Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

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In my mind, this is an unalloyed good

The practice alone of organizing labor power against owners, irrespective of the demands, given the existing state of the world, is what is needed to show Class solidarity.

Simply showing class solidarity in order to kick off other strikes is valuable in and of itself.

Y’all really have to understand a general strike is coming.

A general strike means the labor class (you most likely), which is the group of people who do not primarily gain their income from passive investments, and are reliant on contracts that they don’t create or control which provide them very little control over their economic future, stop working in order to put extreme pressure on the group of people who do control those contracts and who do control capital.

Such a system is foundationally unethical, and should be Deconstructed as rapidly as possible with the expropriation of all that capital to the rightful owners: the people actually producing the value, and done in a way that’s not under duress, such that you do not have to take whatever dog shit contract is put in front of you

In your profile it says you work for some company, do the founders know you want to expropriate their company? Those damn kulaks, feasting on the fruits of your labor.

Yes they do.

I’m employee #3 so…you know Probably not exactly what you expected

>Probably not exactly what you expected

No, because calling for a communist revolution from your position is a suicide wish then, any entrepreneurs or owners of pretty much anything were considered a class enemy and you being in a leadership positions of any kind is a guaranteed ticket to a gulag.

Why is it so hard to imagine worlds other than the ones that you currently live in? as though there’s no possible way to resolve this concept, ergo something like syndicalist anarchism *gasp* who would’ve ever thought something so well understood long described could be implemented someplace imagine that. *faints*

As they say, it’s easier for most people to picture the end of the world than the end of capitalism

Maybe do more drugs or something

Read about Mondragon etc… and explore the idea of living completely differently

I grew up in russia mate, I've seen the alternative to capitalism, and I can tell you that capitalism is a damn paradise compared to what that alternative was.

Instead of doing drugs just read some history on how those things go. Once you start expropriating anything you'll get a violent pushback, that's either a coup or a civil war, during those you will get violent people take charge, then if your side looses you get Pinochet and a helicopter ride, if your side wins, you get Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc that will exterminate anyone remotely like you as class enemies.

>The anarchist movement lived on during the time of the Soviet Union in small pockets, largely within the Gulag where anarchist political prisoners were sent, but by the late 1930s its old guard had either fled into exile, died or disappeared during the Great Purge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Russia

The USSR isn’t the opposite of capitalism. I’m excruciatingly aware of the history of all state communist regimes. Which I directly stated.

Read Proudhon. Try harder

>Try harder

Why? I have zero interest in yet another utopian idea that will probably result in millions dead, as they always do. The current system works well enough and seems like a miracle to me coming from where I grew up, the fact that you can work hard on anything you want, take risks and get rewarded for it, and no one is gonna arbitrarily take it all away is magical.

This is an ancient and universal idea, that has failed to deliver prosperity and growth, and often drives societies that were once flourishing into starvation.

Capitalism is the new, cool, unique idea that has actually delivered prosperity for society. Not perfectly evenly, but certainly more evenly than other ideas like socialism, fascism and feudalism.

Labor action isn't contrary to a free market. Labor action is precisely labor using its negotiating power in a market to secure concessions, the same way that employers use their market power to secure concessions from employees, customers use their market power to secure concessions from businesses, or businesses use their market power to extract profit.

I'm a business owner. I believe in business, and I like participating in a competitive market. I like that it keeps me honest and forces me to really try to do my job. But that doesn't imply that I have to be hostile to the interests of laborers in principle! They're sticking up for their interests, just as much as I stick up for mine. That's how a market works. And just as with my customers, we can have a mutually beneficial working relationship while still negotiating in the knowledge that we're all adults with some degree of self-interest.

As long as we're working within a system where we don't expect businesses to show loyalty to employees beyond self-interest (and it seems that we are), why should we expect employees to behave any differently? You can't make employment an ethical question for one side and not the other: either we're all in this together (and thus that businesses have a responsibility that Boeing has clearly failed to uphold), or we believe in a ruthlessly competitive market (and labor has every right to play hardball).

Well said!

You're conflating political and economic systems here. Capitalism is fully compatible with fascism. And it emerged out of and is an evolution of manorialism, the economic system used under european feudalism.

Not just compatible, but capitalism requires fascism because by default it alienates the person doing work from capturing the value via exploiting the variability in standard of living and environmental sustainability.

Economists call this “arbitrage” which is a fancy word for, “Someone can dominate you economically and you have no legal avenue to avoid it.”

Proudhon covered this thoroughly in “What is property”

Agreed but I don't usually go that hard right out the gate in HN comments these folks are touchy about the virtues of capitalism.

> A general strike means the labor class ... stop working in order to put extreme pressure on the group of people who do control those contracts and who do control capital.

> Such a system ... should be Deconstructed as rapidly as possible with the expropriation of all that capital

(emphasis added)

The result, predictably, is that unions lose all their leverage against the investor class (which no longer exists) and management (which is now the government). See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_unions_in_the_Soviet_Uni... ("[S]trikes were still more or less restricted... Unions remained partners of management in attempting to promote labor discipline, worker morale, and productivity.").

Pray tell:

How much of the Soviet Union was owned in any functional, practical or legal way, by the proletariat?

Oh zero? Did they have communal decision making? Oh also no?

How is state ownership of everything in a dictatorship relevant here at all?

It remains mind-boggling that the only thing people can fathom as an alternative to nightmare capitalism is state centralized, economic controlled bullshit dictatorship.

Unreal

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