this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Socialists don't hate markets, they hate workers not having any power or democratic choice in how they interact in the market.
Workers owning the means of production just means the workers are doing the same work but they are in ownership of the factory and the profits. They will still sell the products they produce in a marketplace.
Do they actually trust their coworkers to run the company without tanking it almost immediatly? Most of my coworkers can barely make it through their own tasks without fucking something up, let alone actually having input on how the business is run.
if you dont raise your children to be adults, they won't act like adults when they grow up. A revolution would mean people learning entirely new skills, like making decisions in the workplace. Most workers have no agency, theyre treated like machines, so I dont expect people raised in that society to know how to run a completely different one from scratch. Revolution is a process, it has to be built. Keep shitting on your coworkers tho, im sure its a productive activity
They can't even learn to do the tasks they are expected to do now. Even with frequent coaching. How the fuck can you expect them to learn to make business decisions?
You've clearly never worked close with anyone making business decisions in the real world.
I used to work for a food type company and the way they decided to import and sell stuff locally was if the board of directors (the CEO who inherited the company from daddy + his siblings) liked the item. They hired someone, my coworker, to actually run the market tests and everything and then promptly ignored any suggestion she had to make about the viability of this product on the local market, instead relegating her to a busser that was in charge of ordering the samples they decided they wanted.
I remember one item nobody liked (they would give us the remaining samples in the break room like some dogs getting the leftovers), but one of the siblings liked it and they got that close to putting it on the market because of it.
That all tracks
I have so many stories from there. At the end of the year they would sell the soon to be expired stock to the employees for like half the price. On paper it was half (you're just giving money back to your employer so fuck them I stole as much food as I could), but the person who actually took the money was super nice and often gave us further discounts. For them the difference was like a decimal in accounting.
They announced these sales by email with the time and date. And in 2020, the year of covid, when half the workforce was working from home, they made the sale as usual. I learned afterwards that on that morning, the siblings who owned the company went and parked their cars right in front of the warehouse where the sale took place, and filled the trunk with as much stuff as they could. Then 2 hours later the sale happened and there was almost nothing left.
Technically legal but a fucking shitty thing to do lol, your job is to have a blurry monitor and pretend to do Excel sheets and you drive a Porsche, I think you have the means to load up your car at the store like a grown adult if you need to.
same way we expect students in 9th grade to be capable of more complicated tasks once they're in 12th grade. The nature of labor in capitalist countries is to sort out wheat from chaffe. "Good" workers become managers (although this is theoretical, ive had plenty of shitty managers), leaving the "bad" workers down at the bottom. This how the economy works right now, but it doesnt always have to. For example, unions sometimes have a probation period where you work as a temp, then join the union after a month or two. This gives you time to learn the job, before you have a say in how things are organized.
I have more thoughts, but im working rn 😝
These days it's mainly external hires, but it used to be you got promoted to incompetence. You do a job well, you get promoted. You don't do it well and you don't get promoted. Thus you get stuck doing something you're bad at
Sounds like you’ve just got some shitty coworkers, m8. Or are you talk about your direct reports?
Sounds like a structural issue. Your coworkers are overworked or underpaid or not informed correctly for the job they're given. Maybe they know they're not skilled, but the job is the only one available to them and since they need the money they're stuck doing something theyre unskilled at. These are but a few systemic problems that might lie to reason.
Ask yourself this: If all your coworkers are bad at their job, are you just an extra special boy, or might there be something wrong going on?