Thinking of Cuba and how a large portion of their workers are self employed through second jobs. Many of them seem to have an entrepreneurial spirit. Is there room for someone saying “I want to start a restaurant” and going to a workers council to see if the community needs it? My brother once said he doesn’t want socialism because it means “my dream of starting a business won’t ever happen.”
Is there a way for Socialism to accommodate an individual’s desire to initiate an enterprise without people getting exploited?
Entrepreneurship is a very interesting phenomenon. Let’s ask, why does someone want to become an entrepreneur in capitalism? I think there are two main reasons.
First, someone has a passion, like being an ideal chef, which is a hard ideal to achieve as a worker, because maybe they want to make X but the restaurant only serves Y. So, they make their own business to cook what they want.
Second, someone wants to make money, and more importantly, not have their own value be stolen by an employer. So, they become their own employer to reap their full benefits, and if they acquire any employees later, reap some of those as well.
In both of these cases, the act of starting a business is an attempt by the individual to liberate themselves from bondage under capitalism, to have control over what you do and ownership over what you make from it. Very good ideals that I agree with, but as an individual act that maintains the status quo, entrepreneurship only allows you to liberate yourself by joining the winning side and becoming a capitalist.
In a hypothetical socialist society, I see no reason why your brother couldn’t start a business, so long as the workers have democratic control, himself included, and he does not exploit them by taking their surplus value as profit. In this way, starting a business is less of becoming a sole owner, and more of becoming a founder, sort of like how the creators of a government can make a democracy that can give power to people in the future who have no claim to its creation or ownership.
A new question, however, is how many people would want to become entrepreneurs in a socialist society? If entrepreneurship is a means to achieve control over what you do and ownership over what you make, and socialism promises to do both of these things, you can just as well achieve these ideals by joining an existing socialist business. Now, if you wanted to do something but everyone else voted against it, then you have a reason to start your own business, but now your business is fundamentally different than where you left, filling a new hole that has never been filled before.
Under communism, all food is bland and the waiters have a bad attitude
Well, yes, I’ve been told Joe biden is a communist by the Fox News crowd afterall
So your brother prefers to have a dream, despite knowing he most likely will never realise it, to the concrete promise of owning and directing the place he works at?
Yes but I never got around to explaining Socialism is democratically controlling your workplace not when the government owns it. I’ll use this line of thinking next time it comes up.
I’m so unread on Deng. I always heard he ruined China’s path toward Socialism so I never gave him a thought.
"When education is not liberating, the oppressed dream of becoming the oppressor." -Paolo Frere, probably
Dreaming of something within the context of present society and reality does not translate to an appropriate dream for a different society and reality.
But when most people say they dream of becoming an entrepeneur, they aren't talking about the wage theft part. Those people dream of becoming landlords/investors.
Well but the parts of it they're interested in that aren't wage theft are the unalienated labor and having a say in the hierarchy. If they want sole control, then that's just wanting to obtain the oppression of the oppressor. If they want to democratically lead production with other like-minded workers, well, then that's what a socialist economy could be. But that wouldn't really be something I'd call entrepreneurial. I'd call that syndicalism or a co-operative or something.
I don't really think that everyone is thinking of that. Keep in mind that entrepreneurial spirit often gets conflated with innovation/invention, as in, a lot of people want to start a business because they want to make something new. And this is definitely an aspect of entrepreneurship because of how often new business ideas have some sort of twist that they think will give them an edge in the market.
I would say the correct attitude would be that if, in an example, Mr. Kalashnikov has a dream of starting an enterprise to design a machine to make it easier to trim lawns, then a socialist society should a) have a mechanism for determine if this is beneficial for people, or that we at least have the resources to chance it; and b) help Mr. Kalashnikov find comrades with similar interests to help, and c) provide startup capital in some form. Capitalism provides these in the form of the free market (which only very roughly approximates consumer benefit), and the other two are his problem but in return he gets full control. So what mechanisms do we provide that still provide outlets for individual initiative?
The whole "one guy with an idea" thing often is a trope to the extent that it is used to justify autocratic workplace power, but that's not a reason that we shouldn't have systems in place for people with ideas to put them into action, we should just provide more equitable ways to do it. And when you think about it -- why WOULDN'T we want to extend this to the masses? Think of how many people throughout history "had an idea", but had no capital to put it into action? We could actually somewhat reasonably make it so that virtually anyone with an idea has a chance to create an enterprise out of it. We could potentially get a lot more innovation with such a system.
Ok but really I think what they're expressing is the desire to work at a bakery or whatever without having a boss, which in the current system means they'd be the owner. Like I wouldn't expect them to invent the concept of a worker coop in order to not do capitalism in their imaginary scenario.
edit: though there are definitely a lot of tech bro type people who want to be an entrepeneur in order to be the boss and make a bunch of money, so I guess I'm just talking about people who want to do it for its own sake.
That's the point though right? The question is, can socialism allow for people's "sense of enterprise?" The answer is "sure, if it's not being the oppression part that they're into." The nature of the current system doesn't really come into it.
I’m using “entrepreneurial spirit” in the context of taking ownership of your labor by fulfilling a need in society. I’m trying to differentiate between entrepreneur in a capitalist society which is “I want to make a lot of money by hiring, directing, and managing people.”
I think everyone has a small sense of enterprise, it just can’t be harnessed correctly with our structures. I think socialism can redirect an entrepreneurial spirit into something better.
Yeah I guess the answer is it depends on what you mean by entrepeneur
I think for most people, they'd just like to not be alienated from their labor.
This reads like someone who took both the ultraliberal and communist thought cabinet options in Discord Elysium and is trying to reconcile them. :tequila-sunset:
people have always been opening restaurants and the like, I don't think any kind of government or socio-economic system could really stop that. You can prevent certain kinds of people, sure, but you can't just stop all ventures.
yeah. :top-use-words: IDK XD. You use a lot of big words XD XD XD
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I joined this site for shrek. Maybe phisosphy isnt right section for me. Sorry uwu
