this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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Lefty Memes

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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.

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That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)

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Simple, really (jlai.lu)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

I'm not a theorist obviously, but it seems like it's inherently going to be a limited number of decision makers who can't possibly know everything, and they become a bottleneck to business creation at best, a corruption machine at worst. I know I wouldn't trust the government of half (or more but my point is, Republicans) the current US states to decide what business are allowed to exist.

Advocates of Central Planning advocate for rungs, not just 5 dudes and some excel spreadsheets. There would be factory level planners, local planners, regional planners, state planners, country planners, and international planners. Nobody will know everything, but they will know their own areas inputs and outputs.

I know the retort is of course that we have corruption now, but I'd think if we're theorizing, there's a better way to reduce extant corruption than introducing a new vector for even more corruption. And there's a way to harness the power of people starting small businesses freely without letting those businesses become unregulated behemoths.

Why would it be more corrupt? Why do you believe Small Businesses are fine? Markets themselves inevitably result in those unregulated behemoths, it's better to have a cohesive whole that is thoroughly regulated and democratically controlled.

Like just set the criteria you would be telling the Central Planning Authority to prioritize, and do that with regulation. Set an ownership tax so that as a business gets bigger the ownership moves away from the founder and into the public trust.

I recommend reading Wage Labor and Capital for more information on why the Profit Motive and Capitalist Production itself to be bad.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Why would it be more corrupt? Why do you believe Small Businesses are fine?

It's more concentrated power. The opportunity for more corruption. Sure, they could be philosopher kings at first but having the control means someone can have the control corruptly.

I don't necessarily believe all small businesses are fine, but their interests compete with each other, and they're small, by definition. And we already have regulations that apply to all businesses, there is democratic control in some sense. So I'm not worried about how the corruption of one small business owner would warp society or national interest.

Markets themselves inevitably result in those unregulated behemoths,

I agree with this premise and then not the conclusion. Inevitably, all behemoths were once small businesses. But is the correct intervention to stop the small businesses from forming in the first place, or to prevent the ones that get big from utilizing that size in an asocial way? You could socialize businesses of a certain size, for example. You could set rules for worker-elected board members, or whatever.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

It's more concentrated power. The opportunity for more corruption. Sure, they could be philosopher kings at first but having the control means someone can have the control corruptly.

Why does that mean it cannot be accounted for democratically?

I don't necessarily believe all small businesses are fine, but their interests compete with each other, and they're small, by definition. And we already have regulations that apply to all businesses, there is democratic control in some sense. So I'm not worried about how the corruption of one small business owner would warp society or national interest.

Nothing is static, they will eventually grow into monopoly and corruption.

I agree with this premise and then not the conclusion. Inevitably, all behemoths were once small businesses. But is the correct intervention to stop the small businesses from forming in the first place, or to prevent the ones that get big from utilizing that size in an asocial way? You could socialize businesses of a certain size, for example. You could set rules for worker-elected board members, or whatever.

The correct path is to avoid the problem entirely via Socialism.

[–] Delta_V 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That sounds like Market Socialism by another name.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Market Socialism has competing cooperatives, not central planning.