The idea of corporate employment as citizenship is interesting and straight out of cyberpunk. There's an exchange in Gibson's "Count Zero" where Angie (daughter of a corp engineer) asks Turner (freelance mercenary) something along the lines of "Isn't it scary to live without a corporation taking care of you?"
I think you could make a case that corporations already take on some of the economic roles traditionally associated with governments, but they don't seem to have taken on the legal protection roles yet. However, I could see a future where the perks of employment include access to corporate retained lawyers. Or maybe corporations will hire lawyer secretaries to allow their employees to cut through government bureaucracy (e.g. to contest credit rating inaccuracies on an employee's behalf).
Another possibility would be the corporations and the cities associated with them sort of work together to act like city states. It definitely seems like the laws of San Francisco/California are informed by their association with tech and provide extra protections for the people living there (or at least the people living there who are employed by tech companies).
There were many times, at least during the time of colonial empires where companies would run entire towns, regions, and countries. Sometimes they provided just law and order like in British American colonies, but usually they coerced pre-existing political structures and violently exploited the local populations for natural resources. The people unfortunate enough to have natural resources whose land was accessible to colonizers were either exploited or destroyed the desired resources [0] before the colonizer's ambitions could consume them too.
I think I would prefer that corporations - whose interests are by nature not aligned with peoples - do not run the place, as it were.
[Edit: Sorry I keep making so many additions!]
[0]: "In 1620, the state of Banten, on the island of Java, cut down its pepper trees in the hope that this would induce the Dutch to leave it in Peace. When a Dutch merchant visited Maguindanao, in the southern Phillippines, in 1686, he was told, "Nutmeg and cloves can be grown here, just as in Malaku. They are not there now because the old Raja had all of them ruined before his death. He was afraid the Dutch Company would come to fight with them about it.""
- Page 245 of Why Nations Fail by Daron Acermoglu, James Robinson
> There were many times, at least during the time of colonial empires where companies would run entire towns, regions, and countries. Sometimes they provided just law and order like in British American colonies, but usually they coerced pre-existing political structures and violently exploited the local populations for natural resources. The people unfortunate enough to have natural resources whose land was accessible to colonizers were either exploited or destroyed the desired resources [0] before the colonizer's ambitions could consume them too.
FWIW, that type of thing still happens in the Africa and South America with oil and mining and some other resources.
This trend is why I don’t believe in policies like guaranteed healthcare coverage for employees, mandatory parental leave, and even minimum wage. I believe these things are so important to our society that they should be provided to all people, not just those who work a certain number of hours at certain size companies.
Companies often provide this in the form of legal insurance - you pay a nominal monthly fee and in exchange can get certain legal tasks done for free or at a reduced rate.
These typically cover common things like living trusts, demand letters, etc.
Business related stuff is usually excluded and expensive stuff like real-estate disputes are very limited.
I remember reading something here that this is already the unofficial case in Japan. You sign up with a corporation, and in exchange for working long hours at that corp for life they essentially guarantee you a middle class lifestyle complete with legal support, corporate reputation, a social life, and even finding a mate.
A minority of Japanese workers are Kaishain (Salarypeople), and there's nothing you really really /need/ from a corporation. Corporate socialising is a thing, as is finding a partner at work. But given the low marriage rates in Japan, not really that big a deal. I guess there are people who are about the reputation of working at a well known company.
> I could see a future where the perks of employment include access to corporate retained lawyers. Or maybe corporations will hire lawyer secretaries to allow their employees to cut through government bureaucracy
Corporations that routinely do international projects have always been working like that: employee x needs to work on assignment in county y for z years? There's a department for that.
That's a slightly different for of support. It's there to directly fulfill business needs. It's not to indirectly support those needs by making the employee happier as a person and thus more productive.
Currently most of the support you get from a corporation is strictly limited to what you need to do your job. The corporation will rarely offer it's services for your private benefit.
There are a few that do though. Of course, opening that door is tricky for a corporation as it may involve more than you bargained for. The bottom line is profit which is easily quantifiable. The increase offered by a happier employee not so much.
That existed for Microsoft employees a while back(not sure now). Heard many stories of people using it to get out of parking tickets rather than anything serious.
Corporations already provide education, health care of all kinds, family health care, housing, career advancement, social membership, libraries, health facilities, food, washing and dry cleaning, transportation services, relocation, parking, financial services and other services to their employees.
We are already there. I pay a small amount each month as legal insurance via my employer for personal legal coverage. Corporate attorneys help navigate govt bureaucracy around immigration. Plenty of corporate resources to help navigate taxes, finances etc.
Actually, no I don't, never heard of this until now, but it is beyond hilariously bad, assuming this [0] was the real version. It gets better, KPMG tried to claim that another website cannot link to them with their permission [1], now _that_ is hilarious.
Oh my god, I did not know that Poe's law applied to corporate marketing now. I could not distinguish this from a parody song like Weird Al Yankovic's - "Mission Statement" [1]
Cybermedia had the worst anthem of all but I haven't been able to find it. There was a page that collated all the cringe-worthy corporate anthems somewhere.
Yes when I was younger I would have absolutely refused (it is ridiculous). Now I’m old and cynical and think everything is insane anyway I’d sing it with all my heart... most places are insane, but few are this entertaining!
You should listen to some Vaporwave. It's specifically geared toward bastardizing a mutant version of that sort of close-of-the-twentieth-century mind set.
I can remember the chorus from memory 18 years later, it’s that bad. Incidentally, if you only listen to the start, you might think it doesn’t get worse. You’d be wrong, it has an absolutely gloriously awful outro that goes full gospel, a key change, the verses have Steely Dan on a bad day modulations, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
(It also has way too long instrumental intros and outros, but they’re just bad, not fun.)
The point of the article is that the salaried people get to contribute a voice to the ethical decisions being made, including how does the company act in the rest of the world.
That is kind of the opposite of living under a feudal Lord: the nonsalaried employees are in that bucket (noncitizen residents in the ancient Greek analogy).
Serfs had a voice too, and just like in a corporation, the lord had no legal obligation to listen. Similar to a corporation, that serf could just be ejected because the lord felt like it.
And yet companies can completely ignore the voices of employees. This article presupposes that the employees are in a position to leverage leaving because they aren't pleased with how things are being done, and that the company cares if they leave.
The feudalism metaphor is appropriate given the lack of collective bargaining power employees have access to.
In some US companies it is already like that, that citizenship is a priced good. Especially since most teams are a collection of differently sourced consultants. You rarely see any real employment besides the project manager.
And yes, a lot of the stuff feels like feudalism. But from my perspective the feudalism part comes from topic ownership and titles, budget ownership and headcount more than from employment status. Of course you can't get your own budget if you are not a full-time employee, but just because you're a full-time employee doesn't mean you will ever get your own budget to manage.
Corporate serfdom is definitely the name for it, we're building a two tiered society of the privileged corporate few who work at Amazon, Google, etc, along with the army of lawyering professionals who protect their wealth vs everyone else.
Inequality isn't new of course, but it's getting really hard to ignore.
I was almost there with you until the bit about the gig economy. This reads more like an advert for Upwork.
People giving up leverage with labor just gives 'them' the upper hand. Why it's so hard for tech workers to band together over something as common as income is the problem, regardless of the disparity.
Teachers in my area are striking over much less money than tech workers fritter away on a daily basis. Sometimes it's worth standing outside with signs and waving at people passing.
The incentive to come together as a group is not about how much an individual is paid, but to come together over a common ground and influence change that benefits the many over the few. Income is one of the most common things to throw out there because it encompasses pretty much everyone's life.
An individual can be paid handsomely, even if the group average is a fraction of the individual's number. Though you believe you are paid well, and you may very well be, it does not mean actions do not happen to suppress the momentum of someone sitting a desk or two away working toward the same goal as you.
A traditional union with collectively-bargained pay grades and seniority probably wouldn’t work in hi-tech but an even more traditional mediaeval style guild could work very well indeed.
And what is an interview if not a test? Or are you advocating written exams only - I don't see why this would be better than a well designed interview process.
You don’t have to do it over and over for each job you apply for?
It also takes some onus off the hiring team to ascertain the technical abilities of prospective hires. “Just get me a guild member!” Now you can interview on other qualities...
I think most (but not all) fields would find a traditional union too limiting and frustrating these days, not to mention the issues with corruption they are plagued with in the US. A flexible and modern hybrid with a guild type system, more like a framework than a prescriptive structure, could get a lot of people on board.
Sysadmins have guild-style organizations (see: USENIX, LOPSA) but they've not had as much impact on hiring and income as would like to be believed. If anything, they've served as a filter for HR, who immediately tried to weaponize it.
I'm not saying a traditional union is the Way, but tech workers as a whole are severely lacking a cohesive voice, any voice. The egregious hiring practices, which have been turned into a game at the highest levels, are symptoms of this madness. When was the last time a doctor had to bring Frankenstein's monster back from the grave with no tools while blindfolded? In tech, that's a fairly typical interview question.
It shows in the amount of overwork-related discussions, shrugged off as part of being a highly-paid, salaried employee. All the while, sharing on LinkedIn this great new shiny your company's CEO really, really wants people to see.
A big chunk of bay area tech workers are on the H1B visa. If they get fired, they might have to go back to their home countries. They simply cannot take the risk of losing their job (almost a $100K downside) for the chance of 10% salary increase ($10K upside).
The perception that Google is an American company serving American national interests as opposed to a fluffy post-nation collective can only harm them over the long term.
There are maybe a few dozen engineers with enough outsized talent to get away with challenging the status quo. Anyone else will be fired and replaced by a ready and willing throng of recent grads eager to put a dent in their student loans.
I feel like you're just cynically making this up. Are you talking from experience here? Most big tech companies have massive amounts of open head count -- you should probably sell them the location of all of these eager recent grads that they can hire who are just as competent as whoever you imagine they'd be replacing. These companies will want to hire them all, this morning, without firing anyone. You could be rich!
GP didn’t say these grads were sitting around waiting to get hired.
They just said those are the people who will do your job after you’re fired for not being a team player/trying to upset the status quo.
The recent grads will be hired either way. The point is they vastly outnumber the people who will even make a legitimate attempt to change a corporate culture.
It’s replacemwnt as in, when you get out of the ocean, you will be “replaced” by salt water.
There a few big time security engineers/privacy advocate types who fought tooth and nail to change these organizations from within. They no longer work there.
"This means giving some people on the engineering team exact information about what the system will be used for."
Yeah, well, remember there were at least a couple people who went around installing fiber replicators for AT&T to tap the entire internet for the NSA, and they managed to keep that a secret for a LONG time.
Not really, it only lasted three years (started in '03, and was exposed by Mark Klein in '06). And more generally, that communications were being spied upon by the NSA was public information for a long time. I first learned about it in a Spanish tech magazine back in 2000 or so (the great HackxCrack), but by then it was old news.
Give that job to the military and it can remain secret for a long time. A signals regiment could have done that job with no leaks, even more so if they were SF.
This article is very well written. It's a very interesting perspective that I find spot on. The cyberpunk dystopia is becoming more and more real. Also (on a side note), if anybody can link me (and other readers) to similar articles, I'd very much appreciate it.
Was it not ever thus? Until the 20th century, it was common for navies to have little regard for the "basic rights" of their crew. See: etymology of "shanghaied". And I don't know why I say "until the 20th century": https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/world/outlaw-ocean-thaila...
"But (1) they were never internally transparent about anything sensitive, and (2) it’s naive to think 10 thousand people can keep a secret."
Maybe this is an opportunity for the C-levels of the very companies responsible for the modern surveillance economy to have a tiny taste of the crap sandwich that is having every detail of your life out in other people's hands, to exploit for their exclusive benefit, at odds with your own interests?
Someone needs to remind this person that the arab spring ended up as a tragedy that only bolstered the idea that there will never be any change. The best mutiny against the big five would be to leave them.
In terms of recurring income (retainers) or access to "upsides", corporate employment does not do any better than the gig economy. You can charge $250/hour for a gig, but I doubt that corporations would agree to pay that out as a monthly salary. You can get 25% of the shares and therefore the profits in a startup but good luck trying to get any share in the profits of a corporation.
Furthermore, in the gig economy you don't get a payslip. You invoice. That allows you to extensively use jurisdiction shopping to minimize tax bills. In Europe, that can spare you from handing over 70% of your revenue to the tax collector. Good luck trying to do that in corporate employment.
Most corporations have a Council of Elders who advise the Glorious Chief. The Council can technically depose the Chief, but this is extremely rare.
The Chief has a Central Executive Committee which is responsible for establishing and ordering policies. Politics is strictly limited to Committee members fighting among themselves and attempts to influence, bribe and convince the Committee members that certain plans should go forward at the expense of others. If the Council of Elders executes the Chief, it is usually a Committee member who they select to step up.
Large Corporations grow by dominating other Corporations through economic warfare and forcing them into starvation, invading and absorbing them, or, most insidiously, subverting their Council Elders and launching a coup.
Think of it this way, large parts of our economy are under central planning because of the power of large corporations.
For example Walmart, when they chose which company to buy lawnmowers from for example, they get to decide which lawnmower makers survive and which don't.
By picking one winner and putting in a huge order at a huge discount, they can undercut every other manufacturer, effectively putting them out of business.
I don't know about you, but I don't remember the election where I got to vote for who is in charge of Walmart, so it's very autocratic.
Cartel or monopoly is the general trend of the day. I believe that laissez faire economics leads toward cartel/monopoly rather than persistent decentralization, it's kind of chaos theory in action with strange attractors or local minima/maxima.
Unless the fundamentals of the system are decentralized: farming/farmland, fisheries, mining, and other commodities.
I never understood why at super-large corporations they would centralize operations for critical stuff (infrastructure, etc) under monolithic organizations when they are large enough to create multiple competing organizations to provide the services: office space, servers, databases/software, laptops, etc.
But then again no company really like competition unless the game is fixed in their favor, and neither does middle management.
Because the legal construct of the corporation diffuses risk enough to make central control appealing.
If the law did not allow incorporation, in other words if officers and directors and shareholders bore full liability for the business, we would see the end of gargantuan businesses like we have now.
I went back to do my master's degree after I had been working as a programmer for about 10 years, so I knew my way around corporate (dys)function by then. I had a professor who had spent his entire career in academia, but who had grown up under communist rule in (I believe) Czechoslovakia. He would often go on tangents about how horrible communist government was and give examples of their lunacy. I was struck that every example he gave was something I had actually seen happen in a corporate setting in my then ten years of employment. One example he gave was that the communist rulers would draft five-year plans, accomplish none of it, and then go back and change the wording of the plans to make it look like they had accomplished everything. I had literally been through that exact same dog-and-pony show at my job that day.
Exactly, “communist” has just become a meme that means “dysfunctional” ish.
People pretend to be experiencing communism even though almost no one is practicing it in the modern world. China is communist? Give me a break.
The nice thing is no one remembers what communist actually means anymore. So someone will be able to come back and describe communism and people will be like “wow, this is interesting.”
Honestly, I work in a huge company (number three in comparison worldwide, >90k employees world-wide), and it feels like Socialism. We eat lunch together in a canteen. Everything we do and buy is shared ownership. There's false propaganda from the top down, and you can live a happy life as long you accept the size of your share of the cake and don't criticize people above you.
This is not meant as criticism, I actually like the lifestyle. Especially since in such a big corps there are actually resources available compared to end-times socialist countries. But if you live here in this company your whole life it is questionable why we should call ourselves capitalists.
The root comment wasn't so bad because it reported personal experience, but the generic ideological bit is a virus. It leads—inevitably—to a generic ideological tangent. Those make boring, repetitive subthreads and so are off topic on HN.
Perhaps there are new and interesting things to be said in the classic ideological debates, but the internet message board is not a medium capable of that discussion. It bursts into flames instead.
Honestly, your explanation makes no sense to me. I don’t understand what’s so generic about this conversation. I think the idea that there are non-dominant forms of government operating inside institutions operating within capitalism is a rarely seen perspective.
I took another look. There are some good comments in there, and then there are the ones about Hillary and Stalin.
I'm not as convinced as you are that the point about capitalist institutions is so fresh or interesting, but I see your point. It's often hard to tell exactly where to apply the pruning shears.
We're trying to change the dynamic in my employer. There is still company-wide centralized planning, and our parent company still sets overall goals and expectations for profitability, but we're something of an experiment in self-organization where individual departments and teams have responsibility for setting and spending budget, setting policy, and selecting the work that needs to be done. It's as democratic as we can get without an employee board or becoming a Mondragon.
New and innovative initiatives are more often started from the mid- to low-levels of the company (three or four new lines of business have been started this way), and for the past year or so those initiatives are encouraged to become startups. The baby businesses are essentially put in an incubator where they have an initial budget and cash provided by the company but are encouraged to be individually profitable, report on their finances, are given coaching and regular meetings with startup business advisors, etc. And if they provide services back to the company, they're supposed to bill teams for those services. (The company still provides salary and benefits to the employees who start businesses within the company; there's some accounting magic to adjust which department budget actually pays for these.)
Examples of internal businesses started include:
* delivery of cafe drinks and food (with a delivery charge paid for by the receiving employee)
* conference room ownership and maintenance: these can now be permanently rented by teams, and the business that "owns" them is responsible for decorating, cleaning, providing technology services, etc.
* balloons, party supplies, swag, and desk toys, purchased either by the employee or their team
And businesses started with a focus outside the company include:
* providing detailed retail sales and product category data to suppliers and manufacturers
* tools to identify and encourage employee networks (who knows who, what skills does each employee have, who may provide an introduction to another employee)
* tools for polling and identifying employee sentiment
* self-organization consulting, training, mentoring, and software
A) There is a lot of democratic control actually. More than employees execute I would say. In a 90k people organisation even the most powerful person has much less power than a majority of the other 89.999 people. The founders btw own less than 20%. Aaaand I also own shares. So I'm one of the guys who sets the policy for employees like me. I also go to the shareholder meeting which is held not far away from where I work. The most powerful owner is probably an investment bank. But they only care about the numbers. If "care package for employees of size $X" is spent on tennis courts or air conditioning in the office, or free ice cream after the canteen lunch, they simply don't care. So it's open for democratic processes to assign these budgets.
The difference between Corporate Socialism and Democratic Socialism is the flavor of koolaid being served at the propaganda canteen. (hint: large concentrated power centers don't remain democratically controlled)
If the primaries aren't democratic, even a democratic choice between two undemocraticly-nominated candidates does not lead to democratic outcomes. We need to destroy the political machines that are running our elections.
There is one other important difference: in democratic socialism, your vote is inalienable. In Corporate socialism votes are quite literally bought and sold as part of the standard operating procedure.
That only matters if voting actually functions as the root cause of election victory, but in practice it is merely an illusion of choice. Party leaders and influencers control the election field, ensuring they get to choose a controlling share of legislature membership. Voting may be a proximal cause of election victory, but it is the ability to choose most of the people who get to even run that actually matters.
In a two-party system, there are two flavors of propaganda and people can choose which political machine they want picking the candidates. In a one-party system like we've seen with the great Socialist states of the 20th century or with American party primaries, leadership control over elections is even more blatant.
In the American system, for example, the existence of third party or non-Machine candidates acts as a pressure valve that ensures no real change can happen, since the major parties can divvy up the successful rhetoric and defuse it with their own loyal candidates, while anyone else who gets elected will be in too small a number to form an effective legislative caucus.
The result of individual elections isn't important. What matters is how the system functions in aggregate.
No. The course of history changed radically as the result of the last presidential election in the U.S., and it will change radically again depending on the outcome of the midterms. Things are very different now than they would have been if Hillary Clinton had won, and if the Democrats take the House, things will go very differently than if they fail to do so.
Yes, things will be very different. We get to choose between corporate feudalism and outright fascism. Great choices we have there. One is obviously worse than the other, but neither are for the benefit of the American people.
The polarizing antagonism between our political parties is a symbiotic relationship that keeps either one from having to own the consequences as both continue to feed off their common host. The party that gets elected determines which group of ultra-rich interests gets preferential treatment in looting the economy.
That's because the advocates of corporate feudalism and fascism are out there working to promote their agendas, while the advocates of alternatives are wasting time whining on HN about the poor menu of choices instead of getting out there to fight for better choices.
Good choices do not get handed to you on a silver platter any more than anything else in life. That doesn't change the fact that in a democracy, if enough people get together and FUCKING VOTE instead of sitting at home gazing at their navels and feeling sorry for themselves, they can change the world.
BTW, love him or hate him, Donald Trump is the poster child for democracy in action. He did not get to be president because some shadowy Powers That Be decided to make him president. He got to be president because he convinced tens of millions of people to FUCKING VOTE for him.
Who says I'm not fighting for better choices? Voting just doesn't happen to be very effective at doing that if you don't first make sure there are good candidates to vote for. Telling people to just vote is as good as believing in the power of markets to solve all ills; neither are a magic bullet. Getting people to understand that problem is part of the fight.
If you would like to support a good candidate, you should consider donating to Ross Barkan for NY State Senate: http://rossbarkan.com/
You certainly left me with that impression when you wrote, "We get to choose between corporate feudalism and outright fascism. Great choices we have there."
> Ross Barkan
... is a Democrat. So now you're asking me to donate to a corporate feudalist?
(BTW, if you want to respond to that, I suggest you look up my donation record in the FEC database before you do.)
Ross Barkan is running as a Democrat, but he is not a Machine candidate; he is an independent who needs to edge out the person preferred by party leadership [so that he can take on the Republican incumbent without splitting the vote]. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is a corporatist through and through. Suppose we had Elizabeth Warren as a candidate instead?
Bernie Sanders is also a Democrat, but look at the kind of games party leadership played against him to make sure their preferred candidate got the nomination. Don't pretend you don't understand the difference between running under a party and being part of party leadership.
I happen to have a productized campaign contributions and expenditures database at my fingertips, so maybe I'll take you up on the offer to check. What state are you in?
EDIT: Your donations are probably to candidates in California, and we don't have that normalized and loaded yet.
And in that example, our choice was a fork between a corporatist and a fascist, and yet you used that to imply I was saying all Democratic candidates are corporatists, while also ignoring the influence party leadership has on aggregate outcomes.
Your example had flaws I attempted to point out, but you are going to such great lengths to find any reason to misunderstand and mix up my statements that I find it both uncharitable and uncanny.
Are you somehow claiming Bernie did not run against Hillary in the democratic primary, and that party leadership did not attempt to sabotage his campaign in favor of their preferred candidate? Why did you suddenly switch from past tense to the present to claim a misunderstanding instead of addressing my point directly?
As I argued elsewhere, a fork is a good example of an illusory choice. A rook/queen fork is not a real choice between keeping your rook or your queen, it is a forcing move designed to take your rook.
A choice between staying in an abusive relationship and killing yourself does not meet the criteria for an uncoerced choice, especially when it is being offered by the people with whom you are in an abusive relationship. Not killing yourself doesn't imply you consent to being in an abusive relationship. You'd have to be trying really hard to consider that a choice except in the most literal unhelpful sense.
Even our legal system (mostly) understands that you can't have a valid contract without consideration on both sides.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about whether the world would be substantively different today if the 2016 election had had a different outcome.
No, I'm pretty sure we agree about that. This is what we disagree about:
"in practice it is merely an illusion of choice"
I think it's a real choice, not an illusion, and that therefore votes matter. You may not be happy with any of the options, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a real choice, votes matter, and the outcomes of elections really can and do change the course of history, for better or for worse.
As an aside, if you are not happy with the choices, you can do something about that too, but effecting that kind of change does require more work than merely voting.
We don't need to agree on the definition of choice, but as long as political machines are allowed to keep playing these games, we're going to keep voting into an effectively captured playing field, and our decline as a society will continue.
The difference between slow decline and quick decline is important, but we still lose.
> That only matters if voting actually functions as the root cause of election victory, but in practice it is merely an illusion of choice.
Illusion of choice strongly implies that the choice does not matter in reality. Yet you go on to say this:
> One is obviously worse than the other, but neither are for the benefit of the American people.
If X predictably scrapes me up very badly but Y mortally wounds me, can you please explain how is choosing X over Y "an illusion of choice?"
Edit: let me abstract out the question to avoid digressions. If X bad but Y is worse, can you please explain how is choosing X over Y "an illusion of choice?"
Here's a direct counterexample for your abstracted question: Consider getting forked in chess. The choice between losing a rook and losing a queen is illusory, even though the outcome is not the same. The choice is illusory because the fork is actually a forcing move aiming to take the rook. The choice was prepared so that your opponent knows what you will pick, with the intent that you pick it and they gain an advantage.
Our two-party system functions as such a fork, multiplied by 100 million. Whether you think the Republicans or Democrats represent the queen or the rook is where Pick-Your-Own-Propaganda becomes a more effective tool than the easy-to-spot state-sponsored propaganda used in single-party socialist regimes such as the USSR or PRC.
That's a fitting analogy for U.S. national politics in every election except the last one. Because what happened was a large enough portion of the electorate voting to sacrifice the queen because fuck chess. (And I don't mean Clinton is the queen here-- I mean a large number of voters made a series of choices in an attempt to make a travesty of the game.)
In one sense of the analogy, you are correct: people who aren't filthy rich are deluded if they think their choice of presidential candidate will substantially improve their economic predicament. In a more important sense, you are wrong: Trump isn't a symbolic link pointing to the same establishment that was behind Clinton.
Put another way-- this was not the year to code up a random boolean generator to pick your candidate for you. Sometimes making the correct choice between two bad options is extremely important, even if the less bad option was set as a trap for you. Now we're living through the most expensive civics lesson as to why.
The illusion of choice is caused by vested interests having strong influence over who can be elected, in order to exercise aggregate control over the economic outcome, by using their market-maker advantage. The illusion is that voting 'correctly' leads to better economic outcomes for the public, but while it is possible to obtain individual differences, in aggregate the effect is still going to be the rich getting richer. Of course, we would prefer it if the rich don't get richer so quickly that it kills the host, but that's not the choice people think they're making.
It's like trying to beat the house at gambling. Individual losses are possible, but the house wins anyway.
I remember these same empty arguments back in 2000, and you know what? There was a difference! It’s hard to imagine Al Gore invading Iraq, and even if that is the single concrete difference between him and Bush, that’s still a whole region that wouldn’t have been destabilized, ISIS wouldn’t exist, etc.
Don’t confuse being unhappy with the choices on offer as there being no real choice. That one election has consequences still being felt today all around the world.
I can't really square the idea of "everything ... is shared" with there being a top down power structure. If some pigs are "more equal than others," you don't have a socialist system, you have a Stalinist system. I hate to break it to you, but you might be a (Russian style) communist.
Maybe I didn't put it explicitely into the previous comment, but in my understanding there is only one system (power pyramid) and different flavors of marketing attached around it. "We are a transparent tech company that shares all info with everybody" (Google? Red Hat?) is just as much B.s. in my eyes as "Socialism" or "Capitalism". Of course the people up the food chain control more of the "common goods". Is there a single communist country in human history to this date, that doesn't have this same setup?
If you want to claim that it doesn't fulfill Marxist ideology, well yes. But not even communists believe that. The world that fulfills this true common shared ownership is called communism, and from a communist perspective we've never seen that. Socialist countries where an experiment at triggering human evolution to achieve communism. It failed. But if we look at Star Trek for instance, there they have achieved commmunism. No need for money, not much need for ownership, everybody works to improve oneself and further the community. That's communism according to communist, and yes that's different from how capitalist propaganda labels communism.
I'm not part of that group of communists though. I have a more fatalistic/pessimistic approach and think we are not really able to develop any further. We apply different labels, but in the end it's always the power pyramid that succeeds, because we can't overcome our limitations.
Corporatists tend to parade around as if regulations are what limit competition when they're the ones writing most of them to keep competitors (both large and small) at a disadvantage. Any sufficiently large and concentrated capitalist system becomes a corporatist system.
Actually that's one of the big things people misunderstand about capitalism - it doesn't have to be competitive. Capitalism can, and does and wants to thrive in a monopoly. Capitalism and free markets are two different things and the latter is far more important though they are often conflated.
At least the Wikipedia article names competitive markets as central aspect of capitalism. I agree with your sentiment though. Companies are basically little bubbles of monopoly in a sea of free markets. But the optimal state for a company (and the owning capitalist) is no competition at all.
This was common practice in Southern Africa for many decades now. Farm workers live in compounds owned by the farm owner (on the farm), buy goods from the farm shop at exorbitant prices, and educate their kids at the farm school. Because farms are remote, the "farm economy" is a closed environment with the farm owner controlling wages, rent, school fees and the price of groceries.
It's a little funny and ironic how most big companies who love to call themselves capitalist and operate in an environment of market capitalism, internally look more like communist dictatorships. Resource allocation and deployment is centrally planned by a politburo who are more equal than the rest of the party members (employees). Internal propaganda communications to shape morale. (Some) employees' life needs taken care of (retirement, health care, legal services, etc.). Strict and pervasive internal surveillance/security. It's as if Lenin himself designed the internal corporate structure and functioning.
I have no idea how you did the gymnastics necessary to say that capitalist power structures that existed for decades before the USSR came into existence are modeled after it instead of the other way around.
The main point of the original comment with that claim was a little hidden but is this: I come from the eastern side of the Iron Curtain and saw socialism in practice in my youth. Then I saw how in the 90s and 00s everything socialist was suddenly bad and needed to be replaced with capitalist solutions, which in many cases meant replacing stuff that works and that people are used to with stuff that doesn't work and sucks for everybody involved.
Now I went to the western side of the Iron Curtain and see that actual, real life capitalism is not how "they" taught us it would be. It doesn't contain much of the bullshit that was created in our countries to be more capitalist. It is the same stuff we grew up with and that we know that it works. Just here it has a "capitalist" label attached, so nobody thought they need to destroy and replace it.
So yes, from my perspective it's socialist, because the capitalists told us that it needs to get replaced when they arrived in our countries. In fact it's just normal human behaviour.
> But if you live here in this company your whole life it is questionable why we should call ourselves capitalists.
Capitalism is about who owns the capital. In a big corporation, most of the workers are unlikely to even have meaningful control of capital, let alone anything approximating ownership.
The community aspect of socialism isn't the problem - that is one of its more beguiling features. The problem is that once you take the cynicism of capitalism out of the picture ideas take root that are pleasant sounding but turn out not to work in practice.
There are a couple of big hitters in that bad ideas category, eg, everyone should get a roughly equal share of societies resources. In practice this turns out to be a catastrophically bad idea where everyone is equal and has nothing. We've seen that story play out more than once - it turns out the best equilibrium is people who are more productive should get more, and people who are less productive should get ... politics is still out on exactly how much they should get, but it is settled that it should be substantially less than the productive ones.
In a corporation, if ideas like that take hold, the people with prospects flee like rats from a sinking ship, the corporation goes bust and then everyone moves on to something that works.
What do you think capitalism is, if not this clear example of a system affording great power to capital?
The definitions of the words aren't simply "capitalism = good" and "socialism = bad", so that the moment something feels bad, it should stop being called capitalism and start being called socialism.
I think you could make a case that corporations already take on some of the economic roles traditionally associated with governments, but they don't seem to have taken on the legal protection roles yet. However, I could see a future where the perks of employment include access to corporate retained lawyers. Or maybe corporations will hire lawyer secretaries to allow their employees to cut through government bureaucracy (e.g. to contest credit rating inaccuracies on an employee's behalf).
Another possibility would be the corporations and the cities associated with them sort of work together to act like city states. It definitely seems like the laws of San Francisco/California are informed by their association with tech and provide extra protections for the people living there (or at least the people living there who are employed by tech companies).