An IT worker writes: 'Emotionally, we are broken'

[DeSwiss]

16. You can tinker around with Capitalism......

....and make it seem fairer. You can even hybridize it into a kind of social/democracy with a Capitalism Cherry on top, but this behavior is inherent in the beast. It's made this way and it is only doing what it is designed to do: ''Make the most profits possible irrespective of anything or anyone else.''

This demonstrates quite clearly that Capitalism has run its course. And so we can expect to see more and more of this. When TPP passes it'll get even worse. And once the Internets and Net Neutrality are dead concepts, we will be theirs for the taking.

- That is, if we don't stop it.

K&R

In most capitalist enterprises, and certainly most major corporations that dominate capitalist economies, the organization of work is highly stratified. At the top are the major shareholders, typically ten to twenty people who own major blocks of shares in the company. Because of that, they have the voting power of all those shares and that gives them the authority under the law to select the board of directors, between fifteen and twenty people.

Together, the major shareholders and the board, thirty to forty people, make all of the decisive decisions in a corporation: What the company will produce, how, where, and, finally, what to do with the profit the enterprise generates. The vast majority of workers in a capitalist enterprise are required to live with the results of all of the decisions that are made by a tiny minority.

Q: What’s the alternative?

A cooperative enterprise is the key alternative to a traditional capitalist enterprise. All the workers, whatever they do inside an enterprise, have to be able to participate in collectively arriving at the decisions about what, how, where to produce, and what to do with the profits in a democratic way. One person, one vote should decide how these things are done.

The reason why we’re interested in making a transition from the top-down capitalist organization of enterprises to a radically different cooperative or democratic organization is simple: We believe the capitalist organization of production has now finished its period of usefulness in human history. It is now no longer able to deliver the goods.

It’s bringing profits and prosperity to a tiny portion of the population, and delivering not the goods but the “bads” to most people. Jobs are steadily more insecure, unemployment is high and lastingly high, benefits are increasingly being reduced, and the prospects for our children are even worse, as more of them go deeper and deeper in debt to get the degrees that do not provide them with the jobs and incomes to get out of that debt.

The crisis we endure is the product of an economic system whose organization is something we should question, debate, and change.

~Richard Wolff, Professor Emeritus, UMass link