@arrrg @breadandcircuses the concept of a corporation is legal; government defined. In the 17 and 18 hundreds, corporations usually required charters that defined public goods they would provide, explaining why they should be allowed to operate. Sometimes other strictures were imposed.
We can demand this from corporations. They exist by the grace of nations.
@breadandcircuses @mudbungie @arrrg
Why do you think the nations, by whose grace these corporations exist, don’t demand this of corporations?
@HeavenlyPossum @breadandcircuses @arrrg because general corporations are really easy for the state to administer, and in most cases are fine (someone wants to rent a place, hire two people, and sell bagels: this is fine and the public good is implicit). Obviously when it matters, the ship has already sailed, and wealthy companies are effective lobbyists. They also are deeply integrated into the lives of constituents, and requiring a restructure retrospectively is difficult.
There are reasons why the idea of a general for-profit company has been so dominant, but it is a legal construct, and the organ that administers the law is actually capable of managing that construct.
@mudbungie @breadandcircuses @arrrg
This is close but not quite there
> “someone wants to rent a place, hire two people, and sell bagels: this is fine and the public good is implicit”
Why is this fine and why is the public good implicit?
@breadandcircuses @mudbungie @arrrg
You misunderstand my question, which is not about the desirability of bagels or even about the provision of goods and services.
My question was about the desirability and “self-evidential” nature of the hierarchical firm. Let me break my question down into several sub-questions.
Why is it good or natural that some people own “places,” such that they can collect rents off the needs of other people to occupy space on the surface of our planet?
Why is it good or natural that some people own resources and others own only their labor, such that they have to sell their labor at the command of people who own resources?
Why is it good or natural that someone desiring to sell bagels, but needing the labor of others to sell those bagels, seeks out subordinate employees rather than equal partners?
Why is it good and natural that some people are in command, such that they can collect a share of the value produced by someone else’s labor, which they can then use to buy political as well as economic power?
@HeavenlyPossum @breadandcircuses @arrrg
I think you're mostly going after good, not natural, as many natural things are bad, as are many good, so I'll answer against that framework.
Rent can exist without private property: property taxes are effectively rent against the land, and they're a reasonable way for someone to stake a claim that they intend to be productive with some property: they expect to exceed the rent with their productivity.
In an entirely classless system, administration is still labor. "Hiring" people to work just means that someone is executing on a plan and needs some people to do so. Financial exchange is a way to do so, but not the only one.
I interview people for management positions in the corporate world, and the third question you ask is very poignant: potential managers who imply strong hierarchy or possession regarding those that report to them get a Do Not Hire from me (and most people I know in that world). Treating employees as unequal is toxic and usually ineffective.
Corporate political lobbying is generally bad. I hope I didn't imply an endorsement.
The narrative that I'm trying to promote above is that the supposed bagel shop can exist, and that it is positive that it does so, regardless of the economic system that underpins the mechanisms of its economic action. We live under capitalism, so the capitalist mechanisms are the most available, but the story is fairly consistent regardless.
@arrrg @mudbungie @breadandcircuses
I still get the sense that you have misunderstood. Taxes are indeed rents (and rents are but private taxes). “Hiring people” to work means something different in the context of class relations than it does in the context of voluntary collaborative labor between equals. But you come close when you write
“the bagel shop can exist, and that it is positive that it does so, regardless of the economic system that underpins the mechanisms of its economic action”
I agree—people have material wants and desires, and we tend to work cooperatively to meet those wants and desires; capitalism is not necessary to explain the existence of a cooperative effort to produce and distribute bagels.
The problem you’re running into is your normalization of the hierarchical firm, as a mirror of your normalization of the state, as a mechanism for achieving this goal.
The firm doesn’t exist to produce and distribute bagels—it exists to extract value from people who labor to produce and distribute bagels. The state likewise doesn’t exist to execute our collective will—it exists to extract value from the people over which it rules. The hierarchical firm and the state are two instantiations of a similar form. We err when we assume these phenomena are neutral tools that can be employed by anyone who figuratively picks them up, such as “the public” in your model of the state as a policeman watching over private firms.
@mudbungie @arrrg @breadandcircuses
I’m also tickled by the idea of managers in capitalist firms *not* being hierarchical. That’s the whole point of the firm! The capitalist firm is most people’s most routine and intimate experience with unfreedom. Owners, managers, and other employees are *not* equal in any meaningful sense.
@HeavenlyPossum @arrrg @breadandcircuses I agree, they definitely are not equal! A manager has a ton of power over an employee, but the most effective power is implicit, just as the most effective employee needs no management. A manager who needs to wield explicit power has already failed.
The ideal system is one in which everyone just does the best thing all the time, and all structures of organization are compromises on the fact that they don't reliably do that.
I don't think that I agree about the point of firms. The goal of the capitalist firm is to create/accumulate/extract wealth, not specifically to create hierarchies. They tend to, for the same practical reasons that they emerge elsewhere, but no more is an office there to produce memos, even if one might be excused to think so.
@mudbungie @arrrg @breadandcircuses
“Maximizing wealth for owners of the firm” is hierarchical. The creation of the firm is the establishment of hierarchy of owners over producers. That is, the two phenomena are as inextricably linked as a magnet’s north and south pole; you’re just using different terms to describe the same thing.
@HeavenlyPossum @arrrg @breadandcircuses The difference is that I'm extricating the ownership model of a firm from its operational model, which reflects my observations and, I think, the theory. If a workers can expel owners and still operate the factory, then ownership is severable from, and essentially unrelated to, operation. Implicit hierarchy in ownership is therefore not implicit hierarchy in operation.
Hierarchies in firms are common, just not necessary or universal.
@mudbungie @arrrg @breadandcircuses
Yes, I agree that ownership is severable from production, because ownership is parasitic on production. That’s the hierarchy.
If you’re using the term “hierarchy” in the colloquial sense to mean something like “specialization,” then sure—you can have specialization without unitary ownership. But you can’t have unitary ownership of a firm without hierarchy any more than you could have feudal ownership of a manor without hierarchy.
Likewise with the state. The state is not a neutral tool that can be used to enforce whatever rules any arbitrary user might desire. Like the capitalist firm, it is a tool of specific class interests.
@arrrg @mudbungie @breadandcircuses
The mistake is in thinking that “the capitalist firm” is a synonym for “cooperative effort to achieve a shared goal.” That ownership is severable from production doesn’t mean that the firm is somehow a universal mode of production.
@HeavenlyPossum @breadandcircuses @mudbungie @arrrg well , let me speculate here for a moment. Let's say that trump releases his minions on election day, who shoot every brown person attempting to vote.
So we have a successful coup, what do we do then?
More interestingly what happens if they move on to all politicians, billionaires, and cops. Now you've got an anarchy with a mob of armed yahoos running the show.
What now? What is the path anarchists want for utopia from there?
@denebeim @mudbungie @breadandcircuses @arrrg
This is a pretty wild tangent, but let me address two things:
> “Now you've got an anarchy with a mob of armed yahoos running the show.”
A group of people using violence to impose their will on a larger community isn’t anarchism; it’s the state. You’re confusing the seizure of state power for anarchy, which means roughly “the absence of rulers.”
> “What now? What is the path anarchists want for utopia from there?”
Anarchism is not utopian and I’m not aware of any anarchists who believe that utopia is achievable.
@HeavenlyPossum @mudbungie @breadandcircuses @arrrg ok so do the anarchy people who say burn the place down and we'll build from the ashes know this? They seem not to.
I see an awful lot of anarchists who refuse to vote even though by not voting for anyone the world is moving away from their goal state.
Since 2000 there have very much been negative results depending on which party got your vote.
1/x
@HeavenlyPossum @mudbungie @breadandcircuses @arrrg my political beliefs were left libertarian. I didn't go all the way to anarchist. However I think most of our beliefs are close. I believed very strongly that people are basically good, and will help each other.
2016 showed me how very wrong I was.
Fwiw I've been a tactical Democrat since bush v Gore taught me that my vote mattered. Today it's more important you don't want want a dictator. They will literally kill people they don't like
@breadandcircuses @mudbungie @denebeim @arrrg
I’m not really sure what prompted this harangue, but…Clinton won in 2016. She didn’t become president because the US political system is designed precisely to thwart democratic outcomes, not because a handful of anarchists refrained from voting.
I’m also not sure if you were aware of this, but the US state also kills people when democrats occupy the presidency.
@HeavenlyPossum @breadandcircuses @mudbungie @arrrg I am aware. However they kill a couple orders of magnitude less generally. Just because one is not good doesn't mean the other isn't a cheap imitation anti-christ. The difference in scale matters.
I mean I'm trying to save my and your life. Trans women can't afford to endanger their own lives to make a point.
As I said in the first post the way I vote is tactical
@denebeim @mudbungie @arrrg @breadandcircuses
Thanks for sharing, but I’m generally not interested in conversations about voting.
@arrrg @mudbungie @breadandcircuses @denebeim
Maybe you will again! I have a hunch that the state will continue to let you down.
@mudbungie @denebeim @breadandcircuses @arrrg
I still don’t know what any of this had to do with this thread
@HeavenlyPossum @mudbungie @breadandcircuses @arrrg I think it was about anarchy. It kinda bugs me that people I normally have a lot of agreement are not doing the smallest thing to prevent the country being taken over by real live Godwin lessed Nazis.
Anyway there's an old sf story called And then there were None. I think you'd like it.
@arrrg @denebeim @breadandcircuses @mudbungie
I didn’t say a single word about voting
@HeavenlyPossum @arrrg @breadandcircuses @mudbungie you didn't need to. And I probably shouldn't have even bought it up. As I've been saying I'm terrified and don't know what to do.
We have to get over 100 million votes to keep the GOP from stealing the election.
mudbungie
HeavenlyPossum
Joy Aliza Denebeim