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So if a sociopath manages to charm their way onto the family farm and convince the majority of the workers to vote out the people who spent most if the effort and most of the investment starting and running the place?

What if they told the workers that the farm could be really valuable and they would make out like bandits if they threw the family off their farm, chopped it up and sold it piecemeal?

Cause that's what a culture capitalist is. Although now it's a culture communist.

That's not right. That's even less fair than traditional capitalism. You cannot even justify that by claiming Mr and Mrs Macdonald are cruel absentee landlords.


This scenario is such a extreme, unlikely case that I highly doubt it is every going to happen in any amount outside of individual edge cases. It is highly unlikely that were will be wide spread groups of nefarious conmen running around the countryside, looking for farmers to beguile out of their land. This is not a case even worth discussing and I can only see it being a valuable example if the person using it wishes to trap their opponent with a rhetorical 'gotcha' tactic.
 
Do you need make character sheet, if so how should it be written?
No character sheets required, although I suppose they'd be a handy reference.
Make a small effort of it, you may well be surprised. ;)
Well, you're coming across as quite hostile from a dead start, so I don't actually especially want to invest the effort, but for the sake of experimentation: my political and economic opinions, in addition to not being present in this text, come from so unorthodox a perspective that they don't readily map to the very categories I'm using in this quest. It is equally silly to suggest that I'm advocating for the entirely fictional New Capitalist ideology as it is to suggest that I'm voting for Turkey Wingnut Rapscallion as the foundation of the ideal political platform.
I don't really understand how this is a hostile takeover? You can only "take over" by... actually working there. In which case, what are you taking over, exactly? Control of your own labour? You had that already, though?

Also, I suspect if you tried to form a syndicate to try to forcibly influence workplace democracy, you would rapidly have the issue of people being unwilling to hire from that syndicate?
I mean, it's legitimate under the rules, but so is a hostile takeover. In a typical corporation, you just go to the shareholders and convince them of the merits of your case, which is perfectly legal. In this case, you don't have shareholders, so you send workers to a business with the intent of outnumbering and displacing the prior workers and assuming control of the company. Or maybe you don't even bother, and just try to convince the already-present workers to sell themselves to your larger company before using your massive numbers advantage to remove them from their positions and restructure their assets. Negotiating in bad faith is not a capitalist concept; it's human. Or maybe (almost certainly) there's some other underhanded strategy that didn't occur to me in the last ten minutes. And in theory, yes, people would stop associating with you, but that a) presumes that their agents are foolish enough to announce their affiliations ahead of time, and b) is in theory what prevents companies from falling to hostile takeovers IRL, but they still do. There's always somebody selfish or short-sighted enough to break ranks, even ignoring malice.

It's just...people being dicks. I've yet to see a political or economic system that has managed to address every case of that. It's a system. There are rules. People will game them.

Really, though, my reaction is more glee than anything else. That's some nice worldbuilding to use.
What sort of legal concepts would those be, exactly?
Lots of First Amendment stuff is rooted there, actually, but you can relate a fair amount of due process back to it. Honestly, a lot more of the stuff in the Bill of Rights is rooted directly in Enlightenment ideals than stuff in the actual Constitution, and it's those things of which we tend to think when we try to envision the ideological foundation of America. Like, if somebody asks you whether the ideological foundation of America is freedom of expression or a legislative body chosen according to geographical districts, what are you picking?
@PoptartProdigy Yeah I figured as much. The mechanical debuff doesn't what gets me, throwing any sort of founding document is a pretty big deal no matter how you spin it. It's just the wording comes off as very aggressive and pessimistic of the Constitution but I suppose in this instance people are legitimately upset as they perceive that it failed them and the nation. Still, saying it belongs in a trash heap of history is very strong wording.
I mean, in addition to capturing the popular perception of the move, I am also paraphrasing a couple of posters from the thread.
Guessing from what others have told me, I trust the OP shall slap us harshly with the pitfalls and weaknesses of our chosen system whatever it is.
This one gets it. :D
 
Depending on the laws and the size of the operation, they may not even have voting shares, just a requirement that all employees be unionized.

Like, we're talking about an easily legislated edge case. "Hey, law against a syndicate scavenging from mom and pop businesses". Instead of, say, today's reality of "Amazon and UPS are literally killing their workers and no one cares. Also companies don't pay taxes."

No one hates small holding farmers or your local mom and pop corner store. Rapscallions that for whatever reason try to grift them using the existing social infrastructure will not be at all sympathetic to wider society.
...See, this is literally all it takes to ease my concern. Someone saying something more substantial than "BUT WORKPLACE DEMOCRACY". An acknowledgment and allowance of nuance for the probably-kind-of-edge-but-maybe-not-as-edge-in-this-world situations we might see happen.

Having laws/acknowledgement of degrees of influence (unions are focused on guaranteeing fair pay, safe conditions, etc., I'm 110% for those), instead of binary setups, is massively better. Thank you.
 
[X][IDEALS] Social Democrat: Centered around the idea that it is the state's responsibility to ensure a bare-minimum standard of living, the Social Democrats add to the New Capitalist agenda with a push for a government guarantee of adequate housing, food, and water to all citizens -- itself a fairly titanic task. It remains rooted in the fundamental ideal of private enterprise. The Social Democrats have some interest in the potential of democratized workplaces and are willing to support them in an experimental measure.
[X][CRUSH] None. This is a democracy. If your ideology cannot make its case to the people in practice, it deserves to fail.
[X][POWER] You are a devolved unitary state with subordinate governments formed or dissolved by central governmental decrees according to need
[X][POWER] You are a centralized federal state along the lines of the later United States.
[X][TEXT] The old Constitution had its flaws, but it was a document of many strengths as well. It lasted two and a half centuries. We shall honor that and preserve the original. Our changes will be amendments, as intended, with our population approving them as specified in the text.
[X][TEXT] The Constitution serves as a broad guide for the structure of this document, and many legal concepts integral to it carry through, but it is rewritten from the ground up to serve its new situation rather than simply amending it until it fits.
[X][REVIEW] The new Constitution will serve just fine with a standardized system for proposing amendments.

And that's my votes. In-universe, I think there'd be many more people who are wary of throwing out too much od the old than we have in-thread. Not to mention that getting full-on Socialism up and working is its own challenge. Social Democrat is a more stable starting point that can still transition to full socialism, given that the socialist policies actually prove their worth. Plus it's effectively two Legitimacy points ahead of Socialism.
 
I guess it's sort of just as a warning that workplace exploitation is still going to happen under socialism and communism, so if anyone was hoping that widespread workplace democracy was going to be the magic bullet, sorry, it's just a vaccine that's like 90% effective.

Anyway, the real exploit is that while within a co-operative, every worker gets a right to vote, contractors do not get to vote on what contracts they are given. Given a sufficiently monopsonic environment where a few co-operatives processing outsize amounts of contracts get to decide what conditions they'll dictate to their contractors, and the workplace democracy that the contractors get to exercise end up becoming alarmingly like "pick option A or B, both require us to eat shit but we don't really have a choice otherwise if we want this co-operative to continue to exist".

But again, that's not something that Socialism and Communism in this quest are uniquely vulnerable to, just something to watch out for when we inevitably find out this bullshit is happening in our democracy.
 
...See, this is literally all it takes to ease my concern. Someone saying something more substantial than "BUT WORKPLACE DEMOCRACY". An acknowledgment and allowance of nuance for the probably-kind-of-edge-but-maybe-not-as-edge-in-this-world situations we might see happen.

Having laws/acknowledgement of degrees of influence (unions are focused on guaranteeing fair pay, safe conditions, etc., I'm 110% for those), instead of binary setups, is massively better. Thank you.

I had actually believed that I had addressed this before.

I'm sorry if I didn't address you with this with you, when I specifically asked you what your issues could be. That's an oversight on my part and I apologize.

Like I'm from a rural area, I have close family friends that literally carved out a little farm from the countryside and have forest cows. I understand this particular fear, but know that it is possible, but unlikely.

My... OUR goal here is not to be rigidly doctrinaire and ideological. We want these things because we genuinely think they would work, and would help people, especially in this broken American landscape. If we didn't have give, want to work with people, we would have Red Flags, vote straight communist, and not be up to discuss this.

I want to make this work. I want this America to work. And I don't want anyone left behind by blind ideology.
 
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I guess it's sort of just as a warning that workplace exploitation is still going to happen under socialism and communism, so if anyone was hoping that widespread workplace democracy was going to be the magic bullet, sorry, it's just a vaccine that's like 90% effective.

Anyway, the real exploit is that while within a co-operative, every worker gets a right to vote, contractors do not get to vote on what contracts they are given. Given a sufficiently monopsonic environment where a few co-operatives processing outsize amounts of contracts get to decide what conditions they'll dictate to their contractors, and the workplace democracy that the contractors get to exercise end up becoming alarmingly like "pick option A or B, both require us to eat shit but we don't really have a choice otherwise if we want this co-operative to continue to exist".

But again, that's not something that Socialism and Communism in this quest are uniquely vulnerable to, just something to watch out for when we inevitably find out this bullshit is happening in our democracy.

There should be laws for that. Or trade union requirements to counterbalence stuff.

But I'm too tired right now to figure out what.
 
Lots of First Amendment stuff is rooted there, actually, but you can relate a fair amount of due process back to it. Honestly, a lot more of the stuff in the Bill of Rights is rooted directly in Enlightenment ideals than stuff in the actual Constitution, and it's those things of which we tend to think when we try to envision the ideological foundation of America. Like, if somebody asks you whether the ideological foundation of America is freedom of expression or a legislative body chosen according to geographical districts, what are you picking?

The latter, because it would be correct.

The core of the Constitution isn't its bill of rights, which is demonstrated by the fact that a significant faction of the people who drafted the Constitution didn't even want a bill of rights and thought it was pointless at best and harmful at worst. It's the creation of a presidential democracy based upon a loose federation of states with an (initially) weak central government. The Constitution isn't some aspirational document about the rights and privileges of man. It's a charter that organizes the method by which a state is governed. Constitutions are the equivalent of business charters or rule documents for nation-states.
 
The Constitution isn't some aspirational document about the rights and privileges of man. It's a charter that organizes the method by which a state is governed. Constitutions are the equivalent of business charters or rule documents for nation-states.
Here you jump from the US constitution to constitutions in general, and that means your statement isn't fully correct anymore. The German constitution quite explicitly put the enumerated basic rights first of all things, before even the basic description of what the Federal Republic of Germany even is.
 
To be honest, If anyone is worried about some grifter taking advantage of the system to steal from people using con jobs and legal loopholes, I'd take a long and hard look at the capitalism that remains under the New Capitalist and SocDem paradigms.

Arguments against Workplace Democracy on the theory that some orange shyster is going to get elected on a platform of theft, hatred, and corruption... Well those arguements should lead us to dismissing Democracy all together.

If you oppose Workplace Democracy on the grounds that conmen exist. Then we need to go back to step one, and decide on who gets to be The King Of America.

If this is endemic, then our society is fucked anyway because no one who votes gives a shit except to hurt and steal.

I don't think workplace democracy will be efficient in terms of growing the economy long-term. Characterizing it as a dichotomy between the good and just workplace democracy or capitalist boot stamping on a human face forever is disingenuous. It seems to me that social democracy will keep in place the efficient mechanisms we already have in place to generate wealth and grow the economy while also redistributing enough to keep poverty well in check.


I had actually believed that I had addressed this before.
My... OUR goal here is not to be rigidly doctrinaire and ideological. We want these things because we genuinely think they would work, and would help people, especially in this broken American landscape. If we didn't have give, want to work with people, we would have Red Flags, vote straight communist, and not be up to discuss this.

I want to make this work. I want this America to work. And I don't want anyone left behind by blind ideology.

Maybe you honestly believe you're telling the truth here, but you're not. If you actually want to make positive change you would suggest specific proposals that would make real, concrete improvements to people's lives. Things like welfare programs, childcare services, housing construction. What you're talking about is making a massive human experiment in switching from a flawed but fully functional economic system to an unproven economic system that you have no reason to think will work (and in fact, ample historical reason to think will in fact not work) because it suits your ideology.

Honestly, the only reason this vote is even viable at all is that Poptart gave us Word of God that the options are mechanically balanced. In real life, this vote would be incredibly irresponsible, like running a live experiment with hundreds of millions of lives in the balance, hoping that these reforms don't fuck things up.

I'm honestly surprised because while I knew SV leaned left, I didn't realize it was full tankie left. In real life my own position of social democracy is just a little bit to the left of almost everyone I know. And yet here I'm scratching my head looking at all these people who want instant, radical change even though nothing in it has been proven to work. Even the more extreme proposals in modern American political platforms, like UBI, would still be able to function within a capitalist framework. A framework for which we have ultimately not actually seen any real effective alternative to outside of leftists' hypothetical scenarios and a few failed attempts by communist states that ultimately used their immense influence in the country to turn to authoritarianism, all under the justification that allowing people to vote for anything other than socialism would be a mistake.
 
Here you jump from the US constitution to constitutions in general, and that means your statement isn't fully correct anymore. The German constitution quite explicitly put the enumerated basic rights first of all things, before even the basic description of what the Federal Republic of Germany even is.

That's a question of ordering, though. The German constitution still is fundamentally about how Germany's government is structured. Again, simply because it isn't a document about the rights and privileges of man doesn't mean it can't include things about fundamental human rights. Most constitutions do. It just means that what a constitution says about the structure of the government is the most important part of the constitution.
 
I had actually believed that I had addressed this before.

I'm sorry if I didn't address you with this with you, when I specifically asked you what your issues could be. That's an oversight on my part and I apologize.

Like I'm from a rural area, I have close family friends that literally carved out a little farm from the countryside and have forest cows. I understand this particular fear, but know that it is possible, but unlikely.

My... OUR goal here is not to be rigidly doctrinaire and ideological. We want these things because we genuinely think they would work, and would help people, especially in this broken American landscape. If we didn't have give, want to work with people, we would have Red Flags, vote straight communist, and not be up to discuss this.

I want to make this work. I want this America to work. And I don't want anyone left behind by blind ideology.
Your first attempt to address my concerns may have been lost in the shuffle. I articulated this scenario only a couple/few hours ago, though.

I think part of what's driving this concern is that....I have doubts we've got tons of large companies/corporations/businesses? I have this feeling a lot of our economy has devolved back to mom-and-pop/family business/small business groups. Not because they're inherently superior but because they're what survived Victoria's meddling and violence. So provisions to protect honest, hardworking families from exploitation is good.
 
Maybe you honestly believe you're telling the truth here, but you're not. If you actually want to make positive change you would suggest specific proposals that would make real, concrete improvements to people's lives.

Thaaat's more than a little bit dishonest on your part. Because this vote literally isn't about concrete policy proposals. We were specifically told that this vote was about the higher level positions on things.
 
I'm honestly surprised because while I knew SV leaned left, I didn't realize it was full tankie left. In real life my own position of social democracy is just a little bit to the left of almost everyone I know. And yet here I'm scratching my head looking at all these people who want instant, radical change even though nothing in it has been proven to work. Even the more extreme proposals in modern American political platforms, like UBI, would still be able to function within a capitalist framework. A framework for which we have ultimately not actually seen any real effective alternative to outside of leftists' hypothetical scenarios and a few failed attempts by communist states that ultimately used their immense influence in the country to turn to authoritarianism, all under the justification that allowing people to vote for anything other than socialism would be a mistake.

>tankie
?????

What definition for tankie are you even using? Almost entirely everyone that voted Socialist/Communist also voted for Crush:None. So pure (as much as possible within this vote) democracy. What's tankie about that? There's also no foreign dictators to support for being "anti-imperialist" here, so I'm honestly perplexed by why you're suddenly using the word tankie.
 
I don't think workplace democracy will be efficient in terms of growing the economy long-term. Characterizing it as a dichotomy between the good and just workplace democracy or capitalist boot stamping on a human face forever is disingenuous. It seems to me that social democracy will keep in place the efficient mechanisms we already have in place to generate wealth and grow the economy while also redistributing enough to keep poverty well in check.

Actual studies from prominent academics who study businesses and coops have been posted showing that you are wrong.
 
Your first attempt to address my concerns may have been lost in the shuffle. I articulated this scenario only a couple/few hours ago, though.

I think part of what's driving this concern is that....I have doubts we've got tons of large companies/corporations/businesses? I have this feeling a lot of our economy has devolved back to mom-and-pop/family business/small business groups. Not because they're inherently superior but because they're what survived Victoria's meddling and violence. So provisions to protect honest, hardworking families from exploitation is good.

Consider it future proofing then. > : V

It's far better than them getting bought out, or bullied around by a Japanese or Russian agribusiness. These policies will work for them as well.
 
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It just means that what a constitution says about the structure of the government is the most important part of the constitution.
That is exactly what the creators of the German constitution would have denied. And indeed, technical constitutional changes happen rather happen frequently in German politics - but the basic rights catalogue is near-untouchable in that regard. It very much was a case of "first of all, those rights must be respected, and then what the state form is is less relevant".

Now, you might argue that this is a noble sentiment and all but not practical reality - but IMO, it is a good sentiment to uphold. Even if the parts about administrative structure etc end up becoming more practically relevant, let us treat the basic rights as more important and weightier.
 
So traditionally in coops, in order to become a member you need to buy a stake, generally this is done by working there for a while and having a portion of your wages go into an account towards that stake. How much that amount is varies, and it's bad form to make in excessively onerous, but in general to get voting rights you need to make a pretty significant investment of time into the project. Out hypothetical hucksters will need to be pretty dedicated here.
 
Actual studies from prominent academics who study businesses and coops have been posted showing that you are wrong.
But they show that their roughly the same, as per your own words, even if some are better (though not significantly) Then there is no reason to encourage one over the other, and allow them to play evenly.
 
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