IWW and syndicalism

That's not why people are confused.This is using a dumb definition of democracy in the workplace to say democracy overall is bad. There's plenty to say about democracy, but this is just disingenuous. Especially on lemmy where there's a lot of support for various definition of communism. So people are adding that baggage to this post.

Imagine making a comic against "solar power" because solar flares break our satellites and are a pretty serious threat to our way of life. Sure? But it's just a shortsighted argument and a bad comparison.

In a country with proper social structures, you do get to choose your manager/boss, it's just not a "democratic process" per se. Also democracies/autocracies/oligarchies/monarchies don't mean capitalism/authoritarianism/communism/socialism. There's a difference.

This is especially weird in late stage capitalism where our workplaces have more say in our liberal democracy than people do anyways

It’s a pro union comic that implies we should have democracy in the workplace, not just politics, else we’re not really living a democracy in our day to day lives. I think it kind of fails to make its point if the only two comments are about it not really making sense. Maybe it should mention that unions give you that? I dunno, never had a union I could join so I don’t know much about them.

Your work, the thing that at least under capitalism is the only source of income for the vast majority of us, is the most impactful thing to your direct day-to-day life after the wider government. Most of us spend a third of our week, if not more, at work. Despite this, it is where we generally exert the least of our political power!

Let's not even discuss how lobbying allows these unelected despots that we call "bosses" and "businessmen" exert almost total political control over the people we vote for! There's a reason we're allowed to vote for representatives in a government, but this very government will almost always do all it can to frustrate the movements that draw political power within our economic sphere.

This comic isn't "anti democracy". It is pro democracy. It simply attacks the common misrepresentation of representative government as "democracy" when it is wholly controlled by a force that we cannot exert power over democratically.

It's a criticism of how work is a dictatorship, despite living in a liberal democracy.

This is a rehash of a classic joke about capitalism vs communism. The American worker feels free because they can criticize their government. The Soviet worker feels free because they can criticize their boss. The joke was funnier during the cold war.

The problem with the joke is that it reinforces the lie that the two are mutually exclusive. Both nations were run by oligarchs selling the idea that their system, which keeps them in power, is in the best interest of the people. But you can have socialist worker protections AND democratic values. Individual rights and economic regulation are synergistically beneficial. It's just much harder to abuse that system to take and keep power.

The comic is asserting that even though we live in a political democracy, almost nothing is democratic. It's also saying that true democracy would be workers having control over their workplace and the economy. It's saying that we spend 2080 hours or more at work per year, nearly a quarter of the entire year, in a dictatorship.