Doesn't generally seem supported by data.

E.g. https://www.fiftybyfifty.org/2021/06/workers-at-cooperatives...

Elsewhere I've seen some reporting on cooperatives report lower satisfaction on some metrics, usually suspected to be exactly because worker cooperatives tend to give employees more of a stake and so stress levels around the future of the business may be higher.

At the same time, it is flawed to focus on any purported notion that they don't optimize for "worker happiness" because workers decide what they optimize for. And so that may or may not be "happiness" for any given coop, but it certainly does mean optimizing for what workers care about.

Comparing that to, I presume the notion of e.g. the Soviet Union as representative of "communism", where workers had near no say in what the dicators imposed on them, seems to be a rather crass and gross misrepresentation when used as a comparison for workers coops where they do have a say.

> just like how communism

There is some kind of derangement in the English speaking West, any attempt to reign in power of capital must be communist.

If free public libraries didn't exist and were proposed today, they'd be accused of communism. If free public legal deference did not exist today, anyone proposing it would be accused of being a communist. Also notice that using public money to hurt a person, i.e. prosecution, is never accused of an ideology.

These sort of comparisons are deeply unhelpful and only betray illiteracy of the accuser.

I'm just being pedantic but "free public libraries" don't really exist though.

They are paid for by property owners via tax millages rates on their homes.

Most people support this but none are free since the public pays for em.

It is pedantic, in as much as when people use "free", we are very aware that it means "free at the point of use", and so pointing out that they are paid for is unnecessary.

>There is some kind of derangement in the English speaking West, any attempt to reign in power of capital must be communist.

I do believe corporatism is a problem with modernity. That being said, the article does sound fairly similar to "workers must own the means of production". Are we not in the ballpark of Marx, for better or worse?

No, this is socialism as best. Not communism.

This criticism would carry more weight if this entire thread wasn't full of snippets of communist fanfic about using legal force to try to upend reality and ending the profit motive for companies and enforcing worker collectives.

> using legal force to try to upend reality

You mean like how we upended reality in 2008 to save corrupt institutions and/or incompetent institutions? And then again during COVID? And then again to save Silicon Valley Bank?

You pretend that current situation some kind of natural state of affairs, when in reality it is a result of ‘legal force for me but not for the’

None of those things are reality, those are how we chose as a society to interface with it. Now that they've happened, they form a part of the fabric of reality, that is the history of the universe and humanity as a species. When I say "upend reality", I mean the idealist delusions that commies hold about the nature of entropy, the nature of humanity (acting like greed doesn't exist, forgetting the iron law of bureaucracy), and the nature of the world (eat or be eaten).

Yes some people hold different views on the nature of humanity. That doesn't mean they're delusional, it just means they're different.

Personally, no I don't think greed is intrinsic. I think its learned. I also don't think its eat or be eaten. I think that's learned, ingrained, to benefit the most powerful.

I think 99% of people are good and just want a decent life. They don't care about having more or being better.

The problem is those people are trying to intellectualize animals. Humans are animals. We, presumably, have free will. We, presumably, have rationality. While these traits make us higher order animals, we are still animals, and the law of the jungle always applies. It is delusional to act otherwise, because when push comes to shove if it's a choice between starvation/death or nearly any alternative, people will choose the alternative every time, which includes violent acts, acts of greed, and all manner of despicable things. I'm not even making a moral argument here, morals are irrelevant. Morals are a fiction created by people to philosophize our own societies. But the reality of the world transcends humanity and we cannot avoid it.

Humans are animals by technicality only. We have higher thinking. Again, what you're stating is an opinion and nothing more. There's nobody anywhere saying you're right. Just you, and your beliefs. Which is fine, but when you act like your beliefs are divined from God, that is what we consider delusions of grandeur.

Yes morals are made up. Everything is made up. Everything is a social construct. "the world" (I assume you mean evil and greed?) does not supersede that. Because if you kill someone you go to jail, and jail is real. Don't believe me? Try it out.

The law of the jungle is... well... something you made up. Sorry. That may apply to your dog. But for the people I know, many would sooner end their own lives than doing something that distasteful. Hell, I've known many to end their own lives for much much less. Point being, it doesn't actually work this way.

> But for the people I know, many would sooner end their own lives than doing something that distasteful.

You bring up jail in the same breath you say that. The plural of anecdote is not evidence, and you've provided equal weighting to both that people will do terrible things and that some people will not. At the very least, presumably that's evidence of free will. Either way, it has no bearing on the iron law of nature.

Just because civilization exists, and we exist within it, does not mean that we have overcome our basest nature, we only hold it at bay, presumably by choice.

> Morals are a fiction created by people to philosophize our own societies.

This is preposterous, and frankly quite uninformed. It is especially ironic coming from you, since you are going round and accusing other people of being delusional.

We have iron-clad proof that cavemen took care of members of their tribe that were born crippled, and of the elderly. For no benefit to themselves. We have evidence of morals going back thousands of years. This is a topic well researched by anthropologists, and is not up for debate.

That's what the word 'civilisation' means - civilised behaviour and ethical standards. The people who think you can have a complex society, but have no respect for morals, are frankly savages.

It is unfortunately quite common to come across people in technology that have great talents, but they are as informed and society and civics as a high-scooler.

The other day I came across libertarians who think parents should have no obligations to feed their children and should not be held accountable if the child dies, because freedom. Might as well be speaking to Neanderthals.

> This is preposterous, and frankly quite uninformed.

I actually studied moral philosophy in a relatively well-respected institution (although I did drop out prior to getting any form of degree). Nothing I have learned about the world has ever indicated that there is any such thing as a moral absolute, although there are certain moral principles that tend to be enforced by most societies across history. You are arguing a position that both presupposes moral relativism and presupposes moral absolutism, and both cannot be true at once. At best, you are applying pragmatism towards your own political and economic beliefs and searching for post-hoc rationalizations, but the argument you have made in this entire thread is neither complete nor internally consistent.

> because when push comes to shove if it's a choice between starvation/death or nearly any alternative, people will choose the alternative every time

Every time? Nonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_children_first has multiple documented examples to the contrary.

> You are arguing a position that moral absolutism,

Not by my reading; the argument was that iron clad examples of moral behaviour exist, not that we all share a core moral absolutism.

> although I did drop out prior to getting any form of degree

Not a suprise. To be fair even had you graduated you'd hardly be the Peter Singer of moral philosphy and those that attain such heights are not without counter argument.

Maybe lay off the "I'm an (almost) expert and this is my strawman" comments, they're clearly weak and cast you in a poor light.

I don't claim to be an expert, just somebody with thoughts and opinions. It was a response to someone saying I was uninformed. I am not uninformed, I am well educated on the topic.

Like most people, I am not an expert in most things, only in a very narrow subset of things. My expertise lies in some areas of technology, not really elsewhere. There is a vast gap between being an expert and being uninformed, it's not a binary distinction.

> Every time? Nonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_children_first has multiple documented examples to the contrary.

I think it was clear that my statement of 'every time' was not to be taken literally.

I don't think we're going to construct a well-supported moral framework defined in the most literal terms in the context of a set of comments on a website.

Nothing anyone has responded to me with in any way supports the idea that communism is something that aligns with reality and is anything more than a fantasy for idealists.

Free will is an utterly delusional, irrational concept driven by religious belief, not logic.

It's amusing, because you'd agree more with Marx than with those "commies" with those "idealist delusions" you mention.

E.g. Critique of the Gotha Programme has a whole sections where Marx rips the then still largely Marxist precursor of the SPD for trusting the state too much, for not understanding that equal opportunity means distribution can't be equal, and The German Ideology has Marx pointing out that "eat or be eaten" means socialism according to him is impossible in a society that isn't rich enough to meet sufficient needs to remove poverty entirely through redistribution.

Overall, Marx central thesis is that workers being forced into a choice of "eat or be eaten" is what he believed would eventually force them to rise up and end capitalism once capital gains sufficient upper hand to drive labour costs down so much it's rising up or starving.

These "idealist delusions" about greed not existing annoyed him enough that there's a whole section in the Communist Manifesto mocking them, and the reason Marx and Engels used the term "communist" instead of "socialist" was to set themselves apart from socialist movements that believed that people could just be convinced to stop being greedy.

If society isn't driven by greed, that would invalidate the central theses of Marxist communism. All of his core predictions rests on the assumptions that greed is what drives the evolution of capitalism towards a stage where he believed workers would eventually not put greed aside but understand that the way to maximise their own benefits would be to work together to strip capitalist of power and wealth.

Whether or not we think he was right or wrong about that, it's in any case clear that the major inspiration of communist ideologies explicitly rejected the notion of ending greed.

The funny thing is that Marx wanted the working class to be armed, and in Critique of the Gotha Programme, he called out the US school system as far preferable to the state-controlled school system proposed by what is now SPD (he argued the Prussian state was in need of an education by the people and shouldn't be put in a position of providing an education to the people). A lot of the people who call everything communism would be very uncomfortable with how many things they agreed with him on if they read any Marx (not because they are left wing, but because a lot of what was radical policy at the time is settled now, but also because already then a schism was developing between those on the left who favoured the state as a tool to transform society, and those who feared it as a potential oppressor, and Marx got increasingly critical of the state with age; where in 1848 he argued for state monopolies, by 1872, after the Paris Commune he criticised them for not having gone far enough in smashing state institutions, and by 1875 he criticised the now-SPD for trusting the reform potential of the Prussian state too much, such as with respect to education as above)