This original post seems confused about how capitalism even works. Workers do share the loss if the company they work for tanks, it means they have to get a new job, and god forbid if they had a retirement plan or something with their workplace because that might be gone too. Hardly anyone has a pension anymore either.
It's such a cliche that the capitalist is taking on the greatest amount of personal risk to operate a business. They're risking the chance they'll lose their property, which the worker doesn't have in the first place. They're risking becoming a worker like everyone else. Oh no, the horror.
A socialist context wouldn't necessarily involve profit or losses, right? A planned economy like Cuba or Vietnam or something, they have mandated outputs they'll need over the next 5 years. Profit's not the incentive, it's meeting the goals and quotas. Failing to meet the quotas means you gotta redraw the plan, because something's not working out right. I guess in that sense the workers do share the losses in a socialist context, because everyone wasted their time, or may not have produced enough of something, but you know that's not all bad. The first five-year plan in the Soviet Union didn't meet quotas, but the second one did.
The incentive in a socialist context is still realized value in the form of wages to an extent. Just with hopefully a medium of exchange that isn't tied to finance, but instead to actual labor values of goods produced.
Over time the need for this exchange system should hopefully melt away, but that requires an end of scarcity and full employment with robust planning and taxation systems to maintain social services for pensions, development of new industry, and maintenance of existing industry.
The also needs to be a way to directly and easily compare use values of different products and calculate total labor content of light industrial goods with dozens of hundreds of input materials.
The USSR had a dual banking system for a while the separated investment capital from worker and exchange capital so a failed investment wouldn't devalue the wages of workers. Something that would never be done in the West because the devaluation of wages caused by failed capital ventures is a positive side effect to capitalists.
This original post seems confused about how capitalism even works. Workers do share the loss if the company they work for tanks, it means they have to get a new job, and god forbid if they had a retirement plan or something with their workplace because that might be gone too. Hardly anyone has a pension anymore either.
It's such a cliche that the capitalist is taking on the greatest amount of personal risk to operate a business. They're risking the chance they'll lose their property, which the worker doesn't have in the first place. They're risking becoming a worker like everyone else. Oh no, the horror.
A socialist context wouldn't necessarily involve profit or losses, right? A planned economy like Cuba or Vietnam or something, they have mandated outputs they'll need over the next 5 years. Profit's not the incentive, it's meeting the goals and quotas. Failing to meet the quotas means you gotta redraw the plan, because something's not working out right. I guess in that sense the workers do share the losses in a socialist context, because everyone wasted their time, or may not have produced enough of something, but you know that's not all bad. The first five-year plan in the Soviet Union didn't meet quotas, but the second one did.
The incentive in a socialist context is still realized value in the form of wages to an extent. Just with hopefully a medium of exchange that isn't tied to finance, but instead to actual labor values of goods produced.
Over time the need for this exchange system should hopefully melt away, but that requires an end of scarcity and full employment with robust planning and taxation systems to maintain social services for pensions, development of new industry, and maintenance of existing industry.
The also needs to be a way to directly and easily compare use values of different products and calculate total labor content of light industrial goods with dozens of hundreds of input materials.
The USSR had a dual banking system for a while the separated investment capital from worker and exchange capital so a failed investment wouldn't devalue the wages of workers. Something that would never be done in the West because the devaluation of wages caused by failed capital ventures is a positive side effect to capitalists.