The overarching goal of communism is for laborers to own the means of production instead of an owning/capitalist class. Employee owned businesses are the realization of communism within a capitalist society.
It seems to me that most communist organizations in capitalist societies focus on reform through government policies. I have not heard of organizations focusing on making this change by leveraging the capitalist framework. Working to create many employee owned businesses would be a tangible way to achieve this on a small but growing scale. If successful employee owned businesses are formed and accumulate capital they should be able to perpetuate employee ownership through direct acquisition or providing venture capital with employee ownership requirements.
So my main questions are:
- Are organizations focusing on this and I just don’t know about it?
- If not, what obstacles are there that would hinder this approach to increasing the share labor collective ownership?
- There are efforts to build emoloyee owned businesses around the world
- The system is pitted towards accumulation through antisocial behavior which is absent in democratic companies, hence they’re disadvantaged
- Communists and anarchists are revolutuonists, not reformists. The reason is that reform makes the inherently cruel system easier to bear and abolishment less likely.
- Some want to go the reformist route to try if it is actually achievable
- Most importantly and very evident in the US: 100 yrs of reform can be rolled back in one day. We’re seeing that reform is pointless.
Most importantly and very evident in the US: 100 yrs of reform can be rolled back in one day. We’re seeing that reform is pointless.
It also means swinging the other way takes a day. (Unlikely, but now far more likely than before.)
Absolutely not. Progressive politics arent easy to understand and need vastly more effort to implement than regressive politics. You’re arguing completely against history.
No they aren’t. A number of proposals have been kicked around for decades. There has not been the will to implement.
Political Economy is material, not based on the willpower of individuals. Reforms are hard to get because the ruling class doesn’t want them, and they control the levers that can enable them in the first place, hence why revolution is necessary.
A number of proposals have been kicked around for decades. There hasniot been the will to implement.
That’s the point. A dictatorship of the bourgeoise will not implement progressive policies unless you fight hard for them. They will however, in the absence of resistance, implement increasingly reactionary policies in a heartbeat.
In that case I suggest a history class.
There have been bloody protests over a long time, people died, there even was a revolution in france.
All for some small changes that are absolutely logical.
Now germany for example is reverting the 8 hr workday without any protests needed.
The ignorance of people is insane.
If conservatives can shape society with executive orders, progressives can as well.
Shaping change grassroots is great, but progressives don’t need to be bound by different rules than conservatives.
Edit: toning down my rudeness.
But again thats only technically true. There are no progressive majorities and fascist billionaires are manipulating the masses. Misinformation is ruling the discourse. What you’re sayibg is factually impossible at this point in time.
This is both rude and ahistorical, laws are passed based on what the ruling class wants. The ruling class cannot abide Socialism unless the Proletariat becomes the ruling class through revolution.
Watch your rudeness if you are going to be confidently incorrect.
According to the UK’s Labour Party’s report on worker co-operatives in 2017, the main difficulty is access to credit (capital). It makes sense since the model basically eliminates “outside investors”. It has to
- Bootstrap with worker’s own investment, or
- Get investment from credit unions, or
- Have (national or local) government to back it up
Even in the above cases, the credit is often not large or cheap enough for the cooperatives to be competitive. (There are examples in the report that serve as exceptions, I highly recommend giving it a read.)
So at least from this, I’d think the appropriation of means of production would be more fundamental rather than being a simple result of some special way of organizing.
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Everyone here seems to be talking about co-ops… And I’m really confused by the conversation in this thread, alas,
I worked for some years for a manufacturing company that was 100% employee owned. We were a multinational manufacturer for: wire and cable, aerospace, and medical. The company began around 1972, started the EO process in the early 90’s becoming 100% employee owned by 2000.
The [National Center for Employee Ownership] (nceo.org) is a good resource for businesses looking at employee ownership. The most common ESOPs are manufacturing companies in the states last I heard at one of the nceo conferences.
The obstacles that I see, is that most companies have Investors. Obviously we all know what the investors want as they own the stock. It takes a generous leadership/company founder to sell their stock to the company for employee ownership. It’s a long process with lawyers and other legal hurdles. Not impossible, but finding generosity in the white collar business class, especially today, is not common it seems. You must have initial generosity and care for your employees from the initial owners. They decide to go employee owned or not. They either see the investment EO is, or they keep greedy.
The founder of the EO I worked for sold his last stock to the company for the same price he sold his first stock (which in the ten-ish years it took to get to 100% EO, raised considerably).
Profit sharing is dope. Basically we all got an extra large paycheck every quarter. This company I worked for paid $3-$4 more per hour to start than any other manufacturing company in the area, and bennies began the day you were hired. They literally held financial literacy classes for all employees, to better understand our financial reports, as the company was super transparent. They believed that the best ideas come from the ones running the machines, and the founder often could be found sweeping floors of his shops to better know his employees and their struggles. In 2019, the company stock was valued at over $6K a share.
The original owner passed away, then covid hit, (I left) then the leadership changed to new people who never met the founder. It’s gone down hill since. Im to be paid out this year, and the stock is half was it was when I left. I still carry a card with the original founders mission and values listed for the company. That card is no longer what they follow. It’s been sad to see.
However, I still believe Employee Ownership is a solid pathway to restoring the middle class.
Folks who began in the 90s were retiring after 25 years with the company with $1-$2 million dollars in their esop accounts alone. I know what a Roth IRA is, what it means to diversify, and what dividends are all because of this company’s financial literacy classes.
It also is possible a company becomes too big to support the EO model. This company was hitting that point around the time I left, they told us “we’re hiring lawyers to make sure that it doesn’t happen”, but as I’ve watched the stock price drop year over year, yeah bet-
Wait, how does it have a public stock price if it’s employee owned?
Multiple types of stock. One would be limited to employees, another would be open for purchase by anyone.
The key is in how the various stock types are structured. If control can be monopolized by a non-employee stock type, is the business truly employee owned? I would posit not.
Given that stock represents ownership of the company, I would posit that if any of it is owned by non-employees, then the company isn’t really employee owned, right?
Tell me you know nothing about stocks without saying you know nothing about stocks.
A company can create classes of stocks that confer zero ownership in a company.
What do they do then?
Confer the right to a portion of the profits, distributed as dividends. Or anything else, really.
So the profits aren’t worker owned?
191·26 days agoHey OP, there is a reply from a user from lemmygrad.ml which you cannot see as sh.itjust.works has defederated from 'grad. Check out the post on lemmy.ml to see it.
Oh, I didn’t even realize this. Thanks.
Yea… I keep seeing lemmygrads replying to people who can’t see them because of defederation. Just because you can see someone, doesn’t mean they can see you/your reply, just keep that in mind.
Thanks, I also can’t see it. Discuss.onlinr should really federate lemmygrad
In terms of communism, as dreamt up by Marx and Engels, you can only turn a completely capitalist economy into a communist one. This has never been achieved, shortcuts have been taken. All communist states in existence have either turned authoritarian or to dust. So in my view, there aren’t many communist movements left in the world. They may use the word but either M&E wouldn’t like them or they don’t really have a lot of support behind them. No support, no money. Capitalists have a lot of money. People with a lot of money tend to have the ear of their leaders. If an investor is interested it’ll be real hard to go for an employee-owned model (excluding models with free publicly traded shares). If investors are not interested, the business may be failing and employee ownership is the last hurrah before the end. Capitalism tends to come up on top.
This is generally wrong. Marx and Engels believed Capitalism itself prepares the foundations for Socialism, but not that revolution had to wait for Capitalism to fully develop to succeed. Socialist governments can oversee economies and build towards Communism without needing to be fully developed Capitalist states before the revolution. As a result, Marx and Engels would support historical Communist movements like Cuba, the USSR, PRC, etc, especially if they had lived to see Capitalism turn to Imperialism, shifting revolutionary pressure from the most developed countries to the most Imperialized countries.
to mythologise a human.
Ramen truly is the people’s food
Read Engels - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, especially the section on Owenism.
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Join the IWW.
If your goal is to, say, kill all of the tigers in the world, why would you be okay with making more baby tigers? Yeah the baby tigers are cute and can’t hurt anyone yet, but baby tigers don’t stay babies for long, and 100% of the large, angry tigers who like to eat people used to be baby tigers.
The goal of communism is not to turn every person into a capitalist, it’s to create a society/economy that meets the needs of all of its members instead of just those of the rich. Encouraging the working class to start businesses is just like making more baby tigers: it’s working in the opposite direction of your goal.
Employee-owned businesses would be the thin edge of the wedge in favour of socialism/communism. It would be a “bridge system” whose purpose is to demonstrate the societal superiority of socialism/communism.
As such, I see your metaphor as being mostly inaccurate. The purpose isn’t to create more tigers, the purpose is to create more house cats. A house cat can still do damage to people, but at a much lower level than any tiger. House cats also provide many benefits even in a fully feral state, by lowering the population of vermin such as rats and mice, helping to blunt the spread of disease and crop/property damage.
Going directly from capitalism to communism is a bridge too far; not enough people know how to do communism correctly, and there would be far too much resistance by those whose greed is benefitted by capitalism and who control the public narrative through media and education (or lack of it).
In fact, as history has shown us, the only way to take that route in a single step is via authoritarianism - to force the population en masse - whereupon authoritarianism gleefully remains resident (as those who are corruptible remain in positions of power that they are loathe to relinquish), invariably employing violence to ensure compliance, and ending up royally f**king up the entire implementation.
With an intermediary like employee-owned businesses, we can both educate and expose, providing society with tangible, real-world, immediately-obvious benefits of communism that erodes resistance and shows people how to be communal in an effective manner.
And there would be other stages beyond that, gradually ratcheting society into a pro-communist state in a careful and thoughtful manner that allows us to build anti-greed, anti-corruption, and anti-authoritarian systems into the mix, to avoid outcomes such as pretty much every other “implementation” to date.
Thats more syndicalist in nature, also the very idea is absurd. Why on earth would you willingly play the capitalist game with the capitalist rules when the entire system is rigged against the workers? What can possibly be gained? The way I see it if organizations like the IWW started making co-ops then the FBI would make sure they fail.
the FBI would make sure they fail.
This is kind of the point. If any of these things remotely threatened the capitalist status quo, they would be obliterated by the CIA, etc.
I think that’s Richard Wolff’s whole thing. I think he’s communist? At least socialist.
Because communists wont/can’t orginize in numbers that would allow for it.
Because fear/greed is the greatest organizer. Abandon that and we’re just a chaotic mob.
Is that harsh?
No, also fear/greed are simple and easy for everyone to understand. Like love could be a great motivator but you need to lay down principles, boundaries, etc. Fear/greed just goes.
Employee owned businesses are the realization of communism within a capitalist society.
Right, but we want the whole system changed. Coops are inherently at a disadvantage in monopoly capitalism.
What?? Why would an organisation free of parasites, not trounce the “meritocratic” system?
Because they cannot compete with the economies of scale, the availability of capital, market power, an exploitable workforce, etc.
It’s like asking why you can’t win at checkers when your opponent is cheating at 4d chess.
Read: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Lenin
Well creating an opposibg empire didn’t work out so great.
Capitalism is a belief system, you can’t beat ideas with guns.
There’s not going to be an anti-imperialist empire that successfully ends imperialism.
It exist only because it’s population is cajoled into accepting it as the only viable, profitable option.
Concentration of power is the social disease, it creates a “all the eggs in one basket” situation where one bandit can seize control of the whole.
It is a strange paradox that a society built on individual responsibility would be corrupted and usurped by its cooperation mechanism. And that the path to a semblance of decency is to cut down on cooperation to disempower those at the grotesque top.
And then maintain taboos to prevent tge concentrations fromvforming again. BECAUSE they are too profitable and power.
Make CEO a crime, make presidents weak, cut off the heads of kings.
The more we get, the better it becomes. Trying to just change the whole system at once is just an excuse for not making the small changes that move the needle.
Do find it interesting that every anti-capitalist society was achieved through revolution? Not by voting or incremental changes, but by ugly, violent, revolution?
By all means go and create some coops! I became a member of a local food coop. But I am under no delusion that this impacts capitalism whatsoever.
Capitalists aren’t going to just let the system slowly change. The mass murder campaigns waged by the CIA have taught us that (read The Jakarta Method).
Making more co-ops doesn’t make them any more competitive against companies that exploit their workers for extra profit.
If you can make a successful co-op then go for it. But they absolutely aren’t a path to any sort of revolution, which communists are all about. Forming a labor union in a critical industry is a much higher priority for communists than starting another co-op.
It isn’t communism, but sometimes making a co-op turns out to be more successful than forming union inside fragmented industry. A prominent example is amul from India. Instead of of forming union against highly capitalistic dairy industry, milk farmers and workers made a co-op that replaced those capitalist industries with market force.
The point was though this initiative got direct support from the government not some agenda against it.
The government funding is really key here. We would be seeing communists constantly starting co-ops if seed money wasn’t a barrier. That’s not to say co-ops would be successful.
Small, local communist Ws would enable more state and national communist Ws.
“Well, that co-op just outside of downtown is doing fine. Molly’s daughter worked there when she was in high school and said it was the best job she ever had. I guess communists can do some things right.”
is an improvement over
“I’ve never met a communist, but I know they’re all stupid and evil. I’m going to vote against anything with the word socialist or communist next to it because [media personality] told me so.”
I’m not convinced of this. One could argue that profit is waste. It’s an overhead of wealth delivered for value provided. If co-ops are less incentives towards profit, e.g. by not having a tradeable stock to manage, then the pursuit of profit is a lesser priority. This means the overhead is less, which could mean lower prices.
To put it bluntly, if you don’t need to pay dividends to shareholders who deliver no value or huge bonuses to executives at the top, maybe the operating costs could be lower. Yes, the cooperative members would take some of that money as profit sharing among the members, but the working class tends to be less sociopathically greedy than those in power.
Definitely open to feedback. This kind of thinking is newer to me
One could argue that profit is waste.
Its not, its profit. Dividends to share holders are interest payments on vital loans which co-ops don’t have access too. Those early investments provide more of an edge than not having to pay them. Otherwise firms wouldn’t bother with investors at all.
You could say excessive c-suite salaries are a waste. But those high salaries gets you the absolute psychos who will squeeze more excess value from the workers than any co-op could. Co-op workers wont be as greedy with wages or benefits, but they will absolutely look to cut their workload and get more free time (actual freedom).
Part of being a Marxist is accepting that the capitalist theory of profit motive applying to everyone is true. Its not universally true to everyone in every instance. And its certainly not a moral imperative like capitalist ghouls believe. But when we’re talking about statistics and large populations it absolutely does hold.
I may not be well informed, so feel free to cite sources that prove me wrong, but I’m not 100% convinced about the co-ops being equally competitive or that they’ll be just as profit-seeking.
Yes, individuals outside of sociopathic executives are also driven by profit, but they’re also more influenced by other factors. For example, most non-executives might opt for a more ethical solution over a more profitable solution. This may also carry over to efficiency: maybe a co-op could opt for a more efficient, if less profitable, solution in order to keep prices low. There are several incentives for this: long-term growth, social good of making things more affordable, personal pride in being the lowest price, general lack of desire to optimize for a single metric (profit). Now, these are all guesses. I don’t know of any good studies about co-op behaviors in aggregate versus traditional corporations, but this sounds feasible to me.
All that said, it sounds like you’re better read on this than I am, so I’d love to learn if you can throw some sources at me
Sorry my ignorance is showing here but I thought coops might be stronger than a company in a way they have more staying power before a company is forced to enshittify. I naively thought people would recognize the better quality of stuff provided from coops because they don’t have to fulfill the shareholders dreams of line must go up. Edit: I see down below the willingness to exploit is a severe disadvantage to coops
I think you already read the reason/s but in a monopoly capitalist society, but companies can just smother smaller ones by leveraging their exploited workforce (more output for less cost), out-competing, buying up all competition, much better economies of scale, and access to capital and market forces.
Just take an example of a small business owner who sells sporting goods (I use this example because I love Freak and Geeks lol). How can you possibly compete with Walmart when Walmart has bigger and better inventory, cheaper prices, more locations, basically no competitors, better advertising, etc? Sure lots of people value ‘small businesses’ from a moral/ethical point of view, but enough for this company to grow and grow and grow and compete with friggin Walmart? That just doesn’t happen often.
Now, something like REI, which is a coop, does compete with Walmart in a very niche market. REI has a strong brand and loyal customer base, allowing it to compete effectively in the outdoor and sporting goods sector. However, its focus is more on quality and specialized products rather than mass-market items. Do you think Walmart couldn’t just destroy REI if it felt like it was being threatened and it wasn’t one of the largest mcap companies on the planet?
REI is not a workers coop. It’s a consumer coop. It’s not even the same thing. The fact that it’s so difficult to even find a workers coop that is a national retailer shows you exactly why competing as a coop on the capitalist market is difficult.
Yep, good point! I was trying to think of examples. Ace Hardware isn’t a workers coop either.
Right, appreciate the write up.Dammit lol
It can be difficult for coops to play on the capitalist market.
A company with a top-down hierarchy can make decisions much faster than an organization where the decisions are made ground up through internal democratic policies. The democratic process also very likely limits the co-op from doing shady stuff.
It’s possible though, but it requires a really good community backing.
False equivalence. Many co-ops have a top-down hierarchy for exactly this purpose: execution speed. But the person “at the top” is there as a navigator, not as a captain. They are there to make those quick decisions based on the will - and projected/estimated will, when time is of the essence - of the actual owners, the employees.
There are also many instances of companies - and even entire countries - going months to years without “top leadership” because the entire framework has been effectively empowered to make critical decisions. The effectiveness of the U.S. Military is also based on this doctrine. This allows a company to respond to market forces purely via effective communication between employees and managers coordinating across the different components of the company.
It’s really hard to generalize about leftist groups. The communists that feel this way have formed co-ops, or are cooperating with anarchists to do something like syndicalism (focused on unionizing existing businesses).
But the methods to start and grow businesses in a capitalist country inherently rely on acting like a capitalist. Getting loans requires a business plan that makes profit, acquiring facilities and other businesses requires capital. Local co-ops exist because they can attract members and customers that value their co-opness, but it’s very hard to scale that up to compete at a regional level. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard to view it as an engine for vast change.
Communists that focus on voting are delusional (in my opinion) but like all reformists they view the existing government as the mechanism to make widespread change.
Huh. Someone I know is trying to start a business with a longer-term aim of a co-op. Business insurance for themselves is going to run 30-40k minimum per year!
Perfect example. Insurance is an entire industry of blood sucking middle men producing absolutely nothing.
Good luck to your friend. Sorry they have to support a useless leech corporation instead of, you know, paying that money to actual workers.
Communists that focus on voting are delusional (in my opinion) but like all reformists they view the existing government as the mechanism to make widespread change.
The only state in my country that has a communist party in power has been consistently leading national rankings in education and health, so I guess they’re doing something right.
Hey, that’s great. I’m not sure it’s a way to reach full communism, but good on them.
Just saw this on the news community. The linked article goes into some detail. I don’t know if these policies will achieve ‘full communism’ (or even if that would be a good thing), but education and health are good things for governments to focus on whichever way you look at it.
