They’re calling it a homage because they think the public won’t know what that means.

Sadly, they’re right :/

Keeping it short: yes; capitalism; no.

Slightly longer-form: worker’s co-operatives can’t compete on price with non-co-ops, so their stuff is invariably more expensive, so they are almost invariably niche. The exception to that comes, in cases like Mondragon, where they manage to establish broader dominance early, in some way. They can sometimes maintain that due to the inherent advantages such a position has; as far as I’m aware, that more or less explains the success of Mondragon.

On the niche side, a common pattern is for a worker’s co-operative to end up servicing wealthy (John Lewis in the UK, say) and/or ideologically motivated clientele. They get to feel warm and fuzzy about the relative lack of exploitation / alignment with their values, and can either afford the premium attached, or are willing to make unusual levels of sacrifice.

I don’t know much about it myself, but SFRY went big on worker’s co-operatives. It could be a fruitful area of reading for you.

There’s been some discussion about it in the Morning Star this month as well. See https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/can-co-operatives-play-role-transition-socialism and a lively debate in following letters pages.

vs?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9doIh4ni3Q

Scuse euronews

“Better” is a bit of a misnomer. What is actually claimed is that the “development of the productive forces” - which is to say, the extent to which that economic formation can get stuff done - increases at each stage.

In the model, before Rome (slave society) would have come primitive communism. The Romans got more architecture done, which is enough for the model.

Pushing on, the slaves got some of the benefits of the architecture. They were treated like property, but got use out of the aqueducts and hypocausts and roads that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

How would you decide if their overall situation is “better”? It’s something British imperialists like to try to do for their empire, but I’d be wary of even trying the exercise, myself.

From 2002: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ejercito-zapatista-de-liberacion-nacional-a-zapatista-response-to-the-ezln-is-not-anarchist

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This is one area where speculative fiction can do a reasonable job of opening the mind to possibilities. Iain M Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Elizabeth Bear - just picking a few recent reads - all have sketches with some relevance to your questions, for instance.

Also worth remembering that work and “jobs” would look rather different in a communist society to the kind of things we have at present. For a start, hours can be much less, and the content of the work would be less degrading. That works wonders all by itself.

The model I like - which is different to saying if it’s likely or not - is work as sport. If you imagine a position like “economic planner”, for instance - and you might imagine that a lot of these would be needed in a communist society, and that we might struggle to automate the position away - it seems compelling to me that some people would want to do this for the challenge it would provide to them, and that more people would want to do it than there are positions.

Out of that, rather quickly, amateur leagues and tournaments with the prize being “you get to be the planner for X” arise, at least in my head.

Why would people do these things as a sport? Well, for the same reasons people do amateur sports at the moment. Fun, prestige, group belonging, etc.

Prestige is interesting to dive into, particularly as it relates to jobs like doctors. The social position of a Cuban doctor is quite different to that of a “western” one, for instance. Definitely worth digging into more.

Mmm, “unskilled labour” is a myth. Particularly when you take productivity into account - all these jobs that are called “unskilled” must, under capitalism, be performed at a certain rate to be profitable to the capitalist. And that rate only increases over time. So you quickly end up in a situation where your “unskilled” labourer - fruit picker, say - is forced to work at a ridiculous pace using highly specialised skills and ridiculous amounts of endurance and dexterity, all at minimum wage.

The brits got to discover this via fields of rotting produce when they decided to stop letting in fruit pickers from the EU, bless.

The Second Democratic People’s Republic of Yemen?

Side? SIDE? I’m on nobody’s side - because nobody’s on my side.

gedit, anyway. Yes, I write code for a living. Yes, it’s fine. Honestly.

Don’t worry, I only read On Materialism this year and would have been clueless about this if you’d asked last year :D. I’m still absorbing it and the various follow-ups, so hardly an expert or authority.

I’ve been suspicious of humanism-itself for a lot longer, though. As with everything, it becomes watered down and repackaged over time, until you end up with pithy statements like “good without god”, etc, and as a general statement of anti-religion, fine, sure, that’s marxism-compatible, materiaism-compatible, etc. But in this form, it’s also unnecessary to synthesise it into marxism at all, since what you end up with is not “marxist-humanism”, it’s just “marxism”. The only reason to add “-humanism” to the end would be marketing, branding, that kind of thing.

What’s interesting to dig into is where humanism and marxism don’t overlap, whether that’s just addressing different things, or actually conflicting with each other. That’s where a synthesis of the two has tricky questions to answer, and maybe - just maybe - value to bring. That kind of effort will use a much more in-depth and rigorous understanding of what humanism is, with jumping-off points like the amsterdam declaration, etc.

What did marxist-humanists come up with when doing this? I’m as in the dark as you as to specifics, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_humanism briefly say:

Marxist humanists reject an understanding of society based on natural science, asserting the centrality and distinctiveness of people and society.

So this basically says “historical materialism is false”, and it comes about because humanists believe individual human free will is supreme and, somehow, the aggregate effect of humans having free will cannot be investigated scientifically.

Marxist humanism views Marxist theory as not primarily scientific but philosophical. Social science is not another natural science and people and society are not instantiations of universal natural processes. Rather, people are subjects – centers of consciousness and values – and science is an embedded part of the totalizing perspective of humanist philosophy.

So much for “scientific socialism”, I suppose. My best summary of this would be “science doesn’t work on people, sike”. Forgive me my skepticism.

Echoing the inheritance of Marx’s thought from German Idealism, Marxist humanism holds that reality does not exist independently of human knowledge, but is partly constituted by it

I’ll get my coat.

(edit: I didn’t say explicitly, but each of these three examples is chock-full of idealism, which is to say, “metaphysical perspectives which assert that reality is indistinguishable and inseparable from perception and understanding; that reality is a mental construct closely connected to ideas”. What marxist-humanism takes from humanism, in these passages, is idealism, and the “synthesis” is to discard materialism and replace it with that idealism)

It’s useful for them that some people will, for sure ^^.

He speaks (very optimistically) of getting 10% opt-in rates. I think he’d be lucky to reach 1%, but even that’s more than sufficient for these kinds of studies to yield results.

One very short version would be “humanism is idealism, marxism is materialism, so this is a contradiction in terms”. Timpanaro touches on it in “On Materialism”, although marxist-humanism specifically only gets a brief mention; he focuses more on structuralism as his object lesson.

(I still won’t be opting in to any of these projects though. I don’t even opt in to popcon)

Yeah, opt-in is fine enough. I’d quite like a broad acceptance of this sort of standard to take root in these kinds of projects; it’s exhausting to have the same discussion, project-by-project, as they go through the pipeline from “we need to make this better” -> “we need data” -> “people don’t like it” -> “opt-out will appease them” -> “ok, ok, we’ll make it opt-in”.

While explaining the change to opt-in, at one point the author - rsc - says something like “opt-in increases the privacy risk to every installation, since there’s fewer installs to hide amongst, and we need data from each of them more frequently to build a sample”. But of course, that privacy risk is only taken on among the opted-in installations.

Another criticism he levels at opt-in is that it biases the sample towards those kinds of people who opt-in. Of course, opt-out biases the sample towards those kinds of people who don’t opt-out.

Kudos for actually avoiding any kind of identifier though, that’s often a fraught point with proponents moving from “we must be able to know the individual person and link it to all this other data” -> “pseudoanonymisation is fine” -> “ok, an actually anonymous id so we can track one install over time is fine”. Getting to “no id at all” is vanishingly rare IME, and again, it would be nice if this somehow became standard for this kind of project.

More broadly, teams can and should do without this kind of telemetry altogether. It’s not essential, it’s just cheaper for them to do this kind of naturalistic study than other options. That argument is never going to win, sadly.

Like Havana Syndrome, you mean?

https://www.webmd.com/brain/features/havana-syndrome

Sure.

In the US, something like 3% of “food service” positions are unionised. It’s not great.

Maybe think about what you want to achieve. Pay increase? Profit share? A change in working conditions? Seize the business and convert it into a worker’s co-operative? There’s not a lot of point in trying to organise if you don’t have an overall goal in mind.

Once you have that nailed down for yourself, you can (carefully) sound out your co-workers and see if they like, or can be persuaded to be sympathetic to, those goals. Do a lot of listening too - they might want to change things you hadn’t thought of, and they may well have better ideas than you.

Once you’ve done all that, you’ll probably have enough information to conclude that there’s not a cat’s chance in hell of pulling off a successful unionisation. If you see green shoots of hope, thought, you can go looking for help to get it done. https://unitehere.org/organize-a-union/ maybe - TBH I don’t know a lot about US unions.

About UK, just lol. Their fleet is few in numbers, have problems with equipment and weapons, carriers break routinely and are also obsolete like the US ones (also needless for anything other than imperializing defenseless nations), and “the progressive updating of its submarine fleet” apparently include superglue in reactor chambers, lol.

There’s also the small matter of the planes to put on the carriers; they go out with about 5 F35s on them at the moment, which is, what, 10%? of capacity.

http://ggcpp.nuff.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Resource-Allocation-Processes-in-Policing-in-Great-Britain-–-Project-report..pdf is interesting in this context, especially the introduction and appendix 4.

A friend informs me that https://www.versobooks.com/books/3906-the-end-of-policing is currently free.

I mean, books are usually free in general, but officially free.

Have downloaded it, but not read it yet. It may have some interesting things to say on the topic though.