It’s a meme
That’s it? That’s the meme? That’s just a piece of toast with the words “The workers should seize the means of production” written on in it.
That’s not toast? It’s bread.
That’s undercooked toast
I feel very sure that there’s no way it’s any kind of toast. I will never concede this argument
Raw toast?
What sort of bread is it?
“Wheat” I assume
What sort of wheat bread?
Of the rectangular cuboid shaped variety
Has it been prepared in some way? With some sort of heat, perhaps?
Why yes, of course. At least twice! Once with low heat (well more like “warmth” around 37°C if I remember correctly) to help the dough rise and then a second time to bake it.
Has it been prepared in some way? With some sort of heat, perhaps?
Sliced.
What sort of sliced bread?
It’s not toast until it goes through the toaster. Out of the bag it’s just baked. Quit.
What sort of bread is it before toasting?
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There’s a meme of a frog puppet drinking tea, and a meme of a pootoo, and a meme of some beans. It can be literally anything.
yeah you call it a meme and put it on the meme community but I don’t see a meme here
Seems to be to serious for this community.
i think the meme is the lazily edited stock photo
Nor will the rich be able to see anything after we bring out the guillotines
Look there, Zach, a message on the toast!
And in the coffee? Revolution.
Not 100% sure why, but i love this. Thank you
This seems political
You’re allowed to post political memes as long as the mods agree with your view.
Same as everywhere, really.
Seems economic to me.
How exactly? Other than excessive bloodshed, which - other than edgelord tankies - most people would neither want, nor have the stomach to pursue.
Take the route California is taking and educate the kids about worker’s rights. Teach them it’s not okay to be exploited at the work place and encourage them to tell their parents about it. Civics classes should also be taught to learn how the government works and what people’s rights are under the Constitution. Encourage people to unionize now that they know how the system works.
Once the basics have been taught, elect people who care about government reform for social policies by paying for them with higher corporate and personal wealth taxes. Reform the tax system the wealthy have been using to hide their money. All their money is tied up in stocks and they’re living off of multimillion dollar loans? Fuck them, tax a big percentage of the loan. All these things can be done to indirectly seize the fruits of their production at least.
Start by talking about your wages. Most people won’t even do that, for fear of reprisals. Even though it’s protected federally.
Casually bringing up support for unions, and those on strike.
This is base level, and in many places, will take a long time to see movement.
General strike (like the writers guild, except everyone) until the distribution of (a part of the) dividends to the workers is enshrined into law.
Sounds pretty doable to me.
i’d do some intellectual property reform.
some banking reform - more local / peer group/long term lending requirements, less fickle international finance. (and less fucking mortgage bubbles!)
some small business support / starter initiatives - link that in with how banks work.i’d consider lobbying for some government sposored work to generate open source plans and enable production processes for useful tools - Okay that isn’t going to happen , , ,
but it’s not all or nothing, but you can do things to help some more workers control and access more of their tooling even if its not outright ownership of the end to end production process.
(By the way i’m basically arguing for a more “free” market in the ecnomic sense (easy access for a large number of small scale producers). . . which is exactly not what large-scale capitalists want.
They want a market “free” from any thing that might regulate their attempts to secure economic power and their abiity to use it to generate supernormal prices/profits.)Progress doesnt happen in 4-5 year political cycles thats a hard one to improve without an electorate capable (any maybe secure enough) to thing about the longer term. Odd that it was extreme econmic and political uncertainty that brought out the likes of FDR and other post-war that people were most willing to think long term when it came to their governemnts - I guess it brought out all sorts of “crazies”.
The big one in terms of bloodshed is land reform - and it has been done in a few places - sort of post-colonial type situations - but granted it does ususally have blooodshed. It’s a personal judgment what degree is “excessive bloodshed”.
What does bank reform mean? Banks already give loans to small bussinesses.
You can start a company that does what you want them to do. You can create all the innovative processes you want and open source them in the existing system.
Agreed, lets just keep doing whatever the capitalists demand until their insatiable greed destroys them and us.
It’s not like it’s gonna take that long. And if not climate change, the AI they don’t fully understand but are trying to monetize. And if not AI, CRISPR derived vectors they don’t fully understand but are trying to monetize, etc.
Lets just stay the course. It will all work out in the end, at least for the planet, and that’s ultimately what matters.
I understand the bitterness, but whoever said the commenter wanted to do what capitalists demand? They just wanted to avoid bloodshed.
There are always options like general strikes, massive voting movements, etc. It’s just a matter of figuring out what will work and how to do it.
If you’re arguing that capitalists will respond with violence, that’s fair, but then the blame is on them, not the workers
That isn’t what I said and I think you know it. Next time just say you don’t know the answer either and save yourself the effort.
I know what humans are going to do by our track record. Kick the can until there is a physical obstruction preventing it.
We will talk the biggest of games claiming otherwise the whole time, though. Surely rhetoric will save the day this time!
You seem to know a lot for a guy who hasn’t been able to suggest any kind of realistic solution.
I believe humanity has passed the point where we can. We lack the will. We’re monkeys just barely smart enough with concerted effort to create technologies we lack the impulse control to wield responsibly. We figured out gun powder, and proceeded to use it to commit genocides, for example.
This wasn’t a problem for the planet, only one another, until industrialization. Now we’re addicted to technologies that make wealthy people wealthier while poisoning our only shared habitat. Now we’re monkeys with multiple, competing self-destructive but potentially profitable technologies all vying to blow up in our face in the quest to enrich those that hold their patents, and they answer to no one. World governments instead seem to answer to them.
So yeah, I don’t see a non-violent solution where you put a big red nuclear button in an orangutan sanctuary that looks like their food dispenser button, and taking thr big red nuclear button away from them, even by force, is off the table.
I can only control myself, I can’t force my fellow peasants to stop digging their own graves to further enrich a few thousand sociopath families who’ve convinced them this is the only way. There’s peace in acceptance I suppose.
The women of Iceland went on strike in 1975, they stopped doing literally everything, walked out of the home, left the kids, to demonstrate how much the system would crumble without them, how important they are to everything being able to function, and ask for equal pay. They flipped everything overnight.
The current system is all the workers do all the work, and the profits from that work go almost entirely to some douvhe who won birth lotto. The system is already rigged. Unrigging the system would look like walking off the job, but globally. It’s going to happen. Society is squeezed too tightly, there’s going to be havoc.
other than edgelord tankies
Maybe you shouldn’t use terms if you don’t understand them, liberal.
Anyone who uses liberal as an insult is incredibly cringe in my book.
There’s nothing cringier than right-wingers who pretend they aren’t right-wingers… ie, liberals. For people who can be called leftist with a straight face, “liberal” is quite the insult.
Wanna see what MLK had to say about liberals?
You lump us with fascists. “Scratch a liberal a fascist bleeds” has to be one of the most ridiculous things ever said. We’re not your enemies! Democratic socialists are in the Democrat party in America. Social Liberals and Social Democrats have much more in common than Social Liberals and Conservatives. In Europe Liberals and moderate socialists form parliamentary coalitions
Scratch a liberal a fascist bleeds” has to be one of the most ridiculous things
Really? Liberals are invested in the maintenance of the status quo, but aren’t willing to do the dirty and bloody work that the maintanance of the status quo requires… fascists are. It’s a match made in the deepest pits of hell. There’s nothing new about this - the liberal Weimar regime climbed into bed with fascism right from the get-go to crush working class revolt. It’s the same reason the liberals USians vote into the Waffle House are more interested in “reaching across the aisle” than actually doing anything to prevent white supremacist terrorism.
Who else will protect the capitalist world order for you, liberal? You? Who did you think maintains the murderous exploitation in the 3rd world that makes your glorious 1st world existence possible? It’s fascists, genius… your precious world order cannot be maintained without them.
If a fascist regime rises, it’s only because a liberal regime came before it that loosened the ground for it to grow.
Read the economy and class structure of german fascism if you want a detailed explanation for “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds”
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Revolutions have happened and will continue to happen regardless of how much smug liberals will bloviate about edgelord tankies.
Okay sure, so what examples do you have of a successful modern revolution?
Bonus points if you can name one where the winners didn’t just immediately change the rules and continue fucking over the little guy.
Another bonus point if you can name an example where a revolution didn’t result in disproportionate civilian deaths relative to the ‘bad guys’.
Then again, maybe you’re one of those ‘the end justifies the means’ kind of guys, who fantasizes about saving the rest of us by way of firing squad. If that’s the case, I’ll expect you to be on the front line to fight the government funded military force that shows up.
Or maybe, just maybe you’re another lame ass tankie who talks a big game, but would piss their pants if someone so much as gave you a dirty look IRL.
Soviet revolution in Russia, Revolution in China, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in Laos, in Nicaragua, just to name a few.
Bonus points if you can name one where the winners didn’t just immediately change the rules and continue fucking over the little guy.
None of the above examples did anything of the sort as anybody with even a modicum of historical literacy knows.
Another bonus point if you can name an example where a revolution didn’t result in disproportionate civilian deaths relative to the ‘bad guys’.
Define what’s disproportionate and how you decide on what’s proportionate.
Then again, maybe you’re one of those ‘the end justifies the means’ kind of guys, who fantasizes about saving the rest of us by way of firing squad. If that’s the case, I’ll expect you to be on the front line to fight the government funded military force that shows up.
Then again, maybe you’re one of those people who are benefiting from capitalism and don’t care about the suffering of other people as long as you got yours.
Or maybe, just maybe you’re another lame ass tankie who talks a big game, but would piss their pants if someone so much as gave you a dirty look IRL.
Or maybe, just maybe you’re an ignorant dronie who is as illiterate as you’re ignorant.
What does that even mean? Give us some practical advice
It means they want to shit on anyone who suggests any mechanism for social change that might actually work instead of wanking about some glorious revolution that’ll never happen. Just another way of maintaining the status quo while pretending to be a revolutionary.
Because it worked to well in Zimbabwe, Sowjetunion 1, Sowjetunion 2, China, and many more
Needs to be more like the women of Iceland in 1975
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try, try, try, try, try again, and also blame everyone else that you had to kill your own people for the good of the whole…
Classic communist tactics, Tovarishch, and if it fails you just didn’t believe hard enough…
I made a bunch of Dalle pics on this topic last night:
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They need only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it.
You already have a mean of production in your hand. But the only thing you produce is stupid memes.
Even if they did produce something, Jeff Bezos would steal it as soon as it started making a buck.
Seizing the means of production made sense when that was the leverage the owners used to strip the surplus value from you.
Today, they use gatekept platform and a captive audience with AI manipulation to insert themselves between you and the customers and strip you of your surplus value.
Now pay Bezos’ 40% tax until Amazon basic is ready to outcompete out of the platform entirely. Welcome to the second page of Google !
Lolwut? You’re delusional, mate.
I’m pretty sure phones are not all that is involved in commodity production.
But they are. Because we live in a service economy and the only thing you produce are services. Phone is enough. Use it wisely.
Yeah. Hold on, I’m just going to build a house, get access to fresh water, and produce food with my phone. After that I’m going to get vaccinated with my phone. And after that I’ll make some clothes with my phone.
Go read the first few chapters of capital on means of production.
Yeah, you can build a house with a phone. Your few chapters are a bit outdated, by about two centuries. The world has moved on.
Please demonstrate how a house is built with a phone.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/@AutoFocus
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
That does not demonstrate how a house is built with a phone
They are bitter and stringy and taste of used currency - not at all worth eating, but for use as fertilizer.
NO they hug tree
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Directly seizing I don’t think would end well. I think it’s one of the short comings of communism.
Encouraging employee owned companies is where it’s at. But to be honest I’m not sure how you would incentivize that.
You incentivize the same way unions are growing now. Just show people the benefits and constantly shout it from the highest mountain tops.
So bb, tell me more about those sweet, sweet employee-owned companies for other readers’ benefit.
Tell me more about how employee owned companies are better at long term planning. Tell me more about how they’re concerned about balancing profit for survival’s sake with societal good. Tell me more about how they participate in the benefits of the free market via competition while not becoming all-consuming, profit-driven monsters. Tell me more about how they avoid stakeholder-chosen, sociopathic leadership in favor of leaders wanting the best for the company’s mission and its employees. Tell me more about the coffee shop branch that was shut down by its company and reopened as an employee-owned cafe. Tell me more about AAA. Tell me sweet nothings, bb
(And yes, I’m explicitly not talking about communism because it’s an emotionally charged concept, and i want to focus on things maybe people don’t know so much about)
A better case for worker cooperatives is just pointing out they satisfy the moral principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. The workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs, but in a capitalist firm, the employer holds sole legal responsibility for 100% the corresponding legal claim to the positive and negative result of the enterprise while employees receive 0%. In a worker coop, this mismatch is corrected
Encouraging employee owned companies is where it’s at.
What did you think “seize the means of production” meant?
But to be honest I’m not sure how you would incentivize that.
Oh, that’s simple - you get rid of the police.
Seize the means of production comes from a conceptually separate part of anti-capitalist critique then workers’ control/workers’ self-management. It is common to conflate these two strands of anti-capitalist thoughts. It is technically possible to have common ownership of the means of production without workers’ self-management and workers’ self-management without common ownership of the means of production. Universal worker coops only requires abolishing wage labor not private ownership
I don’t think the person I was responding to is ready for this level of analysis, okay?
Thanks for assuming I’m an idiot who doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Pleasure to meet you too!
I didn’t assume you’re an idiot - I did assume that not everyone on here is familiar with a hundred-years worth of anarcho-syndicalist theory, okay?
Fair enough
Time to stop blocking the people who post this stupid shit.
Did you mean to say start?
dbzer0 has been probably one of the most consistently low quality posting instances not ending in .de
Genuinely speaking, do you really think Amazon will continue to operate if the “workers” took it over from the (evil) executives and owned all the power?
In my opinion, it’ll fall apart in no time, because not a single decision will be made to progress work and to solve problems, and every problem will be a vote to people who don’t understand the consequences and will prefer to serve their personal needs. Am I wrong?
I think your worries are misplaced. I work for an employee owned cooperative with about 60 employees. I think half of the employees are also owners. There’s still a CEO, chosen by the board of directors, who are elected by the employee-owners. Day to day operational decisions are made by whoever is in charge of the relevant department, just like a shareholder-owned corporation. Bigger decisions, like long term strategy or how to distribute profits among employees, are voted on by all of the employee owners instead of shareholders. It’s been in business for about 20 years and makes enough money to share profits with all employees regardless of their ownership status. So essentially this business operates like any other, but the profits are shared with the employee-owners and employees instead of going to shareholders or insane CEO salaries (compressed pay structure).
This is exactly the problem with such discussion. We end up with anecdotes. Yeah, I gotta see that company’s financial statements, their business model, and their growth, to decide whether this is a good thing. In fact, the idea that it makes “enough money” doesn’t sound good good. This kind of “stability” (I’ll call it) is either due to a niche field or a dying company that sooner or later will become irrelevant. It’s not how the real world works.
And even with this model you proposed, someone eventually can put their foot down. Those employees can sell their shares if they want, and we’re all the way back to the (evil) capitalist model you don’t like.
Worker coops are a good thing because unlike employer-employee-based firms they don’t violate workers’ inalienable rights. The justification is a principled ethical argument.
The workers’ voting shares should be inalienable and attached to the functional role of working in the firm. The employer-employee contract would be abolished, so there would be no mechanism within the legal system for having a capitalist firm.
An inalienable right is one that the holder cannot give up even with consent
Until everyone fights what “rights” are, which is kind of the problem everywhere. You have a picture of these rights, which are pink and rosy. I believe you have good intention. But you have to imagine an contentious environment where everyone will disagree with you to maximize their gain, and minimize their effort. Any system you put in place and anything you define as rights will be malleable and will be up for thousands of debates, and eventually you’ll be the dictator for setting up a system that you think will work. Back to square one.
This is why I said it’s opinion. I got my answer. You agree with firing people. Good enough for me for now. Others don’t.
I really think you should stop arguing and start listening.
It is a straw man that democracy means every problem is put to a vote. Workers can jointly decide to delegate decision-making to executives and managers. The difference in worker coops is that these executives and managers are ultimately democratically accountable to the people doing the work
So you’re saying someone will want to act as an executive, but without getting the executive pay?
Why would anyone want to do that stressful job and responsibility, instead of just being a cog in the wheel and typing on a computer or moving boxes? Who decides who does what? And what happens if the managers disagree with half the “workers/owners” when a decision has to be made that benefits a part but hurts another? Who has the authority to put their foot down for the “greater good” even though half the workers don’t like their decision?
The executives can be paid more. In a system where all firms are worker coops, it would be a much more compressed difference between the least paid and most paid worker in a firm than the absurd pay differences we see today.
A manger in a worker coop has the same decision-making rights as in any company. The difference is that they are democratically accountable to the workers instead of being accountable to the employer, an alien legal party. Essentially, workers hold all voting shares
You said a bunch of nice things, but you ignored the core of the problem. If workers hold all voting shares, what happens when they’re split on an issue? Who can tell them to STFU for the better of the company?
Another similar question: What if there’s an issue that will lead to half of them getting fired? Like, say, a technological advancement? So if work can be optimized by 200% by adding computers, but then 50% of the people are useless then. Wouldn’t the workers vote to stay employed/paid instead of saving the company that can be destroyed in a competitive market where better, faster companies can emerge if this company doesn’t adopt the newer tech? Who will make that decision?
Like I said, its like workers hold all the voting shares in the company, so these issues would resolved the same way that they are resolve in corporations owned by shareholders.
The rational action would be to adopt the new tech and instead of firing half of the workers, which is socially irrational due to the social costs of unemployment, dividing the remaining work among the existing workers. The extra time that each worker has could be used for producing something else
Like I said, its like workers hold all the voting shares in the company, so these issues would resolved the same way that they are resolve in corporations owned by shareholders.
You’re ignoring a key point I’m trying to make: The workers have a conflict of interest, unlike shareholders. The workers want to minimize their work and maximize their gain, which is mutually exclusive in one company. While shareholders in the current system just want to maximize their gain (regardless of whether that’s good or bad). So why would the worker strive to learn new things instead of keeping the status quo? Most people don’t see the big picture and don’t want to read a book to learn a new thing. How many people around you come from work and spend their evenings reading new things to stay up in their job? This is one problem.
Like I said before to another guy, if you keep dividing the extra without firing anyone, given a limited growth, eventually there won’t be enough money to go around. Everyone will go bankrupt. How do you solve that problem too?
Better to have them making the decision than capitalists, who make more money for paying employees less
Also who says half of them have to be fired? Can’t everyone just work less?
“Better” is in your opinion. I need answers based on concerns and problems that happens in the real world. A fast-paced world.
Assuming the revenue of the company doesn’t have massive growth (which is the normal situation unless a breakthrough happened), we need to hire more people who have the skills needed to keep up with the market. So, assuming we want to keep everyone (including useless people who’d rather have beer instead of reading a book to learn the new stuff), the income of everyone will just go down over time. Eventually, with no one getting fire there won’t be enough money to go around to feed them. What am I missing here?
Worker coops are better ethically not just based on opinion. The workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs. By the usual ethical principle that legal responsibility should be assigned to the de facto responsible party, the workers should jointly be legally responsible for the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs.
- Worker coops can fire people.
- Worker coops can charge initial membership fee when a new worker joins.
See you’re still trapped within the logic of capitalism which maximizes profits and expansion over other concerns.
So, assuming we want to keep everyone (including useless people who’d rather have beer instead of reading a book to learn the new stuff), the income of everyone will just go down over time. Eventually, with no one getting fire there won’t be enough money to go around to feed them. What am I missing here?
These are all massive assumptions
This is all stuff you hash out when you create a co-op. But normally you create a co-op, you don’t convert a giant multinational into one.
Even giant multinationals have to be eventually converted to worker coops or federations of worker coops because the workers that work in these companies are having their inalienable rights violated as well
I’m not sure I understand… are you saying that your plans don’t work on giant corporations, so maybe you shouldn’t propose things like OP did?
Well, according to the post, you want to seize the means of production and eat the rich. Sounds delicious! I would love to know whether you’re just a bunch of guys having wet dreams or whether there’s a framework where this can really work. Tell me how you’re gonna seize Amazon and keep it running like it does now.
It depends on the material conditions what specific action would be required. For example, the legal system could abolish the employer-employee contract that violates workers inalienable rights to democracy and to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor. Then, the contract could be reversed so that labor jointly hires capital rather than capital hiring labor. Amazon, in particular, has other issues that should be addressed, but we can ignore that for now
My original questions aren’t answered. You’re just talking about the temporary procedure, not the long term plan, as in the questions I asked.
That’s every bureaucracy that ever existed.
Do you think the shareholders are active in problem solving? Workers include basically everyone but the shareholders. The tech guys, the executives, the managers.
