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?
If successful employee owned businesses are formed and accumulate capital they should be able to perpetuate employee ownership
One issue is, that isn’t necessarily the priority the employee owners will have. I followed some news of a successful coop business where I lived, that sold the business because it had become worth so much that the payout was life changing money for all of those people, so they voted to take the money and potentially retire sooner rather than keep going as a coop.
Ahh fantastic point. There isn’t really an incentive for the individuals to maintain/perpetuate the institution.
Let’s be real. A company comes in and offer you a life changing, fuck you money that covers the rest of your life.
Very few people can resist that, me included.
I consider myself a socialist, but shit, I live in capitalism too and have bills to pay lol.
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.
deleted by creator
Read Engels - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, especially the section on Owenism.
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.
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.
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.
Join the IWW.
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.
deleted by creator
I think communists and socialists and anarchists and broadly leftists do argue for cooperatives and workplace democratisation.
The reason they maybe don’t do it enough is because those businesses in our present environment will get beaten by exploitation mostly.
Co-operatives by nature will sacrifice profit for employee conditions because they have more stakeholders (and shareholders) to be accountable to. Lower wages through exploitation will tend to reduce costs and allow the capitalist businesses to drop prices, and outcompete opponents and secure more investment capital due to higher market penetration, which will allow them to invest in their business, incl. Marketing and product development, and outcompete the more fair sustainable business, until they corner the market and can jack up.the prices and bleed consumers dry and push for laws/lack thereof to exploit employees and cut costs further.
I don’t agree with this. Shareholders extracting value from a company is arguably more of an ‘inefficency’ than treating employees fairly. Well treated employees provide a benefit to the company while shareholders purely remove resources.
I have no data to back up my claim, just logic, so I could very well be wrong.
Shareholders extracting value from a company is arguably more of an ‘inefficency’ than treating employees fairly.
Their pals also owns all media and all economists so they will outright lie to everyone about it. Capitalism at this point in development when even capitalist themselves gets alienated from their own capital loses every advantage and usefulness for developing the productive forces.
You got a point there, and there may be a lot of data to prove that point.
I am part of a housing cooperative (“Wohnungsgenossenschaft” in German), and these cooperatives are noticeably cheaper because they are owned by the members/renters and don’t have to generate any profit, just enough excess money to build new homes. The principle is very convincing if you live in it and save loads of money every month. The cooperatives employees aren’t overworking themselves, too.
Awesome! Where can I read further about this endeavor?
Look for Wohnungsgenossenschaft or Wohnungsbaugenossenschaft. They are relatively common in Germany and Austria; Vienna is an example where the majority of flats are owned by such cooperatives. In Hamburg roughly 14% of all flats in the city are being provided by cooperatives which has huge advantages for those who get to become members.
All sources I know are in German language so if you want to read further just go for these texts and translate them into your mother tongue. Maybe start with Wikipedia:
I saw it happen with Walmart, Ace Hardware, Pizza Hut, Lowe’s/Home Depot. We used to have independent supermarkets too, who set their own prices based on local conditions. I live in an area where the supermarket in a nearby town (it’s really a village) often has lower prices on produce and meats. The big national brands cost more, and this store doesn’t get bulk discounts like Walmart, HT, and Kroger! The problem is I still have to go a few towns over to get decent coffee because Folgers, Maxwell House and Staryuck isn’t it, so when I get a ride, I have to buy extra and freeze it. The local independent store doesn’t have as good starting pay or benefits, though, but without their store, many of our older population would be in serious trouble. An elderly man kept me for some time in the meat department of our chain store because he said he was ashamed to be looking at low quality beef at those prices, when he used to farm and hunt his own. Years of farming to feed our country left him with hands that don’t work the way they used too. I didn’t buy their overpriced products, and felt bad for someone who destroyed their body for people who largely don’t even consider that nature gives us her body and blood for us to eat and drink, and from showing, weeding, irrigating, harvesting, processing, packaging, shipping, stocking, dusting, sweeping, waxing, checking, the individuals who suffer and destroy their bodies to get it to the table.
I was in another independently owned grocery a few towns over by happenstance to pick up a few things while accessible. In less than 15 minutes, because I didn’t know where items were and asked, three different employees told me to wait, they’d be right back. I guessed they were asking or making sure. Each returned with the specific item I wanted, to save me steps! Again, every item but one was less expensive than the chains, and I am guessing they can’t compete with chain grocery starting pay, either.
Interestingly enough, the employees do get a small profit sharing incentive.
Cooperatives tend to be more stable than traditional firms, but they are both harder to start, and aren’t Communist. OP is confusing worker-owned private property with the abolition of Private Property, Communists don’t focus on worker cooperatives because cooperatives retain petite bourgeois class relations.
Rather than creating a society run by and for all collectively, cooperatives are a less exploitative but still competition and profit-driven form of private business. Communists wish to move beyond such a format, even if we side with cooperatives over traditional firms when available.
In my country, the communist party (very watered down version of communism but still) is behind/aligned with most unions and they defend that companies should either be owned by the employees (co-ops) or employees should have a stake and saying on companies governance.
We have another left-wing party that even defends that failing companies should be returned to the employees, with government backed funding (loaned) if necessary to recapitalize the business and relaunch the company under employee governance.
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.
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
Something something they do sometimes
You’re proposing socialism.
Communism wants central authority.
Imagine believing you can defeat capitalism without central authority.
Imagine not recognizing that central authority is the problem.
Central authority is a tool. In different hands it does different things, but if you disarm yourself you’ll lose.
If you do not choose your leaders they will choose themselves. We tried the whole leaderless, decentralized anti-authority thing throughout the 2010s. At best you might be able to collapse the central authority of the currently existing government regime, but what comes after that is always much much worse: civil war, invasion, or an even more repressive government regime. But, more likely, the movement will just collapse because it lacks the structure to actually sustain itself.
We need to be centralized and we need to be ready to assert our authority when the old one is destroyed, or we will lose.
Ok so lets say you get rid of the central authority in one fell swoop. What happens when the millions of people who really really benefitted from that authority or atleast believe themselves to benefit decide they want it back. Can a decentralized stateless society truly win political or military battles against them? I can tell you from history that everyone who has tried this eventually resorted to their own centralized authority in order to survive, failed, or both. Communist do not see centralized authority as good, we see it as a means to survive.
You know how a certain faction in the USA keeps screaming about "states rights?”
In my view, central and decentralized authority have their issues. And here come the down votes. The way the Russian voting system was explained to me by the good people of .ml makes a lot of sense and circumvents the worst issues of both.
Russian meaning Soviet, or Russian meaning the current electoral system? Very different.
Thanks for holding my feet to the fire. I believe current, but I could be mistaken, it’s been a long time since I read it, so forgive my sketchiness, but each region having elections until one person wins a final vote, to represent their constituency. I just checked Wikipedia and didn’t remember the representative voting part, so maybe my bad memory. Is there a post somewhere that compares and contrasts Soviet and Russian models?
Not sure about a post comparing the two, but the Soviet model was more comprehensively democratic, and functioned like this:
Thank you; as always, you’re very generous and informative. I have a friend in the mood to chat here, I will read and probably ask dumb questions later.
deleted by creator
Socio democracy and I’m onboard.
Edit: all socialist & communist dictatorship losers can go live in North Korea IMO. Read a history book ffs.
Edit2: my fault, I didn’t see I was on .ml Tank on tankies.
deleted by creator
The Swiss model isn’t Socialist, but I may be misunderstanding your comment.
Social Democracy is just Capitalism with welfare, all of the “good” Social Democracies in the eyes of Social Democrats like the Nordic Countries depend on Imperialism to function and are seeing sliding welfare and worker protections as a function of being dominated by Private ownership.
America chose the route of social security and a mandated minimum wage instead of the state seizing the assets of robber barons and returning them to the communities that were responsible for their success.
You can see today exactly how well that worked out for the working class: minimum wage is below the poverty line and hasn’t been a living wage since the 70s, social security is being undone, and the government regulations that mandated a standard of living for working class Americans have been entirely dismantled.
This is the result of leaving the power within the capitalist class and allowing them to get away with their abuses without punishment: they do it again as soon as they get the chance.
I truly believe a mixed economy is the answer.
All economies are mixed, the difference in designation of “Capitalist,” or “Socialist” depends on which aspect of the economy is principle, private or public. Communism is a post-Socialist society, a highly developed form of Socialism where private ownership becomes redundant and economically unviable.
It can’t be, really, as Socialism either progresses to Communism or backslides to Capitalism.
Thats so funny because you have it completely backwards. Communism, the end goal, is a moneyless, classless, stateless society in which hierarchy has ceased to exist. State socialism or “the dictatorship of the proletariat” is a interim step on the path to communism that aims to eliminate class and the social structures that perpetuate it.
Hierarchy would exist even in Communism, at least in Marxist conceptions. Class would not exist, but it won’t be until an extremely developed, extremely late-stage Communism where all distinctions in the division of labor can genuinely be moved beyond, well after class has been abolished.
I think long term we could find a place for those who wish to live in a decentralized commune free of hierarchy. I understand that the centralized vision of communist human progress essentially requires hierarchy but I think we will progress to a point where that becomes undesirable for a large amount of people. Eventually we will reevaluate what it means to even progress.
It’s more that eventually, in the far far future, as technology advances we may be able to erase it once and for all, but there’s no basis for being able to do so without it.
deleted by creator
isn’t that anarchy?
I mean kind of yes but most people would not call them synonymous
That’s two different definitions of Communism. Anarchist Communism can be likened to Commune-ism, ie a decentralized network of communes, while Marxists want Communism as a fully publicly owned and planned global economy, one that requires centralization.
Ah, gotcha. Thanks so much for clearing that up for me.
No problem! It’s a common misconception, even among Marxists and Anarchists, that both want the same exact society on a different time scale, when in reality it’s not really the same thing at all. Both are responses to Capitalism, but in different directions.
deleted by creator
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 traditional 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.
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.
Thank you for the write up. That distinction makes a lot of sense.
No problem!
You’re missing the entire point of government.
The goal of communism is control. It always has been. It always will be.
Why?
Because it is a system of governance designed by and used for controlling humans.
Government owned does NOT mean it is owned by the people. It simply means it’s owned by the people who control the government.
Lol no its not.
The people who control the government in Capitalism is the Capitalists, the people who control the government in Socialism is the working class, and the people who control the government in Communism is the people. That’s the point of Communism.
stateless
There would be what we would consider a “government” in Communism, just not a “state,” ie heavily militarized police to resolve class contradictions in the favor of whoever controls the state, the workers or the Capitalists. Anarchists want full horizontalism, Marxists want full public ownership.
