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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

What if we said the point of a company was to make its employees' lives better?

Good news. The world spent the entire last century experimenting with that idea. It did not work out well. I’ve already explained why.

But, you are of course free to start a company doing that. If it turns out to produce better outcomes for customers (the world), you will win and society will win!

I’m guessing you won’t test your ideas though, and will instead vote for authoritarian central planners who will deploy this straight to production via laws. Then your country will cease growing, and will be forced to slowly dismantle this worker-optimized system as a result. See Europe over the next 50 years for more info.

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It's not authoritarian to outlaw unjust systems of power. I'm sure slave owners considered the US "authoritarian central planners" when they outlawed slavery. Doesn't make it wrong.

This is a non sequitur. I'm not saying central planning in general is bad. Companies are an example of central planning. So are families.

I'm saying communism is bad.

It is not a non sequitur! You called them "authoritarian central planners". Am I supposed to think you consider "authoritarian central planners" a totally neutral phrase with no connotations? It's telling you mention central planning in your response, when I objected to your use of authoritarian. If you had originally said "you will vote for <legislators> who will <implement laws>" your original comment is not quite as punchy, I think.

What? We're into late stage capitalism and you're telling me the world was experimenting with making employees lives better? I must be living under a rock!

Where are these so called experiments? I only see employee conditions getting progressively worse. If you go back long enough, we did get a few wins like weekends and some limits on hours after a lot of people died for it, but that's about it.

The last change we had was probably WFH which only affects a small portion of people and, realistically, is only being accepted because it's cheaper for companies.

>But, you are of course free to start a company doing that.

I argue nothing different than the status quo can ever succeed without deep structural change.

It's like trying to be a pacifist in the middle of a war zone. You will be killed. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with being a pacifist, but it simply cannot work under those conditions.

The part that people seem to forget is that we chose to value profits above all else. We can also choose to change that. Even if it's extremely hard to imagine this with all the propaganda we've been bombarded with in the past century, it's possible.

> We're into late stage capitalism and you're telling me the world was experimenting with making employees lives better?

They're repeating propaganda about communism and socialism.

It's tiresome, really, the degree to which Americans have bought the propaganda that countries like the Soviet Union themselves spread, that they were communist, when in fact they were authoritarian dictatorships with a few very-badly-thought-out planned-economy features.

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It is easier to have a productive conversation if you actually address the points being argued, rather than dismiss them out of hand with no justification.

The GP boldly said the Soviet Union wasn’t communist.

Please then, what was it? Capitalist? Feudal? Democratic socialism? I need a clear answer..

I'm not sure why you think there will be a clear answer, since communism is not a word with a clear definition. It means many things to many people. It's no different to "capitalist" in this respect (and you often see lib-right people claim the US is "not real capitalism" because things like social security and govt bailouts exist).

It's obvious that "communist" policies don't entail that you have the same government as the USSR, so I think it's fair to call arguments that suggest so propaganda. It's probably meaningless to argue about whether the USSR had "true communism".

They don't want a clear answer. They never did, and likely never will.

That's the problem with this type of topic. As much as I like to talk about it, there never seems to be any real talk. People pick a side and arguments be damned.

The extent of their knowledge generally extends to "communism bad" and there's no good faith in actually talking about the shitty situation we're in today.

My original answer was not even citing communism at all. I was specifically talking about worker conditions, but people seem to be unable or unwilling to have a conversation and instead degrade it and down vote.

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