Also, is there any evidence that collective action returns a sustainably larger slice of corporate revenues?
As for how to choose, I'm not sure.
> Work somewhere else.
You could equally say to any workers at Tesla who want to establish a union. Work somewhere else.
That’s over four million percent more than the median employee’s total compensation. But he’d rather union bust than be a slightly less rich centibillionaire.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/business/highest-pa...
Great, so bring a union in. Maybe median wages will briefly jump 10% or so in response to threats. Within five years the median wage probably won't be any higher. Probably lower if union action rattles investor confidence and Tesla's access to capital shrinks, leading to less future investment, in turn leading to less profit and fewer jobs at the company.
With all this talk of bringing in a bloated Detroit union bureaucracy into Fremont, you might as well plead with Tesla to focus less on US manufacturing over the next decade. Yay, everyone wins!
This discussion clearly isn’t going anywhere, so I’m ducking out. Have a nice day!
I guess Tesla broke the law in this case, but I do not really agree with the ruling and the law. Musk should be allowed to present the possible downsides.
We've tried this. People died over it. We enacted laws to prevent it from happening, so that labor can stand on equal ground with capital.
Economies without property rights in capital do not. They may have other (and even more significant) problems, but they don't have that one.
I was referring to historical low tech, small community societies, not any places integrated enough with the modern global economic to have “givedirectly recipient stories”. But, that aside:
> Almost everyone uses their money to invest in their home, livestock, or children's education
Neither a home nor children's education is capital. Livestock is, but plenty of historical societies didn't feature private ownership of livestock (though it's probably one of the oldest forms of private capital.)
No, there aren't. There are plenty of countries built on Leninist (and it's descendants, including Maoist) ideology, which advertise themselves as being Marxist as well, but Leninism sharply deviates from Marxism on a number of key points largely because Marxism is grounded in the necessity of starting with mature capitalism, and Lenin wanted a shortcut for the USSR (and later movements following Lenin likewise sought to bypass, rather than develope through and from, mature capitalism.)
Also, recognition of the existence of the conflict within capitalism that Marx’s proposals sought to address isn't the same thing as advocating Marxism.
What is undisputable is that these are three different things:
1. Recognizing the conflict between labor and capital as a real and significant factor in capitalist society, and
2. Advocating Marxism, and
3. Advocating Leninism.
The societies in which Marxism has been most broadly applied are the developed “capitalist” societies, which have generally evolved from what Marx described as capitalism to what has been called (among other things) as “the modern mixed economy”, by adopting both elements of programs of various (in many cases, Marxist) critics of capitalism, or compromise positions.
There are also societies, which never were mature capitalist societies, that have tried to bypass mature capitalism and apply the Leninist course. Advocates laissez-faire capitalism like to point to these as a broad argument against socialism, while advocates of non-Leninist socialism tend to point to them as as arguments against the Leninism as a useful approach to socialism, whether or not they accept it as a genuine socialism.
Nah, the real conflict, if any, is labor and capital vs land.
But as capital has matured, capital as a class has effectively subsumed the landed class, largely by driving land into fee-simple ownership.
Henry George wrote his analysis not under feudalism, but in the US.
See eg https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/07/22/piketty-... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
Marx's ideas were fundamentally negative in nature. He was opposed to things, and had sharp and perceptive critiques of capitalism, but he didn't really present an alternative. To the extent that he did articulate a vision, it doesn't really seem like, e.g. Sweden would really fit the bill, though.
It's at least as fair as it is to call Leninism Marxist.
> Marx didn't really advocate anything in particular in terms of economic organization.
Yes, he did.
> Leninism was able to fill the void in the way that it did.
Leninism didn't fill a void, it made deliberate changes to apply to very different conditions those addresses by Marx’s writing (which addressed mature capitalist societies and where he saw that they should go next to resolve problems he saw as inherent to their system.)
> but he didn't really present an alternative.
Yes, he did, though Marx was very big on path dependency, so his recommendations were more specific when directed at more specific conditions. Capital is pretty pure critique of the then-status-quo, The Communist Manifesto has a fairly broad program, but narrower and less-well-known works like the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, Programme of the French Workers Party have quite specific policy proposals.
> Capital is pretty pure critique of the then-status-quo
Yep.
> The Communist Manifesto has a fairly broad program
The Communist Manifesto doesn't do much policy proposing. Workers owning the means of production is about as far as it goes, and to the extent that that his Marx's proposal...that isn't realized anywhere in Europe.
> but narrower and less-well-known works like the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/03/24.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ou...
These are both pretty short and vague, but they are policy proposals. However, they are both pretty clearly not an articulation of his vision for the post-revolution society he describes in The Communist Manifesto. They are pragmatic demands for political parties to make of their governments.
Let's compare. The Communist Manifesto:
> In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
Demands of the communist party in Germany:
> 15. Introduction of strongly progressive taxes and abolition of taxes on consumption.
So, here's the fundamental issue: When Marx is specific, he's mild. His specific ideas are totally bland, and not at all unique to him. He would be a footnote of history if his specific ideas were all he said. When we refer to "Marxism", we refer to the actually novel idea: Abolition of private property. But of course, it is here that he is vague. He gives no indication of how a society without private property might actually function. And it is into exactly that void that Leninism stepped. It did so because it had no choice.
Lenin understood that they didn't have a revolution to institute a minimum wage. They had a revolution to abolish private property. But Marx had no clue how to manage such a society, and as it turns out, neither did Lenin.
This is simply not true, except in the most pedantic and disingenuous sense.
There were violent strikes by some groups of unionized workers, that broke the law, and that resulted in some deaths, if that's what you're referring to. There is absolutely no reason this thuggery should have been rewarded by giving the strikers what they demanded, which was the abrogation of the company owners' private property and contracting rights.
As it happened, US industry, and with it US wages, grew much faster before society gave into the unions, when the US was still a free market where people had a sacred right to freely contract.
Unless you're also happy about shooting people starting a union or striking, you should read this article to learn why this is a really bad idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...
Mostly I wanted to give a bit more historic context. Japan is arguably a more productive economy and a better place to live than India, and Pseudoerasmus suggests that this is at least partly because labour was not able to mount as effective a defense as in India.
To belabour that point: Fred says at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPINA156NRUG that the labour share of GDP in India is something above 50%.
Japan is also something above 50%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPJPA156NRUG
India's GDP per capita is about 1.9k USD. The number for Japan is about 40k USD.
So even in the hypothetical world where Indian labour would somehow be so strong it would capture 100% of GDP, that would still be only about 10% of what Japanese workers get.
Now, of course, any nuanced argument will take into account that labour suppression wasn't the only difference between Japan and India.
But the important thing is that this shifts the context of the argument: instead of a knee-jerk attitude of 'unions are obviously good for workers in the long run', we have some more explaining to do.
(With sufficient mental gymnastics, you might stil be able to argue that unions and strong labour in general is good for standard of living. But at least now you have to engage in that gymnastics.)
That's their prerogative.
Also FWIW Musk clarified that he was talking about the fact that no UAW employees have stock options at any other company.
Not sure what the laws are. There might be laws saying that you can't discriminate against people in unions, so in order not to hand stock options to unionized employees, they might have to withhold stock options from all employees?
(No clue, just speculating.)
I mean yes. And then a union could strike. At which point elon would have a decision to make: is proving a dumb point worth his business?
> Also FWIW Musk clarified
Presumably on lawyers advice.
> no UAW employees have stock options at any other company.
But that,as others have explained, isn't relevant. Nothing stops the Tesla union from maintaining those perks, and options aren't valuable at most auto companies anyway, so aiming for different perks is superior.
When a direct relationship exists between the parties, this is a possibility. When there is a third party dictating what happens, this is much less realistic.
> [...] because otherwise they could be demanding something more valuable?
Like twice as many stock options? I'm a bit confused. Stock options are fungible. You can make granting of stock options worth arbitrary many dollars, by eg increasing the volume or lowering the strike price etc.