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Will Communism Ever Work?

Pandy

Ramon Vega
Decided to make a thread for this after going off topic in SNV. Want to avoid the mods' naughty chair...

No, it won't. It really won't.

Any political system which seeks to stifle aspiration and individuality is doomed to failure because it sets itself against millions of years of evolution. Mankind (like any species) is hardwired to compete. It's in our DNA.

When most of the world's population leads a secure existence and does not have to resort to whoring itself out to multinational companies for low pay, long working hours and terrible conditions - i.e. when capitalism has developed the whole world enough through the excruciatingly slow 'trickle-down' effect - and subsequently workers' rights have improved to a global standard more similar to that of 'the west', the global working population will have the power to request greater redistribution through democracy. There will be no threat of corporations outsourcing/picking up and leaving to somewhere markedly cheaper because nowhere would be markedly cheaper - the BRICS of today, along with all those currently undeveloped countries would all have similar pay and working conditions. From this point, especially in a system of global democratic governance, the overwhelmingly large impoverished class could effectively lobby for greater redistribution if represented properly. And from there who knows...

It is all dependent on who gets to call the shots really. At the moment, corporations are bigger than governments and as such can assert a degree of control over them. A global government could keep them in check and assure balanced growth across the globe. True Socialism and Communism will never again work at the level of the nation-state however.
 
Also could the competitiveness jimmyb claims is innate actually be the result of our upbringing? We have to overcome many bestial emotions such as anger and lust to function in a harmonious society, why not competitiveness too to some degree? Does a less individualistic society necessarily dictate the expression of less individuality?
 
I would be surprised if the majority of the developed world did not shift to a more socialist culture with an emphasis on personal creativity rather than consumption and wage-seeking in the upcoming post-scarcity age. This is primarily due to technology-driven unemployment, which we are already seeing widening the enormous gap between the rich class (the corporate classes who outsource to the bottom, the very rare creative talents, the STEM-gifted majors and other rare 'knowledge' workers) and the lower and middle classes consisting of debt-saddled college graduates who are consigned to unpaid internships and bricky service jobs that have not yet been automated. The blue-collar jobs except shale oil in America have been sent off to China et al, while the white-collar jobs of secretarial work, middle-management, etc have been made obsolete by technology and small businesses have been made obsolete by Walmart and co. That's why the undergrad degree of today is worth the same as the high school degree of yesteryear, and a Masters the same as an undergrad - too few jobs, too many people. (Specifically, too many people who are not a creative genius or talented in a STEM field. If the average person were, those fields would be as oversaturated as the liberal arts and social sciences; it's the relative rarity of math/logic aptitude keeping engineering and back-end programming afloat.)

Read recent Fed reports - they've snuck the possibility of an increase in the "natural rate of unemployment" in there, and I've read a paper suggesting that we would currently have ~25% more unemployment if all companies maximized efficiency. If the NAIRU increases to the extent that the majority of people can no longer find jobs, then barring remarkable cruelty from our sociopathic elites (this is not out of the question) we would have to guarantee a Basic Income to each citizen that allows them to have a reasonable quality of life. Beyond that, they can come up with whatever ventures they want to make extra money; with the extra free time, I would expect a flourishing in creative ventures and specialist hobbies. In a post-scarcity society where we don't have to worry about resources, this should be easy. The problem comes if we think that people who aren't useful to the market don't "deserve" anything but scorn and self-loathing, or if we have a brickload of resources but the vast majority of it is hogged and defended by the upper elite (the current state of the world).

I'm obviously not a Luddite by any means - rather, I welcome our new Google overlords - but I think the transition period to an automated future will be tough and we will have to come up with a new culture for an age where one program can do the work of a thousand people. If we decide not to assign social positions by how wealthy someone is, how well one's innate gifts (if any ;)) fit the demands of the market, what will the alternative society look like? If we don't *need* to work for a living, what will motivate us? (FWIW, I think that's no issue - imo people will still be motivated, whether that is an internal motivation to do well at the things they like, or a personal conscientiousness, or a desire to out-compete and make more money than others.)

Of course, this all depends whether we CAN get to the post-scarcity age. This is no guarantee. I believe our deeply growth-dependent economies are already running into the physical constraints of the real world and if we don't find new easy sources of energy - by that I mean something comparable to the incredible energy-for-energy returns of fossil fuels, which outstrip any nuclear or renewable resources so far - then we are going to have major problems taking care of a world population of 9 billion by 2050. And that's without considering the darkly humorous state of our seas and skies and rapidly disappearing habitats.

Bottom line - no matter what society we choose, the character of it will be determined by the character of the individuals within it. If the individuals within a society are greedy, shortsighted, and careless of the world and the people around them then that society will fail, and take its grandchildren down with it. The older I grow, the more I believe that we in the wealthy West tend to blame "society" or "the government" too much and acknowledge too little of attitude and culture. Our obsession with being different from others - by that we mean different from the average, different from the "sheep" - makes us suspicious and offended by anything big and powerful enough to curtail our freedoms; anything that might ask us to discipline ourselves, to accept responsibility for what we eat and use and throw away, to feel shame, to sacrifice for others we may not ever meet.

Well, yeah, society equals groupthink and oppression and social control and all those other Orwellian catchwords, you say. More so in communist states than even our own pseudo-democracies. I acknowledge my own fear of the faceless mob but all I can think is, is anyone *really* that different when we're all drinking the same kool-aid? Maybe it's not the gun of our own soldier we should fear, but the upbringing and attitudes and void of empathy that would let him shoot it?
 
Depends. I'm rather surprised communism even came up in the 'Other Games Thread', but hey, that's GG.

The essential concept of communism essentially revolves around fulfilment. It does not entail perfect equality, does not entail the loss of free will or individuality and certainly does not entail what we presently refer to as 'big government'.
Marx and Engels envisioned communism as essentially involving a society which made the maximization of free time its main aim. Why? Because under a capitalist system, we (when 'we' is taken to mean the working class) slog through hours of unfulfilling work, producing everything to excess and losing our connection to the work we do and the things we produce, essentially becoming dehumanized and alienated, in order to generate what Marx and Engels saw as undeserved profits that go to the narrow band of exploitative people sitting at the very top.

We do things most of us don't want to do, in order to earn money, so we can feed and house ourselves and our families. But when the weekend rolls around, we occupy ourselves doing 'fun' things, things that give us pride and satisfaction. What those things are differ vastly (everything from drawing to singing to playing football), but essentially they all involve us connecting to the things we do, and thus earning both joy and pride from our efforts.

But then we go back to the daily grind, dehumanize ourselves and slog through another forty or so hours of work we're totally alienated from in order to earn another big chunk of profits for the fat-cats at the top of the system, in whose favour the entire process is rigged.

Marx and Engels reasoned that only when a man is happy or deeply interested in doing something can it be called 'work'. Only when he feels the things he produces are his 'own', and not just another random item off the line, can true development of the human mind and future be achieved. This system of creating things in vast excess quantities denies us that opportunity for creative, fulfilling work, and create a strange, brutal situation where we slog all week to earn enough money to enable us to go home for the weekend and actually do fulfilling, energizing work, which gets termed as a 'hobby' by the capitalist system, which needs us to produce in excess in order to generate profits for, again, the fat-cats at the top.

What Marx and Engels truly meant by the communist system has been a subject of enormous debate, but essentially it involves creating a society where all major decisions are conducted through direct democracy, where the 'necessary' tasks to preserve the society (creating what needs to be created,growing what needs to be grown and fixing/maintaining what needs to be maintained) are assigned equally among the population, but where creating things in excess of what is needed is frowned upon, and where the goal is to maximise the amount of time available to everyone in society to do creative work, work they feel invested in and are proud of. By doing this, a communist society would end the competitiveness inherent in a capitalist system, because everyone would be contented in their own endeavors and would be assured of their basic needs and of the time needed to do and make what they felt like doing and making, which is essentially what everyone wants in the end: free time and rewarding effort.

Thus, you would create a moneyless (because a means of exchange would be essentially useless when everyone's needs are provided for), classless (because everyone would be equal in political power, needs an fulfillment, making 'class divides' irrelevant), stateless (because everyone operates under a direct democracy), conflict-less society.

There wouldn't be scarcity because no one would be producing in excess. There wouldn't be conflict because everyone would have the free time to do what they felt like doing, within societal limits. And there wouldn't be political tensions because of the usage of direct democracy to allocate the work that needed to be done.

Now, if you've read all that, you probably see the main problem with communism emerging: it's utopian. It envisages a world in which none of our present capitalistic, overly greedy, materialistic impulses exist, one where everyone produces what is needed and works on what they wish.

But that is sort of the point that Marx and Engels made, repeatedly. They were certainly no fools. They repeatedly pointed out that in order to achieve a communist dream the people around the world had to rise up against the capitalist system by themselves, independent of political prodding from above and with the desire to create such a society. This could not be forced, this could not be hurried, and this could not succeed unless people everywhere were willing to help it succeed.

Only when capitalism has truly reached its breaking point will people everywhere unite in pursuit of the communist cause, was essentially their view. And only then would we develop the sort of thinking that would free us from the present capitalist impulses of materialism, dog-eat-dog competition and the pursuit of inequality as a way of life.

In essence, only when capitalism equally oppressed everyone, everywhere, would communism arrive to free everyone, everywhere. This could not and cannot be rushed.


Unfortunately, the Soviets rushed it. In their desire to create a top-down communist society, they destroyed the very notion of the workers gaining consciousness themselves, something Marx repeatedly insisted was the key to the whole process. Thus, they created an under-class (Regular Soviet Russians) and an over-class (the CCP), an inequality that was every bit as self-defeating as the capitalist inequalities they wanted to get rid of. And, having done that, they now faced up to the fact that capitalism had not failed yet: many countries still saw it as the be all and end all of economic models, and it was working in many parts of the globe, creating wealth, infrastructure and opportunities.

And from then on, it was a slow slog to the grave, as the enormous productive capacities of capitalism (something Marx praised often as being an astoundingly great thing) slowly squeezed the life out of the Soviet project.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, many Western capitalists have crowed about Communism as having decisively and conclusively failed, never to rise again.

Stupid, and premature. Whether we like it or not, communism won't go away. The idea that 1 percent of the population can 'own' 50+ percent of an entire nation's wealth seems repulsive, on both a subconscious and conscious level. From there, communism as a philosophy is only a short step away. But crucially, it shouldn't be rushed: it has to come on its own. Only when everyone wants it can it be truly achieved, otherwise it's doomed to fail as capitalism appeals to enough individualistic tendencies to keep itself afloat.

Will that day come? Not in my lifetime, in my opinion. Perhaps in one hundred years, as global climate shifts plunge the world into an ever-increasing struggle for the shrinking amounts of habitable, arable land and fresh water, and as the nation-state is increasingly outmoded as a governmental model by digital interconnectedness and people-to-people communication...maybe then we'll see communism emerge as a truly global phenomenon. But now? Nah. Too many people, and too many nations are still hypnotized by the individualism preached by capitalism to care about the inequalities we see emerging all around us.

One thing's for sure, though: Capitalism will eat itself. It is singularly extraordinary that so many people still believe that the nastiest of men, working for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow create something that works for the benefit of us all.
 
Also could the competitiveness jimmyb claims is innate actually be the result of our upbringing? We have to overcome many bestial emotions such as anger and lust to function in a harmonious society, why not competitiveness too to some degree? Does a less individualistic society necessarily dictate the expression of less individuality?

What makes you think we've overcome anger and lust?
 
I would be surprised if the majority of the developed world did not shift to a more socialist culture with an emphasis on personal creativity rather than consumption and wage-seeking in the upcoming post-scarcity age. This is primarily due to technology-driven unemployment, which we are already seeing widening the enormous gap between the rich class (the corporate classes who outsource to the bottom, the very rare creative talents, the STEM-gifted majors and other rare 'knowledge' workers) and the lower and middle classes consisting of debt-saddled college graduates who are consigned to unpaid internships and bricky service jobs that have not yet been automated. The blue-collar jobs except shale oil in America have been sent off to China et al, while the white-collar jobs of secretarial work, middle-management, etc have been made obsolete by technology and small businesses have been made obsolete by Walmart and co. That's why the undergrad degree of today is worth the same as the high school degree of yesteryear, and a Masters the same as an undergrad - too few jobs, too many people. (Specifically, too many people who are not a creative genius or talented in a STEM field. If the average person were, those fields would be as oversaturated as the liberal arts and social sciences; it's the relative rarity of math/logic aptitude keeping engineering and back-end programming afloat.)

Read recent Fed reports - they've snuck the possibility of an increase in the "natural rate of unemployment" in there, and I've read a paper suggesting that we would currently have ~25% more unemployment if all companies maximized efficiency. If the NAIRU increases to the extent that the majority of people can no longer find jobs, then barring remarkable cruelty from our sociopathic elites (this is not out of the question) we would have to guarantee a Basic Income to each citizen that allows them to have a reasonable quality of life. Beyond that, they can come up with whatever ventures they want to make extra money; with the extra free time, I would expect a flourishing in creative ventures and specialist hobbies. In a post-scarcity society where we don't have to worry about resources, this should be easy. The problem comes if we think that people who aren't useful to the market don't "deserve" anything but scorn and self-loathing, or if we have a brickload of resources but the vast majority of it is hogged and defended by the upper elite (the current state of the world).

I'm obviously not a Luddite by any means - rather, I welcome our new Google overlords - but I think the transition period to an automated future will be tough and we will have to come up with a new culture for an age where one program can do the work of a thousand people. If we decide not to assign social positions by how wealthy someone is, how well one's innate gifts (if any ;)) fit the demands of the market, what will the alternative society look like? If we don't *need* to work for a living, what will motivate us? (FWIW, I think that's no issue - imo people will still be motivated, whether that is an internal motivation to do well at the things they like, or a personal conscientiousness, or a desire to out-compete and make more money than others.)

Of course, this all depends whether we CAN get to the post-scarcity age. This is no guarantee. I believe our deeply growth-dependent economies are already running into the physical constraints of the real world and if we don't find new easy sources of energy - by that I mean something comparable to the incredible energy-for-energy returns of fossil fuels, which outstrip any nuclear or renewable resources so far - then we are going to have major problems taking care of a world population of 9 billion by 2050. And that's without considering the darkly humorous state of our seas and skies and rapidly disappearing habitats.

Bottom line - no matter what society we choose, the character of it will be determined by the character of the individuals within it. If the individuals within a society are greedy, shortsighted, and careless of the world and the people around them then that society will fail, and take its grandchildren down with it. The older I grow, the more I believe that we in the wealthy West tend to blame "society" or "the government" too much and acknowledge too little of attitude and culture. Our obsession with being different from others - by that we mean different from the average, different from the "sheep" - makes us suspicious and offended by anything big and powerful enough to curtail our freedoms; anything that might ask us to discipline ourselves, to accept responsibility for what we eat and use and throw away, to feel shame, to sacrifice for others we may not ever meet.

Well, yeah, society equals groupthink and oppression and social control and all those other Orwellian catchwords, you say. More so in communist states than even our own pseudo-democracies. I acknowledge my own fear of the faceless mob but all I can think is, is anyone *really* that different when we're all drinking the same kool-aid? Maybe it's not the gun of our own soldier we should fear, but the upbringing and attitudes and void of empathy that would let him shoot it?

That's almost perfect, and sums up a lot of my waffle far more succintly. I tip my hat to you, sir.
 
As to OPs scenario, I disagree with the premise. There will always be haves and have nots, and this is the same with countries. There will never be the level of global wealth OP suggests IMO.

When you talk about how great we have it in the 'West', just wait for our Social Security system to come crashing down. State pension liabilities in countries like UK and USA over the next 50 years are astronomical with our ageing population.
 
No. Man is designed to survive by being better than his peers. Survival of the fittest. Every communist society is racked with corruption because of this simple truth.

Works on paper, not in practice.
 
I think at the moment the question that needs to be asked is,is capitalism working ?

As for this argument about hardwired natures there is very little scientific or philosophical evidence to back these ideas up. Natures seem hugely perspective driven,so for a capitalist nature seems to make us competitive and greedy,yet for the socialist our natures can be shown to be formed around cooperation. They can't both be correct,yet there is equally evidence for both. We seemingly have political and religious ideas,that we then hook our natures on.
 
I think at the moment the question that needs to be asked is,is capitalism working ?

Yes, it is. It's been a roaring success with some very minor blips since the industrial revolution.

As for this argument about hardwired natures there is very little scientific or philosophical evidence to back these ideas up. Natures seem hugely perspective driven,so for a capitalist nature seems to make us competitive and greedy,yet for the socialist our natures can be shown to be formed around cooperation. They can't both be correct,yet there is equally evidence for both. We seemingly have political and religious ideas,that we then hook our natures on.

The simple answer is that we're a group-based competitive animal. Like lions and their prides - they'll fight and give for the benefit of their pride but not for the good of all others as it's a pointless exercise.
 
Yes, it is. It's been a roaring success with some very minor blips since the industrial revolution.



The simple answer is that we're a group-based competitive animal. Like lions and their prides - they'll fight and give for the benefit of their pride but not for the good of all others as it's a pointless exercise.

Again perspective,there is no more evidence to suggest we are more like Lions than bees. Also for this nature to be general it would need universality. If it is the case that by nature we are competitive like lions,where do all these lazy people that capitalists suggest are holding us back come from ? Are they not human?
 
What goes around comes around. I have an inward chuckle sometimes when the right wing cold war warriors proclaim the 'final victory' over socialism. Socialism as an idea has been around for a nano second in terms of overall world history and although I'm no ageing trot wishing and hoping for the inevitible world revolution, conditions could quickly change and communism come back on the agenda. Just for some perspective. If somebody had said to me thirty years ago, that fascists would eventually be elected to the Italian parliament and also form part of the government in Austria by the 90's, I'd have laughed in your face. But look what happened!
 
Yes, I believe it can work. The only reason it hasn't so far is because workers have never actually been given power. Instead of it being handed out to a union or the people it's been handed to one guy who is expected to start the 'dictatorship of the proloteriat' and rather than the proloteriat dictating matters you end up with that one guy making him, and some others, a bourgeois oligarchy.

And in response to jimmyb I would say that i communism goes against millions of years of evolotion then we might aswel let people with asthma, diabetes, HIV, disfigurments, or any illness what so ever die and rot to the ground as that goes against millions of years of evolotion also. And we shouldn't give a damn in hell about them either. fudge them, let the bastards die. Why would we feel compassion for others when as we know, it's natural evolotuion?

Wilst we're there rap has also played a role in evolotion and has been going on for millions of years. So why should we investigate that? A child gets abused? Well why stop it, it's going against millions of years of evolotuion.

Survival of the fitness. fudge the rest.

What a bloody stupid logic to go by!!! Yeah evolotuion has happened, but to what end? For the end that humans progress enough for them to not have to kill and look after themselves. Not so that the richest, who sometimes aren't the fitest, survive and prospeour from exploitation and slavery of 99% of people in society.

We have the ability to rearrange ourselves and change the world. Lions rely on instinct but we have more than that. We as humans are able to feel sompassion and sympathy for people we've never met. That's the difference between us and lions.
 
Again perspective,there is no more evidence to suggest we are more like Lions than bees. Also for this nature to be general it would need universality. If it is the case that by nature we are competitive like lions,where do all these lazy people that capitalists suggest are holding us back come from ? Are they not human?

I wasn't suggesting that we had some kind of intrinsic link to lions - it was just an example to make things easier for the faint of mind (always useful when arguing against socialism).

The evidence for this behaviour is all around you - just look. The vast majority of people I know care about themselves and their families above all else. Most would kill to save their own children. Next in their scale of importance would be friends, followed usually by people in their local area (with a fair amount of self-preservation thrown in at this level). As distance from the individual grows, then care about the well being of others diminishes.

The bottom level of that care will be variable between individuals, but the scaling is almost always there. In order for socialism to work people will begin to have to act and care for entirely anonymous people of whom they are unlikely to have even heard, let alone met. How many people do you honestly know who would drastically (I use this word because we're all charitable at varying levels and varying times) lower their quality of life or that of their family for the well being of strangers?
 
I wasn't suggesting that we had some kind of intrinsic link to lions - it was just an example to make things easier for the faint of mind (always useful when arguing against socialism).

The evidence for this behaviour is all around you - just look. The vast majority of people I know care about themselves and their families above all else. Most would kill to save their own children. Next in their scale of importance would be friends, followed usually by people in their local area (with a fair amount of self-preservation thrown in at this level). As distance from the individual grows, then care about the well being of others diminishes.

The bottom level of that care will be variable between individuals, but the scaling is almost always there. In order for socialism to work people will begin to have to act and care for entirely anonymous people of whom they are unlikely to have even heard, let alone met. How many people do you honestly know who would drastically (I use this word because we're all charitable at varying levels and varying times) lower their quality of life or that of their family for the well being of strangers?

Not really for the vast majority it would improve their standard of living.
 
I wasn't suggesting that we had some kind of intrinsic link to lions - it was just an example to make things easier for the faint of mind (always useful when arguing against socialism).

The evidence for this behaviour is all around you - just look. The vast majority of people I know care about themselves and their families above all else. Most would kill to save their own children. Next in their scale of importance would be friends, followed usually by people in their local area (with a fair amount of self-preservation thrown in at this level). As distance from the individual grows, then care about the well being of others diminishes.

The bottom level of that care will be variable between individuals, but the scaling is almost always there. In order for socialism to work people will begin to have to act and care for entirely anonymous people of whom they are unlikely to have even heard, let alone met. How many people do you honestly know who would drastically (I use this word because we're all charitable at varying levels and varying times) lower their quality of life or that of their family for the well being of strangers?

"Come home with this shield, or on it."

Spartan mothers used to say that to their sons before sending them off to battle. If they came back with the shield, they had fought well and honorably in service to their fellow Spartan warriors (a shield being used to protect more than oneself, as opposed to, say, a helmet). If they came back on it, they had died fighting honorably. If they came back without it, they had fled or displayed cowardice, and thus were no longer important in the eyes of their mothers or in wider Spartan society: indeed, they were a source of enormous shame.

To Spartan society, the concept of family was less important than the concept of society. Plutarch spends an inordinate amount of time labouring that point in Moralia, even though he considered family relations one of the most important tenets of communal life. Contemporary histories of Sparta corroborate this, with the military worth of a child ( one form of determining relations based on societal value) determining whether he was allowed to live or thrown off a mountain for being weak.

I'm not saying that was an ideal society: GHod knows, it wasn't. From a modern perspective, it was probably one of the most horrific ancient societies, with nationwide infanticide, slavery and eugenics seen as being normal and healthy. But what is true is that the Spartan people were societally conditioned to give up many of the things that conservatives today argue form part of our genetic makeup: the concern for our family above all, looking out solely for oneself and ignoring the needs and demands of wider society in the pursuit of your own interests. Through a program of mental, physical and emotional conditioning that started right from childbirth, the Spartans destroyed the notion that somehow we were familial animals, only bound together by faint vestiges of civilization. They showed that it was possible to change the way individuals thought, that it was possible to put society above self-interest.

It can be done. It is false, and perhaps deliberately disingenuous, to suggest that we are somehow permanently hardwired to live as we lived millions of years ago, concerned only with the propagation of our line and the well-being of our immediate relations, and merely paying lip service to all the ideas of civilization in order to put a veneer of 'order' on our primeval selves.
 
it only needs a minority of corrupt and selfish individuals to ruin it, and they don't seem to be in short supply so I don't think it's possible

maybe I'm one of these individuals myself, if I consider myself smarter or harder working than someone else I think I deserve a happier and more comfortable life because of that, I don't think this is an uncommon view though

communism only deals with what people need, not what they want, and that is where the corruption will breed
 
it only needs a minority of corrupt and selfish individuals to ruin it, and they don't seem to be in short supply so I don't think it's possible

maybe I'm one of these individuals myself, if I consider myself smarter or harder working than someone else I think I deserve a happier and more comfortable life because of that, I don't think this is an uncommon view though

communism only deals with what people need, not what they want, and that is where the corruption will breed

On the contrary, it operates on the assumption that what you want most is to be able to do rewarding work. Presently, how much you earn determines how much free time you have, and by extension how much 'rewarding' or intellectually stimulating work (termed 'hobbies' under the present economic system) you do. That's because capitalism forces the majority of the population to spend their days overproducing things to make life comfortable for a select few, with the consolation that maybe one day you'll climb higher up the rat race and become marginally less dehumanized than your colleagues.

Communism works by distributing what needs to be done among everyone equally, which ensures everyone is provided with the basic necessities on an equal footing without needing to produce excess quantities to meet a profit margin. Beyond that, the goal is them to give people enough free time to allow them to pursue rewarding labour, labour that they want to do.

In theory, anyway. In practise, it involved forcing everyone into Glorious People's Tractor Factories because it had only been implemented in one place and not universally, and perhaps most importantly it hadn't been implemented by the workers themselves but by a few people at the top.
 
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