Democracy at Work: Curing Capitalism | Richard Wolff | Talks at Google

Seriously. People got canned for resisting the corporate overlords. That’s capitalism. Corporations run by their employees? Guilds? Cooperatives? Hah! ▶ this video Just that usually the forcefed initiatives have to do with corporate profits for shareholders, or trends like shoving AI into everything. Imagine saying no to that! Even at the supra-corporate and supra-national level, if the organizing principle is competition, no actor not even a CEO or a corporate board or a government can afford to stop racing towards disaster. There is a simple mantra: “If we don’t achieve AGI first, China will and then they’ll dominate.” Once in a while, the world comes together to successfully ban eg chemical weapons or CFCs, and repair the hole in the ozone layer. Cooperation and restraint takes effort. Judging by the way we’ve drained all the aquifers, overfished the last fish, destroyed the kelp forests, cut down the rainforsts, bleached the corals, and polluted the world with plastic, I don’t think there is much hope of stopping. Insects and pollinators are way down, and many larger species are practically extinct, 95% of the world’s animal biomass is humans and their food, and people still pretend environmental catastrophe is all about a few degrees of temperature. PS: Yes, that escalated quickly. In the real world, it has taken only 80 years… :-/

Very well said! You might find this talk interesting, it’s about “democracy at work” as a new-ish flavor of socialism. ▶ this video

Mr Graham writes "You would think, after having been on the side of labor in its fight with capital for almost two centuries, that the far left would be happy that labor has finally prevailed. " Unfortunately Mr. Graham has an outdated view about the "far left". I recommend anyone interested in what a modern "far left" looks like learn about Richard Wolff and the Democracy at Work movement. A startup in a garage where everyone is an owner building great stuff is pretty much it. He did a Google Talk here: ▶ this video

To make this discussion maybe a little bit more solution oriented, what would be your solution to problems of labor mistreatment? Or do you suggest that nothing like that exists? I recently came across an interesting talk by Richard Wolff at Google [1] which suggests that a great solution would be the democratization of the work place in the form of worker coops. It’s actually a tried and true model that works well in a variety of contexts. It would probably solve the problem you outline as well as make labor mistreatment a lot less common. 1: ▶ this video

In this video[0], economist Richard Wolff talks about all the things he didn't learn studying economics at the US's most prestigious universities, because they were never mentioned. Fascinating talk. Towards the end he talks of a Spanish company run by its workers, which sounds like it has successfully transformed work for those people to something democratic, and, well, something free from what anarchists (and we all..uh 99% of us anyway) want to be free from. It sounds doable to extend that to other areas of life. Watch it! Highly enlightening ...and 'hope you can believe in' isn't that common nowadays. [0] ▶ this video

I was going to say the same thing but you beat me to it. Without some form of profit sharing or stake holding by employees, there is simply no way to make the workplace fair. That fairness was traditionally sought by unions but they have lost much of their influence for political reasons because of their relationship with socialism. Richard Wolff has talked at length about this: ▶ this video link Thom Hartmann's programs are another good source: link link Socialism gets a bad rap in the US because it has been abused in the past to give rise to things like fascism and communism. But many social democracies (much of Europe) today enjoy high standards of living and I would argue are focused more on culture and the pursuit of non-material goals than the US. We're at a crossroads where the middle class is on the brink of failure due to decades of trickle down economics (Reaganomics). Things like the upcoming tax cut will likely lead to stagflation (high inflation and flat wages, last felt in the 1970s) because there is no mathematical or economic basis for lowering taxes in boom times under a high national debt. So this will be the third bust I've seen (the dot bomb and housing bomb being the others) since the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999 by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act. Keep in mind that we had almost 70 years of relative stability since it was implemented: link The current trends are towards maximizing concentration of wealth, not just in the US but under multination

I used to be inspired by the Venus Project years ago. Unfortunately I realized it is extremely utopian and things needs to change in a more practical sense if we want a good chance of succeding. I'm currently very impressed by the work of Prof. Richard Wolff, an economist that heavily criticizes Capitalism and tries to make actual practical changes in the lives of people starting from their workplaces. Here is a talk he made in front of Google employees (the irony): ▶ this video

Suggested recently by Richard Wolff and many others before him: a possible solution out of this economy is worker coops aka democracy at work. ▶ this video