Seems like nobody is actually reading the TFA which is a shame because what the article describes is truly mind boggling:
>However, the boardâs plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic
What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.
A lot of WordPress enterprise users will be upset after finding out that after paying $20-100k a month, Wordpress actually poaches their employees. Just inspect a Wordpress enterprise site's response to certain endpoints using cURL or Postman, it will actually tell you to apply for Automattic. I have been meaning to write about this for a very long time.
Eh I mean this is common default no? If you inspect element on many sites it links to the career page. Reddit, discord, etc.
Maybe a little distasteful since I suppose since these WordPress sites are not owned by WordPress, but I wouldn't really say it's unique or necessarily poaching
All I know is Wordpress and Beeper, are any of their other products good? Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
It does sound as if he has lost his grip on reality.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, âIâm not a troll Iâm a pirate, obviously.â
And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.
I'm a little unclear on the timeline here, but Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man. I suspect that's related to both the content of the post and the board's timing.
The additional reporting at [0] about his alleged behaviour in internal channels along with his public posts on social media really reinforces this same feeling for me:
> âoh, since Iâm a pirate now, I fucking curse. after 42 years of never uttering a curse word, itâs kinda fucking fun. if this is a HR problem @caron please wrangle me in since my normal wranglers are with @Mark Davies.â [âŚ] Mullenweg also posted that the Automattic Slack âsmells funny, like turncoatsâ and said he was going to hang out in the WordPress.org Slack instead.
So he was on a leave of absense, and now is no longer on such a leave? This is only an attempted coup if you think the leave of absense was a pretense, but they give no evidence of that in the article. I saw it suggested that he usually has wild ideas after returning from burning man, and the board wanted to insulate the company from the effects of that. That he's now back is evidence for a theory along those lines, and contradicts a theory that the board was trying to get rid of him. But I have no insight beyond that.
In 2010 WordPress seemed like important technology. It wasnât perfect, was a big and fruitful hacking target, but it had been built and refined and had a big ecosystem.
Iâm not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. Itâs not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme youâre using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while youâre at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anythingâs better in that department than running WP.
Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?
I used to ask this question back ~2015 - I was seeing companies with massive, clunky CMS installs just so their non-technical/less-technical staff could update their websites without filing tickets to IT/dev. It seemed to be more about those departments wanting autonomy and not having to wait weeks or months for internal IT/dev to make site updates. The consensus within one dev group was that the company would have been better served by hiring someone who knew HTML/CSS/Javascript to embed with the non-technical people and edit a straightforward frontend site for them.
A lot of people know it, there are a huge number of existing installs that work well, the ecosystem is huge and not everyone wants to vibe code replacements.
It is very empowering for people with limited skills.
I mean... you can literally do that now. You can set up a loop to iteratively pentest, review and patch a codebase (with human supervision as you prefer) and it'll find and fix more vulnerabilities in a day than a pentest team used to find in a quarter, for a tiny fraction of the price.
This isn't a joke, this is now part of my pre-launch SOP. I even have it tracking everything so I can log stuff to fix vs. known shippables vs intentional design/false positives vs. upstream stuff which doesn't have a fix available yet, and keep track of which builds have the fixes. Almost entirely automated, I mostly review the findings and do some categorization/enrichment during the pentest review stage, and do a human code review pass as patches are submitted.
Stuff that used to take me multiple hours to write a fix for and then weeks to get code reviewed and deployed now get done in minutes.
How do you actually do that? Is it all running locally? Cloud agents? Would love to hear about this. I see these deep agent loops mostly just burning tokens, but when I guide the AI I get very good results, so Iâm not sure where the disconnect lies.
Definitely stay away from anything Matt Mullenweg is involved in. Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository.
So on reading this comment I was like, "oh, I see, Arby's, like RB, roast beef?" Except on looking it up, that's not the explanation! "Arby's" does come from the initials "RB"... but it doesn't stand for "roast beef", it stands for "Raffel brothers"! Rather less obvious.
Another brother/brother business rivalry, although not involving founders, was Sears and Montgomery Ward from 1985-1990. In 1985 Bernard Brennan become CEO of Montgomery Ward and in that same year his older brother Edward Brennan become CEO of Sears.
Chicago-based Sears was the largest US retailer at the time, and Chicago-based Montgomery Ward was the 5th largest.
A fun fact about another well known company - Foxconn. Apparently the founder Terry Gou came up with this name by joining words "fox" and "conn". Fox is an animal he liked and "conn" refers to connectors (which is what the company specialized in in its early days).
Not really explaining autoMATTic. Amazon, "A" is because Jeff wanted it at the top of search. Fox, Dell, Walmart, Disney, all is closer to the example.
Modern socializing is all about appreciating non-existent achievements by non-existent people so that everyone knows youâre cool. Or as best stated: âLife will find a way.â - Dr. Real Human Jurassic Park Character, And Not Michael Crichton
> and if you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well,â a company spokesperson shared
Did anyone else think "what the fuck did I just read" after this sentence? Did Matt write it himself while posing as a "spokesperson"? This reads like that time Trump wrote in pseudonymously to a newspaper about how amazing and perfect Trump was.
Oh, I hadn't finished reading. The whole article is a WTF did I just read.
I really hate how heavily these comments get moderated. In my opinion if a site moderates user comments this heavily then the site should lose section 230 protections and be considered a publisher and be held responsible for any comments that you choose not to moderate. If the site functions as an editor but it tries to present that editorialized section as user opinions then the entire site may as well be astroturffed, your better off going to wikipedia to see what "regular people" think
The purpose of the Communications Decency Act is to allow providers to moderate community content, and section 230 provides liability from both undermoderating and overmoderating, so that providers don't forgo mederating altogether, for liability reasons.
If section 230 only protected from undermoderating and not from overmoderating, then providers would be incentivized to keep every comment up, from scam links to hate speech, because they'd only get in trouble for removing comments and not for allowing them.
If HN: it isn't a public service that has to allow free speech. One of the reasons it has persisted and maintained a certain level of quality is because of it's community rules, and their enforcement.
> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms.
Ianal but I don't think the laws care about governing structure of corps. You can start a new corp and run it democratically all you want. There are co-ops and other interesting structures out there
Afaik corps can only have board voting on the basis of share ownership ("one share one vote"), but you can mess around with how many votes each share class gets.
Co-ops can have more democratic voting arrangements, and usually have "one shareholder one vote" principles, though other options are available, and you can mess around with how many votes each shareholder gets.
Companies have a largely democratic component at the top, called the board. Voters (those who own the company) have representatives on the board. Some boards also have representatives from the employees, that varies.
It's not one person, one vote, so it's not democracy. It's very explicitly plutocracy (rule by money) as the operating principle of voting power is one share, one vote.
Except there's also a bunch of companies with special dual class share structures, where the founder gets way more voting power than everyone else and you can't even buy your way in. A lot of tech companies do this. This is, functionally speaking, an autocracy.
If you want an actual corporate democracy you would need to assign voting rights to everyone working at the company, aka build a co-op. Co-ops are a great corporate structure in a lot of cases but you can't really raise capital that way because VCs all want on your cap table, so all the big companies wind up being plutocracies.
It's one share, one vote. And you have a choice: You can ask the company to pay you (ie. apply for a job there), or you can pay for a share in the company. Either way, the decisions are made by those who pay. And that can include you â anyone and everyone has the right to start a company and to employ others, anyone and everyone has the right to ask for shares in the company as part of negotiating compensation.
I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
Well, it matters a whole lot once you choose to bring up "One share, one vote" in response to "One person, one vote", since it shows that it's either wrong or shows a gross misunderstanding of democracy.
A hypothetical country with multiple classes of citizens that had different rights and voting powers would not inherently be undemocratic. It's not something I'm in favor of but equality != democracy.
But said country would not fulfill "One person, one vote". Why should we weaken such fundamental ideas by allowing them to mean the opposite of their real meaning?
The same phenomenon is happening with "Opt-In by Default". This is newspeak.
Who do you think pays for the political election campaign theater of all theses "democratic candidates" though?
I often have to think of Bane putting his hand on the shoulder of that Ben Mendelsohn character in The Dark Knight Rises while asking if he feels in charge. Reminds me of living in a western democracy.
> Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy?
Not at all. Market vs planned economy is about how the economy is set up. Are there businesses that offer products that you can choose between? That's a market economy. You can have that with democratic governance of corporations. The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy.
You don't need ownership by idiot dictators with money to have a market.
> The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy
How? Will you also advocate to killing a bunch of people to get from now to the state where workers own the means of production like Trotsky and friends?
China has succeeded so much by moving away from a planned economy when they were fully planned they were one of the poorest nations in the world. Most successful nations are mixed economies and yes, this is a settled question.
Past performance is no indication of future success. It doesn't matter what's been successful in the past, these things can change. Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed and so did the narrative.
None of this is settled, because it's a living system that changes over time. What may have been perfectly true in 1850 might not be remotely accurate in 2050.
> Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed
The word you're looking for is "collapse". It's when something is stable at one point in time, but then later breaks down. That's what "changed". It wasn't random like weather or something. The economic systems collapsed.
> None of this is settled
The fact that it has happened numerous times in different parts of the world makes it pretty settled in my mind.
They were very poor before central planning, and the central planning is what got them from being very poor to relatively poor and economically powerful.
Only very partially free, though. The govt still has massive control over the markets, and especially the banks. They still plan a lot of their economy.
If you look on Alibaba or AliExpress and see different companies competing and undercutting each others prices, I don't really see it as a planned economy.
The CCP publishes their primary central planning mechanism for all to see. They just adopted the new 15th Five Year Plan in March [1].
Thereâs a whole bureaucracy just to coordinate the implementation at the sector, provincial, and corporate level driven by the State Council, NDRC, and NPC. Governments at all levels are involved with coming up with their own implementation plans to execute on the Five Year Plan.
You can trace decades of Chinese industrial development to those plans but the Chinese system is very different from the Soviet central planning mechanism, which is why I think youâre misinterpreting Alibabaâs price competition. The CCP explicitly allows non-state owned enterprises like Alibaba and the manufacturers on it to compete; thatâs their whole point within the system, and they operate within the regulatory environment setup to promote the five year plan instead of quotas like the Soviet system. The resolution of the planning is different, but itâs very much there.
I think a better term might be a âsteered economyâ. You see fierce competition in some very specific and preordained market areas. Lithium batteries, solar panels, electric cars, industrial and autonomous robots, AI.
Now go look at the 5 year plan from Beijing. Green technology, robotics, mature node chips, and AI are the focuses.
In other words, it isnât a mistake that China dominates in the industries that it does.
And in Russian I believe such a company is called a "Soviet". They idea that the main part of the economy is run by this kind of organizations is one of the best parts of the USSR's attempt at communism.
Except A) he said none of that B) it's not actually relevant to what he did say.
There is a vast range of ways you can regulate a corporation and only some of them qualify as communism.
Germany has worker councils, it's still not communist.
Several European countries have much stricter regulations on how companies behave that moves them from the absolute power fiefdom internal model, guess what, still not communism.
Seems like nobody is actually reading the TFA which is a shame because what the article describes is truly mind boggling:
>However, the boardâs plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic
What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.
That company sounds like a clusterfuck. Good luck attracting good talent with such dysfunctional leadership.
A lot of WordPress enterprise users will be upset after finding out that after paying $20-100k a month, Wordpress actually poaches their employees. Just inspect a Wordpress enterprise site's response to certain endpoints using cURL or Postman, it will actually tell you to apply for Automattic. I have been meaning to write about this for a very long time.
Eh I mean this is common default no? If you inspect element on many sites it links to the career page. Reddit, discord, etc.
Maybe a little distasteful since I suppose since these WordPress sites are not owned by WordPress, but I wouldn't really say it's unique or necessarily poaching
Might by time for another employee buyout? https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/17/24272867/automattic-empl...
Too bad because they have some incredible products
All I know is Wordpress and Beeper, are any of their other products good? Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
It does sound as if he has lost his grip on reality.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, âIâm not a troll Iâm a pirate, obviously.â
And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.
I'm a little unclear on the timeline here, but Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man. I suspect that's related to both the content of the post and the board's timing.
The additional reporting at [0] about his alleged behaviour in internal channels along with his public posts on social media really reinforces this same feeling for me:
> âoh, since Iâm a pirate now, I fucking curse. after 42 years of never uttering a curse word, itâs kinda fucking fun. if this is a HR problem @caron please wrangle me in since my normal wranglers are with @Mark Davies.â [âŚ] Mullenweg also posted that the Automattic Slack âsmells funny, like turncoatsâ and said he was going to hang out in the WordPress.org Slack instead.
Good luck to everyone in the blast radius.
[0] https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenweg-swears-for-th...
There's an episode of Archer where Archer and another dude have to battle to the death to determine who the new pirate king is.
Maybe Mullenweg killed the interim CEO in combat?
> Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man
Not beyond the realms of possibility then
you donât get it he is quirky
Recent and related:
Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104 - Sept 2026 (144 comments)
Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283 - Sept 2026 (372 comments)
(I know there have been many other threads in this long saga but I don't have the time (or the stomach) to try to list them)
p.s. We merged an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683265) into this one, which is why the timestamps of some of the comments are older.
So he was on a leave of absense, and now is no longer on such a leave? This is only an attempted coup if you think the leave of absense was a pretense, but they give no evidence of that in the article. I saw it suggested that he usually has wild ideas after returning from burning man, and the board wanted to insulate the company from the effects of that. That he's now back is evidence for a theory along those lines, and contradicts a theory that the board was trying to get rid of him. But I have no insight beyond that.
This title would benefit from editorializing âof Automatticâ for those who do not follow the daily drama this individual has created.
ETA: Or better yet a clearer statement that nothing about this is clear.
So glad I just converted my site to Hugo.. happy to get away from this whole bunch of people.
I only see the headlines of this drama. All it tells me is to stay far away from any dependency on this company.
In 2010 WordPress seemed like important technology. It wasnât perfect, was a big and fruitful hacking target, but it had been built and refined and had a big ecosystem.
Iâm not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. Itâs not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme youâre using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while youâre at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anythingâs better in that department than running WP.
Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?
I used to ask this question back ~2015 - I was seeing companies with massive, clunky CMS installs just so their non-technical/less-technical staff could update their websites without filing tickets to IT/dev. It seemed to be more about those departments wanting autonomy and not having to wait weeks or months for internal IT/dev to make site updates. The consensus within one dev group was that the company would have been better served by hiring someone who knew HTML/CSS/Javascript to embed with the non-technical people and edit a straightforward frontend site for them.
A lot of people know it, there are a huge number of existing installs that work well, the ecosystem is huge and not everyone wants to vibe code replacements.
It is very empowering for people with limited skills.
Why would you have vulns if you vibe coded it in a weekend? Just tell it to not have any security vulnerabilities. Boom!
I mean... you can literally do that now. You can set up a loop to iteratively pentest, review and patch a codebase (with human supervision as you prefer) and it'll find and fix more vulnerabilities in a day than a pentest team used to find in a quarter, for a tiny fraction of the price.
This isn't a joke, this is now part of my pre-launch SOP. I even have it tracking everything so I can log stuff to fix vs. known shippables vs intentional design/false positives vs. upstream stuff which doesn't have a fix available yet, and keep track of which builds have the fixes. Almost entirely automated, I mostly review the findings and do some categorization/enrichment during the pentest review stage, and do a human code review pass as patches are submitted.
Stuff that used to take me multiple hours to write a fix for and then weeks to get code reviewed and deployed now get done in minutes.
How do you actually do that? Is it all running locally? Cloud agents? Would love to hear about this. I see these deep agent loops mostly just burning tokens, but when I guide the AI I get very good results, so Iâm not sure where the disconnect lies.
Definitely stay away from anything Matt Mullenweg is involved in. Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository.
What is curious is that there is very little "leak" from insiders regarding what is going on, how employees are living this joke level management.
This sounds like a mistake and a part of Automatic. This is not a good look for the brand.
I only recently realised why the org is called AutoMATTic
Kumail Nanjiani learning what Automattic is: https://youtu.be/5Y64UeNeiOM?t=74
It took me quite a while to "get" the "Arby's" restaurant name.
So on reading this comment I was like, "oh, I see, Arby's, like RB, roast beef?" Except on looking it up, that's not the explanation! "Arby's" does come from the initials "RB"... but it doesn't stand for "roast beef", it stands for "Raffel brothers"! Rather less obvious.
Tangential, but I have no idea who is eating at Arbyâs. The food looks positively vile from the advertisements.
It used to be pretty good. Same as most fast food.
No. It wasnât ever good. Tried it in the early eighties. It was barely dog food back then too.
The food is pretty vile. Friends that worked their described the "beef" as being a weird loaf of pressurized mewt-like protein before its sliced.
I used to eat there occasionally because it was cheapish many, many years ago.
Did you know that Adidas was founded by Adolf "Adi" Dassler?
And Puma by his brother Rudi, in the same town. Great Feud story.
Another brother/brother business rivalry, although not involving founders, was Sears and Montgomery Ward from 1985-1990. In 1985 Bernard Brennan become CEO of Montgomery Ward and in that same year his older brother Edward Brennan become CEO of Sears.
Chicago-based Sears was the largest US retailer at the time, and Chicago-based Montgomery Ward was the 5th largest.
Similar thing with Aldi. Both brothers kept the name, sort of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi#Split
Rudidas would definitely be a worse name. Though I'd be surprised if an Amazon Marketplace knockoff brand is not already using it.
Adolfler would've been even worse.
Not in today's climate.
It was briefly "Ruda" before it morphed into "Puma".
I did not know that. Very good decision!
all day i diss another sibling
Imagine how glad they were at some point that they didnât go with âAdolfâs Sneakersâ!
A fun fact about another well known company - Foxconn. Apparently the founder Terry Gou came up with this name by joining words "fox" and "conn". Fox is an animal he liked and "conn" refers to connectors (which is what the company specialized in in its early days).
Not really explaining autoMATTic. Amazon, "A" is because Jeff wanted it at the top of search. Fox, Dell, Walmart, Disney, all is closer to the example.
Same with Taco Bell
If only Alexander hadn't wasted time on the phone!
Dont these no-code chasing marketing teams have other ways of building their leadgen ponzi schemes instead of bothering with Wordpress by now?
Corporate coup survivors: Matt Mullenweg, Sam Altman, Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark. They should form a club.
an esoteric club perhaps, given half of these folks are imaginary?
Modern socializing is all about appreciating non-existent achievements by non-existent people so that everyone knows youâre cool. Or as best stated: âLife will find a way.â - Dr. Real Human Jurassic Park Character, And Not Michael Crichton
What a feckless board.
> and if you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well,â a company spokesperson shared
Did anyone else think "what the fuck did I just read" after this sentence? Did Matt write it himself while posing as a "spokesperson"? This reads like that time Trump wrote in pseudonymously to a newspaper about how amazing and perfect Trump was.
Oh, I hadn't finished reading. The whole article is a WTF did I just read.
sigh
Despicable. What an obscene leader + board to not have the guts to remove him properly.
He can vote in a replacement board. The board knew that any action they took was temporary, and likely planned around this from the start.
Dupe/existing discussion from a day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104
I really hate how heavily these comments get moderated. In my opinion if a site moderates user comments this heavily then the site should lose section 230 protections and be considered a publisher and be held responsible for any comments that you choose not to moderate. If the site functions as an editor but it tries to present that editorialized section as user opinions then the entire site may as well be astroturffed, your better off going to wikipedia to see what "regular people" think
The purpose of the Communications Decency Act is to allow providers to moderate community content, and section 230 provides liability from both undermoderating and overmoderating, so that providers don't forgo mederating altogether, for liability reasons.
If section 230 only protected from undermoderating and not from overmoderating, then providers would be incentivized to keep every comment up, from scam links to hate speech, because they'd only get in trouble for removing comments and not for allowing them.
Are you talking HN or TechCrunch?
If HN: it isn't a public service that has to allow free speech. One of the reasons it has persisted and maintained a certain level of quality is because of it's community rules, and their enforcement.
Isn't most of the moderation from downvotes rather than mods?
I don't even have a downvote button. Is it "flag"?
I think you need to be at a certain level of karma to 'earn' the right to downvote.
Flag is for inappropriate content / behaviour.
Karma threshold for the downvote button used to be 500, IIRC. Only 449 upvotes to go!
You get a downvote button, separate from "flag", once you reach a certain karma level (I forget the number, though)
Thatâs a weird thing to say about âcoup attempts.â
Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight.
In the world of AI I imagine that Automatticâs core business model is in turmoil.
> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms.
Ianal but I don't think the laws care about governing structure of corps. You can start a new corp and run it democratically all you want. There are co-ops and other interesting structures out there
Afaik corps can only have board voting on the basis of share ownership ("one share one vote"), but you can mess around with how many votes each share class gets.
Co-ops can have more democratic voting arrangements, and usually have "one shareholder one vote" principles, though other options are available, and you can mess around with how many votes each shareholder gets.
Companies have a largely democratic component at the top, called the board. Voters (those who own the company) have representatives on the board. Some boards also have representatives from the employees, that varies.
It's not one person, one vote, so it's not democracy. It's very explicitly plutocracy (rule by money) as the operating principle of voting power is one share, one vote.
Except there's also a bunch of companies with special dual class share structures, where the founder gets way more voting power than everyone else and you can't even buy your way in. A lot of tech companies do this. This is, functionally speaking, an autocracy.
If you want an actual corporate democracy you would need to assign voting rights to everyone working at the company, aka build a co-op. Co-ops are a great corporate structure in a lot of cases but you can't really raise capital that way because VCs all want on your cap table, so all the big companies wind up being plutocracies.
It's one share, one vote. And you have a choice: You can ask the company to pay you (ie. apply for a job there), or you can pay for a share in the company. Either way, the decisions are made by those who pay. And that can include you â anyone and everyone has the right to start a company and to employ others, anyone and everyone has the right to ask for shares in the company as part of negotiating compensation.
I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
> It's one share, one vote.
This is just wrong. As kmeisthax mentioned, shares can have different voting weights - if any at all. Many shareholders have no voting power.
> I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
Did you actually employ them, or did you buy a specific service?
Indeed, shares can have different voting weights. And that matters, if you care mostly about the corner cases.
Well, it matters a whole lot once you choose to bring up "One share, one vote" in response to "One person, one vote", since it shows that it's either wrong or shows a gross misunderstanding of democracy.
A hypothetical country with multiple classes of citizens that had different rights and voting powers would not inherently be undemocratic. It's not something I'm in favor of but equality != democracy.
But said country would not fulfill "One person, one vote". Why should we weaken such fundamental ideas by allowing them to mean the opposite of their real meaning?
The same phenomenon is happening with "Opt-In by Default". This is newspeak.
> It's not one person, one vote, so it's not democracy
Voting is a democratic instrument, but a blunt one and not the most important.
"...those who spend five minutes voting every three years and call it democracy..."
Majoritarianism is undemocratic in that any desire less than 50% + 1 is deprecated.
If you care IMO the most important feature of a democracy is rule of law and access to the courts.
Who do you think pays for the political election campaign theater of all theses "democratic candidates" though?
I often have to think of Bane putting his hand on the shoulder of that Ben Mendelsohn character in The Dark Knight Rises while asking if he feels in charge. Reminds me of living in a western democracy.
> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms.
Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy? I think we've seen over an over again which one works and which one doesn't.
> Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy?
Not at all. Market vs planned economy is about how the economy is set up. Are there businesses that offer products that you can choose between? That's a market economy. You can have that with democratic governance of corporations. The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy.
You don't need ownership by idiot dictators with money to have a market.
> The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy
How? Will you also advocate to killing a bunch of people to get from now to the state where workers own the means of production like Trotsky and friends?
Democracy in business would be worker co-ops or employee ownership schemes. It would still be fully market-based, not planned.
Is that a settled question? China isn't exactly struggling right now.
China has succeeded so much by moving away from a planned economy when they were fully planned they were one of the poorest nations in the world. Most successful nations are mixed economies and yes, this is a settled question.
Past performance is no indication of future success. It doesn't matter what's been successful in the past, these things can change. Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed and so did the narrative.
None of this is settled, because it's a living system that changes over time. What may have been perfectly true in 1850 might not be remotely accurate in 2050.
> Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed
The word you're looking for is "collapse". It's when something is stable at one point in time, but then later breaks down. That's what "changed". It wasn't random like weather or something. The economic systems collapsed.
> None of this is settled
The fact that it has happened numerous times in different parts of the world makes it pretty settled in my mind.
> Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was) According to whom?
They were very poor before central planning, and the central planning is what got them from being very poor to relatively poor and economically powerful.
This is objectively not the case, selling goods to America and Europe is what made China rich and that is due to a free market system they implemented
Only very partially free, though. The govt still has massive control over the markets, and especially the banks. They still plan a lot of their economy.
If you look on Alibaba or AliExpress and see different companies competing and undercutting each others prices, I don't really see it as a planned economy.
The CCP publishes their primary central planning mechanism for all to see. They just adopted the new 15th Five Year Plan in March [1].
Thereâs a whole bureaucracy just to coordinate the implementation at the sector, provincial, and corporate level driven by the State Council, NDRC, and NPC. Governments at all levels are involved with coming up with their own implementation plans to execute on the Five Year Plan.
You can trace decades of Chinese industrial development to those plans but the Chinese system is very different from the Soviet central planning mechanism, which is why I think youâre misinterpreting Alibabaâs price competition. The CCP explicitly allows non-state owned enterprises like Alibaba and the manufacturers on it to compete; thatâs their whole point within the system, and they operate within the regulatory environment setup to promote the five year plan instead of quotas like the Soviet system. The resolution of the planning is different, but itâs very much there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_Five-Year_Plan
I think a better term might be a âsteered economyâ. You see fierce competition in some very specific and preordained market areas. Lithium batteries, solar panels, electric cars, industrial and autonomous robots, AI.
Now go look at the 5 year plan from Beijing. Green technology, robotics, mature node chips, and AI are the focuses.
In other words, it isnât a mistake that China dominates in the industries that it does.
> China isn't exactly struggling right now.
Have you asked people in China about this?
It's allowed to do a more democratic business in most countries, it's called a:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
There have been some govts that mandated this type of organization for part of their economy; we usually refer to that as communism.
(no value judgement here, there are day's when I'm quite a commie myself)
> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight.
Congratulations you have reinvented communism from first principles! And you are completely correct in your analysis.
Regulation of corporations and the internal/external harms they do isn't communism.
That's a hilarious leap.
Actually you reply to a comment that makes a lot of sense.
Look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
And in Russian I believe such a company is called a "Soviet". They idea that the main part of the economy is run by this kind of organizations is one of the best parts of the USSR's attempt at communism.
Except A) he said none of that B) it's not actually relevant to what he did say.
There is a vast range of ways you can regulate a corporation and only some of them qualify as communism.
Germany has worker councils, it's still not communist.
Several European countries have much stricter regulations on how companies behave that moves them from the absolute power fiefdom internal model, guess what, still not communism.