Comments by "Wandering Existence" (@WanderingExistence) on "The Real Reason Companies Have Become Obsessed With Your Data" video.
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Capitalism will commoditize everything! You thought your data was bad, wage labor is renting yourself via "self ownership". Employment is literally renting another human being as if they're property. The employer-employee relationship is a very insidious dynamic. Employment is a rental contract, like if you rented capital (say, a chainsaw from Home Depot), you pay rent for the "time preference" (basically the cost of time) for a piece of property. Capitalism is based on a principle of self ownership, which sounds empowering, until you realize that most people don't own capital goods other than themselves, and must rent out the authority over themselves as pieces of "human capital". This is a process of dehumanization where human beings are valued for their return on investment as capital goods. This is why, at the very least, capitalism needs unions and safety nets (or abolishment), or else the system won't value people for their human value. Importantly we must also think about our sick, elderly, and disabled people, as they can't provide competitive economic return for the investor class to value. We must figure out a way to change this economic system if we wish to value each other.
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@d33pblu3 You know it's ironic, I'm not currently working right now but I still receive an income, and I'm not on government cash assistance. It's called dividend and interest. You see it's really capitalist that can sit around and do nothing while they watch their money grow. I've been paid dividends recently for doing nothing, my GOOGL is using $70 billion to buy back stock after it laid off 7,000 workers, and my NVDA is up 26% just this week because AI will start taking more jobs. To add to the irony it's the capitalists who are firing people and taking their jobs with automation and then blaming them for not working.
Do you realize people can still do work and retain the full value of their labor without giving it a way to shareholders who literally just sit around the house and talk about socialist ideology (me, lol)? It's called a Cooperative, and the Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland Ohio has helped people increase their wages as well as share in the profits that they help create. Here's a snippet from an article;
"In the 11 years since then, Evergreen Cooperatives has added three more cooperatives to its ranks, growing from two companies with a total of 18 workers in 2010 to five companies with approximately 320 workers. Those workers are paid 20 to 25 percent higher than employees at the cooperative’s competitors. “Our average pay rate is close to $15,” says John McMicken, CEO of Evergreen Cooperative Initiative. “But when you take profit sharing into account, which could equate to $4 to $5 an hour, we’re hoping that we have a shot at breaking the $20 an hour ‘blended rate,’ if you will.” In 2019, the average compensation at Evergreen Cooperative Laundry was around $18 per hour." - Despite a Rocky Start, Cleveland Model for Worker Co-ops Stands Test of Time, by Brandon Duong
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@d33pblu3 What free market? All I see is markets rigged by capitalists from literally before the genocidal inception of the Homestead acts. Capitalism has always used government violence to create and protect private property. The point of cooperatives is to change ownership from private to social, by switching to social ownership it changes the coordinating environment and incentives to disengage from being debased by markets. By democratizing ownership through cooperatives and other institutions, more democratic ways of allocating resources can be developed that don't use market forces.
Personally, I've been interested in two grassroots groups focused on economic democracy, called the Next System Project and the Democracy Collaborative. They have devised a way to keep production local and contract service to cooperatives, called the Preston Model. They have helped multiple cities struggling with job loss due to factory closures build back their communities, in the US and UK. In addition, trade unions, collectives, public banks, credit unions, community land trusts, CSA's, and many other democratically controlled institutions can work together to create democratic networks outside the market to create an economy that doesn't reduce people, their governments, and the environment to a monetary value (which market forces naturally do). I think this can be a viable strategy to give people the autonomy over their work. I believe economic democracy is the only way people who work for the economy will have the economy work for them, their families, and the planet too.
This way of revitalizing communities by building community wealth has helped many communities all over the globe, and it is utilized by the UK labor party and touted by Jeremy Corbyn. Preston, Lancashire became the most improved city in the UK because of community wealth building. https://youtu.be/MObfh_VNqs4 Not to mention, much of the progress in labor rights has been due to union's collective power. The thing that draws my conviction to the movement is that I can see it now, helping empower people to live happier, healthier, and wealthier lives.
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