6 ms·

The corporate world generally resembles Soviet culture a lot to me.

watwut 2y ago
Hierarchical structure with basically powerless bottom, strong blindly believed unaccountable top that is primary rewarded for looking certain way. There is going ro be a sociological rule that this thing always leads to similar dysfunctions.
rqtwteye 2y ago
Totally. I visited East Germany a few times when the wall was still up. The communist planned economies were a lot like corporations: 5 year plans, lots of internal propaganda, power struggles in leadership, total distortion of reality, sociopaths making their way to the top, no acceptance of dissent, metrics that make no sense.
- gyomu 2y ago
  The nice thing about corporations is that they have to be able to make payroll at the end of every month, otherwise they go bankrupt relatively quickly. Things can get much uglier and be much more protracted for governments.
  - wesselbindt 2y ago
    Unless they get bailed out by the government, or get tax breaks, or do mass layoffs. All of which seem to happen a lot.
    - akoboldfrying 2y ago
      With you on the bailing out and tax breaks. Mass layoffs though? That's an appropriate response to being uncompetitive.
    - rangestransform 2y ago
      I will say that perhaps Lina Khan was on the right track to benefit tech and the US economy overall by breaking up sclerotic corporate behemoths
      - rqtwteye 2y ago
        That's over for the next years.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    It's 2025: Many corporations are more funded by investors and lenders, rather than by income from servicing customers on the free market. The investor and lender money is conjured up out of thin air by a Central Committee, oops I mean by capitalistic bankers.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
BurningFrog 2y ago
Except we have thousands of competing Soviets keeping the system healthy.
- wesselbindt 2y ago
  Do you consider the current state of things healthy? By what metric?
  - BurningFrog 2y ago
    It produces steady progress on most any important metric. Compared with the Soviet system, that makes it vastly superior. Compared to an imagined perfect system, it has many flaws, but that's how the real world is.
    - wesselbindt 2y ago
      > It produces steady progress on most any important metric Some metrics I care about are income equality, homelessness, school shootings, level of education. What are the metrics you care about that you see improving? > Compared with the Soviet system, that makes it vastly superior. I'm sure it's also superior to the feudal system and hunter-gatherer systems. The Soviet system has been gone for three decades, I don't see why we would care to compare the current system to the effects of a system operating in a vastly different economic and political reality, more than 30 years ago. > Compared to an imagined perfect system, it has many flaws, but that's how the real world is. Well sure, that's a truism. That doesn't preclude the existence of realistic more effective or healthy systems.
      - BurningFrog 2y ago
        Sure. But I was commenting on this: > The corporate world generally resembles Soviet culture a lot to me.
        wesselbindt 2y ago
XorNot 2y ago
I've annoyed so many people by pointing this out: that anyone who says "free market solves all problems" misses that within that market we just embed thousands of tiny centrally planned economies, and there have been in fact numerous experiments trying to "free market within the free market" that lead to high profile disasters (i.e. Sears).
- quesera 2y ago
  I would never say that "free markets solve all problems". But I would strongly argue that the failure of Sears is an example of free market success.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    Sears failed because a venture capitalist realized they could buy Kmart, use it as collateral to buy Sears and drive both into bankruptcy and sell off after plundering all the assets for the shareholders. How is that a success of the free market? 2 old companies destroyed because someone got enough money to run them into the ground and make a killing doing it? Are MLMs also a free market success story?
    - sema4hacker 2y ago
      You made me read the history of Sears on Wikipedia and the story seems much more complicated than you describe. It's not very clear who took a loss and by how much, and who gained and by how much, but overall it seemed to be the usual story of distracted mismanagement unable to keep up with changing competition and going into a death spiral. In other words, just another slow inevitable boom-bust-style cycle that's constantly happening everywhere around us.
      - jordanb 2y ago
        No I worked at Sears and it was driven into the ground by an idiot PE fund manager and his arrogant consultants. Sears had one big problem when Eddie took over: it was out of step with the then-current retail format (big box stores). Its stores were heavily situated in enclosed malls that were out of fashion. The solution was straightforward if expensive: reformat the business (Sears had already done this twice before). But then Eddie rolled into town with his genius consultants and a galaxy brained idea: Kmart has stand-alone stores that kinda look like big box if you squint. So let's just merge the brands together! Then Sears ends up in big boxes without expensive reformatting! The fact that the brands were completely incompatible was pointed out by everyone who knew anything, but those weren't people in Eddie's inner circle so their opinions meant nothing. By the way I don't think ESL Investments ended up making money on Sears. They stripped the company of assets yes, but most of those assets were distressed by the collapse of Sears. Like a lot of real estate was in struggling malls that had Sears as the anchor tenant. ISTR some of ESL's LPs suing Eddie. Eddie made money the way all PE fund managers make money even when everyone else involved loses their shirt: by charging fees.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> The corporate world generally resembles Soviet culture a lot to me. The problems of Soviet culture are really the problems of bureaucracy. The way this is intended to be addressed in free markets is through competition. If your employer sucks, go work somewhere else. If their product sucks, buy it from someone else. This works pretty damn well as long as the company doesn't find a way to insulate itself from competition. But if that happens, it stops working, and then you're back to an unaccountable bureaucracy and all that entails. This has been happening increasingly in the US because corporations capture the government, and then they do two things: Weaken antitrust laws/enforcement, and "strengthen" other laws that raise market barriers to entry which are then sold to the public under the subterfuge of some kind of safety/security/labor protection/etc., because the public rightly wouldn't accept their true motivation as a valid justification. This also tends to feed on itself. Some industry captures the government, constrains competition, becomes abusive so people start demanding something be done about it. Instead of addressing the root of the problem (regulatory capture and insufficient competition), the incumbents propose a rule to reduce competition even more. So you get housing construction constrained by zoning, but instead of addressing that, the proposal is something like rent control, which disincentivizes construction even more and then long-term rents get even higher.
- einpoklum 2y ago
  > The way this is intended to be addressed in free markets is through competition "Free market competition" is an ideological construct. Collectively (and sometimes even personally), we can't "go work somewhere else" - and we certainly can't not-work at all. Moreover, if an "employer sucks", it may suck in multiple ways - environmental impact, social impacting where it operates, impact of its products and services on society etc. None of that changes even if you do go "work something else". What's necessary is improving things, not finding another 'stall' in the 'market'. > This has been happening increasingly in the US because corporations capture the government, The government exists to serve the interests of property owners, and more so, the larger ones - enforcing the social order and protecting their minority control of economic forces, the means of producing and distributing goods and services, from the rest of surrounding society. Capture by certain corporation is an attempt to tug at that common blanket to favor them specifically rather than keep the system somewhat stable and functional.
trhway 2y ago
>The corporate world generally resembles Soviet culture a lot to me. that is the Marx's law from Das Kapital which in modern language can be stated as "the larger the entropy of the ownership distribution - the more socialism inside". The smallest entropy - one owner, classic capitalism, the largest - everything belongs to everybody, ie. government property, the socialist state, etc. The large publicly owned corporations are more toward the large entropy values, thus a lot of socialism inside.
mempko 2y ago
David Graeber's book "Bullshit Jobs" does a great job going deep into why this is.
prewett 2y ago
Communism is functionally societal-level Taylorism, which I believe is the dominant corporate management style. Hayek said that the reason Communist economies failed was that the center could not get accurate information on what the leaves needed/wanted, so there was always a supply/demand problem. Market economies use prices to automatically convey this information. It seems like as companies get towards nation-state sizes they tend to have a similar problem: management is completely out of touch with what the people doing the work need (and/or out of touch with the customer base, market situation, etc.). Fortunately, leaving companies is a lot easier than Communist countries. Also disagreement is a lot less dangerous, and the consequences of being on the receiving end of political backstabbing are a lot more tolerable. Maybe most importantly, corporations don't tend to be founded on a lie like Communist governments (see the Charter 77 essay [1]). [1] https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23 https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-v...
Sateeshm 2y ago
Absolutely. Everyone is just worried about pleasing their higher ups, without any concern towards what is actually profitable, sensible, or productive.

Hierarchical structure with basically powerless bottom, strong blindly believed unaccountable top that is primary rewarded for looking certain way. There is going ro be a sociological rule that this thing always leads to similar dysfunctions.

rqtwteye 2y ago

Totally. I visited East Germany a few times when the wall was still up. The communist planned economies were a lot like corporations: 5 year plans, lots of internal propaganda, power struggles in leadership, total distortion of reality, sociopaths making their way to the top, no acceptance of dissent, metrics that make no sense.

gyomu 2y ago
The nice thing about corporations is that they have to be able to make payroll at the end of every month, otherwise they go bankrupt relatively quickly. Things can get much uglier and be much more protracted for governments.
- wesselbindt 2y ago
  Unless they get bailed out by the government, or get tax breaks, or do mass layoffs. All of which seem to happen a lot.
  - akoboldfrying 2y ago
    With you on the bailing out and tax breaks. Mass layoffs though? That's an appropriate response to being uncompetitive.
  - rangestransform 2y ago
    I will say that perhaps Lina Khan was on the right track to benefit tech and the US economy overall by breaking up sclerotic corporate behemoths
    - rqtwteye 2y ago
      That's over for the next years.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  It's 2025: Many corporations are more funded by investors and lenders, rather than by income from servicing customers on the free market. The investor and lender money is conjured up out of thin air by a Central Committee, oops I mean by capitalistic bankers.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

BurningFrog 2y ago

Except we have thousands of competing Soviets keeping the system healthy.

wesselbindt 2y ago
Do you consider the current state of things healthy? By what metric?
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  It produces steady progress on most any important metric. Compared with the Soviet system, that makes it vastly superior. Compared to an imagined perfect system, it has many flaws, but that's how the real world is.
  - wesselbindt 2y ago
    > It produces steady progress on most any important metric Some metrics I care about are income equality, homelessness, school shootings, level of education. What are the metrics you care about that you see improving? > Compared with the Soviet system, that makes it vastly superior. I'm sure it's also superior to the feudal system and hunter-gatherer systems. The Soviet system has been gone for three decades, I don't see why we would care to compare the current system to the effects of a system operating in a vastly different economic and political reality, more than 30 years ago. > Compared to an imagined perfect system, it has many flaws, but that's how the real world is. Well sure, that's a truism. That doesn't preclude the existence of realistic more effective or healthy systems.
    - BurningFrog 2y ago
      Sure. But I was commenting on this: > The corporate world generally resembles Soviet culture a lot to me.
      - wesselbindt 2y ago

XorNot 2y ago

I've annoyed so many people by pointing this out: that anyone who says "free market solves all problems" misses that within that market we just embed thousands of tiny centrally planned economies, and there have been in fact numerous experiments trying to "free market within the free market" that lead to high profile disasters (i.e. Sears).

quesera 2y ago
I would never say that "free markets solve all problems". But I would strongly argue that the failure of Sears is an example of free market success.
- cogman10 2y ago
  Sears failed because a venture capitalist realized they could buy Kmart, use it as collateral to buy Sears and drive both into bankruptcy and sell off after plundering all the assets for the shareholders. How is that a success of the free market? 2 old companies destroyed because someone got enough money to run them into the ground and make a killing doing it? Are MLMs also a free market success story?
  - sema4hacker 2y ago
    You made me read the history of Sears on Wikipedia and the story seems much more complicated than you describe. It's not very clear who took a loss and by how much, and who gained and by how much, but overall it seemed to be the usual story of distracted mismanagement unable to keep up with changing competition and going into a death spiral. In other words, just another slow inevitable boom-bust-style cycle that's constantly happening everywhere around us.
    - jordanb 2y ago
      No I worked at Sears and it was driven into the ground by an idiot PE fund manager and his arrogant consultants. Sears had one big problem when Eddie took over: it was out of step with the then-current retail format (big box stores). Its stores were heavily situated in enclosed malls that were out of fashion. The solution was straightforward if expensive: reformat the business (Sears had already done this twice before). But then Eddie rolled into town with his genius consultants and a galaxy brained idea: Kmart has stand-alone stores that kinda look like big box if you squint. So let's just merge the brands together! Then Sears ends up in big boxes without expensive reformatting! The fact that the brands were completely incompatible was pointed out by everyone who knew anything, but those weren't people in Eddie's inner circle so their opinions meant nothing. By the way I don't think ESL Investments ended up making money on Sears. They stripped the company of assets yes, but most of those assets were distressed by the collapse of Sears. Like a lot of real estate was in struggling malls that had Sears as the anchor tenant. ISTR some of ESL's LPs suing Eddie. Eddie made money the way all PE fund managers make money even when everyone else involved loses their shirt: by charging fees.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> The corporate world generally resembles Soviet culture a lot to me. The problems of Soviet culture are really the problems of bureaucracy. The way this is intended to be addressed in free markets is through competition. If your employer sucks, go work somewhere else. If their product sucks, buy it from someone else. This works pretty damn well as long as the company doesn't find a way to insulate itself from competition. But if that happens, it stops working, and then you're back to an unaccountable bureaucracy and all that entails. This has been happening increasingly in the US because corporations capture the government, and then they do two things: Weaken antitrust laws/enforcement, and "strengthen" other laws that raise market barriers to entry which are then sold to the public under the subterfuge of some kind of safety/security/labor protection/etc., because the public rightly wouldn't accept their true motivation as a valid justification. This also tends to feed on itself. Some industry captures the government, constrains competition, becomes abusive so people start demanding something be done about it. Instead of addressing the root of the problem (regulatory capture and insufficient competition), the incumbents propose a rule to reduce competition even more. So you get housing construction constrained by zoning, but instead of addressing that, the proposal is something like rent control, which disincentivizes construction even more and then long-term rents get even higher.

einpoklum 2y ago
> The way this is intended to be addressed in free markets is through competition "Free market competition" is an ideological construct. Collectively (and sometimes even personally), we can't "go work somewhere else" - and we certainly can't not-work at all. Moreover, if an "employer sucks", it may suck in multiple ways - environmental impact, social impacting where it operates, impact of its products and services on society etc. None of that changes even if you do go "work something else". What's necessary is improving things, not finding another 'stall' in the 'market'. > This has been happening increasingly in the US because corporations capture the government, The government exists to serve the interests of property owners, and more so, the larger ones - enforcing the social order and protecting their minority control of economic forces, the means of producing and distributing goods and services, from the rest of surrounding society. Capture by certain corporation is an attempt to tug at that common blanket to favor them specifically rather than keep the system somewhat stable and functional.

trhway 2y ago

>The corporate world generally resembles Soviet culture a lot to me. that is the Marx's law from Das Kapital which in modern language can be stated as "the larger the entropy of the ownership distribution - the more socialism inside". The smallest entropy - one owner, classic capitalism, the largest - everything belongs to everybody, ie. government property, the socialist state, etc. The large publicly owned corporations are more toward the large entropy values, thus a lot of socialism inside.

mempko 2y ago

David Graeber's book "Bullshit Jobs" does a great job going deep into why this is.

prewett 2y ago

Communism is functionally societal-level Taylorism, which I believe is the dominant corporate management style. Hayek said that the reason Communist economies failed was that the center could not get accurate information on what the leaves needed/wanted, so there was always a supply/demand problem. Market economies use prices to automatically convey this information. It seems like as companies get towards nation-state sizes they tend to have a similar problem: management is completely out of touch with what the people doing the work need (and/or out of touch with the customer base, market situation, etc.). Fortunately, leaving companies is a lot easier than Communist countries. Also disagreement is a lot less dangerous, and the consequences of being on the receiving end of political backstabbing are a lot more tolerable. Maybe most importantly, corporations don't tend to be founded on a lie like Communist governments (see the Charter 77 essay [1]). [1] https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23 https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-v...

Sateeshm 2y ago

Absolutely. Everyone is just worried about pleasing their higher ups, without any concern towards what is actually profitable, sensible, or productive.