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For the billionth time already, socialism is not "when the government does it." Using the government to increase your capital and become even richer is standard
by Refreeze5224 3mo ago
For the billionth time already, socialism is not "when the government does it." Using the government to increase your capital and become even richer is standard capitalism.
Altman is not now and will not ever relinquish any means of production he own to the workers.
- satvikpendem 3mo agoWell, OpenAI workers do own shares. Tech companies are significantly more socialist than any other large scale enterprises in modern history (I don't know enough about pre-modern history to say).
- watwut 3mo agoThat is not socialism.
- satvikpendem 3mo agoWorkers owning the means of production, and shares are ownership. So yes it is (one form of) socialism.
- Refreeze5224 3mo agoShares are not the means of production. They are a mutually agreed upon fiction and sit firmly within the realm of capitalism.
- satvikpendem 3mo agoLeaving aside that market socialism also exists, in which shares do as well, not just Marxist Leninist, what do you define as ownership then? Especially in today's age where value is in software not only hardware. How would a worker own a means of production?
- Refreeze5224 3mo agoIn today's age of exclusive capitalism? There is no worker ownership of the means of production. If you can't use a mine to get some coal, or use some tools to make widget, or use a GPU to do inference I guess, then you don't own it, do you? The point is anyone who needs to do those things can, and that ownership is tangibly available to everyone. Not in the "this is public property" but the state actually owns it sense.
- satvikpendem 3mo ago[dead]
- watwut 3mo agoNot at all. They maybe get portion of future valie, but have no decision power and no power at all.
- satvikpendem 3mo agoVoting shares exist. In fact, worker cooperatives are the end result by this method, where every worker does indeed have a vote and therefore decision power.
- watwut 3mo agoEmployees dont get voting shares. These are carefully designed so that there is no risk of employees getting any rights. They are deferred potential compensation. And no, the companies we talk about dont produce worker cooperatives.
- satvikpendem 3mo agoEmployees can, if they work at companies that do give them, nothing fundamentally stops them from receiving voting shares.
- KingMob 3mo ago[dead]
- geysersam 3mo agoWhy do you say that?
- satvikpendem 3mo agoWhat do you mean why?
- geysersam 3mo agoI mean why do you say that large tax evading organizations, operating in an extremely capitalist environment, steered by a small, unfathomably rich, group of people with uncommon and often ultra liberal ideologies, are more socialist than typical manufacturing companies with a largely unionized workforce?
- satvikpendem 3mo agoUnions aren't socialist, the employees don't own the means of production while engineers for example at Google literally own shares of the company and can vote. Don't confuse your screed with the literal definition of the word.
- geysersam 3mo agoWhat fraction of Google is owned by the engineers at Google? 5%? That's nothing compared to the bargaining power obtained by organized labor, actual socialist organization.
- satvikpendem 3mo agoYou are misunderstanding me, I never said it was good or bad or better or worse than unions, just that unions are explicitly not socialist by the definition of the word as they are an external organization, not internal to the company. It is true that a tech company issuing voting shares like Google is explicitly more socialist than any union simply because shares are ownership of the means of production. As I said, I am arguing as to the definition of the word itself because most people get it wrong and think any labor movement is socialism which is wrong, it has a very specific definition.
- pyeri 3mo agoAltman may not be an altruist but the overall direction the organization takes is what matters in the end. And as long as that organization retains even a semblance of a non-profit (despite having a revenue centric approach to tackle competition in the field), it is still a preferable organization to Anthropic and Amodei.