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[deleted] wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by celebratedrecluse in by !deleted24215

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celebratedrecluse wrote

What sort of source would you find helpful? I can try to find one that illustrates what you would like cited.

Worker's direct ownership over the means of business and production is what I am talking about, the degree of this reorganized ownership (whether just in one business, one trade, one nation's economy, or the world economy) is the difference between cooperativism, socialism, and communism. All of these, still have valid critiques levied against them on the basis of ecology and anti-industrialism, critique of market dynamics, critique of etc. You are right to worry about how it is applied, it is hardly a silver bullet for addressing capitalism, and a misinterpretation of worker's control (abstracting it into unions, the state, etc) leads easily to neoliberal recuperation, authoritarianism and statism, etc problems.

The devil is in the details, but the fundamental ideas can be expressed in this way to get people on board with having the discussion of those details. The first step, is to recognize there are problems with capitalism. The second step, is to offer a very general framework for beginning to articulate something that would be more desirable than capitalism as it exists today. Just my two cents.

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[deleted] wrote

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celebratedrecluse wrote

Hm. I'm not sure if any source I can find will help, because it sounds like the people you are talking to have a material vested interest in supporting capitalism, because they benefit from it greatly. but you can make some points to chip away at the pro-capitalism stance, by highlighting some of the contradictions. Here are some suggestions, you might want to use these or not in your conversations depending on how they would be appropriate or not rhetorically for your audience:

every big company, for example like Amazon and Wal-Mart and other American big companies, they all have internal central planning. Even the franchised ones, have coordination within and between workplaces, standardization of prices, vertical and horizontal integration to some degree. That is, within their company, they do central planning and accounting, because it's the only efficient way for them to operate. However, when planning things in a coordinated way among an industry is proposed, the "common sense" is that this won't work for some reason, but it is not explained why this would not work.

Paying people living wages and providing support to those who cannot work increases spending which benefits the health of that economy more than giving money to institutions, companies, or the wealthiest people. At this time with the pandemic, it is the best way to stimulate the economy and keep it from falling apart.

Places which prioritized the pandemic response and successfully repelled the disease to negligible levels, have had the best economic recoveries from the pandemic. Vice versa, too.

Fiat money is arbitrarily decided in value by centralized institutions. Relying on money in postmodernity decreases self-reliance and personal responsibility in society, because it makes people depend on systems which can be arbitrarily manipulated to become highly unstable or serve irrational priorities, rather than developing and honing skills which are genuinely useful to real people. For example, the way that healthcare workers are quitting in large numbers due to mistreatment and overwork in the pandemic, while there is a huge surplus of unemployable lawyers.

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