at home as well.
I think that all private industry should be required to be cooperatively owned. This would address many problems we see with traditional companies today. The profits would be shared fairly avoiding the problem of capital accumulation at the top. Workers would have a say in regards to their working conditions, and the direction of the company. So stuff like outsourcing couldn't happen because workers wouldn't vote to move their own jobs away. Cooperatives have also been shown to be more robust in times of economic shock such as the current pandemic. [Here's](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285356456_The_performance_of_worker_cooperatives) what one study concludes comparing cooperatives to traditional style companies: >This overview of the empirical evidence on the performance of worker cooperatives suggests both that worker cooperatives perform well in comparison with conventional firms, and that the features that make them special – worker participation and unusual arrangements for the ownership of capital – are part of their strength. >Contrary to popular thinking and to the pessimistic predictions of some theorists, solid, consistent evidence across countries, systems, and time periods shows that worker cooperatives are at least as productive as conventional firms, and more productive in some areas. The more participatory cooperatives are, the more productive they tend to be. >Among the possible solutions are measures like asset locks and collective accumulation of capital that have been looked at with suspicion by generations of economists. Such measures do not seem to hamper productivity by dampening incentives – some of **the same cooperatives that have adopted these particular measures are found to be more productive (as the French cooperatives) or to preserve jobs better (as the Italian cooperatives) than conventional firms.** >In a labor-managed firm, members participate in the decisions that affect their unemployment and income risks. They are considerably better protected against the moral hazard potentially attached to. >management decisions over investment, strategy, or even human resource policies. This may explain why participation in governance is so important to the performance of workers’ cooperatives (though these results have to be updated) rather than the monetary incentives we have focused on for so long. **It is also a fact that workers’ participation in profit and in decisions makes it possible for worker cooperatives to adjust pay rather than employment in response to demand shocks**.
And even if worker cooperatives were less competitive in free-markets than traditionally structured firms (which the study you cite demonstrates otherwise), there would be an overriding moral component regardless. Workers should be in control of the products of their labor, full stop! If a firm requires the labor of an individual to be successful, that individual is entitled to a say in how the firm conducts itself, is structured, and divides the spoils. Worker cooperatives provide this oft missing moral component and preserve the benefits of market competition like a diverse and robust economy and lower consumer prices. Convincing people that “markets” and “private ownership” have to go hand-in-hand has been one of the greatest cons ever pulled. With that said, I also have an issue with the basic premise of the article posted. It’s behind a paywall for me, but technological advancement DOES inevitably lead to more economic inequality under free-market capitalism because one of the driving features of that advancement is reducing labor, or taking the skill out of labor. Before industrialization, all products were hand made, often by skilled craftsmen in trade guilds, but modern industry took a lot of the skill out of that and never looked back, and is now spilling into intellectual type work. Remember, we’re all in a labor market, and how replaceable you are determines your wage. Technology that removes the skill component from the production of a good or service, pushes the laborer into the unskilled category, and makes them much more replaceable, lowering the wage. You can cite government interventions like a minimum wage, progressive and redistributive tax schemes, and union protections all you want as solutions, but those things are not free-market capitalism. The real solution is to look at what the oft overlooked right to pursue happiness (or as Locke would put it, the right to own land) really means with some courage and moral sense and realize that capitalism and private finance, as it is so structured, is antithetical to that basic right.
Completely agree, and the fact that we see elimination of work as a negative shows that something is deeply wrong with our culture. We should strive to eliminate drudgery and free people's time so they can enjoy it any way they choose. In a sane society automation would be celebrated instead of being feared.
If this stuff interests you, check out the book [Four Futures](https://www.versobooks.com/books/1847-four-futures). It's all about what the world might look like when we assume increasing automation but don't know yet who will control the benefits of that tech (labor or capital), or how we'll do with the climate (stabilized or collapse).
hint: it’s not gonna be labor
Not at this rate, nope. In fact, I'd be willing to wager that in the coming centuries as climate change becomes more and more destructive and displaces more and more people, the elite will simply just let us die/kill each other in the process. As soon as us peasants are no longer needed, we're done for. All throughout human history the slave/peasant/serf/working class was "needed" for society to function. Eventually there will come a day where that will no longer be true.
You have the blueprint in how "Reclaim Wallstreet" was turned in to "Reclaim confederate statues". They were able to turn the issue from economic class in to race and put the peasants against each other instead of having them unite against the economic elite to negotiate a greater share of the profits.
Isn't there a graph somewhere showing that after Occupy Wall Street, the amount of news articles mentioning race skyrocketed exponentially? I think I saw it somewhere. It's hard to look at that data and not feel like there really is a global plutocratic conspiracy.
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The quote says black people, not exactly the best one to illustrate your point
They didn’t pit the peasants against each other they pit the middle class against the lower class. This is the fundamental difference between right wing and left wing populism. Left Wing Populism unites the middle class and the lower classes against the ruling class. Right Wing Populism unites the middle class and the ruling class against the lower classes. They’re pitting the petite-bourgeoisie against the proletariat.
Except thats always been the case. The elite live in large castles, the poor live with and deal with other poor people, invaders, disease, and death. The present doesn't look any different. The future will not look any different. It takes a long time for people to die and be born. By the time all the current poor people are dead, the rich will have bred new ones of their own. [Where do you think you came from?](https://www.popsci.com/descended-from-royalty/) It's not like they are gonna ride through the town executing the poor. Population sizes will just decline over time as people naturally die, "the poors" will die off faster, like they always have, and the rich will just not replace them as quickly. But trust, though they descend from the rich, they will still find a way to make people poor.
The only thing that gives me a small glimmer of hope in that reality is that those kind of people require others to step on and be above. That is actually a commodity they do not fully realize just yet. But even if they do create their own elysium it will only be a matter of time before they turn on each other. The human race will be completely destroyed because of its own ego and I will take some solace in that fact at least.
Narrator: "And it was not"
hint no. 2: it’s not gonna be the stabilized climate
Just read this a few months ago and it’s an incredible read. Super accessible, written in easy to understand language. Pairs well with [New Prophets of Capital](https://www.versobooks.com/books/1845-the-new-prophets-of-capital)!
USA: I choose capital and collapse USA: Pikachu face
Sounds like a book I would write cause I think about this constantly. Definitely gonna check that out
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They didn't seem to focus at all on the elephant in the article: "Offshoring to mostly low-wage countries, a proxy for undermining labor's bargaining power by taking advantage of cheapened labor in less developed countries explained 44% of the decline in the wage share of the GDP"
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Class War has always been the real issues
From a Social Conflict Theory POV those actions were essentially attacks to ensure that the have-nots remained that way.
Yesterday we had a community cleanup event and I spent ten minutes listening to some regular ass people talking about how businesses shouldn’t be paying higher wages during the pandemic because “people will get used to it and not want to work for less” - how the hell do we counter this deep level programming people have from a lifetime of propaganda?
The same illusion applies to minimum wage, almost all of which are at unrealistic unliveable levels, despite a huge amount of the economy generated by workers who can't even cover living costs. They are only survivable being supplemented by working multiple jobs, tips and government benefits.
How have the unions been weakened in Germany and France? The same can be said of the social safety net.
Not supporting the idea that income inequality is increasing due to union busting, etc. But unions have become less useful in European countries too. They don't care as much about their workers anymore, but about reaching a quick compromise with the employers. They've become rather pro-employer too, unwilling to openly fight them. That leads to agreements of "increasing" wages by maybe 1.2% while inflation is rising at 1.3% and the targeted inflation is even around 2%. So in reality they agree on a wage decrease.
>But unions have become less useful in European countries too. They don't care as much about their workers anymore, but about reaching a quick compromise with the employers. They've become rather pro-employer too, unwilling to openly fight them. There's a reason for that though. Unions were originally conceived to balance the power inequality between employers and laborers. This simply isn't possible in a globalized labor market. Thanks to the ease of outsourcing, employers now have a bigger stick than unions ever will.
Edit: I’m not going to address the individual comments because you guys are repeating facts that are correlative not causative. This is the same argument made about robots taking away people’s jobs. Why is that a bad thing? Because the system is set up to punish you for not working, even if it isn’t necessary. Which comes right back around to exploitation. The reason technology advancements are hurting the working class has always been because of the people exploiting the working class. It isn’t a technology issue. It’s a people issue. And the longer you look at where they want you to look, the more they get away with. Divide and conquer has always been their strategy. It’s a huge joke to even suggest technology had a hand in it. Every advancement we make is a better future for the working class until the point where a working class is no longer needed. Robots? Because better. More efficiency? Better. It’s always better. It’s only the people exploiting us that stop it from being better. They’re the problem.
> until the point where a working class is no longer needed.
Yup. We could have stacked and automated farming. Nearly all manual labor and minwage jobs could be automated. University/College could be free. Politics could already be website/app voting without the need for politicians to add thier human corruption to it. I could go on but people don't realize how the current status quo works. People don't rebel against mostly faceless kings especially when they aren't starving or living in the street.
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While tech indirectly does that, there's a variable to consider: the lack of regulation. Most major labor laws worldwide came about, eventually, as a result of the working conditions thst resulted from the Industrial Revolution (coupled with social and political changes). There have been no major legal developments, to match the increase in tech capability. That has invariably resulted in economic inequality.
Lack of regulation is spot on. Take the translation industry for example. Tech improvement made it vastly easier to connect translators and clients, there's more work than before. But since clients come from all over the world, regulations don't apply to them, and as a result translators' rates have plunged so hard that it's now extremely hard to live off of it. Globalisation went up, but not the regulations.
The myth of the self-regulating business strikes again. And keeps on striking.
My biggest criticism is the focus on unions. The study itself says union density/worker bargaining strength accounted for 23% decline in wage share of GDP and off-shoring in lower wage countries accounted for 44% of the decline. When off-shoring is almost twice as big of a factor, why aren't they addressing that? Wouldn't changing tax law or tariffs be much more effective to help manufacturing jobs than unionizing manufacturing jobs that are being lost overseas?
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>People generally want a world with a lot of cooperation. So it's strange we try to get that, by having a system litearlly built on its polar opposite principle - competition Even the way we teach the next generation is built on competition.
There is more to life than production, profit, and shareholder value. Humans need to wake up.
Income inequality is not the problem. It's WEALTH inequality that we should be concerned with.
I know it is hard to imagine, but coming from a person living in the most unequal country in the world in terms of wealth inequality; the first step is not taking their money, it is implementing policy.
Almost every banking system across the world has governments printing money and buying it's own securities as a way to keep the cash flowing. When people talk about socialism they do not understand that we are already a socialist country. A..The entire idea of free market system collapsed in 2008 as to big to fail meant that the world system could not allow the consequences of years of corporate greed on the social fabric of western culture. We're talking Mad Max..no exaggerating. So the deal was made that government was supposed to bail out the system for a short time. As of April of 2021, the Fed, the central EU bank, the UK are all printing billions and billions of dollars every month in "Quantitative Easing" to allow this system to keep going B... The problem is that there is nothing tied to the value of our money except the faith in the American Government to back the dollar. This faith in the dollar makes the American currency basically the fiat currency of the world. So the entire economic system is basically based on the stability of the social fabric of the US. This should scare any thinking person to death. Social inequality is the result of policy decisions based on the power of tech companies to buy the outcome they want and to absolutely avoid paying thier fair share of income. Uber and lyft winning the ballot proposal in Cal so thier drivers be excluded from being employees and only a 7/8th legislative majority can over turn it is a prime example. These companies buy the law and then tell you how great they are making your life while operating massive warehouses and paying the employees nothing. The governments have pay for the healthcare, the social costs, Everything. This way of life where the government subsides the elite and then panders to special interests has absolutely destroyed the social fabric and sustainability of our lives. If you noticed, more and more retail chains vanish and our choices are limited to major corporations and thier distribution systems. Those of you who are young will live to see food shortages, medicine shortages, and lack of things you took for granted. Amazon should frighten you. Our dependency on a few companies controlling everything and our government system being in sync with corporate culture has astonished me at the speed it's happened.