7 ms·

Honestly, I work in a huge company (number three in comparison worldwide, >90k employees world-wide), and it feels like Socialism. We eat lunch together in a ca

by erikb 8y ago

Honestly, I work in a huge company (number three in comparison worldwide, >90k employees world-wide), and it feels like Socialism. We eat lunch together in a canteen. Everything we do and buy is shared ownership. There's false propaganda from the top down, and you can live a happy life as long you accept the size of your share of the cake and don't criticize people above you. This is not meant as criticism, I actually like the lifestyle. Especially since in such a big corps there are actually resources available compared to end-times socialist countries. But if you live here in this company your whole life it is questionable why we should call ourselves capitalists.

groestl 8y ago
Capitalists do not necessarily like the competitive market aspect of capitalism ;)
- devonkim 8y ago
  Corporatists tend to parade around as if regulations are what limit competition when they're the ones writing most of them to keep competitors (both large and small) at a disadvantage. Any sufficiently large and concentrated capitalist system becomes a corporatist system.
  - grimbly 8y ago
    Of course, that's not REAL capitalism, because I, devonkim, say so. Reality be damned!
- conception 8y ago
  Actually that's one of the big things people misunderstand about capitalism - it doesn't have to be competitive. Capitalism can, and does and wants to thrive in a monopoly. Capitalism and free markets are two different things and the latter is far more important though they are often conflated.
  - groestl 8y ago
    At least the Wikipedia article names competitive markets as central aspect of capitalism. I agree with your sentiment though. Companies are basically little bubbles of monopoly in a sea of free markets. But the optimal state for a company (and the owning capitalist) is no competition at all.
    - jakemoshenko 8y ago
      I think that's a really efficient way to find a local maxima. In my opinion, companies need competition to drive continued innovation.
      - diab0lic 8y ago
        Most companies aren't otimizing for innovations, they're optimizing for profits. If they desire innovation it's primary purpose is profit.
wffurr 8y ago
That's the thing. You're not a capitalist, the owners are. They have the capital and set the working conditions for you, the worker. What makes that entire setup capitalist is that it's privately funded and owned, as opposed to being subject to democratic control.
- philipov 8y ago
  The difference between Corporate Socialism and Democratic Socialism is the flavor of koolaid being served at the propaganda canteen. (hint: large concentrated power centers don't remain democratically controlled)
  - lisper 8y ago
    There is one other important difference: in democratic socialism, your vote is inalienable. In Corporate socialism votes are quite literally bought and sold as part of the standard operating procedure.
    - philipov 8y ago
      That only matters if voting actually functions as the root cause of election victory, but in practice it is merely an illusion of choice. Party leaders and influencers control the election field, ensuring they get to choose a controlling share of legislature membership. Voting may be a proximal cause of election victory, but it is the ability to choose most of the people who get to even run that actually matters. In a two-party system, there are two flavors of propaganda and people can choose which political machine they want picking the candidates. In a one-party system like we've seen with the great Socialist states of the 20th century or with American party primaries, leadership control over elections is even more blatant. In the American system, for example, the existence of third party or non-Machine candidates acts as a pressure valve that ensures no real change can happen, since the major parties can divvy up the successful rhetoric and defuse it with their own loyal candidates, while anyone else who gets elected will be in too small a number to form an effective legislative caucus. The result of individual elections isn't important. What matters is how the system functions in aggregate.
roenxi 8y ago
> But if you live here in this company your whole life it is questionable why we should call ourselves capitalists. Capitalism is about who owns the capital. In a big corporation, most of the workers are unlikely to even have meaningful control of capital, let alone anything approximating ownership. The community aspect of socialism isn't the problem - that is one of its more beguiling features. The problem is that once you take the cynicism of capitalism out of the picture ideas take root that are pleasant sounding but turn out not to work in practice. There are a couple of big hitters in that bad ideas category, eg, everyone should get a roughly equal share of societies resources. In practice this turns out to be a catastrophically bad idea where everyone is equal and has nothing. We've seen that story play out more than once - it turns out the best equilibrium is people who are more productive should get more, and people who are less productive should get ... politics is still out on exactly how much they should get, but it is settled that it should be substantially less than the productive ones. In a corporation, if ideas like that take hold, the people with prospects flee like rats from a sinking ship, the corporation goes bust and then everyone moves on to something that works.
- grimbly 8y ago
  >The cynicism of Capitalism. The efficient market hypothesis, the idealization that capitalists will not monopolize, and the concept of the invisible hand are not cynical. The subjective theory of value is a massive dose of idealism (hedging on the idea that consumers have any knowledge whatsoever compared to the producers), and we had to entirely retool Humanity in order to even get to the levels of productivity we currently have. Read less HackerNews and more political economy.
TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
How soon till one of the top-10 largest multinationals take the next step and pay in scrip instead of money? Someone will probably jump in here and tell me this is already happening in developing countries...
- gaius 8y ago
  one of the top-10 largest multinationals take the next step and pay in scrip instead of money You could argue that that’s what stock in a non-public company is already
- sangnoir 8y ago
  This was common practice in Southern Africa for many decades now. Farm workers live in compounds owned by the farm owner (on the farm), buy goods from the farm shop at exorbitant prices, and educate their kids at the farm school. Because farms are remote, the "farm economy" is a closed environment with the farm owner controlling wages, rent, school fees and the price of groceries.
- pdfernhout 8y ago
  Happened in the USA too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip http://appalachianmagazine.com/2014/03/07/coal-mining-the-history-of-scrip/ http://appalachianmagazine.com/2014/03/07/coal-mining-the-hi...
danharaj 8y ago
The propaganda is so loud that the reality of being a worker under capitalism is criticized as being socialist.
- erikb 8y ago
  Not from my side. That you associate "socialist" with "negative" might be already the result of propaganda, though.
tgreener 8y ago
I can't really square the idea of "everything ... is shared" with there being a top down power structure. If some pigs are "more equal than others," you don't have a socialist system, you have a Stalinist system. I hate to break it to you, but you might be a (Russian style) communist.
- erikb 8y ago
  Maybe I didn't put it explicitely into the previous comment, but in my understanding there is only one system (power pyramid) and different flavors of marketing attached around it. "We are a transparent tech company that shares all info with everybody" (Google? Red Hat?) is just as much B.s. in my eyes as "Socialism" or "Capitalism". Of course the people up the food chain control more of the "common goods". Is there a single communist country in human history to this date, that doesn't have this same setup? If you want to claim that it doesn't fulfill Marxist ideology, well yes. But not even communists believe that. The world that fulfills this true common shared ownership is called communism, and from a communist perspective we've never seen that. Socialist countries where an experiment at triggering human evolution to achieve communism. It failed. But if we look at Star Trek for instance, there they have achieved commmunism. No need for money, not much need for ownership, everybody works to improve oneself and further the community. That's communism according to communist, and yes that's different from how capitalist propaganda labels communism. I'm not part of that group of communists though. I have a more fatalistic/pessimistic approach and think we are not really able to develop any further. We apply different labels, but in the end it's always the power pyramid that succeeds, because we can't overcome our limitations.
Chinjut 8y ago
What do you think capitalism is, if not this clear example of a system affording great power to capital? The definitions of the words aren't simply "capitalism = good" and "socialism = bad", so that the moment something feels bad, it should stop being called capitalism and start being called socialism.
ryandrake 8y ago
It's a little funny and ironic how most big companies who love to call themselves capitalist and operate in an environment of market capitalism, internally look more like communist dictatorships. Resource allocation and deployment is centrally planned by a politburo who are more equal than the rest of the party members (employees). Internal propaganda communications to shape morale. (Some) employees' life needs taken care of (retirement, health care, legal services, etc.). Strict and pervasive internal surveillance/security. It's as if Lenin himself designed the internal corporate structure and functioning.
- jahaja 8y ago
  This seems to imply there's some other, more righteous, form of capitalist organization, and that these are unfortunate anomalies?
- danharaj 8y ago
  I have no idea how you did the gymnastics necessary to say that capitalist power structures that existed for decades before the USSR came into existence are modeled after it instead of the other way around.
  - erikb 8y ago
    The main point of the original comment with that claim was a little hidden but is this: I come from the eastern side of the Iron Curtain and saw socialism in practice in my youth. Then I saw how in the 90s and 00s everything socialist was suddenly bad and needed to be replaced with capitalist solutions, which in many cases meant replacing stuff that works and that people are used to with stuff that doesn't work and sucks for everybody involved. Now I went to the western side of the Iron Curtain and see that actual, real life capitalism is not how "they" taught us it would be. It doesn't contain much of the bullshit that was created in our countries to be more capitalist. It is the same stuff we grew up with and that we know that it works. Just here it has a "capitalist" label attached, so nobody thought they need to destroy and replace it. So yes, from my perspective it's socialist, because the capitalists told us that it needs to get replaced when they arrived in our countries. In fact it's just normal human behaviour.
dang 8y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17884638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17884638 and marked it off-topic. The root comment wasn't so bad because it reported personal experience, but the generic ideological bit is a virus. It leads—inevitably—to a generic ideological tangent. Those make boring, repetitive subthreads and so are off topic on HN. Perhaps there are new and interesting things to be said in the classic ideological debates, but the internet message board is not a medium capable of that discussion. It bursts into flames instead. Lots more explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20generic https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... if anybody cares.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  Hi Dang, Honestly, your explanation makes no sense to me. I don’t understand what’s so generic about this conversation. I think the idea that there are non-dominant forms of government operating inside institutions operating within capitalism is a rarely seen perspective. And I read a lot of HN.
  - dang 8y ago
    I took another look. There are some good comments in there, and then there are the ones about Hillary and Stalin. I'm not as convinced as you are that the point about capitalist institutions is so fresh or interesting, but I see your point. It's often hard to tell exactly where to apply the pruning shears.

by erikb 8y ago

groestl 8y ago

Capitalists do not necessarily like the competitive market aspect of capitalism ;)

devonkim 8y ago
Corporatists tend to parade around as if regulations are what limit competition when they're the ones writing most of them to keep competitors (both large and small) at a disadvantage. Any sufficiently large and concentrated capitalist system becomes a corporatist system.
- grimbly 8y ago
  Of course, that's not REAL capitalism, because I, devonkim, say so. Reality be damned!
conception 8y ago
Actually that's one of the big things people misunderstand about capitalism - it doesn't have to be competitive. Capitalism can, and does and wants to thrive in a monopoly. Capitalism and free markets are two different things and the latter is far more important though they are often conflated.
- groestl 8y ago
  At least the Wikipedia article names competitive markets as central aspect of capitalism. I agree with your sentiment though. Companies are basically little bubbles of monopoly in a sea of free markets. But the optimal state for a company (and the owning capitalist) is no competition at all.
  - jakemoshenko 8y ago
    I think that's a really efficient way to find a local maxima. In my opinion, companies need competition to drive continued innovation.
    - diab0lic 8y ago
      Most companies aren't otimizing for innovations, they're optimizing for profits. If they desire innovation it's primary purpose is profit.

wffurr 8y ago

That's the thing. You're not a capitalist, the owners are. They have the capital and set the working conditions for you, the worker. What makes that entire setup capitalist is that it's privately funded and owned, as opposed to being subject to democratic control.

philipov 8y ago
The difference between Corporate Socialism and Democratic Socialism is the flavor of koolaid being served at the propaganda canteen. (hint: large concentrated power centers don't remain democratically controlled)
- lisper 8y ago
  There is one other important difference: in democratic socialism, your vote is inalienable. In Corporate socialism votes are quite literally bought and sold as part of the standard operating procedure.
  - philipov 8y ago
    That only matters if voting actually functions as the root cause of election victory, but in practice it is merely an illusion of choice. Party leaders and influencers control the election field, ensuring they get to choose a controlling share of legislature membership. Voting may be a proximal cause of election victory, but it is the ability to choose most of the people who get to even run that actually matters. In a two-party system, there are two flavors of propaganda and people can choose which political machine they want picking the candidates. In a one-party system like we've seen with the great Socialist states of the 20th century or with American party primaries, leadership control over elections is even more blatant. In the American system, for example, the existence of third party or non-Machine candidates acts as a pressure valve that ensures no real change can happen, since the major parties can divvy up the successful rhetoric and defuse it with their own loyal candidates, while anyone else who gets elected will be in too small a number to form an effective legislative caucus. The result of individual elections isn't important. What matters is how the system functions in aggregate.

roenxi 8y ago

> But if you live here in this company your whole life it is questionable why we should call ourselves capitalists. Capitalism is about who owns the capital. In a big corporation, most of the workers are unlikely to even have meaningful control of capital, let alone anything approximating ownership. The community aspect of socialism isn't the problem - that is one of its more beguiling features. The problem is that once you take the cynicism of capitalism out of the picture ideas take root that are pleasant sounding but turn out not to work in practice. There are a couple of big hitters in that bad ideas category, eg, everyone should get a roughly equal share of societies resources. In practice this turns out to be a catastrophically bad idea where everyone is equal and has nothing. We've seen that story play out more than once - it turns out the best equilibrium is people who are more productive should get more, and people who are less productive should get ... politics is still out on exactly how much they should get, but it is settled that it should be substantially less than the productive ones. In a corporation, if ideas like that take hold, the people with prospects flee like rats from a sinking ship, the corporation goes bust and then everyone moves on to something that works.

grimbly 8y ago
>The cynicism of Capitalism. The efficient market hypothesis, the idealization that capitalists will not monopolize, and the concept of the invisible hand are not cynical. The subjective theory of value is a massive dose of idealism (hedging on the idea that consumers have any knowledge whatsoever compared to the producers), and we had to entirely retool Humanity in order to even get to the levels of productivity we currently have. Read less HackerNews and more political economy.

TheRealDunkirk 8y ago

How soon till one of the top-10 largest multinationals take the next step and pay in scrip instead of money? Someone will probably jump in here and tell me this is already happening in developing countries...

gaius 8y ago
one of the top-10 largest multinationals take the next step and pay in scrip instead of money You could argue that that’s what stock in a non-public company is already
sangnoir 8y ago
This was common practice in Southern Africa for many decades now. Farm workers live in compounds owned by the farm owner (on the farm), buy goods from the farm shop at exorbitant prices, and educate their kids at the farm school. Because farms are remote, the "farm economy" is a closed environment with the farm owner controlling wages, rent, school fees and the price of groceries.
pdfernhout 8y ago
Happened in the USA too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip http://appalachianmagazine.com/2014/03/07/coal-mining-the-history-of-scrip/ http://appalachianmagazine.com/2014/03/07/coal-mining-the-hi...

danharaj 8y ago

The propaganda is so loud that the reality of being a worker under capitalism is criticized as being socialist.

erikb 8y ago
Not from my side. That you associate "socialist" with "negative" might be already the result of propaganda, though.

tgreener 8y ago

I can't really square the idea of "everything ... is shared" with there being a top down power structure. If some pigs are "more equal than others," you don't have a socialist system, you have a Stalinist system. I hate to break it to you, but you might be a (Russian style) communist.

erikb 8y ago
Maybe I didn't put it explicitely into the previous comment, but in my understanding there is only one system (power pyramid) and different flavors of marketing attached around it. "We are a transparent tech company that shares all info with everybody" (Google? Red Hat?) is just as much B.s. in my eyes as "Socialism" or "Capitalism". Of course the people up the food chain control more of the "common goods". Is there a single communist country in human history to this date, that doesn't have this same setup? If you want to claim that it doesn't fulfill Marxist ideology, well yes. But not even communists believe that. The world that fulfills this true common shared ownership is called communism, and from a communist perspective we've never seen that. Socialist countries where an experiment at triggering human evolution to achieve communism. It failed. But if we look at Star Trek for instance, there they have achieved commmunism. No need for money, not much need for ownership, everybody works to improve oneself and further the community. That's communism according to communist, and yes that's different from how capitalist propaganda labels communism. I'm not part of that group of communists though. I have a more fatalistic/pessimistic approach and think we are not really able to develop any further. We apply different labels, but in the end it's always the power pyramid that succeeds, because we can't overcome our limitations.

Chinjut 8y ago

What do you think capitalism is, if not this clear example of a system affording great power to capital? The definitions of the words aren't simply "capitalism = good" and "socialism = bad", so that the moment something feels bad, it should stop being called capitalism and start being called socialism.

ryandrake 8y ago

It's a little funny and ironic how most big companies who love to call themselves capitalist and operate in an environment of market capitalism, internally look more like communist dictatorships. Resource allocation and deployment is centrally planned by a politburo who are more equal than the rest of the party members (employees). Internal propaganda communications to shape morale. (Some) employees' life needs taken care of (retirement, health care, legal services, etc.). Strict and pervasive internal surveillance/security. It's as if Lenin himself designed the internal corporate structure and functioning.

jahaja 8y ago
This seems to imply there's some other, more righteous, form of capitalist organization, and that these are unfortunate anomalies?
danharaj 8y ago
I have no idea how you did the gymnastics necessary to say that capitalist power structures that existed for decades before the USSR came into existence are modeled after it instead of the other way around.
- erikb 8y ago
  The main point of the original comment with that claim was a little hidden but is this: I come from the eastern side of the Iron Curtain and saw socialism in practice in my youth. Then I saw how in the 90s and 00s everything socialist was suddenly bad and needed to be replaced with capitalist solutions, which in many cases meant replacing stuff that works and that people are used to with stuff that doesn't work and sucks for everybody involved. Now I went to the western side of the Iron Curtain and see that actual, real life capitalism is not how "they" taught us it would be. It doesn't contain much of the bullshit that was created in our countries to be more capitalist. It is the same stuff we grew up with and that we know that it works. Just here it has a "capitalist" label attached, so nobody thought they need to destroy and replace it. So yes, from my perspective it's socialist, because the capitalists told us that it needs to get replaced when they arrived in our countries. In fact it's just normal human behaviour.

dang 8y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17884638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17884638 and marked it off-topic. The root comment wasn't so bad because it reported personal experience, but the generic ideological bit is a virus. It leads—inevitably—to a generic ideological tangent. Those make boring, repetitive subthreads and so are off topic on HN. Perhaps there are new and interesting things to be said in the classic ideological debates, but the internet message board is not a medium capable of that discussion. It bursts into flames instead. Lots more explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20generic https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... if anybody cares.

erikpukinskis 8y ago
Hi Dang, Honestly, your explanation makes no sense to me. I don’t understand what’s so generic about this conversation. I think the idea that there are non-dominant forms of government operating inside institutions operating within capitalism is a rarely seen perspective. And I read a lot of HN.
- dang 8y ago
  I took another look. There are some good comments in there, and then there are the ones about Hillary and Stalin. I'm not as convinced as you are that the point about capitalist institutions is so fresh or interesting, but I see your point. It's often hard to tell exactly where to apply the pruning shears.