But in all seriousness, John Deere is not just a manufacturer (say, like Kubota), but is to some degree a bit of a agricultural cultural icon. I’m surprised that they think that this degree of shitting in the mouths of those that (literally) feed them is not going to somehow have negative repercussions in the long run.
(like I dunno, people who previously didn’t cotton to buying Kubota, because their pappies fought those (insert midwestern accepted racist term for asian here) in WWII or Korea or Vietnam…, and they always buy American, now thinking “Well, Kubota’s not going to tell me that I don’t actually own the tractor that I paid X thousands of dollars for…”.
Stakeholder isn’t synonymous with shareholder. A stakeholder is anyone with a tangible interest in the company doing well, or at least staying afloat. Workers are already stakeholders, but all too often are not treated as such — decisions that they ought to have some input on are made without soliciting their opinions or even notifying them about beforehand so they have a chance to volunteer feedback.
Isn’t that attitude definitively outdated now that Japanese and Korean companies employ plenty of Americans in their U.S.-based factories? Kubota builds tractors and mowers and ATVs in Georgia and provides diesel engine parts and service through Kubota Engine America in Illinois. Which exchange its stock is traded on is immaterial since anyone can invest in the Tokyo Stock Exchange or the Korea Exchange. Meanwhile, Deere has factories in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, and India.
Almost all of your examples in your last two paragraphs fall under the rubric of “personal property”. You’ve reinvented the distinction between private property and personal property that @the_borderer cited early in the thread.
It’s a red herring. No one is advocating for a world where everyone just steals what they want from their neighbors – such a system is obviously unworkable in the first place and it’s insulting everyone’s intelligence to think that they hadn’t already thought of that and have never addressed it (many people have, there are links at the top of this thread).
You make a lot of good points here, but please consider a few counterpoints:
In places like Taiwan and Japan, fewer janitors are needed because people tend to pick up after themselves. I believe a big part of this is that there are no (or maybe just fewer) school janitors and school children are expected to clean up after themselves.
Similarly, not enough people may want to produce clothes and food to support the population, but what people desire is really a function of culture. We live in a culture where people spend many hours a day watching TV or playing video games. Not that people shouldn’t do those things, but consider a possible world where more people found gardening pleasurable, and where more people found creative satisfaction in making clothes, furniture, or tools.
Our society’s solution to this mismatch between people’s desires and socially necessary roles is to threaten everyone with homelessness unless they get with the program and do a bunch of stuff they don’t want to do – unless, of course, they win the birth lottery and just just naturally like to do something profitable like programming computers or managing other people’s money. But people like to help each other and do the right thing – they enjoy it and derive satisfaction from it. As a result, our society pays a lot of really necessary jobs way less than the value added – nurses in particular come to mind, but almost any job involving a lot of emotional labor would qualify. I know that school teachers in the US are sometimes explicitly told “If you cared enough about the kids, you’d be willing to work more hours.”
So we have a cruel, arbitrary system that penalizes people for trying to make a living helping other people and threatens everyone with deprivation and exposure if they don’t stay in line. This system is not inevitable, and everywhere you look you can find excellent pro-social human behavior that suggests the possibility of something better. I think that’s what motivates socialists and left anarchists to try to imagine different forms society could take on. Pointing out the reasons that these ideas haven’t already been implemented is missing the point, which is that those reasons themselves aren’t inevitable and that a better, more equitable world for everyone is probably possible under a less short-sighted self-centered system.
Yeah, I know. The person I was originally talking to specifically stated[quote=“popobawa4u, post:14, topic:99614, full:true”]
Ownership has always been a superstitious, stodgy idea. Getting rid of personal property is IMO a good thing - provided that people don’t recognize corporate ownership either.
[/quote]
So it appeared to me as if they were indeed talking about personal property as that was the term they used, and I figured that “ownership” worked as a blanket term for both. I admit, I lost track of who said what, and thought the person I last replied to was the same as the original poster, however, so I do apologize for that. Had I been paying more attention my post probably would have been a lot shorter.
This may also be true. My job in college involved tutoring stupid papers, and my current grad school position (told you my contributions to society were questionable at best) involves grading student papers. Once you have to honestly explain to someone why mandatory organ donation would be a bad thing, you kinda stop making assumptions about what sort of things people will and won’t argue.
I’m not a fan of the current system either, but I’m very wary of ideas where criticizing the practicality of them is “missing the point.” The current system doesn’t have to be. I find a lot of the left anarchist leaning ideas are a bit too optimistic about human nature, and ignore other human issues. But let’s say that the number of people who generally want to be helpful is sufficient for demand. People get satisfaction out of making a difference they can see. Usually teachers cite seeing a student get something out of the class, grow as a person, or understand material as the thing that makes their job worthwhile. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear similar things from nurses or the like. That doesn’t work for clothes. It’s important that the seven and a half billion people in the world have clothes, but it’s not going to feel meaningful. It’s not a hard job with some moments where you can see that you made a difference and feel satisfied. It’s a hard job that will likely feel meaningless over time. Which, admittedly, is awful even if you do get paid, and most clothes are made under horrifying conditions anyway.
The point I’m getting at here is that a lot of these solutions are good on the “it doesn’t have to be this way” part, and poor on finding a practical, workable way to fix things. I take issue with that because I’m not at all convinced that a workable system that’s not arbitrary in some ways and cruel at least sometimes exists. We don’t live in a universe that guarantees solutions exist. All we can really do is make things less arbitrary and cruel, make things better. If it turns out to fix the problem entirely, great. If not, it was still worth doing. Hence, something that can be implemented, to make things better, if not fix them, is going to sound better than a solution that fixes everything, but is too plagued by practical realities to come into being.
There’s an internal contradiction here: to the extent that it is important that people have clothes, it should be completely possible to feel like making clothes is a meaningful contribution to the human condition. If it doesn’t feel that way, then it is a problem of perceptions rather than facts – and perceptions are often more changeable than facts. I find it strange that you don’t even consider possibilities like people deriving satisfaction from a job making clothes, or that jobs making clothes doesn’t have to be hard or feel meaningless, or that we could have jobs making clothes that aren’t under horrifying conditions. This last one seems especially strange – why do you think horrifying conditions are inevitable?
The criticism precedes the solution. Insisting on having a solution before allowing criticism is the same as insisting that there is no possible better way to do things.
We may not live in a universe that assures us of solutions, but we can look around at the solutions we already have. We live in a world of drastically unequal wealth and living standards, and objectively we waste enormous amounts of resources on creating useless crap. It’s clear to me that if we had different values than we do then we could do a lot more to make life better for everyone on earth. It’s a problem of culture, not of resources, and so it’s not necessary to wring our hands about whether there’s enough to go around. We can look around and see that there’s plenty to go around. The only question is how to convince people to share it.
Can you be more specific? Who proposed the latter type of solution? What are the practical realities that are plaguing it?
Funny you mention it, because there’s often talk of making software engineering one of those professions that requires certification, just like physical engineers. I could see that taking this very specific, dark path.
Well, the attitude is definitely outdated, but the absolute dumbfuckery that perpetuates it isn’t. I’ve gotten crap when I went to school in a somewhat rural area (“well, at least your Toyota isn’t a Chevy/Ford, but why drive an import when you can buy american?”).
Um… Wow… I’m absolutely the last guy you should probably talk to about an american made Japanese product (being a born in the USA product of an ethnically Japanese (but also made in the USA) mom and caucasian (German) dad (also also made in the USA). I don’t think that the level of thought penetrates much more than “It’s got that funny “foreign” name, so it can’t be American”. Just like “wow, you’ve got slanty eyes you can’t be American, where were you born?” Umm… Here, as were my parents and their parents as well… When did your family come over?
Maybe it’s different if there’s a Toyota, or Honda, or Kubota, or etc… plant in town, but much beyond that, I dunno.
I’d think that by now anyone who lives in the South (or rural Indiana or Ohio) knows that foreign manufacturers have substantial factories in the U.S. They probably even know someone who works in one. If someone gives you shit over buying an “import” there’s a good chance you can retort with “This was made in Tennessee [or wherever] dumbass! Where were your jeans made?”
There’s that bloody logic again! You’ve put some thought into this, what are you some librul academic elitist! How dare you tell someone that their mindless distrust of something primarily based on name or original country of origin is poorly thought out!
(hmmmph! I bet you voted for that Kenyan communist!)
((Total sarcasm people, please remove undies from crack…))
Or that almost everything that they’re buying from the mecca of meccas (Walmart) comes from China…
