The "Employers Take All the Risk" Myth:

People are always bitching about the system but then say "employers deserve most of the money because they take all the risk." Let's test that.

When a business burns down, the owner has insurance. Do the workers? When a business folds due to a bad decision the owner made, the workers lose their income, their health insurance, sometimes their homes. The owner loses an investment. The worker loses their livelihood. Who's actually more exposed?

When an employer hires a dangerous person, who gets hurt? The workers.

Financially. Physically. The risk is shared, and workers often carry the heavier end because they have fewer safety nets.

Now flip it: if every employee walks out tomorrow, can the owner run the business alone? In almost every case, no. That means the business only exists because of the workers. Their labor is the engine. The owner holds the title to the engine, but they didn't build it and can't run it without the people who do.

That's the core of why workers' movements argue employees should have ownership stake in what their labor produces. It's not radical. It's logical.

And yes, good bosses and good small business owners exist. In the same way good slave owners existed on good plantations. That doesn't change the structure. Being decent inside a system doesn't make the system decent.

Why the System Stays This Way

Owners didn't just get lucky. They built a legal and political infrastructure backed by governments, international trade law, and military force that protects capital over labor. Basic needs are kept behind a paywall on purpose. When you need a job to eat, you'll accept bad terms. That's not a free market. That's coercion with paperwork.

And when countries have tried to decouple survival from wages, providing housing, healthcare, food as rights, the response from capitalist powers hasn't been debate. It's been sanctions, coups, and war. That tells you something about how threatened the system feels.

Worker protections exist too, but understand what they actually are. They're the minimum necessary to keep workers from realizing they're wage slaves and doing something about it. Just enough comfort to prevent revolt. Not enough to change who holds the power.

"Nobody Wants to Work Anymore"

Big Deal Pizza on Monroe Ave is the perfect case study. Owners overworked and underpaid staff. Workers asked for raises. Owners said "there's the door." Workers eventually left. Business collapsed to three struggling owners who still couldn't see what happened.

Their conclusion: workers are lazy.

The actual lesson: labor has power, and when you abuse it long enough, it walks. Every time a boss says "nobody wants to work," what they mean is "nobody wants to work for what I'm offering." That's the market working exactly as advertised. They just don't like being on the receiving end of it.

Where This Leads

When capitalism is under pressure, the response from the ownership class is always the same: remove worker protections, criminalize organizing, increase control. That's not capitalism fixing itself. That's capitalism becoming fascism to survive. It's happened before. It's recognizable if you're paying attention.

There are better models. Worker co-ops, where employees own and run the business collectively, show it's possible. The condition is simple. It can't become a situation where one group of workers elevates themselves above the rest and forgets the community around them. Shared power has to mean shared power.

Communism actually votes on decisions from the bottom up, then unifies behind that decision once it's made. That's called democratic centralism. It's still democracy, just organized differently than what you're used to. The US has democracy too, technically. But whose interests does it centralize around? Follow the legislation, the bailouts, the tax structures. You'll find your answer.

You were told communism means dictatorship. It was only a dictatorship in the fact that the workers had final say, not the owners. That's why it was vilified and lied about. Take a look around you. A small wealthy class controls your legislation, your media, your courts, and your elections. That's a dictatorship too. It just wears a suit and calls itself freedom. Marx called it the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Turns out he was describing what you're already living under.

Look through history. When workers in large numbers strike, what happens? The police and military are sicced on the people. That's not the actions of a free country. That's the actions of a country that enslaves its people to corporations and the economy. And if every worker deemed essential during the pandemic had suddenly decided they were done, that's exactly what their fate would have been.

Those same governments often resort to military conscription, a draft, stealing their citizens' sovereignty and forcing them to fight in place of, or to defend, the government against their will. Anyone remember Vietnam?

The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed, just not for you. Remember, a system designed to violate, oppress, exploit, coerce, and extort can never truly be reformed to make it acceptable. All one can do is temporarily pacify the victims until they finally revolt.

One Last Thing

The Black Book of Communism, the source behind most "communism killed millions" arguments, has been debunked by serious historians for inflated numbers, sloppy methodology, and holding socialist states to standards capitalism's colonial body count has never once been held to. Nobody's counting the Congo. Nobody's counting the Bengal famine. Nobody's counting what the IMF structurally adjusted entire nations into.

You're not living under communism or socialism. You're living under capitalism functioning exactly as intended. And when things go wrong, they blame the workers, including the ones they directly or indirectly imported from other countries to keep wages low and workers divided.

Deprogram accordingly.