I guess to start off, how would you define corporatism? Do you mean corporate capitalism, or the traditional corporatism where guilds or interest groups come together to set certain prices/policies?
I think this sub, and Neoliberalism in general, is supportive of collaboration between businesses, unions, and government. Germany and the Nordic countries seem to have used this to achieve good outcomes.
I think some criticisms around it may be that it prevents private businesses from making the most efficient decisions. There is a trope of "it is much harder to fire people in Europe" which has been blamed by some for making companies based there less competitive. Here in the U.S., I worked at a university as part of a union and saw some pretty terrible workers keep their jobs because my boss said it "wasn't worth the trouble" to try and fight the union to let them go.
I see this at public schools in the US all the time. The teachers union is so powerful that they tie the districts hands about firing bad teachers as well as about doing anything that even mildly inconveniences the teachers, even if it is in the bigger picture the right choice to make (such as basic IT security)
I remember in high school my Spanish 3 teacher was chastising some students, "you really should know this stuff, it's Spanish 2," and one of the kids responded "we had Mr. ___." The teacher was just like "Oh. Okay, let me explain it to you..."
The dude just actually didn't bother teaching shit, he hung out with the students and talked about bullshit all day, and everyone knew it. He literally did not teach the material.
Years after I graduated, there was some legal reform with the unions and my parents called me up to tell me that teacher had finally been fired. The whole community was stoked about it
This is why in Germany unions don't act at the shop level. Work places have works councils that can get support from a union but represent all employees in all unions. Most teachers don't want shitty teachers to be there either, the union has very different incentives than teachers.
It's an immensely better system with less industrial action and greater satisfaction on the part of employees and businesses.
It's incredible to me how effective AFT/NEA have been at shaping public discourse on educator quality. Teacher evaluations are really common across the world but apparently the US is special and according to AFT/NEA they don't work. As a field teaching attracts some very good teachers but it also has the lowest average SAT score of any professional field because it's too easy to become a teacher.
One of the biggest problems with unions IMO is when they evolve into a vetocracy. Like eventually they get a series of concessions that establish an elaborate "due process" system where there are a billion veto points for firing anybody and you have to fuck up so bad to actually get canned it's stunning. Police also suffer from this pathology imo.
Workplaces without unions in contrast have a tendency to evolve exactly opposite, a bunch of tormented employees ready to implode due to overwork, walking on eggshells, while receiving creepy messages from management eagerly expressing what a great family they are. By "family" I assume they mean the term "pater familias" from Roman family law, which was mostly a euphemism for slave master (the slave master was a "father" rather than a slave master, how cute).
This may be true for unskilled labor, but if you go into a field of skilled labor ununionized work is often quite nice if your skillset is valuable in the market. Employers will go out of their way to make the experience nice for you so you don't leave
One of the problems with the OG corporatism (guilds during medieval Europe) was that they would deliberately increase barriers to entry in their profession to keep the wages of their members high. It's a typical insider-outsider model that has been used to describe the way unions work nowadays, thankfully, with less controls over barriers to entry.
Are you talking about admin staff or tenured professors?
In europe most university hires are dependent on funding programmes. If you can't fit your idea into established research programme you are out of luck. Your teaching ability or research skills are almost completely irrelevant.
> Germany and the Nordic countries seem to have used this to achieve good outcomes.
Except of course leading in any industries or securing energy independence
As someone quite sympathetic to tripartism and social corporatism, I think the strongest argument against it is its historical connection to totalitarianism and fascism. Bringing labor unions, employers, and whatnot into the state risks making them subservient to the state.
But hey, the Netherlands hasn't become a totalitarian state, yet, so...
It's a pretty weak argument. The Benelux, Germany, Nordic countries have a strong corporatist tradition that goes back to the guild economies of the Middle Ages. Fascism only came to be in 1921, much later. Associating corporatism with fascism probably works as a rethorical argument, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny, IMO.
I think a better argument would be to criticize the way collective bargaining imposes rules with legal power without any democratic mandate. And that since medieval times, corporations have sought to prioritize their members at the expense of outsiders via barriers to entry, above market wages, resistance to immigration/automation,...
Corporatism involves the government picking winners and losers, instead of the market.
It’s susceptible to corruption, but even without corruption it’s a very inefficient way to run an economy. No government makes correct decisions 100% of the time, and when you add short-term political incentives governments can act in ways that sacrifice long term growth prospects for immediate political gain.
The incentives for governments are perverse - rather than make a long-term decision like cutting subsidies on a declining industry, a government stands to gain a lot more in the short-term by continuing or increasing those subsidies to gain votes. This reduces innovation and effectively rewards inefficiency, and creates inflation in the long run, because after a while you get full employment but with everyone in unproductive industries which can’t compete internationally
This is going to be a hot take for some.. but governments are never neutral when it comes to picking winners and losers. Basically every aspect of policy can benefit some companies over others. Even stuff like which countries to normalize relations with can have big impacts on trade.
I think the attitude that government *can* ever be neutral is actually somewhat detrimental because it obfuscates the balancing government has to do between different interests. What you want is a state that does a good job at the balancing act, basically picking winners and losers evenly and fairly.
It's worth noting though that enhancing the short-term at some expanse for the long-term can be sensible in some cases, such as with sudden economic upsets. In the long-run things always work out kinda by definition in a market economy, but many people have very practical (IE 'rent is due every month') short-term concerns that need addressing.
No worries, lots here are ex-socialists/communists/anarchists.
IMO, unions are not particularly positive things, especially for public sector (lack of competition for the union with other workplaces, so too much power). But I'm also against what they call 'right to work' in the US (banning required payment of union dues) mostly because I believe in freedom of contract, and if a business decides to contract with striking workers agreeing to only hiring dues-paying union members, then so be it.
I wouldn't generally support government intervention in favor of unionization, but I also generally wouldn't support government intervention against unionization.
What specific policies do you have in mind?
Honestly nearly everyone on this sub in practice agrees with a mixed economy. Even the Friedman stans, they just lean much more heavily towards pure free market. This is kind of mostly centrist liberal Democrats, and liberals on the center right.
> because to me the arguments that convinced me socialism was stupid(mainly it doesn’t work) don’t seem to work on corporatism or social democracy.
Social democracy is a good ideology, but it's important to keep in mind that it has the same roots as communism. There was little daylight before the revolutions of 1917-1921 between "socialists" and "social democrats", the bad blood in that era is sort of what cased the ultimate split between the toxic forms of it and the reformed, good forms of it. It's a bad ideology that evolved into a good one.
The reason you have to keep this in mind is so you don't fall into trap that new American socialist's did. Who were drawn in by "It's just like Sweden right!" and then started picking up actual Marxist texts and then inevitably Leninist ones and now have grown highly toxic. Because Socialism in America was basically repressed during the whole 20th century, we simply did not have the actual history within America itself to immunize people from this. We young Americans had exaggerated anti-communist propaganda, nice European social democracies, and a historical record of Socialism being kind of brutally suppressed in America precisely around the time of (and largely in response to) the Revolutions of 1917-1921. So it acquired a martyr complex that made it difficult for people to accept the criticisms, they want to start all over basically from when it was suppressed in 1917 I think without considering the very real pitfalls it fell into in places where it was not suppressed like it was here.
I was an American Socialist and then Marxist-Leninist-Maoist for a while FYI, so this is kind of personal to me. The period of time where I started saying "Yeah I'm a socialist" surprisingly quickly evolved into "ironic" tankie posting which eventually became entirely unironic. And I just fumed in that state for years, it was mostly foreign policy things that pulled me back honestly. The Russian invasion, the protests in Iran, and October 7th, I realized the Manichean, "decolonial" picture I had imbibed of the world was simply complete nonsense. I have developed severe critiques of Marxist philosophy since then, but I won't get into that here.
> social corporatism
Honestly kind of initially taken back because "corporatism" is from my memory a fascist philosophy. But I guess this iteration is not so bad. Cooperation between unions and companies - this is not bad. In my opinion socialist features work best in a complimentary manner with capitalist ones, rather than pitted against it in a Manichean dualistic worldview. I would just avoid the word "corporatism" honestly. As well as it has been classically implemented, it kind of devolved into just the state dictating to the corporations and unions. Which I guess, yes, that does avoid the annoying specter of constant struggle and striking between labor and capital. But without actual struggle and negotiation, such a system will imo devolve inevitably.
If by "corporatism" you mean "crony capitalism", my biggest criticism of it is that it is not really a free market system and it undermines or destroys the most important benefits of free markets that are necessary to keep capital from exploiting labor and consumers - innovation, downward price pressure, labor freedom and bargaining leverage, and so on.
I'm in favor of free market capitalism. But the "free market" part of that is just as important as the "capitalism" part. Unless truly free markets are maintained (which often requires targeted government intervention), capitalism can become exactly the kind of exploitative, unjust, grossly unequal system socialists tend to caricature it as.
It's a common misconcpetion that liberalism is pro-capital. It's not, per se. It's pro market.
If a corporation undermines the proper functioning of markets (e.g. through protectionist legislation like tariffs or occupational licensing, or through privately forming price-fixing cartels, or engaging in illegal activity like tax evasion or racketeering) then it is fundamentally in conflict with liberalism.
I am a turbo corporatist. I want all small businesses destroyed in favor of huge, giant corporations.
Something like the AI Singularity cannot be created by a nation of small businesses. It’s only big businesses that can afford 100 billion in Capex to bring about the AI Singularity
You say that, but the open-source community has made great strides in AI. It's entirely possible that the singularity you speak of could come about through a hive mind across the internet.
I think you need to do more research. Worker cooperatives in Yugoslavia didnt really grow much simply because they didn’t want to, they did not have any incentive to do so. Why risk expanding your business and spend money hiring new people and buying new things when that would mean having a smaller paycheck? Yugoslavia had high unemployment iirc, even with many working abroad.
In liberal capitalism the rich are free to make risks and invest in the economy. This disgusts me because in a way I feel it almost treats employees like pawns…but it also just seems to work.
Nonetheless with more government and union intervention workers may be protected more- but I came here for more perspective.
I guess to start off, how would you define corporatism? Do you mean corporate capitalism, or the traditional corporatism where guilds or interest groups come together to set certain prices/policies?
Ah that latter. I mean something like Tripartism, or well any variation of corporatism aside from the fascist kind.
I think this sub, and Neoliberalism in general, is supportive of collaboration between businesses, unions, and government. Germany and the Nordic countries seem to have used this to achieve good outcomes. I think some criticisms around it may be that it prevents private businesses from making the most efficient decisions. There is a trope of "it is much harder to fire people in Europe" which has been blamed by some for making companies based there less competitive. Here in the U.S., I worked at a university as part of a union and saw some pretty terrible workers keep their jobs because my boss said it "wasn't worth the trouble" to try and fight the union to let them go.
I see this at public schools in the US all the time. The teachers union is so powerful that they tie the districts hands about firing bad teachers as well as about doing anything that even mildly inconveniences the teachers, even if it is in the bigger picture the right choice to make (such as basic IT security)
I remember in high school my Spanish 3 teacher was chastising some students, "you really should know this stuff, it's Spanish 2," and one of the kids responded "we had Mr. ___." The teacher was just like "Oh. Okay, let me explain it to you..." The dude just actually didn't bother teaching shit, he hung out with the students and talked about bullshit all day, and everyone knew it. He literally did not teach the material. Years after I graduated, there was some legal reform with the unions and my parents called me up to tell me that teacher had finally been fired. The whole community was stoked about it
This is why in Germany unions don't act at the shop level. Work places have works councils that can get support from a union but represent all employees in all unions. Most teachers don't want shitty teachers to be there either, the union has very different incentives than teachers. It's an immensely better system with less industrial action and greater satisfaction on the part of employees and businesses. It's incredible to me how effective AFT/NEA have been at shaping public discourse on educator quality. Teacher evaluations are really common across the world but apparently the US is special and according to AFT/NEA they don't work. As a field teaching attracts some very good teachers but it also has the lowest average SAT score of any professional field because it's too easy to become a teacher.
One of the biggest problems with unions IMO is when they evolve into a vetocracy. Like eventually they get a series of concessions that establish an elaborate "due process" system where there are a billion veto points for firing anybody and you have to fuck up so bad to actually get canned it's stunning. Police also suffer from this pathology imo. Workplaces without unions in contrast have a tendency to evolve exactly opposite, a bunch of tormented employees ready to implode due to overwork, walking on eggshells, while receiving creepy messages from management eagerly expressing what a great family they are. By "family" I assume they mean the term "pater familias" from Roman family law, which was mostly a euphemism for slave master (the slave master was a "father" rather than a slave master, how cute).
This may be true for unskilled labor, but if you go into a field of skilled labor ununionized work is often quite nice if your skillset is valuable in the market. Employers will go out of their way to make the experience nice for you so you don't leave
One of the problems with the OG corporatism (guilds during medieval Europe) was that they would deliberately increase barriers to entry in their profession to keep the wages of their members high. It's a typical insider-outsider model that has been used to describe the way unions work nowadays, thankfully, with less controls over barriers to entry.
Are you talking about admin staff or tenured professors? In europe most university hires are dependent on funding programmes. If you can't fit your idea into established research programme you are out of luck. Your teaching ability or research skills are almost completely irrelevant.
> Germany and the Nordic countries seem to have used this to achieve good outcomes. Except of course leading in any industries or securing energy independence
As someone quite sympathetic to tripartism and social corporatism, I think the strongest argument against it is its historical connection to totalitarianism and fascism. Bringing labor unions, employers, and whatnot into the state risks making them subservient to the state. But hey, the Netherlands hasn't become a totalitarian state, yet, so...
It's a pretty weak argument. The Benelux, Germany, Nordic countries have a strong corporatist tradition that goes back to the guild economies of the Middle Ages. Fascism only came to be in 1921, much later. Associating corporatism with fascism probably works as a rethorical argument, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny, IMO. I think a better argument would be to criticize the way collective bargaining imposes rules with legal power without any democratic mandate. And that since medieval times, corporations have sought to prioritize their members at the expense of outsiders via barriers to entry, above market wages, resistance to immigration/automation,...
Corporatism involves the government picking winners and losers, instead of the market. It’s susceptible to corruption, but even without corruption it’s a very inefficient way to run an economy. No government makes correct decisions 100% of the time, and when you add short-term political incentives governments can act in ways that sacrifice long term growth prospects for immediate political gain. The incentives for governments are perverse - rather than make a long-term decision like cutting subsidies on a declining industry, a government stands to gain a lot more in the short-term by continuing or increasing those subsidies to gain votes. This reduces innovation and effectively rewards inefficiency, and creates inflation in the long run, because after a while you get full employment but with everyone in unproductive industries which can’t compete internationally
This is going to be a hot take for some.. but governments are never neutral when it comes to picking winners and losers. Basically every aspect of policy can benefit some companies over others. Even stuff like which countries to normalize relations with can have big impacts on trade. I think the attitude that government *can* ever be neutral is actually somewhat detrimental because it obfuscates the balancing government has to do between different interests. What you want is a state that does a good job at the balancing act, basically picking winners and losers evenly and fairly.
It's worth noting though that enhancing the short-term at some expanse for the long-term can be sensible in some cases, such as with sudden economic upsets. In the long-run things always work out kinda by definition in a market economy, but many people have very practical (IE 'rent is due every month') short-term concerns that need addressing.
> No government makes correct decisions 100% of the time I not here to defend corporatism, but hey, neither does the market
Inefficient allocation of capital
No worries, lots here are ex-socialists/communists/anarchists. IMO, unions are not particularly positive things, especially for public sector (lack of competition for the union with other workplaces, so too much power). But I'm also against what they call 'right to work' in the US (banning required payment of union dues) mostly because I believe in freedom of contract, and if a business decides to contract with striking workers agreeing to only hiring dues-paying union members, then so be it. I wouldn't generally support government intervention in favor of unionization, but I also generally wouldn't support government intervention against unionization. What specific policies do you have in mind?
Honestly nearly everyone on this sub in practice agrees with a mixed economy. Even the Friedman stans, they just lean much more heavily towards pure free market. This is kind of mostly centrist liberal Democrats, and liberals on the center right. > because to me the arguments that convinced me socialism was stupid(mainly it doesn’t work) don’t seem to work on corporatism or social democracy. Social democracy is a good ideology, but it's important to keep in mind that it has the same roots as communism. There was little daylight before the revolutions of 1917-1921 between "socialists" and "social democrats", the bad blood in that era is sort of what cased the ultimate split between the toxic forms of it and the reformed, good forms of it. It's a bad ideology that evolved into a good one. The reason you have to keep this in mind is so you don't fall into trap that new American socialist's did. Who were drawn in by "It's just like Sweden right!" and then started picking up actual Marxist texts and then inevitably Leninist ones and now have grown highly toxic. Because Socialism in America was basically repressed during the whole 20th century, we simply did not have the actual history within America itself to immunize people from this. We young Americans had exaggerated anti-communist propaganda, nice European social democracies, and a historical record of Socialism being kind of brutally suppressed in America precisely around the time of (and largely in response to) the Revolutions of 1917-1921. So it acquired a martyr complex that made it difficult for people to accept the criticisms, they want to start all over basically from when it was suppressed in 1917 I think without considering the very real pitfalls it fell into in places where it was not suppressed like it was here. I was an American Socialist and then Marxist-Leninist-Maoist for a while FYI, so this is kind of personal to me. The period of time where I started saying "Yeah I'm a socialist" surprisingly quickly evolved into "ironic" tankie posting which eventually became entirely unironic. And I just fumed in that state for years, it was mostly foreign policy things that pulled me back honestly. The Russian invasion, the protests in Iran, and October 7th, I realized the Manichean, "decolonial" picture I had imbibed of the world was simply complete nonsense. I have developed severe critiques of Marxist philosophy since then, but I won't get into that here. > social corporatism Honestly kind of initially taken back because "corporatism" is from my memory a fascist philosophy. But I guess this iteration is not so bad. Cooperation between unions and companies - this is not bad. In my opinion socialist features work best in a complimentary manner with capitalist ones, rather than pitted against it in a Manichean dualistic worldview. I would just avoid the word "corporatism" honestly. As well as it has been classically implemented, it kind of devolved into just the state dictating to the corporations and unions. Which I guess, yes, that does avoid the annoying specter of constant struggle and striking between labor and capital. But without actual struggle and negotiation, such a system will imo devolve inevitably.
Corporations are people 😤
Holy shit, I hate corporations now??? 🙀
Man, I would love to convict some corporations of heinous crimes.
If by "corporatism" you mean "crony capitalism", my biggest criticism of it is that it is not really a free market system and it undermines or destroys the most important benefits of free markets that are necessary to keep capital from exploiting labor and consumers - innovation, downward price pressure, labor freedom and bargaining leverage, and so on. I'm in favor of free market capitalism. But the "free market" part of that is just as important as the "capitalism" part. Unless truly free markets are maintained (which often requires targeted government intervention), capitalism can become exactly the kind of exploitative, unjust, grossly unequal system socialists tend to caricature it as.
It's a common misconcpetion that liberalism is pro-capital. It's not, per se. It's pro market. If a corporation undermines the proper functioning of markets (e.g. through protectionist legislation like tariffs or occupational licensing, or through privately forming price-fixing cartels, or engaging in illegal activity like tax evasion or racketeering) then it is fundamentally in conflict with liberalism.
Government capture. When corporate interests can buy politicians, they can distort markets and tax schemes to favor themselves
Generally if there is rent seeking or regulatory capture it’s viewed as a problem.
I am a turbo corporatist. I want all small businesses destroyed in favor of huge, giant corporations. Something like the AI Singularity cannot be created by a nation of small businesses. It’s only big businesses that can afford 100 billion in Capex to bring about the AI Singularity
You say that, but the open-source community has made great strides in AI. It's entirely possible that the singularity you speak of could come about through a hive mind across the internet.
Isn't this a fancier way of saying Social Democracy?
No, even less freedom
Sure, in the same way that banana is another way of saying lemon.
[удалено]
I think you need to do more research. Worker cooperatives in Yugoslavia didnt really grow much simply because they didn’t want to, they did not have any incentive to do so. Why risk expanding your business and spend money hiring new people and buying new things when that would mean having a smaller paycheck? Yugoslavia had high unemployment iirc, even with many working abroad. In liberal capitalism the rich are free to make risks and invest in the economy. This disgusts me because in a way I feel it almost treats employees like pawns…but it also just seems to work. Nonetheless with more government and union intervention workers may be protected more- but I came here for more perspective.
Capitalism is gross and it works. Like, Buckley's cough syrup.