There are no countries with socialist policies.
Can you name a country that has workplace democracy? No? Then there isn’t a socialist country out there.
Would I move to the social democracies of the world? I love norway and whatnot politically (as much as a communist can love the state of any country)… but I love having warm air and nature I can enjoy without a coat much more.
Doesn’t any country with cooperatives have workplace democracy?
Norway is cheating because they have many natural resources to sell.
Yes, they have a tiny, insignificant amount.
An entire country has to have workplace democracy for the country to be socialist.
This is kinda like saying “doesn’t any country with a slice of bread have food”
What would change if every company would be democratic?
To begin with, there wouldn’t be an unspoken agreement between companies to keep wages as low as they can be because more than half of the companies in that market agree that the best they can do is starvation wages.
Y’know how totalitarian regimes are incentivized to be shitholes because of the keys to power problem?
https://invidious.asir.dev/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
at the very least, that goes away. But there’s many more other things.
autistic people could actually get hired
You think a co-op only has a tiny amount of democracy? I think it’s the best form of workers owning the means of production - the definition of socialism.
I believe they meant that worker cooperatives are a small, almost insignificant part of the overall economy in every country that has them. Often co-ops end up serving a small niche market because they really can’t compete with the anti-competitive nature of capitalist big business.
That’s not what I said, my point is that co-ops make up a tiny fraction of a percentage of the economy. If they made up all of it, that would be socialism.
Ah - I misunderstood. My mistake.
cuba is quite close to real socialism
In what way? I have yet to hear of a single socialist policy from cuba.
Do note: socialism is worker ownership over the means of production.
afaik, in cuba the means of production isn’t directly controlled by the workers but is controlled by the government which acts as a middle man between the workers and the means of production
That’s state capitalism, and has nothing to do with socialism.
The workers control the means of production under socialism, not the government, this makes it in no way socialist by any commonly used definition of socialism by philosophers.
if the government functions as a worker’s union is that state capitalism or socialism?
State capitalism.
What does a “workplace democracy” mean?
I’m envisioning that’s the janitor having a vote in where the brain surgeon makes the next cut.
That’s a possible interpretation of “the people control the means of production”, but that’s just ridiculous.
It means the janitor has a vote on how their duties are done
So…what if they decide their duties are brain surgery?
Like the nonsense a peer post to yours is spewing. From a person who’s handle is “communist”.
They could have reasonable points, but if your philosophy suggests that brain surgeons can get told what to do by janitors, that’s a problem. I wouldn’t call that “totalitarian”. I would call that sane.
Now, what do we do about brain surgeons and the cost of healthcare (which is and will always be phenomenal, no matter who is paying and how it is being paid for)?
Are you being outrageous and arguing in bad faith on purpose?
I genuinely can’t tell, in the event that you’re not, nobody has ever suggested that janitors should be allowed to do the duties of brain surgeons. Furthermore, even if a single absolutely insane janitor decided he should be allowed to do the duties of a brain surgeon… nobody else would agree with them, because we live in a society with vaguely reasonable humans… and that janitor would likely be democratically FIRED for suggesting something so outrageous, or put in a mental institution.
Or are you worried about the janitor uprising in which janitors decide they can do all jobs known to man? Perhaps nothing can stop the janitor uprising, and we are all doomed.
At the very least, they’d keep the streets clean! I, for one, welcome our janitorial overlords.
What kind of idiot workplace would allow that? Perhaps if you don’t assume the people you talk to are literally brain-dead, you might understand what they’re saying.
You make my brain hurt.
what if they decide their duties are brain surgery?
In your world the only thing keeping janitors from doing brain surgery is the current corporate structure?
Like the nonsense a peer post to yours is spewing
Which parts are nonsense
but if your philosophy suggests that brain surgeons can get told what to do by janitors,
It can’t.
Now, what do we do about brain surgeons and the cost of healthcare
The government pays for it like in most wealthy nations
The first part reminds me of religious people who can’t fathom ethics existing outside of religion.
“If there’s no hell what’s to stop people from doing bad things?”
It’s quite simple, right now businesses are structured in a totalitarian manner, socialism seeks to overthrow that totalitarian regime within your workplace, there’s a number of ways to do this, nobody is suggesting the janitor should decide how a surgeon does his job, we just want to eliminate the useless position of CEO, and replace it with democratic systems managed by the people who work the jobs.
An easy to understand version of this would be if every company was transformed into a worker co-op, but that of course is only one of many models for socialism.
It is important to note that the government is not the worker, and therefore government control over the means of production DOES NOT COUNT.
hat’s a bad faith interpretation of “the people control the means of production”.
I want you to consider the difference between the work needed to complete a task, and the work needed to manage a workplace: for one of those tasks, only the experts in that task can meaningfully contribute to the outcome, whereas for the other, everybody who is part of the workplace has meaningful input.
I don’t know about your experience, but everywhere I’ve worked there have been people “on the ground” who get to see the inefficiencies in the logistics of their day to day jobs; in a good job a manager will listen and implement changes, but why should the workers be beholden to this middleman who doesn’t know how the job works?
I’ve also had plenty of roles where management have been “telling me where to cut”.
Well, that is a pretty ridiculous interpretation.
Workplace democracy would most likely and most broadly refer to all employees of a company having a say in how the company is run. Either by voting on policies and changes, or by electing people to various executive/representative roles, much the same way that current Western democracies work.
An example of the janitor voting on where the surgeon makes a cut makes about as much sense as us voting on where the president flies in his helicopter. At best, it doesn’t pass the make sense test, and at worst is a bad faith interpretation of what people mean when they say “workplace democracy”
I’d settle for just having a labor representative in the C-suite at this point.
