Welcome to Aftermath, a worker-owned, reader-supported news site covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that surround them. Just launched today.
Welcome to Aftermath, a worker-owned, reader-supported news site covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that surround them. Just launched today.
Aren’t those called indie establishments?
Not really. Technically Bungie was “indie” after the Activision split and before being bought out by Sony and some of the issues circulating the news today were the same management issues they had when they were “indie”.
Worker-owned is a term rooted in socialism. It means the majority stake (ideologically 100%) of the company is collectively owned by the workers. Thus it means the workers decide what the company does and how they will do it. If an indie company has an owner, who makes the decisions, and employees, who don’t have a say in those decisions, then that’s not really a worker-owned company.
Worker-owned companies are certainly rooted in anti-capitalist thought, but they aren’t inherently socialist in the 20th century sense because they are compatible with private property
I think it comes down to whether you believe in market socialism or not, as market socialists and non-market socialists have a different understanding of private ownership. Non-market socialists, such as orthodox Marxists, see any kind of privatization as a negative and as such promote public ownership. Market socialists make the distinction between private ownership and cooperative ownership, because cooperative ownership still tackles the worker exploitation at a micro level. In a private ownership the worker is exploited because the owner of the means of production can use their power dynamic to exploit the worker but in a cooperative that worker is a part of the ownership which would mean exploiting the worker is akin to exploiting yourself. In that sense the worker-owned companies may not be compatible with orthodox Marxism, but they’re still socialist in nature.
I will mention that it wouldn’t be the final state of socialism, I don’t believe we can switch to cooperatives and call it a day. Marx saw socialism as a process and we should see socialism as a process. Going from private ownership to cooperative ownership is just one small step in that process. There will be more steps in the future that might eventually end up looking more like orthodox Marxism. So I really don’t see it as not socialist.
So Valve, as game devs?
No. The main reason people are worried about what happens to Valve when Gabe passes is because Gabe is the owner, he owns more than 50% of the company. Valve has done well under him but once he’s out the picture and that more than 50% ownership is transferred to another person then who knows if the company will stay the same. After all that 50 makes the decisions about the company
If that 50 was split between the workers there would be less certainty about the potentially passing of ice person because the workers collectively uphold the company vision.
I have heard rumours that his son has a similar mindset. Though who knows, those rumours were on this site, plus even if they are true, he could just be pretending so that Gabe doesn’t look into other options or he could change his mind after being told some enticing numbers.
No company survives the third generation.
I mean, unless something has changed in theater few years, Gabe owns only about a quarter of Valve
So communists? Thought we had rooted them out in the nineties. But then again lemmy is run by commie tankies while Reddit is headed by far right nationalists. There’s no good platform nowadays huh.
Bro… For starters, not all socialists are communists. This video does a good job explaining the differences. Secondly, there’s a whole other world I’d have to explain just to get to how “lemmy is run by commie tankies” is wrong. For that I’m just going to leave that Lemmy is FOSS, which means the creators are not relevant to the continuation of the project, and Lemmy instances are individually ran and can be used to block “tankies” like lemmy.world did with lemmygrad and hexbear. And finally most people have a negative view of socialism because they don’t know (because it’s not being taught) Marx’s criticism of capitalism that is the foundation of socialist ideology. Marx wrote a whole book on it called Das Kapital, but you can get the general idea starting from here. It’s a summary of chapter 4 of Das Kapital and you should watch chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 (In total doesn’t take more than half an hour) to get the general idea. So even if you don’t agree with socialism as a whole you at least would understand what the core issue is that socialism wants to fix.
sadly most indie companies are not co-ops
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Indie just means you don’t have a major publisher like EA, Nintendo, Activision, Ubisoft, etc.