Men Without Work (2016)

I don’t mind the flagging - I don’t expect anything more from people unwilling to take a look at things objectively.

The conversation would have ended up the same way had I seen his reply before editing the example in - I'd just have given it afterwards, and he'd still have no answer.

> Ha sure.

Yes, worker cooperatives exist and are successful. Mondragon[1] is probably the biggest and most well known. It's effectively the GE of worker cooperatives. It's based in Spain, functions across numerous verticals and has 80,000 worker owners and total annual revenue around 12 billion euros.

One you might be more familiar with is Equal Exchange[2] - yes, the tea, coffee, and chocolate company. They have 126 employees, annual revenue of around $70 million, and national distribution.

Those are just two examples, there are hundreds more. You can scoff all you want, but these companies exist and are successful. They show that companies owned and governed by their employees can operate perfectly efficiently and compete in the marketplace.

> Ok, which brand of socialism do you support and why?

It's interesting to note that nowhere in my comment did I imply support for socialism. I merely mentioned its existence as a system, in the context of a conversation about boiling down the world of economic systems to a spectrum. Interesting that the parent commenter found mere mention of its existence triggering.

> Socialism: social control of the means of production > What does that even mean in practice? Nobody knows. This is why socialists and communists always end up killing each other.

From wikipedia[3]:

> Socialism is a left-wing[1] economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership[2] of the means of production[3][4] as opposed to private ownership.[5][6][4] As a term, it describes the economic, political and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems.[7] Social ownership can be state/public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee.[8][9] While no single definition encapsulates the many types of socialism,[10] social ownership is the one common element.

In other words, there are any number of ways social control can be constructed, and has been constructed. Some more successful than others.

And no, socialists don't always end up killing each other. Social control through the state of large segments of the economy has been perfectly successful both in the US and in Europe.

Driven on a road? Congrats, you've benefited from social control of infrastructure. Drunk water from your tap? If you're in the US, the water you drink from your tap and the sewer that carries away your waste is almost certainly owned by a municipal utility - again social control. In most of Europe, entire health care systems are run by the state through social control.

In other words, state socialism - both municipal and national - has been shown to be perfectly successful when used in the sectors of the economy it's best fit for and on the scale most fitting.

As I pointed out above, social control of individual enterprises (worker cooperatives) has also been shown to be perfectly effective.

By all means, engage in the debate about what economic systems are the most effective and the least harmful. But if you're going to do it, do your homework first and leave the self satisfaction behind.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Exchange [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

What's the solution though? I can think of 3:

1) Bullshit jobs (i.e. fake jobs or real jobs that exist only to support fake jobs. This is the current answer)

2) Universal Basic Income - Doesn't solve the problem of giving people meaningful work, but gives them some freedom to discover/create their own solutions

3) Artificially making life more difficult - For example, banning furniture companies that are too good at their job. Want new furniture? Here are some tools, go and make it. Maybe find some friends to help you with it too. This solution would solve the problem, but it would be extremely unpopular and would likely need to be enforced globally, or people would just go to a place where they can buy furniture cheaply.

First solution will likely continue to be the most popular one. I hope the second solution continues to gain popularity, maybe not directly as UBI, but something similar. Third solution is extremely unlikely, it's more of a thought experiment to realize how solving real problems gives us meaning and creates bonds among people. Kaczynski writes about this when he writes about three groups of human drives.

For example, billionaires running 3 companies (poorly) is an indicator that they could stand to pay higher taxes so the rest of us don't have to pay their share. Oil companies with a combined worth of trillions of dollars would do just fine without their subsidies when we already have cars like Aptera and Lightyear 0 getting over 40 miles of range per day on solar alone. Factory farming has not prevented us paying $5+ for a dozen eggs. And so on.

By these kinds of metrics, I would say that we passed into post-scarcity sometime between the late 60s and the rise of Reaganomics in the early 80s. Certainly by 1990 with the fall of the USSR. Everything since, and especially pivotal events like the Dot Bomb, 9/11 and the Housing Bubble popping, were due to the post-truth reality that filled the void left by scarcity. This was all fairly obvious by the time The Matrix and Fight Club came out in 1999. Similar movies like In Time are practically documentaries now IMHO.