Worker cooperatives are fully compatible with capitalism. Only mentioning it because sometimes this idea gets unfairly maligned due to some mistaken association with socialism or even communism. There should be more of these sorts of entities in the USA and Europe, and frankly everywhere. It's an assured route towards better conditions for the working class, by making them owners and stakeholders in a more substantial way than merely holding some stock equity (which is kind of a superficial ownership that's sometimes presented as this same type of worker cooperative ownership).
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, especially Green and Blue Mars, provide a nice fictional exploration of this idea. I think Mondragon may even be name dropped.
Capitalism is not simply free markers - it means "control by people with capital." People control society proportionally to how much capital they have, and those who control vast boards of capital are very uninterested in allowing capital to be spread around more equitably.
I would say that capitalism is not only characterized by private ownership of capital, but also by free market for labor, which could be almost considered a complementary feature (other side of the same coin).
On the other hand, socialism primarily rejects free market for labour in favor of worker emancipation and participation in decision-making. So both socialism and capitalism are compatible with free markets; it's the labor market where the opinion differs.
(As a socialist, I would add, salaries cannot be treated in economics the same way as e.g. price of apples, because apple doesn't care what its price is.)
Control by billionaires is incompatible with free markets. A billionaire will always use his power to close up the market and grant himself a monopoly.
Socialism is completely incompatible with free markets. Free markets typically stop being opinionated beyond the concept of enforcing contracts/consent, i.e. people are allowed to structure their economic relationships with one another however they want, they just have to respect their agreements.
Socialism is a prescriptive ideology, it is concerned precisely with the nature of the economic relationships people make. Labor theory of value. "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs." Workers own the means of production. To the degree that people are able to freely structure their economic relationships with one another, then the vast majority of those relationships will look nothing like the prescriptions of socialism. To the degree that the economic relationships are made to look like the prescriptions of socialism, then the economic model would fail to be described as a free market.
This is why in a free market/"capitalist" economy, communes can exist, Mondragon can exist...because you can structure your relationships with one another however you want. It's just that most people don't like that structure. "Capitalism" itself doesn't care at all if that's the way people want to distribute equity and control of the corporation. Now, if you want to structure an arbitrary economic relationship in a socialist communist country...good luck.
I often wonder if these classifications have long outlived their usefulness, and only lead to endless, often heated, ideological discussions about their definition. To the extent that those benefiting most from observably-broken-form-of-global-capitalism can use that as a tool to sow division and strife and ensure nothing changes. The gist of your and parent's comment is the interesting bit, where new systems and mechanisms are discussed.
I don't think it's a tool for sowing division. There is a significant group of self-proclaimed socialists who proudly stan the Soviet Union and Mao's China, so I think it's more of a case of ideologies being more messy than they seem.
Personally, I don't care as much about the label themselves as I do about the relationships they describe behind.
Not sure why this comment is downvoted. In the context of Marxian Socialism and Command Economies, it's very much true that socialism is incompatible with free markets.
Going even further, without a free market for labour, there's no true worker emancipation. Even with "worker-ownership" (read corporate-ownership under a democratic governance), each worker's power is still diluted by the governing body (which, funnily enough, means socialism strengthens capitalism as "control by those who own capital" while weakening capitalism as "free markets").
I didn't downvote it (obviously), but, for starters, it confuses socialism with communism (and also makes a typical categorical error in assuming that FEATTATEATTN is an implementation rather than desired value).
Second, it confuses capitalism (existing systems) with free market (some kind of ideal). It also pretends "free market" is a value neutral proposition. That completely ignores real-world role played by property, information, money and other multiparty relationships that socialism (and other regulations) try to address.
Third, it ignores the fact that socialism has been, not extensively, but successfully, implemented in the real world. (Mondragon and other worker coops, postwar tripartity models of worker participation in company control, etc.)
Lastly, it treats "free market" as an all-or-nothing proposition, which is never the case. There is, for example, no free market for nuclear bombs or for human children, and for a good reason.
Which brings us to your second paragraph, why rejecting free market can emancipate the workers. Treating labor as a commodity means that the person who performs the labor loses their decision power to the market, and so they lose freedom. Thus socialism demands that you do not separate human from the labor, and so they should always have a say over conditions in which they perform the labor. (This is different from other commodities, which, being inanimate objects, do not have a say about how they are used.) Accepting that free market for labor shouldn't exist is not really that different from accepting that free market for slaves shouldn't exist; in both cases there is human freedom attached which shouldn't be simply subjugated to the decisions of the "free market".
I would also say that worker coops show that your 2nd paragraph is empirically untrue. (Which is also bad for that model, because they often struggle to find capital, most of it being owned by
capitalists who demand control over it.)
In regards to socialist/communist confusion, OP primarily refers using the term "socialism", except at the end where they use "socialist communist countries", likely referring to the self-proclaimed socialist countries that strive/strived towards communism. (I'm not sure FEATTATEATTN means here)
> There is, for example, no free market for nuclear bombs or for human children, and for a good reason.
Reasons that don't contradict OP's: "Free markets typically stop being opinionated beyond the concept of enforcing contracts/consent." Nuclear bombs only current purpose is indiscriminate eradication of human life and child trafficking is well... child trafficking. They all break consent. The same can be said about slavery, but not labour.
Which brings to the core of this discussion: the free market of labour. The addition of the free market of labour cannot, on its own, result in loss of self-control by either party. Removing it, however, rewards those who benefit the most from the current arrangement, which is most likely to be the employers.
While commodities, and other conventional properties, indeed do not have a will of their own; once appropriated, they become an extension of the will of their owner. With this in mind, labour, capital and commodities aren't different: neither the human actions applied to make bread, nor the machines needed to make bread nor the bread itself care about their prices or how they are used, but their owners do. In both cases, the same human freedoms are being affected in the same way. Slavery is special because the traded resource in question is another human being, someone capable of self-ownership, and the slaver isn't simply dictating on, for sake of simplicity, non-essential part of their body as with labour and commodities, but the slave's whole body and life, thus violating the consent part.
Which segways to your final paragraph. When I mentioned "worker-ownership", I was specifically alluding to worker coops. They not only do not prove what I said untrue, they, both theoretically and empirically (but mostly theoretically, yet), prove it true. One empirical part is the fact that Mondragon's increasing reliance on contractors, for instance. But, more interestingly, is the fact that, presuming that all ~70,000 Mondragon employees are members (they aren't), each would have around 0,0014% share. Given that Mondragon works under indirect democracy, this share doesn't even translate to direct influence. Is this painting the image of worker emancipation? Notice how the corporate power over the individual is still strong - sure smells like capitalism, as defined as "control by those who own capital", except "those" here is a corporation, which is not that different from today.
Given that you brought the slavery, likely for the analogy with wage-slavery - trying to fix workers by making their employers democratic is like solving slavery by making their slavers republics. The proper solution is to give direct private ownership over the means of production to all, but that's likely economically infeasible (but who knows, society where everyone is a capitalist like this would be neat). However, we can fix the issue with coops previously by keeping them small, but to handle the large contingency of workers and their diversity, a lot more coops would need to exist. Furthermore, these coops would need to be able triage workers that fit into their culture, and worker would need to be able to chose coops that satifify them. That implies a free market of labour. It points to the issue being more located in the concentration of power on people, not individuals, which means socialism can't do anything to fix this, specially if it implies getting rid of the free market of labour. Perhaps pushing for coops can help prevent corporate power concentration, but a healthy free market of labour is critical.
> The addition of the free market of labour cannot, on its own, result in loss of self-control by either party.
I disagree with this, and it's less true in theory than in practice. The free market is deliberately engineered to push down price to cost of production. In terms of labor, it means your remuneration will be reduced to subsistence wage, and not more. An apple doesn't care about its price, but price of your labor determines your living standard and your freedom.
And where this doesn't happen in the real world, it is actually a consequence of labor market failure, for example, labor negotiations through unions.
(There are also other labor market failures that prop the wages upwards, for example for CEOs.)
So I am not sure how you imagine free market for labor to help workers unless you assume a market failure of some sort.
The individual share of worker within a coop might be low, but it's still better than 0 under a private (capitalist owned) company. Moreover, all the value produced gets redistributed to the workers, not just a portion. (And I agree here that outsourcing Mondragon is bad.)
> That implies a free market of labor.
No it doesn't. Free market of labor is more than just a free choice of job, it also means that people who are not involved in the job itself might dictate the conditions of production (for example, it implies no labor laws, so you might die in the summer heat as a consequence). And it is by design.
(I was appalled to find that Hayek defended mining towns. Freedom to change the job my ass!)
> The free market is deliberately engineered to push down price to cost of production
The free market is not deliberately engineered for any particular goal, except the free trade between parties. Fundamentally, it's a trading and information system.
Technically speaking, market prices only seek an equilibrium point between supplier and consumers. While, due to human ambitions, there's an empirical pressure for commodities' prices to go down, human labour is different. In case of commodities, you can scale all aspects of productions as long as there are enough. Whereas commodities are constrained by environment, human labour is constrained by the environment and ethics, as you can't just produce people, a hard requirement for human labour. As such, I find that the only cases in which people will be paid subsitance wages are when there's a oversupply of workers and an undersupply of businesses.
> So I am not sure how you imagine free market for labor to help workers unless you assume a market failure of some sort.
Because restricting worker/employer relations only makes it harder for switching firms, which empirically favors the more scarce side, which normally is the employers. Making these firms coops doesn't prevent lack of control, as elaborated bellow.
> The individual share of worker within a coop might be low, but it's still better than 0 under a private (capitalist owned) company.
The thing is, shares on their own are not ownership proper (the same applies to publicly traded companies, BTW) as it's exclusive. A share is percentage of influence over a corporate process that determines the final allocation of the corporately-owned resources. While the share division might be quasi-continuous, the final decisions are discrete and made by the corporation, for the corporation. In the context of a direct democratic governance, everyone will get a vote, but this vote will only translate into control if it falls in the required majority of a decision. In practical terms, having 1% share doesn't mean you have 1% control over the resources of the company: if a worker consistently fall under minority over all elections, they have effectively 0 control. Alternatively, they might find themself having their way in all elections. Despite having the same shares, two worker may have different levels of influence over the corporation. And that's just direct democracy. Indirect democracy, seem in large worker coops, make this distribution of control even messier. Ultimately, this is all to say that worker coops are still private corporations in the sense that they both alienate individual workers. The details of this alienation may be different from traditional individually owned private corps, but this is not the path for worker freedom. For disenfranchised workers, their only option is to find another corporation that better aligns with their values and goals.
Also, value getting redistributed to workers isn't exclusive of worker coops. Stock options, ESOPs, etc. aren't exactly rare in other private corp formats.
> Free market of labor is more than just a free choice of job, it also means that people who are not involved in the job itself might dictate the conditions of production
How so? In a free market, the only ones actually dictating the conditions is the supplier (the worker) and the consumer (the employer). The employer is the one providing the job, so they are involved by definition. The market often informs the employer in their decisions, but this influence is always consented, not forced. (Also, one cannot consent to their own death, no need for labor laws to state that.)
Finally, not sure why you just freely mentioned Hayek without elaborating. I also would like a citation, for the only reference I got was:
> There are, undeniably, occasions when the condition of employment creates an opportunity for true coercion. In periods of acute unemployment, the threat of dismissal may be used to enforce actions other than those originally contracted for. And in conditions such as those in a mining town the manager may well exercise an entirely arbitrary and capricious tyranny over a man to whom he has taken a dislike. But such conditions, though not impossible, would, at the worst, be rare exceptions in a prosperous competitive society. (Hayek 2013: 204)
It should be noted that Hayek would consider such dismissal coercive if the action was to result in the unemployed's ruin. As such, wouldn't call this a defense of mining towns.
It is quintessential socialism: collective ownership (of the “means of production”).
It is just embedded in a market system, just as, say, USSR or Cuba was embedded in the global economy.
That doesn’t make it not socialist.
And not all socialism is “bad”. It has to do with whether it is voluntary or not. I am a libertarian, and I fully support communes, housing cooperatives, credit unions and the like. I consider the lack of a superfluous extractive landlord or shareholder class a feature.
It is not a mistaken association. Socialism traditionally meant workers control over production. Work councils in Germany originally pursued direct workers control over respective businesses. Unions in Germany pursued some version of this well into the 1950s. Most socialist movements in Europe understood this to _be_ Socialism until the Soviet counter-revolution swept it all away.
And there is another forgotten truth. Before the Soviet counter-revolution, liberals advocated for this type of Socialism.
The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.
It remains confusing that, after centuries of profiting off capital generally being a much better strategic choice than profiting off labour, workers insist and persist in trying to make labour work.
If the unions had dumped their efforts into co-ops instead of trying to fight their own companies then they might have managed to have a positive impact. They've been at it for long enough for capital accumulation to have kicked in even at pathetic rates of saving.
You may be surprised to learn that if one does not have capital, yet does have the capacity to labour, then one may seek to make labour work rather than profiting from capital.
to be fair, in the pharoahs quest for immortality after death, if they could have put their pyramid burial tombs in space to avoid decay/ruin for longer they would have. I wouldn't be shocked to see the oligarchs paying for their own space burials inside very lavish satellites whose orbit won't decay for thousands of years so they can "live forever".
It's not about the "Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning."
Since you are right. All of these things are available on Earth for far cheaper, with better ROI and with far less risk of dying or getting early cancer from cosmic rays.
The real benefit is a commanding lead over geopolitical rivals in the domain of satellites and satellite platforms for hosting devices in orbit, thus securing an insurmountable national security advantage.
> By soul I mean "the part of you that is an observer"
This is a nice notion, but it's not how the existing literature (going back very long) generally uses the term "soul." Conventionally speaking the term soul is theological and has ties to modes of spiritual salvation as it is considered a substance that persists beyond human mortality. What you're describing seems more like the term "self" or "ego" or "conscious awareness" as those terms are used in philosophy. You're welcome to create your own definitions, but if they trample over the prior art of the terms in literature that is hundreds if not thousands of years old then that's going to almost certainly lead to the confusion you say you're noticing among people.
for what it's worth my drawing of "the part of me that is the observer" would look like some subset of the brain.
Also that the "spiritual world" (i.e. religion) in America has been colonized by money, consumption and commodities as well, which has drained all the spirituality from it. Religion in America is as desolate of meaning and sustenance as the American Western Frontier. You have to be a heretic to find spirituality that's worth anything here.
The Slate truck might be the only one to have less digital tracking just due to how they are skipping so many electronic bells and whistles to keep costs in the $20k range.
Though demand for heating should be falling simultaneously, no? I wonder what the net CO2 tradeoff is there. At least historically with burning fuels to create heat, that likely contributed more per unit of degree-change than AC, however with Heat pumps now that's probably either a wash or reversed, if I had to guess.
Yeah, there is a lot more energy spent for heating, https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/homes.php. Climate change is a problem, but this narrative that poor people near the tropics will needs to use some energy, the world is ending is kinda gross. Even with ACs they will only use a fraction of the energy of people living in Finland or Canada. Plus, the energy they do use will have a lower carbon footprint.
WhatsApp, famously launched and served millions of users with a small team using Elixir. Seems to me that speaks to the language's production capability, or enterprise capability, if you will. Considering that, can you go more into detail about your assertion here?
> But for a long list of reasons, I wouldn't use it for anything other than prototyping/hobby projects.
It's an interesting topic, but it seems that presenting an opposing viewpoint is generally downvoted on Hackernews (and likely other social media), so I'm not sure it's worth spending the time.
My position is pragmatic, from a managerial economics perspective, of maximizing value and reducing risk. I suspect that Elixir attracts a fair amount of language enthusiasts, who are somewhat biased when they evaluated the business value of a language choice.
WhatsApp/Discord is a very specific use case, of needing a high number of concurrent users that expect real-time messages when to the same session (e.g. chat/chatroom, "Bob is typing...").
AFAIK, BEAM excels at immutability (lots of reads, like readers in a chatroom) and concurrency (vertical scalability).
So those are not appropriate reference use cases for the typical user.
BEAM is notoriously slow, and has been bottom-ranking in Techempower benchmarks.
Although that seems to have improved in recent years.
The over simplification here is that not all plants are equal and not all soils and/or climes can support all plants. So for soils or climes that can only really grow "weeds" that are inedible to humans, if you put them through an animal (specifically a ruminant), then it converts biomass that is inedible to edible for humans.
The effect of this on your diagrams is in diagram 2, with the intermediate farm animal, there are many situations in that scenario where the calories from those plants would be entirely lost, not simply rerouted losslessly to human consumption.
That's a great question. It's actually hard to get this type of data. I once tried to calculate something adjacent by looking at feedstock production, but actually a lot of feedstock is used for 'biofuel'.
My knowledge comes from exposure to the agricultural industry. You might be able to find some animals grazing on a grassy hill, but that doesn't scale. In addition, most NA climates don't support year long grazing.
