this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Capitalism is not the reason mobile phones exist, or that food exists. Engineers designing phones and workers building them are why phones exist and farmers growing food is why food is on the table. The fact that individuals own industry, rather than a collective, is not what enabled or even encouraged this.
Why do you think it's better for individual mini-dictators to control and own production, rather than democratically run production via worker ownership? Do tools work better when one person owns everything?
Secondly, Socialism isn't "safety nets," it's worker ownership vs individual ownership like Capitalism.
Better than Capitalism unrestrained, but not exactly a long-term solution.
The current system doesn't prevent worker ownership of any business. So, the obvious question is why businesses organized as owned by workers don't tend to make those sorts of big developments rather than ones owned by one or a small group of founders or owned by whoever wants to buy a piece on the public market.
Not preventing outright does not mean there isn't downward pressure via already existing larger Capitalists. Competition + price of Capital provides a significant barrier to entry for Worker co-operatives.
Worker co-operatives do make a significant amount of progress! Hell, FOSS itself is fairly leftist in organization, and we both seem to think at minimum it's worth exploring. The fact that there are larger Capitalist entities does not make them better or more efficient, just larger.
You're posing a hypothesis without doing any actual analysis, and hoping to skirt by on vibes. Tell me, why do you think it's better for individuals to own tools, than workers? Do you think Democracy is fundamentally a worse concept than dictatorship?