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?
This isn’t really accurate, from a Marxist perspective. Marx advocated for public ownership, ie equal ownership across all of society, not just worker ownership in small cells. This isn’t Communism, but a form of cooperative-based socialism. There are groups that advocate for worker cooperatives, but these groups are not Communist.
Essentially, the reason why cooperatives are not Communist is because cooperatives retain class distinctions. This isn’t a growing of Communism. Cooperatives are nice compared to tradition businesses, but they still don’t abolish class distinctions. They don’t get us to a fully publicly owned and planned economy run for all in the interests of all, but instead create competition among cooperatives with interests that run counter to other cooperatives.
Instead of creating a Communist society run for the collective good, you have a society run still for private interests, and this society still would inevitably erase its own competition and result in monopoly, just like Capitalism does, hence why even in a cooperative socialist society, communist revolution would still be on the table.
Thank you for the write up. That distinction makes a lot of sense.
No problem!
If a worker co-op based society erased it’s competition and formed a monopoly co-op run for the benefit of workers, is that not just a communist managed economy at that point with the monopoly playing the role of the state before erasing itself?
To even get there in the first place requires making several nearly impossible leaps. If such a thing could happen, it may be able to form something like that, but given that it would be a profit-driven firm it’s more likely that it would lose its cooperative character without a proletarian state over it to enforce that. More than likely, it would go the same way the Owenites went, moderate success at first before fizzling out and failing to overcome the Capitalist system.
Owenites?
Pre-Marx Socialists following Robert Owen. Owen was a Utopian, ie a “model builder.” He believed that it was the task of great thinkers to create a perfect society in their heads, and bring it about in reality. This is the wrong approach, which Marx and Engels spent a good amount of time countering.
That all makes sense except the class distinctions part. If whole cooperatives share the capital of the organization, how is there a class divide?
Everything you’re saying about competition and private interest makes sense, with my limited understanding. I just don’t get the class point you made. Help me understand?
Cooperatives are petite-bourgeois structures. They are small cells of worker-owners that only own their small cell, and exclude its ownership from society as a whole. Since cooperatives exist only in the context of the broader economy, they form small cells of private property aimed at improving their own standing at the expense of others.
Think of it this way, a worker in coop A has fundamentally different property relations to the Capital owned by coop A than worker B does in coop A. This creates a society of petite bourgeois worker-owners, not a classless society of equal ownership of all amongst all.
Got it. That makes much more sense. Thank you for the clarification! And very clear explanation
No problem!
So for a concrete example, if you end up in the worker coop for a finance company and own a slice of that, or work in Microsoft and are an employee-owner of that, you’d end up a lot better than if you worked in a fast food restaurant you partly owned. Is that kind of what you’re saying?
Pretty much! You’d even see some coops dominate others more directly, like collective worker-owners employing collective worker-owners in wage labor similar to what goes on individually in regular firms.
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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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.
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).
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
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.
Co-op is using capitalism to fight some harmful effect of capitalism itself. Many Conmunist movements believe there are better and stronger alternatives.
This can be especially true for industries that are centralized by nature. You can’t set up production ready silicon factory or power plant today to set up a co-op. The more practical alternative is to set up union to protect rights of workers.
The hell of capitalism is the firm itself, not the fact that the firm has a boss.
The forces of the market and of capital do not go away just because the workers own the company. In worker-owned cooperatives, the workers exploit themselves, because the business still needs to grow. They simply carry out the logic of the capitalist themselves on themselves, using their surplus value to expand the business’s capital, and paying for their own labour-power reproduction. i.e., the workers all simply become petit-bourgeois.
There are extant organisations (some political parties, some NGOs) that push for more workers’ cooperatives, and none of them are communist nor call themselves communist. If you believe in a cooperative-based economy, you are not a communist. I don’t mean that as an insult, it’s just a fact, the same as if you want, for instance, the current US economic system, you are not a communist. You can advocate for coops but you would fare much better in that political project if you didn’t try to put it under the banner of something it’s not, and something far more controversial than just “worker coops are good” anyway.
Why does a worker-owned coop need to grow? Are you presuming they take outside investment / capital?
Capitalism compels firms to grow or die, in order to fight the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. We’d need to move beyond a profit-driven economy to move beyond this issue.
There is no tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The theory is inconclusive, as is empirical research. If TRPF were true, then growing a company would, in fact, accelerate the process.
It’s a tendency, not an ironclad law. Competition forces prices down, and rates of profit with it, but this process can be struggled against by expanding markets or finding new industries, which is why Capital always pours into “new fads” in the short term. Imperialism is actually quite a huge driver of this.
There are numerous studies showing broad rates of profit falling over time, as well. Moreover, Marx never lived to see Imperialism as it developed in the early 20th century, where the TRPF was countered most firmly.
Competition forces prices down, and rates of profit with it
This is not true in the general case. If prices for input materials are down, profits rise for the company using them. One company’s profit loss is another’s gain. That is even with the shaky assumption that competition can exist long term in a free market. Imperialism, as defined by Lenin, results in concentration of capital and the removal of competition.
this process can be struggled against by expanding markets or finding new industries
There are counteracting forces for it, but expanding is not one of them. Expanding does not change the rate of profit (profit/capital invested); at most, it changes the total profit.
If it costs 5 dollars to make one widget on average, and company A creates a machine that improves production so as to lower the cost of widgets produced by them to 3 dollars, then they temporarily make more profit until other companies that make widgets find ways to lower their cost of production to around the same level. This new lower price has a higher ratio of value advanced from machinery as compared to labor, lowering the rate of profit. This is a general tendency, but can be fought against by many measures, including monopolization and using regulations to prevent companies from properly conpeting, ie by copyrighting machinery and production processes.
Imperialism didn’t just allow for expansion, it also came with violent means of suppressing wages and extracting super-profits. It wasn’t just an expansion that would raise total profitd while rate of profits fell, it also created new avenues for exploiting labor even more intensely, and selling goods domestically at marked up prices.
Really, I don’t know what your issue with the TRPF is, are you under the assumption that Marxists claim it’s an ironclad law over time and not a tendency, or are you against the Law of Value in general?
You didn’t address any of my concerns, nor was I talking about productivity. Let’s try again for the the first one with a simple example:
Company 1 makes a product (let’s say timber) at 50 surplus value. That 50 is a cost for company 2 that uses the product as an input material (it makes wooden chairs). We can calculate the total rate of profit of both companies. Now company 1 is forced to lower the price to 40 because of competition. We calculate the total rate of profit again and the total rate of profit has actually increased.
Thus, it does not follow that lowering prices/profits leads to a decrease in the overall rate of profit
Because they are subjected to market forces. I’m not referring to the decisions an individual worker in a coop might make—an individual may well decide to give away all their money and become homeless, that doesn’t mean it’s in people’s interests to. In a market, you must compete with other businesses, otherwise you will be out-competed and not survive. The “profits” obtained by a coop are still surplus-value; all the laws of capital outlined by Marx are still at play. Marx’s critique of political economy did not really hinge upon the specific boss/employee relationship; it’s about impersonal domination of the market over people who live in a capitalist mode of production. In Capital Marx spends quite a bit of time talking about how even capitalists are subjected to and dominated by capital; the domination is impersonal, and the domination of (hu)man by (hu)man is only secondary to that impersonal domination.
Read Engels - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, especially the section on Owenism.
The idea for a lot of communist ideologists is we don’t need these hyper competitive corporations. The end goal isn’t “higher GDP” (or more salary), it’s “better quality of life”. I think most unions are like that.
I understand the sentiment. I’m wondering about the efficacy of the strategies to achieve those end goals.
111·1 month 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.
Something something they do sometimes
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.
I suspect a big part is tax and investment law.
A bunch of poors (like me!) who band together won’t have much capital to buy inventory or equipment. I doubt banks and investors would lend to the bunch of poors, since they have a non-standard decision making structure.
That’s gonna make it hella hard to get started.
Hard to get started, and not Communist, either. OP is confusing worker owned private property with the collectivized system of Communism, hence why though Communist orgs support cooperatives as less exploitative than regular firms, neither is the basis of Communism.
I think worker cooperatives are sometimes bashed too much but worker cooperatives are fundamentally a lower petty-bourgeois form of organizing. Cooperatives can only be an ally to the movement of the proletariat and not a driving force. That said, they might have minor use.
I have been thinking about how to sublate the lower petty-bourgeoisie into the movement of the proletariat. I think it would be cool for a bunch of workers in a worker’s state to make a worker cooperative as a startup, make it big and then sell the cooperative off to the worker’s state. As long as the land and the banks are owned by the state anyway, the worker cooperative would be financed and largely owned by the people indirectly anyhow.
But in terms of pre-revolution, worker cooperatives may help educate the workers who are part of it, and cooperatives can help ease the transition of class suicide for petty-bourgeois and labor aristocracy class traitors.
There’s a bit of a trouble for educating the workers compared to unions due to the class situation and nature of ownership. But I think it would be less harmful for a small business owner to create a cooperative than to go out of business during an economic bust and with unexpected declassing become a reactionary blaming their debt on minorities.
I think the trouble is where to focus the limited time and effort of the communists. It’s not that cooperatives are bad necessarily, it’s just that it’s more helpful and important to focus elsewhere.
I do think some communists get weird about strata other than the proles proper such as the reserve pool of labor, lower petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy. The foundation of the communist movement should be the proletariat but these other strata are not inherent enemies. There’s not a fundamental antagonism of exploiter and exploited here.
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.
Join the IWW.
I think that’s Richard Wolff’s whole thing. I think he’s communist? At least socialist.
