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Comment by hyko | Hacker News Reader

It’s things like this that make me realise I’m actually a free market socialist.

I don't think things like this lie on the capitalism-communism spectrum. You're an employee during work hours, and what you do outside of work hours is your own. It's completely orthogonal to capitalism or socialism. Capitalism definitely has its issues, but this is not one of them as far as I can tell.

Who said anything about Communism? I’m talking about the people who do the work for a business owning and managing the business themselves, and competing in a free marketplace.

Having a class of workers and a class of capital owners is central to capitalism.

Capitalist-communism spectrum, which socialism lies on it somewhere.

Are you arguing for the abolishing of capital and business owners?

No, my view is essentially that companies should be democratic institutions, and in order to achieve that it means the workers must also be capital owners.

Corporations today are essentially authoritarian regimes, whose agents have wide remit to dictate the working conditions of other people.

The bit that usually confuses people about the socialist axis is that capitalism vs socialism is always framed in terms of free market enterprise vs statism; I’m arguing you can keep the free market dynamic while having a truly empowered workforce (not just some management spiel). This is very different to the models where the state either runs everything, or taxes private enterprise to run half the things.

Do corporations that grant their employees RSUs or options fit your view of being democratic institutions?

It’s a good question; the exact instruments used would be for the employees to decide, but I would propose either restricted or common stock for the initial grant.

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