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> Your corporate job isn't a democracy. Herein lies the crux. We want to live in a democracy, but fundamentally undemocratic entities run the world and act on

• twoodfin 3y ago
  The family is a fundamentally undemocratic institution. The demos does not get to decide how spouses interact or how parents raise their children anywhere but at the extremities. Nobody wants to live in a totalizing democracy.
  • mandmandam 3y ago
    > The demos does not get to decide how spouses interact or how parents raise their children anywhere but at the extremities. For 99% of human history, they did actually. But that whole argument is a red herring. OP is dead right: If your megacorp aids genocide, there should be consequences. Firing employees who dare to make noise about it is just peak dystopia shit and we'd be mugs to accept it.
    • runarberg 3y ago
      [flagged]
    • skissane 3y ago
      > For 99% of human history, they did actually. No. Do you think, in mediaeval France, the King cared about the internal relations of the family of some random townsperson or peasant? Do you think any of the aristocracy cared? Do you think the Church cared? No. And that is the norm of human history – unless it gets to the point they have to pay attention to it, what ruler wants to be bothered with the details of the private family lives of their millions of subjects?
      • mandmandam 3y ago
        I'm talking about 2m years of humanity. Responding with "mediaeval" France is missing the point by a very wide mark.
        • skissane 2y ago
          Mediaeval France was just an example. What I said was true of them was true of just about everywhere and everywhen else too. Rarely in human history have rulers displayed any great care for what goes on in a family behind closed doors; to the extent they ever have, it is predominantly a feature of modernity, not pre-modernity.
          • mandmandam 2y ago
            The word 'demos' does not mean ruler, if that helps clear up this confusion.
            • skissane 2y ago
              The demos didn't either. Do you think people ever cared what their neighbours did behind closed doors? I didn't see it, so it didn't happen.
              • mandmandam 2y ago
                For 99% of human history, most children have been raised in communal environments. This whole 'keeping kids behind closed doors all their childhood' thing is a WEIRDness, and very much not the norm. It's ok to be wrong sometimes you know, as long as you learned something...
                • skissane 2y ago
                  People have had doors that could be closed for thousands of years, and raised their children behind them. Not just in the West either. It isn’t a WEIRD thing. Of course, neither then nor now do children spend 100% of the time behind them. “Communal environments”? In many societies, the primary unit has been the extended/multigenerational family not the nuclear family, yes. But your grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins are not the demos any more than your parents and siblings are. The point I made stands, since I said “family” not “nuclear family”. Most of human history has been hunter-gatherer societies-many of which are composed of small units federated into larger ones. The members of the smallest units were usually closely related to each other by blood or partnering (but again, an extended/multigenerational family rather than a nuclear one). And my point stands there too - do you care what goes on in the friendly group that lives a couple of hills over? It's ok to be wrong sometimes you know…
  • rakoo 3y ago
    The atomic family of 2 adults and children is a very recent invention. The historical family is a bunch of people living under the same roof, working and doing for the whole family, from each according to their ability, for each according to their needs. The democracy is not simply everyone in a country deciding on everything down to the minutiae of individual lives. Some political lessons are missing here. Democracy is about the people who are subject of a situation being also actors of the decisions on this specific matter. Nobody is saying how you should behave in your bedroom.
    • Turing_Machine 3y ago
      > The atomic family of 2 adults and children is a very recent invention. The historical family is a bunch of people living under the same roof, working and doing for the whole family, from each according to their ability, for each according to their needs. Somewhat true, but not relevant to the point at hand. The historical family was typically run in an autocratic fashion by the elders, without even a vague trace of democracy. For that matter, there are still plenty of places in the world where families are run that way.
      • Red_Leaves_Flyy 3y ago
        >The historical family Is this a serious comment or flame bait? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_family https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_family
        • Turing_Machine 3y ago
          I'm using the OP's term. If you don't like the term, take it up with that person. It's not "flamebait" in any case. Instead, perhaps you're disagreeing with my assertion that most families in the past were autocratic, and that in many cultures they still are. A link to a lengthy Wikipedia article does nothing to refute the claim. You're going to have to be more specific. Most historical families in Europe, India, and China were run by the elders on autocratic lines, and those constitute, and pretty much always have constituted, the majority of families on Earth (at least since the population boom brought on by the invention of agriculture). Indeed, in classical Roman civilization, the paterfamilias could kill any junior member of the family at any time, for any reason he chose. Your own article even mentions that. Sounds pretty autocratic to me.
  • kurikuri 3y ago
    Using families as a counter example is quite a strawman, no?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• pfannkuchen 3y ago
  The singleton structure with guns being a democracy and the many structures anyone can start (without guns, which exists inside of the singleton superstructure) being a democracy are not the same thing. Maybe the latter should be a democracy as well, but the former being one does not logically imply that the latter necessarily should be.
• PM_me_your_math 3y ago
  [dead]
• Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > We want to live in a democracy, but fundamentally undemocratic entities run the world and act on it in ways none of the citizens decided. The obvious next step is to dismantle those undemocratic places, or at least reduce their actions to what citizens decide, but we're far from it. Governments and companies are different things entirely. These folks can choose not to work for Google. They (and we) can't just impulsively choose to stop dealing with the United States of America Well, of course you could obtain citizenship in another country and move there, but that's much more difficult than just finding another job, particularly if you are a Googler. I doubt they'll be unemployed for long.
• creer 3y ago
  Democracy doesn't mean that everything is micromanaged by elected officials. The legal system is. The legal system is the framework for non-profit and for-profit entities and individuals to live their life. We can certainly argue competence and alignment. - And soon enough we reach the issue of who the voters choose to represent them...
  • rakoo 3y ago
    No indeed, democracy is the group collectively deciding about their conditions. A democracy doesn't necessarily implies elections and officians, that's only one form. The whole point of a democracy is that people are the priority, all else is a tool for furthering the betterment of society. That a company can decide how it works without input of its workers means it has stopped being a tool and is now an end in itself; that's progressively leaving the territory of democracy.
    • creer 3y ago
      You are forgetting the owners of the company somewhere in there. Also that different forms of corporations do already exist (in the US), including not-for-profit, cooperative / worker-owned, mutual / member-owned, state-owned corporations and more. So that, yes, even Google could have been founded under a different form of corporation... Oh wait, it was - see its governance and the original purpose for it.
      • rakoo 2y ago
        That there can be owners of a company who take all decisions is, in itself, a political decision to remove workers from deciding. Yes it is allowed in the current system, of course, because that's what the system is built for. Just like another system allowed people to own other people, but many parts of the world got out of it because it sucks. I'm not forgetting owners, quite the contrary. > Oh wait, it was - see its governance and the original purpose for it. Who cares what the original governance and purpose was ? Does it has any single impact on how things are run today ?
• gameman144 3y ago
  Wait, do we want to live in that kind of democracy? Literally the whole reason that I love democracy is it lets the people set the rules, then gets out of the way and lets people do their thing. I could not disagree more strongly with the notion that democracy should be the mechanism by which businesses should be run. Democracy says which choices we're okay with, but businesses and people should totally have the autonomy to decide which of the allowed choices to go with.
  • paulryanrogers 3y ago
    When companies are big or rich enough they can capture regulators and pay for lobbyists to override the masses, the democratic process is undermined. We become ruled by socialopathic oligarchy, in the form of corporations instead of a few individuals. And no one executive can be held accountable because they're large organizations that diffuse responsibility. Once I was a young conservative who thought these ideas were crazy Hollywood tropes. As I get older I see the pattern manifest more and more in the USA.
    • alakin 3y ago
      And you're suggesting what, that we hand the reins to the democratic process you just described as flawed, one that is corrupted by lobbying? Yeah why don't we just take a corrupt institution and put it in charge of more things.
      • remarkEon 3y ago
        I don't think that's a suggestion that we have Google take over the country or something. It's an acknowledgement of the Iron Law of Oligarchy[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
        • alakin 3y ago
          Anti monopoly law already handles that.
• addicted 3y ago
  What you’re suggesting is a non democratic dystopic nightmare. For example, in your world, as long as enough people agree with me, I can decide that the couch in your living room should actually be in the kitchen. After all, one of the most widespread place in the world is your housing and in todays world it’s fundamentally undemocratic. But simply sticking to companies/businesses, how are startups supposed to work? You start a business, hire 2 people to help you out, and suddenly they can democratically take over the entire company? How is that a solution to anything?
  • SpecialistK 3y ago
    > as long as enough people agree with me, I can decide that the couch in your living room should actually be in the kitchen. de Tocqueville spoke on this in the 19th century, and highlights exactly why liberal democracy has codified bills of rights limiting the scope of what the masses can enforce on others.
  • berdario 3y ago
    > For example, in your world, as long as enough people agree with me, I can decide that the couch in your living room should actually be in the kitchen. After all, one of the most widespread place in the world is your housing and in todays world it’s fundamentally undemocratic You should learn about the difference between personal property and private property. Having democratic control of what's currently private, non-personal property has clear benefits to society which obviously don't apply to personal property. Arguing that people would want to encroach on your rights to enjoy personal property is a big strawman. > You start a business, hire 2 people to help you out, and suddenly they can democratically take over the entire company? How to get from our current situation A, to our democratic utopia B is of course not something that we can make justice to in a brief comment, but: Instead of thinking "hire 2 people", if you need support of more workers think: "cooperative" If instead of support from more workers what you need is capital investment for the public good, think of partial state-ownership in your enterprise (which would be a mean to ensure oversight and making sure that funds are not wasted... Which should already be the case when we talk about subsidies and state grants in our society)
  • rakoo 3y ago
• anal_reactor 3y ago
  That's exactly the observation I made when working for a corporation.
• tim333 3y ago
  The US is a capitalist democracy where companies with money can choose to pay people to do stuff and if the people are annoying, stop paying them. A lot of people with choice would like to live there, hence the millions of immigrants turning up. Maybe you can find some other system where you can protest against your employers policy without problems? I'm not sure communism works well if you want to protest your leaders there either. Maybe some place like France? They have a lot of protests and make it hard to fire people.
  • rakoo 3y ago
    All democracies today are capitalist democracies, with varying degrees of equilibrium between the bourgeoisie and the rest. I'm not sure you understand that communism, like any ideology, has multiple currents. The most common one today is trotskyism which specifically rejects the notion of bosses in the movement and only uses self-organization. Anarchim is also another system that works. Unfortunately no capitalist system will gently give away its power over the people for new forms of governance to be used.
    • tim333 3y ago
      I'm not especially up on communism but did any of those systems let workers hold protests without repercussions in real life, as opposed to in theory?
      • rakoo 2y ago
        Yes and no, a communist system (so, not the USSR) doesn't need protests because people take part in the decisions. See the way Chiapas was run, or the Commune de Paris. Unfortunately as soon as such a system is brought up it is crushed by the alliance of capitalist forces uniting against their common enemy.
• inglor_cz 3y ago
  Personally, I want political democracy. But I don't want random private institutions to be forced into adapting internal democracy.
• randomcarbloke 2y ago
  working for Google is not indentured servitude nor are you a citizen of Google...you are an employee hired to get shit done.
  • rakoo 2y ago
    So, why did we ban indentured servitude but not jobs-with-no-decision ? What makes one bad and the other good ? There's no argument in absolute about keeping one and not the other.
    • randomcarbloke 2y ago
      what are you even talking about?