Why don't communist movements focus on creating and nurturing employee owned businesses?
communism @ communism @lemmy.ml Posts 29Comments 889Joined 1 yr. ago
communism @ communism @lemmy.ml
Posts
29
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889
Joined
1 yr. ago
I am opposed to "maximising utility" because I am a communist. Production should serve needs, not production for the sake of production.
compulsively reinvest all their excesses and internalize all of their external cost
Ok, still exploitation.
I can see that those are your political beliefs. You are welcome to have those political beliefs. OP is asking about communists, and communists do not want this, so this is rather orthogonal to the question.
Do you think that it's not possible to interact with each other outside of a market, outside of capitalism?
Because they are subjected to market forces. I'm not referring to the decisions an individual worker in a coop might make—an individual may well decide to give away all their money and become homeless, that doesn't mean it's in people's interests to. In a market, you must compete with other businesses, otherwise you will be out-competed and not survive. The "profits" obtained by a coop are still surplus-value; all the laws of capital outlined by Marx are still at play. Marx's critique of political economy did not really hinge upon the specific boss/employee relationship; it's about impersonal domination of the market over people who live in a capitalist mode of production. In Capital Marx spends quite a bit of time talking about how even capitalists are subjected to and dominated by capital; the domination is impersonal, and the domination of (hu)man by (hu)man is only secondary to that impersonal domination.
The hell of capitalism is the firm itself, not the fact that the firm has a boss.
The forces of the market and of capital do not go away just because the workers own the company. In worker-owned cooperatives, the workers exploit themselves, because the business still needs to grow. They simply carry out the logic of the capitalist themselves on themselves, using their surplus value to expand the business's capital, and paying for their own labour-power reproduction. i.e., the workers all simply become petit-bourgeois.
There are extant organisations (some political parties, some NGOs) that push for more workers' cooperatives, and none of them are communist nor call themselves communist. If you believe in a cooperative-based economy, you are not a communist. I don't mean that as an insult, it's just a fact, the same as if you want, for instance, the current US economic system, you are not a communist. You can advocate for coops but you would fare much better in that political project if you didn't try to put it under the banner of something it's not, and something far more controversial than just "worker coops are good" anyway.
Death to Germany
I also thought it was because it looked like pommel, and I was like well that's not very funny...
I'm subscribed to their tech, gaming, and news communities. They're fine, I don't care to make an account on their instance but nothing wrong with the Hexbear communities I subscribe to.
Listen to music or watch a video, if you don't want to read?
I prefer Mullvad. I've found it a lot more reliable. I was a paying Proton customer but still had connectivity issues a non-negligible number of times, whereas I've literally never had Mullvad be the cause of connection issues in my years of using it. It's great that they take cash and have literally only an account hash associated with your account.
I've also found that Mullvad customer support are responsive, helpful, and know what they're talking about. I've had experiences with Proton's customer support that were ok, but occasionally had the typical customer service hiccups along the lines of being assigned a new support agent who doesn't read back all the conversation (understandable—I had one bug I was dealing with for months) and you have to explain again what the original issue was and what has been done since.
I think both options are perfectly fine, but I definitely prefer Mullvad, and it's what I recommend to people if they ask me to recommend a VPN service.
The issue is that older kernel versions will lose support and stop getting security updates eventually. I don't know if there is enough of a community around old CPUs for fixes to be backported by the community.
In the event of legal action, your side can request disclosure from the other side. It's standard to request disclosure of evidence the other side holds that will help your case, and in this case something like a meeting in which something said is important evidence, I'm sure that both your company's lawyers and if not then a judge will get the company to hand over the recording.
A lawyer could point you in the right direction. Not all legal action is necessarily "damages" (also, the lack of a promotion is damages—if your boss says to you "You're my most skilled employee, but I don't want to give you a promotion because you're a woman", that's unlawful discrimination in any place that prohibits sexism. Of course in the vast majority of cases it is much harder to prove since the boss won't actually explicitly say that, but you get the principle of the law); legal action can be to correct a wrong, in this case changing company policy to ensure that employees are not discriminated against on the basis of not using this app. You can just explain the situation over email to a law firm that deals with labour law, and if perhaps you'd be better served by a different law firm for instance, they will be able to point you in that direction.
People graduate from Bachelor's wayy older than you. I was meant to go to uni when I was 18 then had a medical emergency, then a combo of surgeries and incarceration stopped me from going for several years after that, and I'm currently just working but may try to go to uni once I have more money. There are plenty of students who start an undergrad degree when they're your age or older. People who start when they are 18 have various personal emergencies that mean they have to delay their education. You will be entirely fine.
No, they need consent. The state is a third party and cannot consent on your behalf
I also don't live in the United States; do you think trans people only exist in the US? Transfemicide is an even bigger issue in the global south; for instance, Brazil, a global south country, is notorious for its high transfemicide rates, and has a strong transfeminist movement as a result. There will be trans people in all countries who face transphobia, and the countries lacking a particularly noticeable trans liberation movement will be because transphobia is so bad there that trans people feel the risk of speaking out is too great.
I do suggest that you put some effort into educating yourself and engaging with trans and LGBTQ+ struggles where you are, which will not just be "online". I don't know where you live, but at worst it will just be the case that the trans people where you are, are not inclined to become political militants because of both transphobia in general meaning they put an even bigger target on their heads, and transphobia on the left that is common across the world meaning that trans people feel unwelcome in organising spaces. This is not related to the original topic of donations, I mean this just for the sake of your politics. If you really can't find any kind of organised political activity around trans issues where you are, you could at least read transfeminist texts, and tbh feminist texts in general, since feminist theory (including Marxist feminist theory) has discussed the issue of gender, gender essentialism, and transphobia for decades now. For instance, in relation to your screenshotted dm above, it has been a feminist demand for decades (rescinded upon only because some feminists decided to jump on the anti-trans bandwagon) to desegregate sports, and I think anyone who knows anything about women's sports knows all the ways in which the gendered segregation of sports harms women athletes' careers.
They use it for Google Maps as a pin. Nothing new, and not particularly weird either. You can just skip it and not tell them.
Do you also think that eg when corporations celebrate Black History Month that the bourgeoisie is also pro-Black? Capitalism has a vested interest in neutering and subsuming liberation movements so that they cannot pose a threat to capital itself, and also of course, as groups such as LGBTQ+ people become less socially stigmatised, it becomes worth it profit-wise to market towards these demographics specifically as the financial hit from bigots becomes less. We can see this reverse in real time in the US as it becomes more profitable to appeal to social reactionaries, showing that any appeals to "pride" were, as queer people have been saying all along, a marketing campaign and nothing deeper.
I don't think this comment at all suffices. If you're going to be a communist, then you need to put the effort in to engaging with all struggles for emancipation, and that includes trans people's struggles. You shouldn't "refrain from commenting on" liberation struggles; you should be supporting them.
I think people who didn't grow up eating tofu, or just haven't eaten a lot of tofu, may easily believe that tofu has no flavour. Or maybe if your nose/tongue is just less sensitive. I can most easily smell it when tofu is frying in a pan, personally. Like I said, it's really subtle, and easily overpowered.
"Utility" is not a concept I subscribe to per se, unless you just mean use-values in the same sense Marx uses them. I am responding to the concepts you are using. In a communist mode of production, production is, in the famous quote, "according to need"; in a capitalist mode of production, production is divorced from need, and we find production for the sake of production.
Marxists use the word "exploitation" differently to its colloquial use. "Exploitation", in Marx's critique of political economy, refers to the extraction of surplus-value. I'm not sure if you know what that means or not. I can explain it if you want but you can also look it up; it's a pretty basic part of Marx's critique.
I'm assuming you're not a communist because you don't seem to be familiar with communist views, and seem to be advocating for/in defence of a mode of production that is not communist. I don't know how exactly you label yourself politically but it seems based on this short conversation that we can exclude communism from the list of possibilities, meaning we disagree.