In a conversation with AfD leader Alice Weidel on X, Musk concurred with her assertion that Adolf Hitler was a communist and pushed disinformation about migrants coming into the US.
See, you go on to prove my exact point, that QA workers and safety workers need the authority to stop production. You recognize this necessary authority, but then undermine it by saying it’s the “will of the workers.” If you don’t recognize it as authority, then it can be gone against, meaning you have to recognize it as authority. Managers don’t just do reports, otherwise they wouldn’t exist.
You’re doing the Engels thing. “See, subordinate, you give authority to Bob from safety. Thus, you accept authority, thus, I get to tell you what to do, and I’m telling you to increase production by 200%, skirting safety protocols if need be”. It doesn’t work like that. Authority, like respect, is earned. A king is not an authority on bootmaking no matter how much power he wields. (Well he could actually be a hobby bootmaker but you get my point).
Proper managers just do reports. Not always the written kind. They’re not saying “do this, do that”, they’re saying “X needs Y, can you supply it, please contact them”, they’re saying “have a look at this procedure what do you think of it”. They’re keeping an eye on everything, produce a larger picture and communicate their insights to anyone who should know, or is asking. Their authority comes from good analysis.
OSHA has power because it is punishable to not do what they say, they have authority.
You’re still equating power and authority. And not just in the “eh those terms have some overlap and speech can get fuzzy”, but in your thinking itself, you’re not making crucial distinctions: OSHA would not need any power if bosses did not have power over workers, its authority as people knowledgable in matters of work safety is plenty to make the workers listen to them. You do not need to threaten a machinist for them to not put their dick in a vice. You do need to threaten bosses who threaten machinists so that they put their dick in a vice. The necessity to threaten the boss with gulag does only arise because the boss is given the power to threaten the worker with gulag.
You’re doing exactly what Engels points out, though. You are trying to change the nature of a thing by changing its name.
OSHA has authority, power, whatever you want to call it to compel unsafe or toxic production to cease. This is necessary, and cannot simply be a request to be denied, as people will work in their own interests and may want to cut corners. You don’t need to threaten people not to put their genitals in vices, correct, but you do need to have power over people who are deliberately skirting safety protocol for their own benefit.
This is why this entire conversation has been relatively pointless, it’s clear that you certainly have firm beliefs about what you want, you just fundamentally lack the understanding of the Marxist position to its entirety and can only disagree with it by shifting and distorting things or by changing the names of things we agree on. You double down when proven wrong and try to pretend Marxism isn’t Socialist.
I think you need to take a step back and read at list a bit of Marx and Engels and read up more on the various AES states if you want to actually come up with sensible critique.
“to compel”. That’s power. Authority is more like “to convince”.
This is necessary,
No.
as people will work in their own interests and may want to cut corners
It is not in the interest of workers to cut corners. That interest is coming from somewhere else. That is why OSHA needs power. Without those external interests, all that OSHA needs to do is convince that certain practices are beneficial to the worker’s own self-interest. If they are any good at their job, they will be very convincing, they will have much authority.
This is the fundamental stuff that Marx, and by extension many Marxists, miss in their analysis. That’s why the revolution failed: Because it was not, systemically, beneficial to the worker, because it was the exchange of one boot for another boot. Advances such as healthcare? Goddammit SocDems caused Germany to introduce universal public healthcare under Monarchism. “We need the dictatorship of the vanguard to introduce these advances” is not an argument, it never has been necessary and with the likes of OSHA: The USSR was not great, not terrible. Bosses could override safety concerns because higher-ups want production quota, and they did. The reason it wasn’t terrible is because the people engineering factories cared about that stuff, and worked it into the design.
The same misappreciation btw also extends to histography: “The peasant has no class consciousness”. Peasant revolt after constant peasant revolt attested in history would beg to differ.
Okay, so OSHA needs power. If a factory is producing in unsafe conditions or produce toxic or unsafe goods for the public. Not every situation can be solved via “convincing.” Depending on OSHA to be “convincing” is silly, all such Utopian formations of societies like the Owenites and Saint-Simon’s commune failed for similar reasons.
I think you need to revisit Marxist theory and history, and you honestly should revisit Anarchist theory which today understands the necessity of just hierarchy. The USSR was great, not perfect but absolutely massive for Workers around the world.
Not every situation can be solved via “convincing.”
Well, you need to convince the KGB to stop enforcing the bosses’ commands, taking away the bosses’ power, as that is where the necessity for OSHA to have power even arises. Of course, enforcement of power is all the KGB is there for so you have to convince power-hungry authoritarians to stop doing what they do and retire. It’d be in their own interest, but their neuroses doesn’t let them see it.
We can talk about the need to coerce to get rid of the KGB to bring about a system that is free from the KGB, we can talk about the need of defences against the resurgence of a KGB while the very notion of ordering people about is not relegated to the history books, but we do not need to even entertain the idea of power being necessary in actually realised socialism as it would be a contradiction in terms.
“The whole working gang is interested in production. The program for next month is discussed with all of us. The foreman calls a meeting and tells us that the administration wants us to put out 3,000 milling tools next month. How shall we do it? We discuss in detail; each of us says what he can do. It all adds up to 4,000. So the foreman goes to the administration and raises the plan to 4,000. […]
That’s not how quotas were set in the USSR. An analysis of how implementation came to differ from those kinds of ideal descriptions might be in order. Right-out mandatory if you want to call yourself a materialist.
Do you have stuff on this? Not sources, I’m not asking you to prove you are correct, I was wondering since you said this that you may have something that I can take a look at.
You’re doing the Engels thing. “See, subordinate, you give authority to Bob from safety. Thus, you accept authority, thus, I get to tell you what to do, and I’m telling you to increase production by 200%, skirting safety protocols if need be”. It doesn’t work like that. Authority, like respect, is earned. A king is not an authority on bootmaking no matter how much power he wields. (Well he could actually be a hobby bootmaker but you get my point).
Proper managers just do reports. Not always the written kind. They’re not saying “do this, do that”, they’re saying “X needs Y, can you supply it, please contact them”, they’re saying “have a look at this procedure what do you think of it”. They’re keeping an eye on everything, produce a larger picture and communicate their insights to anyone who should know, or is asking. Their authority comes from good analysis.
You’re still equating power and authority. And not just in the “eh those terms have some overlap and speech can get fuzzy”, but in your thinking itself, you’re not making crucial distinctions: OSHA would not need any power if bosses did not have power over workers, its authority as people knowledgable in matters of work safety is plenty to make the workers listen to them. You do not need to threaten a machinist for them to not put their dick in a vice. You do need to threaten bosses who threaten machinists so that they put their dick in a vice. The necessity to threaten the boss with gulag does only arise because the boss is given the power to threaten the worker with gulag.
You’re doing exactly what Engels points out, though. You are trying to change the nature of a thing by changing its name.
OSHA has authority, power, whatever you want to call it to compel unsafe or toxic production to cease. This is necessary, and cannot simply be a request to be denied, as people will work in their own interests and may want to cut corners. You don’t need to threaten people not to put their genitals in vices, correct, but you do need to have power over people who are deliberately skirting safety protocol for their own benefit.
This is why this entire conversation has been relatively pointless, it’s clear that you certainly have firm beliefs about what you want, you just fundamentally lack the understanding of the Marxist position to its entirety and can only disagree with it by shifting and distorting things or by changing the names of things we agree on. You double down when proven wrong and try to pretend Marxism isn’t Socialist.
I think you need to take a step back and read at list a bit of Marx and Engels and read up more on the various AES states if you want to actually come up with sensible critique.
“to compel”. That’s power. Authority is more like “to convince”.
No.
It is not in the interest of workers to cut corners. That interest is coming from somewhere else. That is why OSHA needs power. Without those external interests, all that OSHA needs to do is convince that certain practices are beneficial to the worker’s own self-interest. If they are any good at their job, they will be very convincing, they will have much authority.
This is the fundamental stuff that Marx, and by extension many Marxists, miss in their analysis. That’s why the revolution failed: Because it was not, systemically, beneficial to the worker, because it was the exchange of one boot for another boot. Advances such as healthcare? Goddammit SocDems caused Germany to introduce universal public healthcare under Monarchism. “We need the dictatorship of the vanguard to introduce these advances” is not an argument, it never has been necessary and with the likes of OSHA: The USSR was not great, not terrible. Bosses could override safety concerns because higher-ups want production quota, and they did. The reason it wasn’t terrible is because the people engineering factories cared about that stuff, and worked it into the design.
The same misappreciation btw also extends to histography: “The peasant has no class consciousness”. Peasant revolt after constant peasant revolt attested in history would beg to differ.
Okay, so OSHA needs power. If a factory is producing in unsafe conditions or produce toxic or unsafe goods for the public. Not every situation can be solved via “convincing.” Depending on OSHA to be “convincing” is silly, all such Utopian formations of societies like the Owenites and Saint-Simon’s commune failed for similar reasons.
I think you need to revisit Marxist theory and history, and you honestly should revisit Anarchist theory which today understands the necessity of just hierarchy. The USSR was great, not perfect but absolutely massive for Workers around the world.
Well, you need to convince the KGB to stop enforcing the bosses’ commands, taking away the bosses’ power, as that is where the necessity for OSHA to have power even arises. Of course, enforcement of power is all the KGB is there for so you have to convince power-hungry authoritarians to stop doing what they do and retire. It’d be in their own interest, but their neuroses doesn’t let them see it.
We can talk about the need to coerce to get rid of the KGB to bring about a system that is free from the KGB, we can talk about the need of defences against the resurgence of a KGB while the very notion of ordering people about is not relegated to the history books, but we do not need to even entertain the idea of power being necessary in actually realised socialism as it would be a contradiction in terms.
https://comlib.encryptionin.space/epubs/this-soviet-world/
That’s not how quotas were set in the USSR. An analysis of how implementation came to differ from those kinds of ideal descriptions might be in order. Right-out mandatory if you want to call yourself a materialist.
Do you have stuff on this? Not sources, I’m not asking you to prove you are correct, I was wondering since you said this that you may have something that I can take a look at.