Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board

This reminds me about the time we wanted better safety gear to our milling machine and boss basically told us that if we focus on safety too much, we might aswell shut the shop down.

Sure, I work with the risk of injuring myself, so that you can make 10x my income.

> Capital is pretty pure critique of the then-status-quo

Yep.

> The Communist Manifesto has a fairly broad program

The Communist Manifesto doesn't do much policy proposing. Workers owning the means of production is about as far as it goes, and to the extent that that his Marx's proposal...that isn't realized anywhere in Europe.

> but narrower and less-well-known works like the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/03/24.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ou...

These are both pretty short and vague, but they are policy proposals. However, they are both pretty clearly not an articulation of his vision for the post-revolution society he describes in The Communist Manifesto. They are pragmatic demands for political parties to make of their governments.

Let's compare. The Communist Manifesto:

> In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

Demands of the communist party in Germany:

> 15. Introduction of strongly progressive taxes and abolition of taxes on consumption.

So, here's the fundamental issue: When Marx is specific, he's mild. His specific ideas are totally bland, and not at all unique to him. He would be a footnote of history if his specific ideas were all he said. When we refer to "Marxism", we refer to the actually novel idea: Abolition of private property. But of course, it is here that he is vague. He gives no indication of how a society without private property might actually function. And it is into exactly that void that Leninism stepped. It did so because it had no choice.

Lenin understood that they didn't have a revolution to institute a minimum wage. They had a revolution to abolish private property. But Marx had no clue how to manage such a society, and as it turns out, neither did Lenin.

U.S. unions are much more adversarial, seeing themselves as the enemy of management. In fact it is illegal for a member of management to be in a union in the U.S.

In Germany, unions hold board seats and see themselves more as partners, invested in the overall success of the business. The principle of codetermination means that union members can be in management. In Germany, unions are much closer to trade organizations or professional organizations, rather than the worker-management divide in the U.S.

In terms of politics, it's hard to be cognitively captured by the whole "greedy corporations oppressing workers" meme when you are sitting on the board and realize that your livelihood depends on the business doing well.

Similarly, German CEOs do not have the astronomical executive pay that US CEOs have. They are much more down to earth.

Germany is a nation that has had social insurance since Bismarck, primarily to contain a vigorous and violent left wing movement during the Kulturkampf of the late 19th Century. German unions are often quite conservative with respect to the culture wars and are hostile to that movement, which has its base more in the universitites and eco-groups than in the heavily unionized shop floors and production lines.

Yet at the same time, Germany has had no minimum wage until 2015. The US had a minimum wage since 1938. This, too, is because historically German businesses adopted a much more cooperative relationship to workers.

So even though it's true that Germany has high rates of unionization and an innovative economy, that does not mean that unions in the US would lead to the same outcomes. German and US unions are different beasts.

None of what you wrote applies to assembly line workers. And arguably, it doesn't apply to junior software devs either.