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Comment by harwoodjp | Hacker News Reader

Why don't workers unite to democratically manage production? The police, propaganda, wage slavery.

> Why don't workers unite to democratically manage production?

Because the majority of workers are doing the minimum amount of work to get by, because ~50% of workers are below average intelligence, because those with the entrepreneurial skill and/or business management competence necessary to make this happen benefit more from the current system and have less motivation to mess with it.

There have been over 20,000 communes set up in the US. They are not illegal. Pick one and join it. Or set your own up.

Socialism is seizing the workplace from the capitalist.

The problem with a system based on taking is that one runs out of things to take.

Better to have a system based on creating things.

Well actually socialism has been historically concerned with maximizing human creativity. Fourier’s utopian vision was “libidinal” work that aligns passions with labor. Marcuse has a similar view in Eros and Civilization. Chomsky views creativity as axiomatic for humans, and syndicalism the appropriate system for harnessing it.

That’s why cooperatism is superior to socialism and capitalism. It’s a free market of worker-owned companies, creating things by running their businesses together.

It's not a free market if you do not allow capitalism to exist.

Note that capitalism does not exclude worker-owned companies at all. You're free to start one.

The free market is a set of principles between companies, not a principle for how companies need to be organized internally. Capitalism is based on single-owned companies. Cooperatism is based on worker-owned companies. Cooperatism is a better free market based economy. It’s capitalism 2.0.

> The problem with a system based on taking is that one runs out of things to take.

Pretty damning critique of capitalists there, comrade.

What was America like before capitalists? and after? Where did all that wealth come from, comrade?

Did you know there used to be people who lived on that land

I missed the railroads, steel industries, chip manufacturers, iphones, etc. that were looted from those people?

BTW, studies of the bones of pre-Columbian Indians shows they worked hard and suffered from periodic famines, as well as a lot of violence.

Therein lies the commonality between all economic systems: where there are people, there is the taking.

Industries tend to require raw materials, which many times are located in or around land.

Free markets are not built around taking. They are built around exchanging.

Ah, the starry-eyed utopianism. Marxists and Objectivists are truly funhouse mirror images; they may look completely different from one another, but both belong at the carnival.

Free markets are a ideal which has never been achieved, much like socialism. There is, and never has been, a market without regulation, and with only voluntary participation and without stolen goods being exchanged.

Those things weren't looted from the natives.

But the profits were looted from the workers who actually built all that stuff.

Capitalists aren't the ones hammering in steel spikes or wearing clean-room fab suits.

Better for the natives and enslaved Africans, that's for sure.

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