Organized by an employer, capital, and management. The orchestration, decision making, done well, is the difference between a highly valuable well functioning company, and dysfunctional paralysis. There are now multiple examples in history (pre-1989 Poland, Soviet Union, DPRK, etc.) that show the communal ownership of industry by labor does not create a high standard of living, enabled by plentiful goods, services, and innovation.
At what point was labor communally owning industry in the Soviet Union or DPRK? Did Stalin or Kim ever ask a laborer for their opinion on how a factory should be run? Or give them a penny of the work they were doing?
The Soviet block and DPRK was exactly as close to socialism as it was to democracy: 100% in their propaganda, 0% in reality. Or would you say democracy doesn't work because the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a shit show country despite being "democratic"?
The problem with collectivism is less with collectivism as platonic ideal (which has a lot of romantic appeal), and more with the inevitable concentration of power it requires and thereby enables.
The reason there has been no successful implementation of it is that the process of enacting it is inherently fragile. And some bastard is going to exploit that fragility.
Then you're screwed and we end up with the bountiful historical examples that people love to cite & then others refute as "that's not real xyz-ism".
You're absolutely correct that they're not "real" xyz-ism. And that should make you very worried about supporting something that has the same or similar end goals as those initiatives once had.
We have little to no idea if this is indeed inevitable. The same kind of arguments could have been made, and were in fact made, about democracy and capitalism before the American and French revolutions. And some attempts at democratic revolutions have indeed fallen into authoritarian rule - Cromwell's being one of the most well known.
Socialism is nothing more than extending democracy beyond the state to the workplace. It is no more collectivist than democracy is in any other economic system. And like any other form of democracy, it is naturally opposed to authoritarian rule, not conducive to it.
As such, the problem with socialism is not at all that it's easy for it to fall into dictatorship. The problem is that it is hard to convince the rich to allow it to form without aggression, since it necessitates them losing much of their power. The same problem that democracy faced: kings rarely step down, and bloody revolutions are typically worse than the status quo (and you can never be sure what will happen after one).
This concept that there is a well defined polar opposite to western “freedom” capitalism is so far from reality in literally any economic history understanding
Not only that but the USSR was in no sense Marxist Communist. It was well known that the Lenin-Trotskyist Bolshevism was the core, specifically the command economy part.
That regime coopted the philosophy of Marxism well after his death.
That’s what happens when both sides are spinning the same propaganda.
BTW I’m equally not a fan of Marxist material dialectic as I am the trotsy-lenin unholiness or the American oligopolies.
We need a true state-free attempt at anarcho socialism but that’s nearly impossible as such a concept fundamentally threatens the basic structure of the modern state.
While I am sympathetic to the idea that we need to burn e everything down, baby steps, first. If we're talking halfway realistic changes, let's get stuff like this wealth limit in place first, and once those been established for a while, we may have a better picture of the ideal state.
I can understand how you can assume catastrophic intent on my part however, that’s not the case.
In no revolution are the poorest and weakest persons ever benefited it’s only typically been to the benefit of some small group they just recycles hands so in fact, the last thing I want is some kind of hard break.
No, I’m an anarcho syndicalist. Which is a gradual reappropriation of the means to worker collectives slowly and peacefully.
Sorry for the mischaracterization. Your position sounds interesting. When it comes to how the means of production should be structured, I envision a microkernel kind of model: enforce strict protections for worker pay, fairness, and whatever, and let the dice fall where they may. If it's worker collectives that result as the optimum, so be it.
That’s the core conceit of anarcho syndicalism - to own the fruits of your own labor amd it not be intermediated or alienated by anything which reappropriates the capture of value.
So for example, if I own a table saw and my neighbor doesn’t and needed one for his labor, anarcho-syndicalism would suggest that if my saw was not planning to be used for a day, and he uses it for a day of creation, then the neighbor owns 100% of the resulting value. Much like if you rented a tool from Home Depot.
That makes sense and there’s no reason to believe that simply because I own a fallow tool, would benefit even equally from the labor.
Now look at how companies are created they are created in such a way that 100% of the value is retained by the organization and labor does not get to set its own rate. It Hass to simply be responsive to the rate offered by the organization decoupled from an alienated from, the labor that I’m inputting into it.
This isn’t accidental it’s a type of accounting that assumes labor inputs are not valued based on the productivity outcome they are simply, and only based on the relative bargaining power of the respective organizations.
This is why you see corporations, so aggressively fight the concept of collective bargaining because it creates the power dynamic that is actually appropriate for equitable relief, but reduces the amount that the more powerful organization can determine the relationship between the less powerful individual.
So anarcho-syndicalism is really about ensuring the individual worker cannot be put into a position of deprivation or suffering such that they have so little relative bargaining power in labor production that they can only choose between oppressive tyrants.
The key fallacy that people love here is that it’s all about relative deprivation so people have exceptionally varied views on what is considered oppressive or what a lifestyle would look like that is, let’s say inequitable.
Often times and you’ll see in many threads is the argument that “Actually we’re objectively more comfortable and well off that really, you shouldn’t be complaining about anything because you’re not starving to death”
The problem here is that it’s a completely separate argument than the argument for long term concentration of power, and who is actually controlling the economy, and has the ability to be flexible and create a life free of intermediaries that are confiscating your labor.
It all comes back to who has the power to set their own destiny in the economy, and the reality is, it’s always been small groups of exploiters who are able to do whatever they want to do because they’re taking advantage of the relative deprivation around them to not make things actively better for everybody. The people in situations like this, take no responsibility for their surroundings, their community their environment, they simply say how do I take advantage of this environment to my own best ends, and if that is the foundational conceit of a society, then you will not have a society that long and history tells us that society is built on this go through this political cycle, which so far has been basically every society in recorded history, unfortunately.
Anyway, there’s a lot of Intersectionality here with, for example, global finance, how this got really amplified after Bretton Woods two and the kind of fiatization, and then financialation of all possible value so there’s a giant kind of systematic thing here that is encoded in a lot of these as foundational assumptions in western capitalist economics.
East Germany, North Korea, and the USSR are wonderful examples of how this idiotic idea fares in real life.
Unless people there somehow have much lower IQs than their neighbours, who do vastly better, the difference in outcome must lie in the system that co-ordinates their work.
