“Communism in one country as opposed to the glob” - that’s the problem.
How u gonna handle competition from non communist countries?
There’s literally a running joke where I work called the “Union Shit”. You run to the bathroom to take a 15 - 20 minute shit between your breaks.
Whether or not you’re actually shitting or just shitposting is between you and those walls lol
In Germany, you’re having a “Sitzung” which is the word for a conference meeting, but literally just means “sitting”.
When you return to your desk, coworkers will ask if the “meeting” was productive.It roughly means “session”, which also derives from sitting.
I never understood why we’re stuck with just capitalism or communism, two economic systems developed before railroads were a thing and written down at night by candle light or a lantern burning whale fat. I think we should come up with something better. To quote President Not Sure, “The water doesn’t have to come from the toilet, but that’s the general idea.”
“It’s socialism or barbarism!”. It’s because there hasn’t been any other convincing arguments otherwise. If you give the capitalists an inch, they’ll eventually take it all. You cannot allow capital to accumulate to the degree that it wields real political power.
Socialism hasn’t exactly worked out either. Replacing a flawed system like capitalism with something even worse is not a solution
The real choice is capitalism or democracy.
These aren’t opposites. Democracy is a system of governance, capitalism is a system of economics. A society can be both at the same time.
Things don’t need to be opposites to affect each other in predictable ways.
They are both decision making processes where different groups hold power over society’s resources. Democracy very much has economic power and Capitalism is very much about who gets to make certain decisions.
They have what you might call… friction.
I can list at least one.
Can’t think of a communist democracy, though.
I’m all ears for ideas.
So am I! I just can’t believe Adam Smith and Karl Marx are the Einstein and Newton of economics. It feels like capitalism and communism are the luminiferous ether and fluid theory of electricity and we never bothered to advance any further.
To paraphrase Tim Curry, communism and capitalism are both red herrings.
Oh that big punch up between the Soviet Union and the United States, decadent capitalism vs brutalist communism. Who won? According to the scoreboard as of 2026: Israel.
The catch phrase I’ve always heard about communism is “the people own the means of production.” Has that ever been true in practice? Did Soviet citizens own any piece of the means of production? Did anything resembling “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” ever once happen under the hammer and sickle? Or was that the false narrative the idiot asshole in charge used to cow the unwashed masses?
Similar questions could be asked of my fellow capitalist Americans. Capitalism is allegedly about the free market, supply and demand, if there is a demand someone will provide a supply, probably multiple someones, competitors will compete, those who do it faster, cheaper or better will succeed until someone else does it even fasterer, cheaperer and betterer repeat until someone else comes along with a completely different idea, welcome to the infinite cycle of meritocracy where the cream rises to the top. How’s that working out? Some substance has risen to the top, not sure it’s cream.
A common problem I see between the Soviet Union and the United States: Weak systems for preventing psychotic despots from ruining it all.
Further expanding on this: My understanding of the Soviet Union: Something something the Bolsheviks, something something communist revolution, They just about have an election, that Lenin overthrows because it isn’t going his way. Lenin is King Shit Of Turd Mountain until his death, then the dumb guy from the ghetto he kept around because he’s good at hurting people, Josef “probably worse than Hitler” Stalin takes the throne. The entire run of the Soviet Union is essentially a dictatorship with a command economy and remains thoroughly miserable.
The United States, meanwhile, has gone through phases. Tides have ebbed and flowed, robber barons have come and gone, consumer protection laws have come and gone. Times when a very few, very rich men have been mostly miserable for most people; times when those assholes get knocked down a peg and the common man has a chance to make a decent living get better.
The problem is a few ultimately rich assholes in charge.
You criticize society, yet you live in it. Hypocrisy much? Chekmate liberal
Do the bare minimum to avoid getting fired.
Actively sabotage your employer.
why are you doing the bare minimum?! you’re so lazy!
bruh I’m doing literally only what the job asked, unless you pay me more, I’m not doing more
I did some ‘back of the napkin’ math a few days ago to see what it would take for the employees in my company to purchase enough shares for a controlling stake in the company. I figured that we’d never get 100% of the employees to buy in, but we also don’t need 100% of the shares, so to keep it easy I calculated if 60% bought 60% of the shares… and it would cost each employee around $2.3 million.
That tells me that each employee provides $2.3 million worth of value to the company… and we’re not getting paid anywhere near that. Not even close.
Why is this highly upvoted? This is just a poor understanding of economics.
The market cap just shows the aggregate value of shares that are being publicly traded. It has nothing to do with labor value. You can’t derive labor value from the market cap because there’s no correlation. If you want to find out how much each employee contributes, you would have to use something like company revenue.
Company value is just the result of shareholders expectations for the future company value. It doesn’t directly reflect the employees worth
this is interesting to me. can you show your work? Id be interested in going through the thought experiment as well.
Market cap is around $141 billion.
Number of employees is around 60,000.
60% of employees: 36,000.
60% of market cap: $84 billion.
$84B / 36,000 = $2.33 million.
If you want to compare it to salaries, I think you would need to do the year-over-year change. But even that wouldn’t factor in all the bloated C-suite bonuses and such, so I feel like the calculations would end up being much more complex.
For instance, if you work somewhere for 23 years making on average $100,000 per year, you’ll have received about $2.3 million from that company over time. If that company’s market cap increases by $2.3 million per employee in that course of time, then you would be about even by your metric.
gotcha. What about assets? Im not an accounting person, but we routinely buy tooling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Raw materials have costs/value associated with them. How would that figure in?
Those are operating costs, I’m referring to control of the board of directors.
Market cap doesnt reflect the value of labor, its purely speculative these days.
These days?
So get to shitposting!
You should subtract initial investments in the company, value of real estate owned, value of machines etc.
Communism is a meme. It will never work and there will never be a silver bullet revolution.
Communism can mean a lot of different things. What kind of economic system do you advocate for?
I just hope we do find an economic system that works at some point, before it’s too late.
This but I’m self employed 😭
😂
commenting on shitposts at work until my value matches my pay 🫡
Remember, people, the economy depends on you. It is important to be responsible, and to #ActYourWage
I thought shitposting at work increased my value.
Well, you can always go work for a non-profit organization. Your salary will be even lower.
Non-profit only means that any profits generated will be reinvested into the organization, donated or put in a trust fund that finances things the owners want, as a tax avoidance scheme. It has nothing to do with how high the salaries are.
Mozilla is a non-profit and their salaries aren’t that bad:
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/mozilla/salariesReinvesting profits in the organization is in theory much better than giving it to shareholders. In practice, most non-profit are quite poor, and yes, salary are usually lower than market. Partly because they can’t scale up by using investors money like for-profit do, I guess.
It depends on the npo.
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Your labor is more valuable as part of a business than as a freelance secretary. If someone increases the value of your labor in exchange for a cut that’s a fair deal.
Your labor is compensated more as part of a business. That doesn’t mean it’s fairly compensated.
That’s between you & your union
