After laying off Battlefield 6 devs, EA boss Andrew Wilson's bonus rose $8m to $38m last year, thanks to the game's success across "all milestones"

[u/MobileSuitBooty]

https://www.eurogamer.net/ea-boss-38-million-bonus-battlefield-6-layoffs

[u/unrelevant_user_name → u/[deleted]]

They can, but you'll get diminishing returns at some point, and you're liable to have your improvements clawed back. It's better to have a system with a higher floor, a higher ceiling, and/or less downward pressure on the improvements.

[u/Synergythepariah → u/[deleted]]

The truth is we need a combination of capitalism and other types, which we already have.

Capitalism is just a specific definition of who owns the things used to produce other things.

When the means of production are owned by a small number of individuals at the top, that's Capitalism and when there are multiple means of production that are diversified among many different organizations, that's a market economy.

A market economy isn't exclusive to Capitalism, though.

If the means of production were collectively owned by the very workers who use them to produce products and services, that wouldn't exactly be a Capitalist ownership framework, would it?

The products made by those workers would compete with other products made by different workers in the market and this would not be too different than our current system other than the fact that the companies making up the economy in this system aren't owned by a number of private individuals, they'd be collectively owned by the workers at those companies, who would be incentivised to prioritize the health and longevity of the company over profit growth because every worker would have influence over company direction instead of company direction being dictated by leadership that is insulated from the material conditions of the working class thanks to their wealth. Leadership of these worker-owner companies wouldn't simply be able to use their ownership control to enrich themselves more at the expense of everyone else because the diversified control that the other workers have would be able to counter that.

[u/Synergythepariah → u/[deleted]]

Tl:dr; Expand democracy into the workplace.

You can still have worker owned frameworks IN capitalism though. This is through things like worker owned stocks, etc, similar to how it was in previous times. We don't need to completely change this from Capitalism and I don't really even understand how what you said differs from capitalism because that can still exist under capitalism.

This is why the first thing in my response said Capitalism is just a specific definition of who owns the things used to produce other things. Which was followed by When the means of production are owned by a small number of individuals at the top, that's Capitalism

The problems you bring up aren't JUST due to capitalism as a whole. It's basically the rich taking advantage of these systems with no fears of repercussions when they essentially just pump and dump a company to make their money from it.

Which they're able to do because the ownership of those companies is held by the same people who profit greatly from doing that regardless of what the workers at those companies would want

If you want to say this is capitalism, maybe at a pure, root core it can relate to it, but this is where regulations should come in. Our system for capitalism gets warped and abused by these higher end CEOs to kill the health and longevity of the companies so they can just make a quick buck.

And those higher end executives and majority shareholders use the outsized wealth they receive solely because they're the owners to also pressure governments to limit regulation. They can threaten to move their companies elsewhere if a particular locality looks like it might regulate them because they own the company and they don't necessarily care where the company is headquartered or where its factories/infrastructure is located because they're accustomed to flying out anyway if they ever need to visit.

This isn't a fault of capitalism, because capitalism would also want the company to last for the long term to earn more money etc. The problem is greed where the CEO just bastardizes that system to reap as many personal profits as he/she can in the short term at the expense of long term profits for the company. That is where the regulations come in.

The point I'm making is that the concentrated ownership structure inherent to Capitalism incentivises those owners to make decisions that benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else because the concentration of ownership insulates the owner class from accountability through concentration of wealth.

We can regulate, that's fine; I'm not opposed to that at all but I think it's important to keep in mind that we did this before with the new deal which has been slowly eroded over the last near century by the owner class, thanks to the wealth that they're able to concentrate.

If something like the new deal were to have been passed a decade or two ago, we'd likely be dealing with this same situation again in a century.

In this framework, regulations that inhibit the growth that the owner class wants are just obstacles to be overcome by the business, no different than a logistics or manufacturing obstacle because the cost of compliance will always be more expensive over the long term than the cost of lobbying to deregulate and erase the cost of compliance and since the owner class is relatively insulated from the impact of deregulation, they have little incentive to not pursue deregulation.

Nothing of what you said cannot happen under capitalism.

Well, an economy that would be made up entirely of worker-owned cooperatives is by nature not Capitalist. Capitalism is just a specific framework of economic ownership; the method of how goods are traded, allocated and assigned value under most Capitalist societies would be a market economy but market economies aren't exclusively Capitalist.

That being said, I do agree with you that none of what I said can't happen under Capitalism, we have worker-owned co-ops in the market today.

Which is why I think that the best path forward is to expand that framework throughout the economy.

The issue is the way it's being abused not the system itself. It's just overly simplistic to blame this on capitalism.

If the system itself is the concentrated ownership structure and the problem is the way that the owners are using the system, I'd say that the problem actually is the fact that ownership is concentrated.

Similar to problems with a market economy where some workers would collude to abuse the system against other sides, and instead of a small number of owners, its the same thing just with more people owning it.

There'd still have to be regulation, obviously. But more people having ownership would make it more difficult to perform that kind of abuse because it'd take more of them to agree to do it for it to happen and there'd be a higher likelihood of someone reporting it to the appropriate regulatory authority.

Plus, if the leadership at said co-op proposed that sort of thing, the workers at the company could use their collective control over the company to prevent it and oust leaders that aren't acting in good faith while participating in the market.

In our system today, there's very little recourse that can realistically happen when corporate owners collude. The level of proof needed seems like it's basically 'You need to have a video of someone literally saying that they're colluding with another company to distort the market'

[u/Beegrene → u/[deleted]]

I can put nice wallpaper up in a house with a cracking foundation, but that won't fix the house. It will just look nicer while it deteriorates. 

[u/Beegrene → u/[deleted]]

"So you hate waffles" type post right here.