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> ...between 1971 and 2018, 3,280 trade unionists were murdered in Colombia.
> Is there a solution? Not within this system. No amount of union organizing or progressive legislation will alter the nature of work in it.
Why are they killing the union leaders if unionization does not work? The massive push by large industries to get unions out of the mix indicates that unions helps workers massively. Collective bargaining changes everything for the workers as companies are forced to give them a much larger part of the value they produce. A society where people make good money also creates a positive spiral of consumption which makes it much easier for others to create well paying jobs as well - when people actually have money to spend.
In 1985, FARC entered a peace process and began working electorally and non-violently. The right never went for this and despite the government agreeing to a peace settlement, the right slaughtered political candidates, trade union leaders, etc. So eventually FARC reformed and began its armed campaign again. Something to think about for complaints about FARC "terrorism" from 1985 on. Actually they began doing so well that the US began having to bankroll the Colombian military with Plan Colombia (not a new thing, Kennedy was doing the same thing on a smaller scale).
> Why are they killing the union leaders if unionization does not work?
They're killing union organizers because unionization _does_ work... when the organizers don't die in the middle of setting up a union.
(Of course, "works" doesn't mean "works perfectly and always", or that unions don't have their own internal challenges and risk of bureaucratization etc. etc.)
> Only a radical change in how work is done and who controls this can make labor once again an integral part of life, one through which we can fully develop our capacities as thinking, acting human beings.
uhh. The article appears to suggest that we change who controls our labor...
#1 - we do, we can quit anytime we want and find another place to work for.
#2 - I assume they are railing against private individuals and private companies. Sorry, no. I've seen how government control of the workforce ends. The books been written. I'll pass, I never liked the horror genre.
Why do you assume the only options are being controlled by a different self-serving employer, or having the government regulate everything? After all, shouldn't those who actually form the workforce of a company and shape the products and services it offers be in control? Why not have those who actually do the work collectively control the fate of the company, instead of having to hand over that power to someone else?
Resource 1 by me: https://vladh.net/alternatives-to-wage-labour
Resource 2 by Yanis Varoufakis: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49098225-another-now
More resources: https://vladh.net/wage-labour-resources
Co-ops are quite common but I guess the problem is that if they grow the old co-ops guys becomes the shareholders of a corp. So co-ops stay small or becomes corps.
It's not like this hasn't been tried.
First, do you know what Soviet stands for? The relevant meaning of the word in Russian is "council", and it refers to "worker councils", "soldier councils", etc. that made the revolution happen (the Petrograd Soviet, or council, in St Petersburg was the main alternative power structure to Provisional Government that took over from the czar), that were supposed to "democratically" run things like factories, and send delegates to higher levels to democratically run things there. Somehow, this all ended up a dictatorship, as it did pretty much every time something like this has been tried.
Then, economically, co-ops are perfectly legal in the West. There are some successful ones, like REI. I shop at REI a lot, and I really don't give a damn if employers are wage laborers or co-op members - I doubt most people do. If anything, some people might prefer co-ops because they would give them the same warm fuzzy feeling as green-washed products do, so a co-op would start out with a competitive advantage at least among the well-off liberals. Why not go build a coop to replace your local restaurant or a laundromat; or Exxon, or Google, or whatever? Perhaps because generally, it doesn't work so well? Heck, I don't know how much of a "real" co-op REI is anymore, at this scale.
Nothing significant stops people from forming worker collectives. Maybe it's telling that they're so uncommon?
> After all, shouldn't those who actually form the workforce of a company and shape the products and services it offers be in control? Why not have those who actually do the work collectively control the fate of the company, instead of having to hand over that power to someone else?
That is viable in some cases.
The underlying issue is that distribution of corporate growth is relegated to a small percentage of all organizations out there. To put it simply, a small percentage of companies above a certain size grow quickly while the rest are slowly dying. As a result, not only are the distribution of outsized monetary rewards highly biased in favor of a small percentage of companies, but the fight to maintain position once that period of growth is over is intense. Modern companies growth fast, survive for a time, and then go away.
This leads to an unfortunate dynamic where any competitive advantage that leads to either growth or survival matters. If a top-down managerial structure where rewards inside of the company are distributed to a small layer of top level managers and owners provides even a slight economic advantage over an employee-owned structure, the former is going to win out.
This may sound unfair, and it likely is, but the question becomes: if I am a worker at 'traditional corp.' with a 100K salary and a funded 401K, will I do better than if I was a worker at 'employee-owned corp.' with the same salary but an ownership share? The deciding point being that traditional corp. has a 20% chance of going away over the next ten years while employee-owned corp. has a 20%+ chance of going away over the same period of time.
>#1 - we do, we can quit anytime we want and find another place to work for.
Sometimes this is not straight forward for example when you have some responsibilities in your life, or when your career is too specialized with little to no transferable skill (like when you´re proficient at an internal process of a company).
Unless we could quit and be self sustainable without a job, then yes, at that point you could say one can quit anytime we want to find another place to work for.
I think my point is being misunderstood just slightly.
Its not that 'finding a job is easy' its that we are not slaves and while we can not necessarily choose who we labor for, we can choose who we do not labor for.
> uhh. The article appears to suggest that we change who controls our labor...
> #1 - we do, we can quit anytime we want and find another place to work for.
We change who controls our labor by making those who control our labor us, the workers creating wealth, not the heirs who own companies and expropriate our surplus labor time via dividend profit checks.
The idea that a worker controls his own labor seems to be the one idea that is alien to your prescription.
No, I'm a big fan of workers controlling their own labor.
If a person wants to 100% control their own labor, they can create a business and provide their services (at a price someone else will pay for them) to the world at large.
What is alien to me is that a person believes they can take over other peoples property (factories, existing IP [go to microsoft, say 'windows is mine now' and try to sell your copy of the source). I'm a big fan of property rights.
So, I think we mostly agree right? Someone should be able to start their own business, using their own funds, and have their chance to excel in this world.
> #1 - we do, we can quit anytime we want and find another place to work for.
speak for yourself, i sure as hell can't.
I believe that the point of life is to become more than we are.
My friend - grow to where you can.
I wish you the best.
Regarding number #1, why limit yourself to finding another place to work when crime is also an option? Though I suppose crime is work too.
#1 The article is suggesting radical change across a wide swathe of society, while you are suggesting a minor adjustment for individuals. Yes, ideally we can choose any one of many options that require us to work, work, work to make someone else rich. The suggestion is that none of those options are ideal.
#2 There are more options than "private individuals" and "government control." The author specifically says, "Cooperatives and communes, organized and controlled locally, are two avenues to pursue." Feasible or not, neither of those options are "government control."
We can choose who we work for (sometimes), but we can't choose not to work at all. Our engagement in the capitalist labour market is mandatory; otherwise we starve to death. Doesn't sound like we have much control over our labour to me.
This is missing a lot of history. There was a lot of Anarchist violence in the 30s that led to things like the Inheritance Tax, now repealed. Up until Reagan it was possible to live reasonably well and even raise a family on a minimum wage. Now even middle class people can barely make it and are vulnerable to large medical bills. The past was not impossible. It actually happened. And we should be able to use that experience to craft something better if we really care to. Getting distracted with "Not within this system" talk is useless. The system can be changed and honed so let's do that.
In case anyone is curious, there have been a variety of different estate taxes at a federal level in the United States from 1797 through the present. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/ninetyestate.pdf
The "modern" estate tax was enacted in 1916. It was repealed for a single year -- 2010 -- but returned the following year and is currently in force. The exclusion amount has grown considerably over time.
Up until Reagan it was possible to live reasonably well and even raise a family on a minimum wage
At least according my grandparent's that's an absolute falsehood. Unless you assume "live well" in a 600 sq. ft. house doing manual labour in the sun and having your spouse take care of grandma who is dying of cancer for which there is no treatment.
There is another bit of history that possibly informs the change. ~Up until Reagan, US needed to present an alternative to communist and socialist systems. Post USSR collapse, 'history ended', and that's when the neo-liberal genie was let out of the bottle. This is a somewhat cynical view, but imo not an unreasonable speculation.
> Up until Reagan it was possible to live reasonably well and even raise a family on a minimum wage. Now even middle class people can barely make it and are vulnerable to large medical bills.
This feels like an oft-repeated trope to me. Do you have books or stats that back this up?
If you took all the income from the billionaires and distributed it evenly, the average person wouldn't even get a 2% raise. If you took all the wealth and distributed it evenly, the a average person wouldn't even get $500.
In the US - Billionaires have $1.3T: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/
That's ~$3880 per US person. Globally, there's a lot more people, and countries aren't as rich as the US.
Even if you count their entire change in net wealth in good years as income - their best year ever - during the pandemic - Billionaire wealth increased $240B. That's not even $900 per person in the US. Median salary was almost $43k: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_Unite.... That's ~2%.
This is counting billionaire income and realized and unrealized capital gains - cherry picked to the best year ever. It's a massive overstatement.
Even if you cherry pick the best 11-year bull run ever - from 2010-2021 - Billionaire wealth increased $2.57T. That's $697 per year per person. Barely a 1.5% increase.
Even if you try to get exclusionary - let's only include workers - not children, retirees, or the disabled or the poor - you get ~$1400 per person per year - a ~3.3% increase.
And it's a ridiculous idea. If you took all their capital gains starting in 2010 - they wouldn't have compounded. Most of the gains wouldn't have occurred. You'd end up with an even smaller number less than 1% for everyone, less than 2% for workers.
It's not the reason people who work at Google and Intel aren't mega rich.
And even in the US, Billionaires are definitely not the reason that people who work minimum wage or don't work at all are poor.
Billionaires are concentrated disproportionately in rich places like the US and the EU. Globally the true picture disputes this article much more. There's 5x more people on the planet than in just the US and the EU - but the billionaires there have almost 70% of billionaire wealth.
Do billionaires have enough money that it's creating systematic problems and we should do something about it? That's a different question.
They don't have so much money that they're causing everyone else to be poor.
This is true, but I have a slightly different question to ask. Imagine you work at, say, a game development company, along with 99 other developers. The only other member of the company is a CEO and shareholder, who decides how much to keep for himself and how much to pay the employees, but, importantly, does none of the actual work himself.
Let's say the game is wildly successful and the employees are collectively paid 60% of the profit, with the remaining 40% going to the sole shareholder. This is not an uncommon arrangement, and it is allowed and encouraged, culturally and legally.
Morally and practically speaking, not legally speaking, does this not amount to wage theft?
This is misunderstanding how billionaires get their wealth. It's mainly from investments and equity, not income. Share of wealth is a better number to look at. The top 1% now own close to double what they did in 1980:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/top-1-share-of-net-person...
The numbers for 0.1% and 0.001% are even more extreme:
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/never-mind-1-percent-let...
The thought that 'billionaires' are the problem is missing the point. There are folks worth the better part of $1T. They are a bigger part of the problem, by several orders of magnitude.
The systematic problems are, that the system is rigged so a tiny few skim from everything, leaving the absolute minimum they can get away with for the rest of us.
The issue is not so much a one-time cash grab, it's that with that concentration of wealth comes a concentration of power that distorts society.
Put another way, the primary goal is not to give more money to everybody else, it's to take it away from the few who are abusing the rest of us. It could be set on fire and that would still be a benefit! That would be deflationary and reduce the ability of those people to have an outsized effect on society.
BTW, you seem to have misread the site you linked. It says that billionaire wealth grew by $1.3T in 11 months, not that they have $1.3T. It's literally in the first box on the page: "The total wealth of U.S. billionaires grew by $1.3 trillion during the roughly first eleven months of the coronavirus pandemic -- a 44% spike in wealth. This increase in wealth is more than it would cost to send a stimulus check of $3,900 to every one of the roughly 330 million people in America." So that would be a one-time $3,900 check to everyone just for 2020.
The second box says "The total wealth of U.S. billionaires grew from $240 billion in 1990 (adjusted for inflation) to $4.18 trillion in March 2021." So you're off by quite a bit, and seem to have misread your source site consistently.
You quote sources but you don't seem to use their numbers: US billionaires have 4.18T (not 1.3), divided over 300M gives 14k per person (not 0.5k). You were off by a factor of 28.
14k per person is actually a years worth of minimum wage (7.25x40x50).
The average US household is 2.6 ppl, so that would give 36k per household (you know, kids). That is serious money to a lot of people. Another way
On top of that, if you include the people worth 100M+ into the pie, the total amount of money goes up a lot, as there are so many more of them.
Nevertheless, I agree with your conclusion, just the sheer money they have that others don't is not the problem.
> In the US - Billionaires have $1.4T: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/
Correction: It says 4.2T on the site you linked when I clicked through to the google doc [0].
[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q1iNtDEDsm_tMQhRSmE9...
> If you took all the income from the billionaires and distributed it evenly, the average person wouldn't even get a 2% raise. If you took all the wealth and distributed it evenly, the a average person wouldn't even get $500.
This is missing the forest for the trees. Immense concentration of wealth affords the power to significantly affect change and mold society. This power in the hands of the few is the actual issue, given that social stratum is strongly correlated with political outlook and mores.
This has to be downvoted because people aren't writing things like this because they want to do any deep understanding or enact meaningful change, they are doing it because it makes them feel better to complain about how unfair it is.
This is a strawman argument. It is a diversion. It is not about billionaires and their wealth.
It is about the expropriation of a worker's surplus labor time by the heirs. It is about control of all the worker's work time (surplus and non-surplus) by the heirs.
Laughing at the thought of engineers making $400k reading this and identifying with it.
It's been a while since I dug into the French Revolution, but I think many software developers today would be considered "petite bourgeoisie."
Very familiar sentiment to thoughts I have been thinking and feeling over the past year or so. Interesting to see more of this stuff popping up. I am starting to think unionizing is going to be the path to start pointing the majority of folks towards.
https://medium.com/@kris-nova/why-i-wrote-hacking-capitalism...
The unionization factor is interesting. It's not a zero-sum game. The more everyone does, the better everyone is.
Due to egalitarian efforts getting women and others into the workforce it produced a large surplus of labour.
There was also very clever work by China in creating very low tax economic zones which created globalization and moved low skilled jobs out of the developed world. Also creating a surplus of labour.
Unionization doesnt work well when there's so much surplus of labour. Worse yet, incompetent males were displaced from the workplace by competent others. Which created a net-negative growth on population. Therefore population decline is coming.
The thing is with the population pyramid, the decline isnt even coming yet it's a productivity drop relative to the boomers retiring and the boomers are woefully under invested for retirement.
So we are going to have a transition quickly from labour surplus to depression level labour shortage. That already started, this is the antiwork movement. They suddenly probably for the first time feel no labour surplus and are excited to be treated properly by shitty employers.
The funny thing about severe shortages, unionization is still lame. You dont want to have your salary and benefits limited by union process. You want to job hop for better profits.
The really good thing about this productivity drop, the powers that be will put money into tech to boost productivity. Self-checkouts, atms, etc. No humans needed.
> Since Taylor, management gurus, led by the Toyota Corporation, devised “lean production,” with its systematic hiring, work teams, cross-training, just-in-time inventories, and kaizen. This last, Japanese for “constant improvement,” is an insidious form of continuous speed-up. Management stresses the production system—by, for example, taking away a team member or speeding up an assembly line—and work teams are pressured to keep production running smoothly. Autoworker Ben Hamper, author of Rivethead, described modern auto factories as gulags. And no wonder. Workers must labor 57 seconds of every minute.This is propably the biggest missrepresentation of TPS I have read in a while.
“44 years later he died of emphysema”…sounds like he had a long and fruitful life.
As opposed to communism, which will make everyone work like dogs so that the elite party members can be rich (like Maduro's goons).
100,000,000 dead but let's try it again, because that wasn't real communism.
Do you think the only available and conceivable options are two bad systems, and nothing else?
Another Marxist in a new coat. Good analysis, wrong prescription. Been there, done that, ended up badly.
Look into Georgism, that's where the cool kids are now. You don't need a revolution, you need a minor shift in tax code that you haven't thought of yet.
It's not the problem of your employer that prices around you increase, so don't make them a villain that you can't pay your rent. Go complain to your slumlord for riding the inflation wave and tak(x)ing away any raise and disposable income your employer gave you.
Explanation by a game designer: https://youtu.be/FTZH0Y6OS7g
> tak(x)ing away any raise and disposable income your employer gave you
An employer does not give a raise and disposable income to a worker. The worker is the creator of wealth, and the heirs collecting dividend profits are who are being given to. Your confusion about the directionality of created wealth within the relations of production is the whole point of the article.
Re: Georgism/LVT I’ve gotten interested in how it affects land use.
I’ll check out that long video (listening now, sounds like they get past the introductions at the 30 minute mark) but here’s a couple shorter videos about it meanwhile. The guest of the podcast’s articles are here: https://gameofrent.com/
https://youtu.be/jFQgOy-5Tng Land Value Taxation and the Built Environment (10 min)
https://youtu.be/h0DvT8_6Hx0 What are the on-the-ground effect of the land value tax? Lesson from the Pennsylvania experience (5 min)
https://youtu.be/wHwFyXDx2_U (28 min) For the Land is Mine. An old documentary with more philosophical/economic background of the idea.
You got on the one hand, the Open Free Market System in America, you have on the other hand, the exact opposite, the closed, controlled, command economy of the Soviet Union…
The Chinese tried the Communist model, with their own modifications, and it failed! And they have admitted that it failed.
The kids today talk as if these things have never happened. They haven’t learned!
Keep writing! We are just one or two more articles from everyone susddenly realizing that capitalism is mean and overthrowing the system.
What will we do afterwards? Who cares! That's not nearly as much fun as whining.
> whining
We workers are bombarded consistently with whining about estate taxes, carry interest and that sort of thing. Actually the recent senate bill was held up over the fight over carried interest, a fight which was won by the funds.
However when the workers who create all the wealth press for their interests, it is "whining".
Insofar as the afterwards, to quote Malcolm X "anywhere is better than here".