in the video, the uploader complains about her standard of living while making her boss all this money. this dude, rather than looking at the reality of the situation, makes up a scenario in his head where she’s supposed to make a competing business with her employer despite using all her time to work for her employer at a job she says barely pays her rent let alone would allow her to start a business from nothing that competes with one making millions per year
https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1q39rdn/the_american_nightmare/
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No, it is kinda implausible for those niches that i mentioned, because bank won’t loan 20 million for you to produce vacuum gauges, because even if you and coworkers are competent in that area, the bank can’t judge that or payments will fuck you up anyway. For small restaurants? Idk, if le small business is impossible there, that’s how those dipshits start after all, they get tyrannized by rent (so pure guy with idea, instead of bored property owner) or no traffic without advertising, which is again spending available capital. But structurally 10 people getting 1 million dollar in loans doesn’t sound implausible to me, you tell me.
More likely burgers can’t imagine trusting each other that much to coown business and fail together. The whole ass country organized so that business bankruptcy won’t touch your own assets, you can pay yourself profits and avoid taxes, interest payments reduces your tax exposure (relevant for salary/profits split)
And that’s all in comparison with bright idea to donate money to dem consultants. You bet your ass collecting money for some angel investment coop loaning structures to try at 50 coop businesses sounds more viable to me, after observing bernie and aocias of the world.
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yes, but business loan bankruptcy doesn’t fuck you up in the same way, they don’t stay in debt. say it fails, only 10% still work after 3 years. so what? unionization rate is 10% as well. i’m saying there is certain magical thinking involved in we have to elect good people (doesn’t work for 60 years running), we have to do revolution (doesn’t work for 100 years running), and not doing what actually existing early capitalists did - doing more efficient business than their feudal counterparts, because you don’t have externality of paying porky his share.
all exploitation calculus points to 2-5x rates of exploitation in high manufacturing (i’m ignoring software, where it’s even more obvious), meaning that if you somehow wind up running that business you can afford 2-3x higher salaries (restaurants are an exception here, but even there - successful ones still get 1.5-2x, but with more complicated calculus of managers and rents, due to tiny size). yes, in my napkin plan of angel invest coop, their principal capital will disappear through succession of bankruptcies and falling rates of compensation on used equipment during bankruptcy sales, that’s the angel part, you spend to deny porky profits out of spite, not because you run successful banking operation.
i mean compare plan of opening (or plain buying out) 100 restaurants for the money bernie wasted on his good friend campaign, where if 90 fails you still can point to something working.
unions won’t work in any business employing 10-20 people (which is a lot of modern manufacturing), they just can’t generate sufficient leverage (lost dollars per day of slow down) unless you get sympathy strikes, and average treatlerite won’t strike even for themselves, so sympathy strikes are really wild in 21th century to imagine.
and yes, it can only be in small business niches, but for simpler reason - capital won’t notice it to fuck you up out of spite. you can’t run commodities production where your competitors are bankrolled by goldman, they could run at a loss for years (see uber). you can run a niche production, because there are 5 competitors there not bankrolled to the limit and owned by small petit bougie fucks themselves, who can’t afford to take losses infinitely (i.e. not owned by high finance - plausible if hard to compete, owned by high finance - you are fucked)
*the biggest issue with high manufacturing is both capital and name recognition. as far as i know, their expenses are something wild like 2 millions on salary, 20 million on asset depreciation, 5 million in profits, 2 million on rents/expenses. meaning that to start such a thing, you have to buy equipment worth 100-200 million. some of it it scalable to smaller sizes (i.e. instead of 5 cnc machines you get 1, but some just isn’t reducable) (you can of course run it like modern business - lease equipment, but then you are getting more and more exposed to the vagaries of the market, dependent on central bank rates, etc)
So what is to be done then?
i’m saying that numbers-inclined socialists shouldn’t be dismissive of economics (real micro-economics of how to run a business - accounting/market research/feasibility studies, not supply demand bullshit or business school idiocy, prices of commodities are already known), and, in my idealized example, investigate business reports of publicly traded companies to find feasibly “disruptable” industries to try their hand at running business as explicit coops with like minded folks (everyone gets loans together, the ownership structure and future worker recruitment if it succeeds is predetermined to be equitable in some fashion, just as loans repayments are considered collectively), yes probably majority of them would fail via bankruptcy, and finding like minded committed people (and interested in business area of choice! unlikely system designs engineer would want to be a cook in a restaurant, even if they are a communist) who you won’t argue 50 times a day is hard, but (a) this is valuable experience even in ghoul why-i-left-the-left life (failed to run a small business is not a bad thing on resume), aside from myriads of things you learn about permits/accounting/taxes/commodities (b) if it succeeds, you directly interfere with porky and probably making good money (again, big if) © ideology sell isn’t made hard by word communist from the get go, be our own boss, collectively, is resonating with treatlerite mindset (d) there is kickstarter as risk free seed money whitehole to check consumer desires, if it’s something not b2b related.
obv its hard and all that, and heavily conjectural, but i don’t think i’ve seen concentrated efforts in non-mercantile business (probably due to capital restrictions) to just be small revenue business, at best it’s like farmers market reseller, book shop or publishing (dying industries with chronically low margins). i understand perfectly well i’m biased, but i can see constantly small headphones companies popping up, who employ like 5 people in a garage (extremely niche business model obviously), or something like mini pc market (minisform and beelink something are obviously chinese), where the components are there for the taking, and someone with kickstarter takes them, or some radio kits or other small electronics stuff. why can’t a kickstarter business be a coop? (well, for consumer discount tech it’s obvious - they would make it in china, it’s glorified dropshipping with some engineering on top at best, but it doesn’t have to be nor is it always that)
**real (moral) problem in manufacturing is you have to serve either top decile (who can afford to pay for usa made goods, and sounds little bit unfun) or military (which seems extremely unconscionable for communists), the rest of usa is not exactly swimming in cash for this businesses to work
I think this is the kind of thing Richard Wolff advocates for. He’s very pro-coop iirc
i don’t think it’s a savior or an answer to all problems, compared to richard. like yugoslavia tried to do this stuff for whole economy and it hasn’t exactly worked, due to a myriad of issues, some with productivity, some with historically inbuilt productive forces in manufacturing regions, but i do believe it might be better than twiddling thumbs for so-inclined folks
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i also feel restless that i can’t find some socialist-related stuff in my vicinity, my choices in applying my labor is like soulless ngo, where you feel like a toy for rich people, political party which i don’t particularly agree with, church with its own brainworms out of wazoo or animal shelter. All of them are in some way doing good in the world, some of them i support, but nothing is something i can believe in in my heart to go full hog with my time and quit my job