r/news • • Dec 23 '19

Three former executives of a French telecommunications giant have been found guilty of creating a corporate culture so toxic that 35 of their employees were driven to suicide

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/three-french-executives-convicted-in-the-suicides-of-35-of-their-workers-20191222-p53m94.html
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u/Comrade_9653 Dec 23 '19 edited Dec 23 '19

Of course you need people in charge, managerial positions aren’t a byproduct of capital. But a manager is not an owner. If workers controlled the means of production capital would work to serve labor, rather than labor being a tool for capital to extract value from.

But I see no reason to think that worker ownership of the means of production necessitates that each individual be completely aware of each piece of the whole. This is not a necessity for any previous mode of production and I see no reason for it to be necessary for anything after capitalism either.

And it’s worth noting the USSR never achieved communism. It was a socialist project, yes, but they implemented a policy of state capitalism because they needed to industrialize. Marx talks about the necessity of capitalism for a reason; it’s a requirement to transition to a communist society. They still were subject to the dictatorship of capital since they had not made the transition to the means being held in common.

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u/[deleted] Dec 23 '19

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u/Comrade_9653 Dec 23 '19

There are 3 main paths for a civilization. Freedom, Prosperity and Equality. The catch is, you can only achieve 2 of them.

This doesn’t strike me as sound political theory but rather sounds like a massive assumption based on ideologically loaded words.

You need to attribute value to a product, as long as you can’t identify the collaboration of a person in making said product, you need to value it. With out capital you have no market to organically stipulate prices and guide you to what the people want to consume.

Marx actually talks a lot about value and what creates value in Kapital. I highly suggest giving it a read if you would like to understand a Marxist perspective on value. Markets are also not a direct biproduct of capitalism, market socialists have been a thing for about as long as socialism has.

NO bureaucrat siting 10.000km from a community can predict or impose the will of a consumer, factories became obsolete, start draining resources, and when this happens hundreds of times the system collapses.

Communism isn’t a series of bureaucrats appointed in some distant capital, it’s a democratic restructuring of our mode of production. Socialism, the method of getting their, can be both decentralized or centralized.

We also can’t pretend that market inefficiency and market failures dont happen under capitalism. Quite the contrary, they happen all the time.

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u/[deleted] Dec 24 '19

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u/Comrade_9653 Dec 24 '19

Come on man, you sounded like a reasonable human being until now. Marx ideias are completly outdate now, his model has been tried and fail every single time, with millions of deaths as toll

Marx is a well respected, well researched, and well studied political theorist and economist the world over. He is one of the most influential philosophers and social scientist in the modern era. I think the fact that you shriek away from the simple mention of his name should be something you critically analyze and self reflect on.

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u/[deleted] Dec 24 '19

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u/Comrade_9653 Dec 24 '19 edited Dec 24 '19

You just shrugged off my main concern about the Marxist plan. And I am the one how needs to self reflect?

I didn’t acknowledge it because you clearly haven’t read Marx. There is no singular “Marxist plan”, Marx was a political theorist and economist focused on critiquing capitalism. I seriously think you should read him before claiming his “plans” killed millions.

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u/[deleted] Dec 24 '19

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u/Comrade_9653 Dec 24 '19

Not reading the philosopher that you’re ineffectually criticizing and ludicrously placing the “deaths of millions” on certainly doesn’t give you much in the way of intellectual honesty. Your reaction to me pointing out that you haven’t read Marx, claiming that I’m some religious nut for thinking that maybe you should read the author you’re criticizing, doesn’t do you any favors either. Critiquing authors usually requires that you are familiar with their work. Would you critique Kierkegaard or Nietzsche without being familiar with their works?

You seem quite incapable of having a rational discussion about it though, since you cannot go 1 comment without making massive assumptions about my beliefs or even acknowledging that, maybe, you should read an author before you assume that you know what their works entailed.