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We live in the future!
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Trust me bro, Capitalism is necessary for innovation, just trust me bro
Love em. Peak Capitalist innovation! By shipping a 99% complete product for a low price, you can gain a large user base. Then, you make it addictive as fuck and add pseudo-gambling, to take advantage of people likely to routinely make small purchases. Then, all you need to do is spend a fraction of dev time on new skins or stickers, and make obscene profit!
What, you don't like living in the modern orphan crushing machine, designed to commodify literally every second of your existence? Are you some kind of radical? Spooky!
Yeah you're right let's follow the great innovations of the USSR, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba
Those aren't the only alternatives, lmao. Do you think humans stop innovating if they share tools and democratize production, rather than having a bunch of unaccountable mini-dictators?
Do you think the Capitalists are the ones who innovate, or is it the Engineers and Scientists that do?
So you're saying engineers and scientists aren't capitalists. That's pretty dumb of them, then again engineers and scientists aren't terribly keen on history.
Engineers and Scientists are workers, not Capitalists. Capitalists are owners.
You're quite literally on the explicitly leftist, anti-capitalist alternative to Reddit. Instead of a centralized, closed, Capitalist system filled with ads, you're on a federated, decentralized, openly shared platform that deliberately rejected the profit motive and Capitalistic development for its own innovation.
Did it legitimately never occur to you that FOSS is a leftist structure? Right now, you're using an example of anticapitalist innovation.
Also the commentor above probably doesn’t realize that engineers and scientists have all throughout history had a pretty negative take on capital. Academics are generally left leaning
Absolutely. Engineers aren't the ones that see any of the benefit of the IP they create unless they have the money, connections, resources, and Capital to also manufacture and sell said products. The ones who create what people use every day get to see the IP they designed get resold countless times with no kickback. Same with Scientists, many go uncredited for critical research, especially women, historically.
Show the alternatives then.
And yeah the capitalists are the ones that drive the innovation since they're the ones that allocate the capital where it would generate the most return, which sometimes means innovation.
You're literally on one of the alternatives. FOSS is a rejection of the profit motive, and individual ownership of Capital. It is, quite literally, an anticapitalist statement. Are you under the impression you're on Reddit?
Money doesn't need to come from Capitalists, and again, Capitalists aren't doing the innovating. That's like saying the bread baker that fed the Engineer is doing the innovating, because without the bread baker, the Engineer couldn't innovate. Of course humanity is interlinked, no one man is an island, but that doesn't mean labor performed by one person is actually labor performed by another.
I'll make it simple for you, and give you 2 choices.
Factory 1: Capitalist owner, non-owner workers. The only voice workers have is to either get a new job, or unionize.
Factory 2: Workers are the owners, and thus production is democratized. One of the workers is elected as a manager, and may be stripped of power by the rest of the workers at any time.
Which one is better?
To circle back: what you listed is a very, very narrow vision of what Socialism can mean. Socialism is Worker Ownership of the Means of Production, and can be just as varied as Capitalist organization. Are you going to say that Sweden is the same as Pinochet's Chile, just because both were/are Capitalist? Absurd.
FOSS is not necessarily a rejection of the profit motive, it just says that there shouldn't be restrictions to redistribute work to the masses. Just look at Linux itself. The project is maintained largely by contributions from (big tech)[https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/] even though it's under the most restrictive copyleft license.
Also, I'd rather the factory that has the incentive to reduce prices to compete with others instead of the one that has all the incentive to increase costs (wages).
Besides, you can absolutely create any co-op you want in a capitalists system. If you think it's just as innovative then just go and start one instead of screeching at people that capitalism bad.
Are you really that dumb? The point of open source software is that anyone can contribute and use. So of course some tech companies are going to contribute to the Linux kernel, why? Because it’s more innovative than the alternatives. The best innovation happens when you let go of the profit motive and just let engineers tinker.
Buddy look around. We are in a capitalist paradise and what is happening? Oh right, costs are rising! Why are you pretending that capitalism means that companies keep the costs low, when it literally incentivizes monopolies to form, and thus drives UP costs??
Capitalism is the reason for institutional racism (in the US), for the degregation of the environment, for poverty in first world countries, for so many wars and violent coups, for literal slavery. If you think that billionaires controlling society will create innovation, it might, but for the a cost of exploitation and destruction that 100% isn’t worth it.
It’s crazy to me that people like you genuinly believe that a worker led society is somehow bad. You do know that you are a worker right?
FOSS is undeniably a rejection of the profit motive. People may use something developed as FOSS to make a profit, but FOSS itself is rejecting profit. Linux being used by for-profit companies does not mean it's suddenly privately owned, a la Capitalism.
You didn't answer the question, you dodged it entirely. If this is your way of massaging that you think antidemocratic measures to ensure workers have no say other than to unionize or leave is a good system, then it's a very odd dodge. You can have normal wages and normal sale prices with worker ownership.
Being able to start a co-op within a market based system does not mean co-ops are Capitalist. They are firm rejections of Capitalism. Additionally, if we can agree that democratic control is better than authoritarian, centralized control of Production a la Capitalism, then it makes sense to advocate for a more democratic and horizontal structure.
Am I not allowed to make my case against Capitalism when clearly relevant? Shutting me down by claiming I'm screeching at others, when you yourself attacked my comment first, is ironic to say the least.