• rockSlayer@lemmy.worldOPM
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    1 year ago

    I’m happy for you, I really am! It sounds like you have a very good situation, but it’s important to remember that if the company is making profit, they are still taking value of your labor without doing the bulk of the work. Capitalism is designed to do exactly one thing, and that is to maintain the power of the wealthy elite. Any benefits are coincidental.

    • solstice@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      My example shows all three parties benefitting from the arrangement. Everyone would lose if I, the worker, quit. It’s not exploitation at all. I willingly enter into this agreement because I literally can’t do this on my own. So I benefit from company resources. My clients can’t be serviced by a small one man show so they choose a bigger company too. The firm owners make the most because it’s their company and none of this would be happening without them. It’s not exploitation and it’s not parasitic, it’s symbiotic. We’ve got loads of issues with legislation and enforcement, minimum wage should be like $20-30, corporate governance needs to address all stakeholders and not just shareholders, and so on. But that won’t be resolved by swapping capitalism for any other -ism. It’s overly simplistic to think one ism is the only problem and another ism is the only solution.

      • rockSlayer@lemmy.worldOPM
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        1 year ago

        I agree that it sounds like you have a mutually beneficial relationship with your company. I’m curious, do you have a union in your workplace? I do have a point to this question, I swear.

        Don’t believe that the company will struggle without you. In capitalism, you are replaceable. For the record I don’t believe that, I think you have extremely valuable skills that would be desirable in any society or economic system. I don’t need to know anything about you for me to say that, because everyone is inherently valuable to society. What is the difference between you quitting and you being fired, to the company? Effectively none, because capitalism requires a pool of labor that they can pull from as a threat to keep people in line instead of questioning the status quo. Why else would you think companies fire union organizers?

        You, personally, are in a good situation. There are multiple engineers that are not, and will jump on the opportunity to take your job because people in the labor pool are second class citizens with no assurances of their basic needs. This precarious position is a threat to every single person in the working class. You are only a few paychecks away from homelessness.

        Socialism, by comparison, ensures everyone’s basic needs are met. They are guaranteed the right to healthcare, housing, education, food, and access to a job. Companies can still exist in socialist societies, however they are not owned privately by any individual. Instead, they are owned by the workers. There are a lot of different socialist experiments that have done this in different ways, I highly recommend you do some research about this; it’s actually pretty fascinating if you like reading about politics. One very American example of worker ownership are worker cooperatives.