Frank Casa

We actually used to have some form of stakeholder capitalism, at least practiced at a large number of companies. This is before the greedy corporate raiders ruined it, where they made investors the priority. It only existed for a short period, between the abuses of the past, and the abuses of now. But it was long enough where some people enjoyed an entire career.

At these companies, employees used to have jobs for life, pensions, and generous benefits. But then the corporate raiders took that all away. That is also about the time that employee’s wages stopped growing and started to stagnate or worse.

Was it perfect? No. But it was better than communism, and better than laissez-faire capitalism, and better than crony capitalism, which we have now.

The good news is that some people are trying to bring stakeholder capitalism back. Many states now have something called a “public benefit corporation” which is legally required to consider all of the stakeholders, not just the investors. These laws would prevent corporate raiders and investors from gutting these companies at the expense of the workers and consumers.

Plus, cooperatives and employee-owned companies have been around for a long time. Both employees and consumers are treated much better at these enterprises than they are at their investor-owned counterparts.

It is a model that works, and must be protected.

In the United States, “lack of transparency” or “not transparent” is mostly used. Although “opaque” is sometimes used in some circles of people.

There are different kinds of capitalism, just like there are different types of socialism.

Authoritarian socialism or communism is the worst, and crony capitalism is what we currently have, and is pretty bad too. But there are things like democratic socialism and stakeholder capitalism which attempt to balance competing interests.

For example, stakeholder capitalism is where all of the stakeholders benefit from their contributions, including labor. Workers get a share of the profits of the company, and are paid well as stakeholders in the company. The workers often own part or all of the company. There are also cooperatives, where the customers own the enterprise. Cooperatives work great for healthcare and necessities like groceries.

People tend to pick the worst examples of capitalism and socialism, but those are not the only flavors.

China suffers from the same problem the USSR did. When you have one party rule, it does not matter how democratic the constitution says a country is. If you can only elect people from one party, and the party determines who can run for office, voters can only select from a list of candidates that are aligned with the party and its leader. This effectively transfers power to the party leaders and away from elected officials and the people.

The fediverse mostly has two types of people: people who don’t want to be part of surveillance capitalism, and those who got banned on centralized social media for bad behavior. Unsurprisingly, the second group causes the same problems here as they did on centralized platforms.

As long as you never say anything even remotely political or controversial, you are fine.

But that comes at a cost of self expression. Conform or be cast out (blocked).