As if workers give a shit about customers.
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
17 points (100.0% liked)
Memes
45583 readers
1318 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I'm reminded by that guy on TikTok
"You just lost a customer"
"Good"
You skipped over the part where he says "You think I own this business? You think I own IKEA?" implying he would care if he actually had any skin in the game which he would if his job operated as a worker co-op.
Co-ops are still capitalism.
Capitalism is a system of capital accumulation with the people who own the means of production hiring workers to operate them. Co-ops are a market economy, but they're demonstrably not capitalism because capital is distributed fairly amongst the workers doing the work. Learn the difference between markets and capitalism.
That would be an improvement actually, because the customers of these companies are not users, they are other companies looking to advertise or buy users personal data. The users of for profit social media are in fact the product, not the customers.
Great counterpoint. This is what Reddit has been missing for the last 6-8 years: actual thought instead of regurgitation.
Lmao, social media sites would be insanely worse if the employees made all the decisions. They would all be left-wing circle jerks, as if you all haven't gotten unhinged enough.
What are you doing trolling on this site then?
Honestly I don't even know where to start with this, so I'll keep it simple. Enshittification of Twitter, Reddit et al. is not necessarily a result of capitalism, and likewise Fediverse doesn't exist because "workers took the means of production".
For example the disastrous YouTube monetisation policy comes in part from a desire to keep the site "child friendly" (that's why swear words and gore are banned), and in part due to a need to follow existing copyright law.
Even if YouTube was run by a worker co-op, or was a state enterprise those two factors would likely still lead to stringent monetisation rules.
Monetisation rules are a direct result of capitalism. Profits are what motivates the decision making. In a post-capitalism economy it would be the needs and wants that motivates the decision making. One of the failures of capitalism is that we assume wants/needs has a correlation with profits, when clearly the enshitification demonstrates otherwise.
In socialism nobody wants to work so good luck with your YouTube. There is a reason for proprietary software being most popular and often more feature rich. What we need is capitalism + more opensource work from us, regular people. Capitalism + opensource is way to go.
You posted this on an open source platform built by volunteers without any hint of irony. 🤡
If you seriously compare socialism with opensource then I'm sorry for you.
I'm huge advocate for opensource software and I can even say it's my life passion and I really know how important the relation between capitalism and opensource is.
You wouldn't have react.js without capitalism. You know what is made in react.js? Mastodon
They could have used different library for js. one made totally by volunteers, but they haven't. Why? Capitalism and opensource provide reliable products because there is a money factor and it fuels development
😂
Constructive reply
When somebody thinks that something like react.js wouldn't be possible without capitalism, you can only laugh or cry. If you really can't understand that open source existed long before corps started messing with it, then you're an utter ignoramus not worth having a discussion with.
No, lol 😂
Listen, socialism doesn't work.
Thank you for providing a great example of being confidently incorrect.
Do you have any example of working socialism?
Every single socialist country is an example of working socialism having lifted millions of people out of poverty, provided them with, food, housing education, and jobs. Meanwhile, we're still looking for examples of working capitalism where majority of the population is not being exploited for the benefit of the capital owning oligarchy.
Wow. Read the rest of the thread because I'm not gonna rewrite stuff.
But as I was saying. I live in post communist country and the influence of socialism was extraordinarily destructive and I can see damage made from it to these days.
I grew up in USSR, and I lived through the collapse of USSR. It was one of the biggest humanitarian disasters in history. People who are cheering that on are the ones who benefit from all the exploitation under capitalism today. People who got theirs and don't care about anything else. Deplorable.
Only a small percentage of socialists (albeit larger in this instance) hold the USSR up as anything but an example of an early, ham-fisted attempt at socialism with a lot of mistakes. If there have been no places socialism has worked yet (debatable, but I’ll argue from this position), that disproves nothing. The first several hundred tries at the lightbulb were probably failures, too, but capitalists talk about that failure as a side effect of innovation without realizing that social systems might need innovation too. I’m sorry if you suffered under an authoritarian socialist government; there’s nothing inherent about the connection between those two characteristics. But authoritarian governments tend to survive better against the kinds of conspiracies and attacks established capitalist governments launch against socialist ones, so you get to see what’s left. (If you don’t know about this, go to a library, start with…maybe Allende in ‘73…It’s very well-documented.). In sum, it has nothing to do with not caring about people harmed by authoritarianism. It has to do with seeing the evils of the system around us and refusing to accept that this is the best humanity can do. I’m sorry you can’t see that. But I’m not letting my friends’ access to insulin sit in the greedy hands of insurance companies without a fight. I’m not living in a pay-to-play political system where donors’ interests matter more than voters’ my whole life if I have anything to say about it. Regardless of your beliefs.
I think perhaps you meant to reply to the parent comment, I certainly did not suffer in USSR and the dissolution of USSR was a great tragedy in my view.
USSR obviously wasn't the ideal of socialism. In fact, it would be pretty surprising if the first ever attempt at building a socialist society didn't have problems. Obviously we can learn from USSR and do better going forward. However, I do think that despite all its problems, USSR did manage to achieve many positive outcomes for the majority of the people. It provided everyone with education, housing, healthcare, jobs, and all the necessities of life. This was done despite USSR having been under duress during its whole existence and it's something that current capitalist regimes are unable to achieve.
"Lifted millions out of poverty"
Some people were effectevelly not much different from slaves up until 1970 as they had no passport, worked for food (oh, sorry, for workdays, which is even worse) and required permission to move from kolhoz. Ah tankies never change.
All what communists did for citizens is: lost the election, overturned it with force and forced millions of people back to medieval society with fancy goals.
NoT MuCh DifFeReNT FrOm SlaVes. Should really read up on what actual serfdom was like before the revolution instead of making a clown of yourself in public.
When you say "workers" do you mean the actual workers or some vanguard party of intellectual champagne socialists who make decisions on the workers' behalf?
Obviously they meant the former since that's what we're literally doing here. But even the latter would do a better job managing Twitter/Reddit than what they have now.
Is it obvious though? MLs mean something very different from anarchists when they say "workers" in this context
Do you think OP is a Marxist-Leninist, posting online using a decentralized protocol ironically controlled by workers, to subtly build support for a big government-run website?
THAT IS WHY I AM ASKING
That doesn't seem a little convoluted, improbable, and nonsensical to you?
THAT IS WHY I AM ASKING
Actual workers. If we made a society where people are taken care of, we'd find most folks would be enthusiastic about their work. Saying "people don't want to work" is often taken at face value when the reality is that most people do want to work, because it helps them feel a sense of purpose. They don't, however, want to be exploited/work under capitalism because that is soul crushing.
Oh I agree completely with all of that. I just have been duped before by MLs saying worker ownership and what they really mean is their particular political party controlling everything. If everything is run by workers' councils with no existence of a vanguard party, that would be paradise for me.
I would also go beyond saying that labor (not "work," as IMO the word "work" implies labor under capitalism) gives people a sense of purpose in that it gives communities a sense of purpose and connectedness. When we are all sharing in common labor toward the goal of enhancing our community and generally improving lives, we feel a more collectivized responsibility for one another.
Incidentally, I wrote a detailed article on the subject a while back https://justiceinternationale.com/articles/2020-12-02-we-must-own-our-tools/
Amazing how many people will step in to defend the ownership of everything to a small minority. They will not reward bootlicking yet yall continue.
Look, they're just temporary inconvenienced billionaires.