this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
453 points (76.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43811 readers
953 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There is nothing preventing anyone from starting a worker-owned collective. The fact that they don’t, while having the freedom to do so, indicates that the typical arrangement of wage labor is consensual. It’s what people choose.
If socialism requires an arrangement other than the one they would freely choose, then socialism requires a non-free market where people are forced into economic arrangements they wouldn’t freely choose.
So socialist may not in principle have anything against markets, but the fact that the implementation of socialism requires curtailing markets means it does have something against markets in practice.
It's actually that most people simply don't have the capital to do so while entrenched capitalist interests do. But I guess maybe you're conveniently ignoring that wildly imbalanced scale to be able to say it's consenual. Most people are only born with their labor to sell while the capitalist class hands off their wealth to their progeny, who can live without labor, and thus do things like start a business without fear of failure. More than half of new businesses fail within 10 years. For someone without oodles of capital to fall back on, that kind of failure can be financially devastating, which makes them less likely to choose to run their own business, because the risk is far higher. The risk to the nepo-baby is negligible, because they have capital to fall back on, so they are more likely to start their own business. This is obviously an unbalanced situation so calling it "consensual" is frankly bullshit. Also it ignores the coercive nature of the risk of homelessness if your business fails badly, once again something the capital-having nepo-baby doesn't have to fear or risk.
Like, it's generally considered at this point that Monica Lewinsky didn't have consensual sex with Bill Clinton simply because the power relations were wildly off. He was the President of the United States of America at it's absolute zenith in history, while she was a random 20-something intern with no connections or power in the situation.
Nice try, tho.
That's a bad example. As far as I know, Clinton is not of the “do me or you're fired” persuasion, nor did Lewinsky ever say anything to that effect in the multiple decades since.
Monica Lewinsky in 2018:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/02/monica-lewinsky-in-the-age-of-metoo
It's not about whether or not he's a "do me or you're fired" type. To quote Dennis Reynolds, it's about "the implication" about the mans power in the situation.
So, the truth of the matter is that she was young and naïve and he arguably took advantage and it's complicated? Okay, that's somewhat worse than I thought, but it's still a bad example. You were talking about coercion, and that isn't coercion. What Harvey Weinstein did is coercion.
It's really not that hard to start a small business. There's no grand shadowy conspiracy against your idea. If it was a superior method, it would see more widespread success. Bluntly forcing one business structure and removing freedoms when there are far less drastic tools is a big ask.
How do you get a loan to start a business if you don’t have enough capital to begin with? It’s not that simple, it’s not on the interest of banks to invest on small businesses, because it’s comparable higher risk and they are profit driven.
As someone who started and still works in a co-op, it's because it's hard. Banks don't understand worker coops and won't lend money to you without a real person to attach the risk to, which means founders have to take an enormous risk which it can be hard to compensate them for. The legal structure isn't common so you are limited in the lawyers who can set one up for you. Others have mentioned the cost problems - I started a software dev coop so we didn't have a large capital outlay but it did cost nearly 10k just in setup costs.
It took a lot of work to get to where we are, with little supporting resources. In contrast, I started an LLC in half an hour and $150 registration fee to the government. So no, it not just "what people choose".