Actually, employers and employees are mutually dependent upon each other. (Believers in the myth of rugged individualism are constantly trying to skirt this fact.) This dependency shifts one way or another according to laws of supply and demand, which can be affected by macroeconomic policy or by large groups of people who decide to "opt out" of capitalism and create something else between themselves. If we're going to really talk "capitalism and its alternatives," we had better address laws of supply and demand as a social force to be reckoned with, in the world as it is today.Let's start with jobs and rents. How many of you are competing with too many other people for too few jobs, and how many of you can walk up to bosses and name your salaries because your skill is so valuable a commodity and there are so few who have it? How many of you are affected by corporate deskilling, where corporations replace skilled jobs with jobs any unskilled person could do?
Rents. How many of you are paying exorbitant rents because there's nowhere else to live, or all the landlords are raising their rents at once and can get away with this practice without inciting a rent strike, and how many of you are threatening to move out of your current place if your landlord doesn't fix the place up, and lower the rent to boot?
OK, now, let's talk about alternatives to capitalism. If you work in a cooperative or an employee-owned business, you're both the employee and the boss (which solves THAT problem). How many of you work in that sort of arrangement?
It's agreed that cooperatives are still part of the capitalist system, since their operation is still dependent on the laws of supply and demand for whatever commodities they trade with their consumer clientele. What business practices would change that fact? Be specific in your discussion, show in what way "trade" or "exchange" can be replaced by other ways of distributing the essentials of life.
None.
