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?
In the US there are organizations that focus on and advocate for employee ownership. National Center for Employee Ownership, The ESOP Association, The Employee Ownership Foundation, and Employee-owned S Corporations of America.
I think the public should absolutely be more educated in ESOPs because it’s an absolute win/win (IMO). It is not the communist concept of workers seizing the means of production (i.e. taking the capital away at a loss to ownership), so that may be why you don’t hear communists advocating for it. In most cases, a business owner who wants to protect what they’ve worked on for X amount of time “sells” the company to itself and the company gives ownership stake to the employees by some predetermined formula.
So Bob spent 30 years as owner of a widget company. It’s been in the family since his grandpa started it. He’ll be retiring in the next few years and his family doesn’t want to take over. He also doesn’t want to sell to his competitors or some conglomerate that will close the factory, fire everyone, keep the name and the customer list and sell cheap imported knock offs. So the company takes out a loan and buys itself from him. Every employee gets shares and as they pay down the debt over the next 5 to 10 years the value of the shares go up dramatically. Bob gets all the benefits of capitalism. The workers get the means of production. ESOPs get some tax advantages.
ESOPs also tend to outperform their market. Turns out employees perform better when they can personally benefit in a direct way from the outcome of their labor.
With all that stated it isn’t what a communist would want. It still has to exist and operate under the rules of the US market. If an ESOP needs to hire a manager or director they’re going to need a competitive compensation package. And you’ll still end up with managers makeing 2 or 3 times what their workers do and depending how the stock rules are set up they may get more stock.
TLDR: What you’re asking about exists. I think it works great. I wouldn’t consider it something that would appeal to a communist as a social goal.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
If you’re vegan you don’t decide to eat chicken just because chickens don’t eat meat. They’re still chickens.
What he means is the commulists still want to dominate workers for their own good, when they say “own the means of production” they are not going to let the actual workers do the owning. The commulists will own tge means of production on behalf of the workers instead of the current parasites.
Cooperatives would put the actual power in the hands of the workers and would stop external forces from directly interfering into their affairs and telling them how to work or what to work on or why.
Wanting an economy run democratically by all of society for all of society, rather than have an economy made up of small competing cells that each want to further their own interests at the expense of others, is a reasonable thing. “Domination” has nothing to do with it.
If only they remained small competing cells. But nearly always grows more and eat the others. Then the big cells say they have to make their employees piss in bottles to survive. They use the arguments of what small cells do to survive to justify the business model that made them huge and allowed them to kill all the small cells.
It’s an arms race dynamic of cut-throatedness where the biggest bastard is favored to win.
What a shit system. What a terrible and disgusting infection of the human mind.
