Posts by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #9kFTo97rHwJCkfXJQW by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-06-26T19:43:40Z
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@freemo I’m a libertarian and a communist, so I don’t trust the State to run either a border control/patrol system or a welfare state. I support welfare state policies while we’re stuck in a capitalist State system, but ideally that’d be decentralized and operated as mutual aid as much as possible in a better society than our own.
(DIR) Post #9kFUCank2izvXHmeXo by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-06-26T19:48:06Z
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@freemo if I had to choose, I’d endorse a welfare state, keep the border with loosened immigration laws, increase taxes on billionaires and corporations, and impose the kinds of sanctions Trump suggested on those businesses who attempt to leave the country.
(DIR) Post #9kFV5xHWAC3BBU6tRA by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-06-26T19:36:23Z
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@Liberty4Masses @nerthos @freemo when Holocaust survivors and Japanese internment camp survivors’re calling these things concentration camps, I think we should listen. May be an appeal to authority fallacy, but if anybody was able to correctly define a concentration camp, it’d be them.
(DIR) Post #9kFVhoa6xUTBCnrNlQ by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-06-26T20:04:57Z
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@freemo I support free higher education as well, and I’m glad you do too. You may be correct about businesses leaving and lack of investment, you may not; it’d depend on the stability of the market and investors’ willingness to take risk. I’d argue that this plan, combined with a right of first purchase for employees, could offset corporate exit and simultaneous begin American socialist transformation by creating coops out of the businesses left behind by capital flight.
(DIR) Post #9kFWXjU39nIKSAmUj2 by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-06-26T20:14:20Z
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@freemo I’d recommend looking into the functioning of SFR Yugoslavia’s market socialism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s mutualism, and participatory economics. They all emphasized a truly free or “freed” market with extensive if not complete worker control of the means of production. It keeps the benefits of a truly free market while removing the capitalist profit incentive and capital accumulation that prevent dialectical social evolution.
(DIR) Post #9kFWvZbFYZFukVW796 by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-06-26T20:18:38Z
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@freemo personally I believe every industry should be entirely cooperatives, both because coops are (usually) inherently socialist and because they’re vastly more efficient than capitalist industries.https://www.thenation.com/article/worker-cooperatives-are-more-productive-than-normal-companies/
(DIR) Post #9kFXQNe838RmeXYNo8 by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-06-26T20:24:12Z
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@freemo the problem with your logic there is ignoring context. The free market should ideally allow the most efficient to dominate, but the power existing companies already have to crush emerging competitors, the refusal of banks to lend startup funds to coops due to their focus not being on profitability, and coops almost always being small local affairs (Mondragón and REI, while interesting in their own right, are outliers) prevents said dominance in our markets.
(DIR) Post #9kFYDBlB2055yg7juK by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-06-26T20:33:02Z
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@freemo let’s take the example you’ve used of America moving west. In the Old West it wasn’t mostly individually owned entrepreneurial ventures, but outposts of established corporations built near railroad depots, so it’s not a great comparison. What usually happens to coops in new markets is established corporations move in, drop their prices to drive the local coops out of business, then resume business as normal. Happens all the time today w/ coop groceries & Dollar General.
(DIR) Post #9kFYfL8DmUMZ9TKHaq by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-06-26T20:34:42Z
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@freemo as for your investors, you’re an entrepreneur and your business’s main goal is to make a profit to pay said investors, no? That’s not a coop’s main goal, so it makes sense that investors would be far more likely to invest in your businesses than coop ones.
(DIR) Post #9kFYigJ1Vp01guyKfY by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-06-26T20:38:44Z
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@freemo coops didn’t exist even as an established concepts when companies started accumulating and consolidating. The cooperative movement only became a cohesive ideology after the Revolutions of 1848, so they already had plenty of competition to deal with. Plus, it’s not just coops that’re crushed by dominant corporations, but small- and medium-sized capitalist businesses. A coop just has less ability to get back on its feet than a capitalist business because there’s no profit.
(DIR) Post #9kFYt6RtATvtfU5XAu by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-06-26T20:40:33Z
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@freemo it’s not that coops don’t focus on paying back their loans (that’s actually the main money sink for most coops); it’s that they’re not trying to make a profit in the first place. Their purpose is to fill a present need as cheaply as possible and benefit their owner-workers, not to make a profit.
(DIR) Post #9kFZEzqcOL1HZ95wcS by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-06-26T20:44:30Z
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@freemo but there’s the kicker: they don’t get established and grow like capitalist businesses because, once again, that’s not the point. The Mondragón coop in Spain is huge, but that was a concerted effort to protect the coops that allied to make it from bigger businesses. Coop businesses don’t get dominated because they’re coops, they get dominated because they’re small in industries already dominated by giant corporations.
(DIR) Post #9kFZNIcwSD5G7renIm by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-06-26T20:46:03Z
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@freemo making a profit would either require exploitation, which is nigh impossible for a worker-owned business, or selling at a markup, which coops don’t do because that’s not their purpose. They sell as near to cost as possible to provide the best and cheapest service for their communities.
(DIR) Post #9kFZxE7mfi00aQDN3o by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-06-26T20:52:33Z
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@freemo “The truth is a co-op will just like any company be just as willing to exploit and make a profit so long as the people being exploited arent its own workers/owners.”I meant exploitation in the Marxist sense of extraction of surplus values, which is impossible for coops given their nature, but you have a good point here that coops aren’t by default ethical and may screw over customers. This is why I prefer a planned economy where the ability to do so is eliminated.
(DIR) Post #9kFa0jqHCdWhpFhT2O by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-06-26T20:53:11Z
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@freemo good night friend! Thank you for the stimulating conversation!
(DIR) Post #9kTx3M8nFoF7566am0 by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-07-03T19:17:27Z
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@usdcollector @chillallmen Filling these up with syrup is peak Canadian parenting dontchaknow
(DIR) Post #9km2hzm8Uveix9T82S by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-07-12T12:45:36Z
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@muehlfield
(DIR) Post #9ktReKEUviKfxez4Ma by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-07-16T01:15:23Z
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If your tequila doesn’t say “100% agave,” then it’s 40%-49% rum. That’s why José Cuervo Especial gives people headaches.
(DIR) Post #9ktReQ3jGfHe1zzYPY by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-07-16T01:18:26Z
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Most Canadian whisk(e)y is actually made in the US
(DIR) Post #9l3ZLnZNrBWQHr5kNk by kaptainwalcott@mastodon.social
2019-07-20T23:41:22Z
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@freemo dude the preview makes it look like you just wrote “grey area”