Post #2959197

2026-05-22 12:57 UTC

Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but owning stock in a company is nothing like owning the means of production and all this does is give the company a pretext of making employees work against their class interests. An employer might mention that a strike would decrease stock value and scare a worker into staying in poor working conditions despite a strike being better for them for gaining long term benefits. Also, bonuses are a bad form of compensation in general because they often are dependent on decisions outside of workers control and in this case come from AI demand. Now those workers feel as though increasing prices, increasing AI use, and decreasing the number of employees all leads to them personally benefiting. All of these are against the interests of their own class.

Replies (1)

@MagicShel@lemmy.zip 2026-05-22 13:47

I said vaguely. I’m not a communist or Marxist and recognize the limits of my understanding. The difference between owning the means of production and sharing ownership with investors feels meaningful but not diametrically opposed. Without the investors, the workers would STILL have to weigh their ownership stake against working conditions and determine what is in their best interest. I agree that bonuses being outside the workers control makes them not great overall, however in this case the bonus isn’t cash, but a stake in the company which again ties the payment to future performance. Not in a way the workers can directly control, but there is always going to be friction between what workers deserve to be paid for their work and what customers are willing to pay for the product. Ordinarily that friction serves to make investors fabulously rich and the workers largely get exploited. Anyway, I said vaguely and I stand by it. If you want to go in depth on your views of capitalism and Marxism, I promise to read and likely be fascinated. But I think you read that with a lot more intent than I originally meant to impart. I probably should’ve just left that bit out, knowing Lemmy users.

Open ##2959196