Oh thank you thank you thank you! Every time I post something like that on Reddit, I get a swarm of libs and right-wingers trying to get semantic on me to prove that capitalism isn’t just feudalism in disguise. Like, “But under Capitalism you can just change your employer! You couldn’t do that under feudalism!” and I am like - oh, so you’re saying it IS just like Feudalism, except we haven’t reached the “Every town is a Company Town” stage yet. Got it.
Arguing with low-intellect, ‘meme’-intellectuals is never fun. But capitalism doesn’t ‘create’ the ‘inherent’ social friction and inequalities between people. Because almost ‘nowhere’ in human affairs, do you find people evenly represented. Even before you had capitalism, you still had the arrangements of ‘commerce’. Which were every bit as greedy and atavistic as the worst excesses of capitalism you find. And even before you had concepts like ‘property’, you had concepts like ‘territory’. I don’t like being a ‘rung’ on the ladder as much as anyone else, but I don’t think it’s a completely fair criticism of ‘capitalism’.
I think what happens is that people don’t remember that we’re using “capitalism” as shorthand for “the current and all previous western economic systems”.
Workplace Democracy is something that is so foreign to so many people. It is so rare. Mondragon is like the only company that anyone maybe has ever heard of, and they’re pretty much only in Spain.
People think 1984 is about totalitarian government. It’s really about totalitarian capitalism.
corporations are just a new and improved form of feudalism.
Oh thank you thank you thank you! Every time I post something like that on Reddit, I get a swarm of libs and right-wingers trying to get semantic on me to prove that capitalism isn’t just feudalism in disguise. Like, “But under Capitalism you can just change your employer! You couldn’t do that under feudalism!” and I am like - oh, so you’re saying it IS just like Feudalism, except we haven’t reached the “Every town is a Company Town” stage yet. Got it.
Arguing with low-intellect, ‘meme’-intellectuals is never fun. But capitalism doesn’t ‘create’ the ‘inherent’ social friction and inequalities between people. Because almost ‘nowhere’ in human affairs, do you find people evenly represented. Even before you had capitalism, you still had the arrangements of ‘commerce’. Which were every bit as greedy and atavistic as the worst excesses of capitalism you find. And even before you had concepts like ‘property’, you had concepts like ‘territory’. I don’t like being a ‘rung’ on the ladder as much as anyone else, but I don’t think it’s a completely fair criticism of ‘capitalism’.
I think what happens is that people don’t remember that we’re using “capitalism” as shorthand for “the current and all previous western economic systems”.
This, so much this!! The workplace needs to be democratic as well.
Workplace Democracy is something that is so foreign to so many people. It is so rare. Mondragon is like the only company that anyone maybe has ever heard of, and they’re pretty much only in Spain.
Is Zappos in the ballpark? I remember reading something about them once, but it’s been a long time.
I think that was the case back in 2015, but I’m not sure how they’re run currently.
In fact, Holocracy doesn’t have them on the list anymore: https://www.holacracy.org/success-stories#whos-practicing
But Zappos themselves still say that they do.