A Man Who Broke Capitalism – Did Jack Welch Destroy Corporate America? | Hacker News Reader

A Man Who Broke Capitalism – Did Jack Welch Destroy Corporate America?

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21 pointsrawgabbit20 comments

By dismantling they mean making public statements about making improvements and then weeding out people who express joy.

This can be put in the same bucket as the "Great Man" theory of history. But really, what was the issue? That corporations today put a greater emphasis on performance, efficiency, and profits? Why is that a bad thing?

I'll bite, because we're humans. Humans are complex social creatures with many needs that we fulfill throughout our days. Being efficient is good, sure, but being efficient through the alienation of individuals from their communities, their culture, and themselves trades away something essential.

I used to believe efficiency above all else. But as I've gotten older I've come to realize that efficiency is only good to a point. After that point we lose what makes us human.

Same with profits and performance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpQYsk-8dWg (The Corporation)

I'm soon leaving a company after having seen it grown from a mere startup to what it is today. It had a goal at the beginning, had to fight an entire industry to get an idea across which is accepted broadly nowadays. But there is also a strong inertia towards making these non-goal "goals" more and more important, which in turn define more and more how this company operates inside and what comes out of it in the end. It requires strong and really good leadership to see this problem in the first place and then prevent such a construct from sliding down that slippery slope.

The problem with stuff like socialism, communism, but also capitalism is simple: Humans. You create rules, you have conceptions of how something could work. You add humans, and things go sideways. Even if you aware of the issue, there is potentially no way to create something stable, it requires humans to stop other humans from being dicks, as sad as it sounds. It only needs a few dicks to break pretty much everything into pieces. Worse, more often than not, there was not even real ill-intent in the first place, like with the company I've written about above.

The only way we can change things on a larger scale is to change the incentives, to change the overarching goals. Check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th3KE_H27bs (TED talk Nick Hanauer)

I wish he had broke capitalism. Capitalism sure seems pretty powerful to me these days.

I’ve lived in non-capitalist countries.

No thanks.

You know there are options besides capitalist hellscape and autocratic state capitalist hellscape, yeah?

Please provide an example.

If you mean socialist states like Scandinavia, those are capitalist states. They fund all their social programs through money made by capitalism.

I'll provide a few.

Indigenous Americans participated in a gift economy quite successfully.

African Socialism, notably Ujaama, was a non Stalinist socialist government.

Pre (and even part of) Hanseatic league Europe was neither state capitalist nor capitalist.

Portions of Spain were socialist and anarchist until state capitalists/Stalinists shut them down for being the wrong kind of socialist.

So all your examples failed to sustain themselves?

Indigenous Americans survived using this method longer than capitalism has been around. Then there was a genocide.

Pre Hanseatic league Europe likewise had evolutions of non improvident markets stretching for hundreds of years, when capitalism took over.

Ujaama was attempted to be started up right before a brutal oil crisis, and Western attitudes towards a successful and progressive Africa were hardly complementary.

Spanish independents faced Stalin literally marching on them. No tiny state can survive one of the world powers deciding you are done.

None of these failed due to their governments, and many existed for much, much longer than capitalism has.

Besides, my assertion was that other models were possible, and I think I've demonstrated that yes, such models have successfully existed for decades or centuries.

You’re comparing systems that existed centuries ago to modern life.

I mean I have no doubt a “gifting economy” works great as nomadic hunters.

But I prefer my antibiotics and cancer treatments.

Spanish anarchist communities were less than a century ago, and there are people who practice these ideals and still have access to healthcare today.

They aren't nations, of course. But it's possible at a moderate scale.

Nope. Every single African socialist movement failed. Woefully too.

Source: I'm Nigerian, versed in history, and I have neutral sources that back up everything I'll say here.

1. Haile Mariam Mengistu's socialist policies didn't lift Ethiopia from poverty. Instead, it contributed to the deaths of 500k to 2 million Ethiopians, due to the government messing with grain production and sales. Yes, Ethiopia would have had a famine anyway but Mengistu's agrarian socialist policies made it worse and led directly to at least 2 million deaths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983%E2%80%931985_famine_in_Et...

2. Julius Nyerere's socialist policies (the Ujaama) in Tanzania were bitterly resisted by the locals and Nyerere had to forcefully have the same rural villagers he claimed he wanted to help forcefully removed to collective farms.

Police began to round up farmers and forced them to move into the villages. 13 million people were eventually registered to 7000 villages. As a result, rural production was severely disrupted.

According to a 1978 government survey, none of the villages had achieved the official targets for agricultural productivity.

Many villages were left reliant on famine relief. In contrast to the government's intentions, food imports rose dramatically, and inflation accelerated. Overall import levels tripled during the 1970s, while exports only doubled. The entire process also damaged Nyerere's reputation with the rural population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-082142...

I could go on and on, because I've actually studied along this line extensively. Socialist policies don't work. It only concentrates power and wealth with a strongman leader, and then socialists turn around and claim it wasn't real socialism because it didn't created a stateless utopia.

So, you think you understand socialism more than Malenkov, Beria, Stalin, Mengistu, Mugabe (yes, he was socialist; his policy was to seize and redistribute land from the whites - it only destroyed Zimbabwe's economy), Tito (Yugoslavia), etc?

Mao ate chicken and imported comfort food while tens of millions of Chinese died in his engineered famines. How can you even wake choose to uninformed when all this is public knowledge?

They all failed woefully. I'm not asking you to denounce your socialist ideals, but please, in a world where information is just a click a way, it's immoral to be promoting lies like these.

Thanks for this. I'm curious how you feel the oil crisis in 78 impacted Nyerere's vision, or if that was not a factor.

From what I've read, Nyerere didn't have a desire to become an autocratic ruler in the style of a Stalin. (Though using police forces to relocate people pretty much makes one an autocracy.)

I genuinely do believe that socialist policies can work, but not Marxist-Leninist (or Tankie) approaches. Soviet style socialism, with its vanguard parties is basically set up to install a strongman leader, I agree with you there!

But it's not the only model. Read Bordiga and Gramsci for how council communism and left communism are built on democracy, and letting workers councils collaborate (rather than seizing power through force). These ideologies strongly oppose state capitalism or state communism and planned economies. Chomsky and Kropotkin discuss a sort of Anarcho syndicalism.

I certainly don't claim to be a scholar, but plenty of scholars do exist and do not consider the discussion as settled as you do. Zizek and Badiou, David Harvey, etc.

I believe strongly that Marxist-Leninist policies are bad and will demonstrably fail. But that we can learn from those failures and investigate the other modes that Stalin stamped out as opposition to his autocracy.

Of course, financial crises will always affect entire countries financially. But, private firms usually reallocate capital quickly enough to weather economic shocks faster than the government can.

If they can't, they go out of business, losing their own capital. Government bureaucrats don't change their mind quickly enough because they don't suffer personal loss. They might even get promoted.

For instance, Nigeria's former economic minister (Okonjo Iweala) was part of a super-corrupt administration; guess where she works today? World Trade Organization DG!

I'm a bit relieved you obviously see the evils of Marxist-Leninism and Stalinist strongman socialism, but I doubt any other than those can even exist. If you can recommend a book on truly democratic socialism, I'll take a look at it to see things from your perspective to see why you sincerely believe them.

on my own part, I'd love if you check out this book (History of American Socialisms; link: https://cdn.mises.org/History%20of%20American%20Socialisms_3...). The book analyzes 20+ socialist experiments in the United States. This were individuals pooling their farms and property to start democratic socialist communes because they sincerely believed capitalism was the answer.

Mostly sincere humans, but their ideas always failed, and they had to split up. I sincerely want you to read it, even if just the last chapter.

Thanks for your reply - not the typical 'gotcha' you expect on a HN thread.

I'll check it out. Learning from failures, as long as they are written constructively, is always useful.

Have you read about Kibbutzim in your studies? I'm obviously not a fan of ethnonationalism, but they seem to be a collectivist arrangement akin to your brief on farmers in America.

As for books to recommend, I'm just finishing The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood, but that's more of a historical analysis of the differences between French and English agrarian land ownership and how that led to capitalism in England but not France (not immediately, anyway).

Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread is next in my queue. It's quite critical of ML politics and suggests instead socialism is only achieved via bottom up worker organizing. It's highly recommended by a bunch of folks.

Also, I've found David Harveys lectures a very approachable intro to Marx's Capital https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n5vu4MpYgUo&feature=emb_title

And yeah, holy shit so many socialists get way to caught up in feeling superior and it sucks. Also, so many people see the word socialist and start hitting insults. Always nice to have a conversation with someone who disagrees but does so in an interested way.

Ordered the book you suggested, and I'll reconsider how I represent Ujaama.

I'm curious, given your background as coming from Nigeria, and given the extractive (and write destructive, from my understanding) oil industry there that seems to be primarily benefiting the wealthy, how do you view the role and impact capitalism has on Nigeria?

Is it the best model? Are there other models to try?

The wrench in being against ML was that it was responsible for the tremendous growth of the USSR and China. Every third world country would love to replicate this. At best, ML would make a country self sufficient enough to withstand geopolitics and economic pressure from first world countries seeking to use their advantage against third world countries. Cuba and North Korea are isolationist in this regard. However, their standard of living is comparably higher than similar third world countries.

The issue in countries where "socialism" (arguably indirect democracy state capitalism) took off were that they faced backwards conditions compared to the first world. ML provided the command economy to quickly divert investment for creating the nonexisting infrastructure necessary to be able to achieve more advanced modes of capitalism. This capitalistic step is necessary to build up the conditions for socialism according to a Marxist timeline of development. The Stalin model attempted to reinterpret a state control of capital as a socialism since it was in theory held responsible to the worker masses as opposed to private individual capital holders.

Perhaps, the fall of the USSR inro capitalism for better global trade and investment and the fall of Maoism into Dengism were rebukes of the Stalin model in being unable to sustain growth without global trade that first world capitalism benefits from. China however maintains the ML party control over the state and economy in order to maintain control over how capitalists invest and develop their country more for the Chinese benefit rather than the foreign country interest.

This is not as free and bottoms up as alternative models of socialism, but from a game theory perspective its hard to compete against a top down system of private capitalists and their democratic representatives without another top down system unless the economic circumstances do rapidly shift (perhaps in a Marxist manner where the economic forces destabilize the upper classes and the lower classes are empowered to grow the economy in a new way)

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