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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are very close. Government owned does mean its owned by the people who control the government. 100%. But who controls the government? In the west, government is largely controlled by the wealthy (industry lobbying is an easy example). So then how do we have a government that is controlled by the masses?
This is where the type of government called a socialist government comes in. Communism, on the other hand, is some distant future where humanity no longer has to worry about scarcity, and all ideas of money and state are gone.
So a communist party is named thusly to say “we wish to work towards that goal, but recognize that there are steps required to get there”. For example: increasing the democratic control of a country, both politically and economically, while decreasing the influence of capitalists, whose interests are in contradiction to the interests of those who work for a living (or need to sell their labour to make a living, since labour is the only commodity most of us control).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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:
1·8 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.
Read Engels - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, especially the section on Owenism.
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.
Thank you for the write up. That distinction makes a lot of sense.
No problem!
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.
I need you to give me a rigorous definition of what a “firm” is. Because I think to a lot of people, “firm” just means “distinct agent participating in an economy” and so the idea that this is something that can or even should be avoided on principle (even if basically all firms organized under capitalism are socially harmful) I think makes people imagine a bunch of hermits that never interact with each.
Do you think that it’s not possible to interact with each other outside of a market, outside of capitalism?
I mean, it depends. Are you insisting that a market necessarily be composed of extractive firms? Because if so, of course, I can imagine interacting with each other outside of such a structure. But my point is that what people call a “market” in neoclassical economics is literally just any situation where you have a bunch of relatively autonomous groups of people all trying to accomplish various goals all interacting with each other, and so like if we’re going by the neoclassical definition of markets, it really is pretty difficult for me to imagine people interacting with each other outside of that paradigm. The important thing to understand is that even if you hate capitalism, neoclassical economics provide provides a pretty useful framework for analyzing and understanding it, and because of the fact that it can also apply the situations where firms are motivated by other things, like social progress for example, it means it’s perfectly suited for analyzing non-extractive economies too, as long as people are allowed to come together and work on problems without asking someone else for permission first.
The important thing to understand is that even if you hate capitalism, neoclassical economics provide provides a pretty useful framework for analyzing and understanding it
It really doesn’t—which was Marx’s whole project as a critique of political economy, not “communist economics”, not “Marxist political economy”, etc.
But my point is that what people call a “market” in neoclassical economics is literally just any situation where you have a bunch of relatively autonomous groups of people all trying to accomplish various goals all interacting with each other
Communism abolishes the individual as economic subject, and the conflicts of interests found in a “market”. Communism abolishes exchange, and abolishes economies. So, no, there is no “market” in a communist mode of production, even by your definition.
So like neoclassical economics as a framework was formalized and developed mostly during the hundred years following Marx’s death so I don’t understand the idea that any of his criticisms were oriented at neoclassical economics, or could’ve possibly taken it into account.
Communism abolishes the individual as economic subject, and the conflicts of interests found in a “market”. Communism abolishes exchange, and abolishes economies. So, no, there is no “market” in a communist mode of production, even by your definition.
I have to be honest I’m not really seeing what you’re saying here because my definition of a market would include just like a neighborhood of people that has like a local nonprofit grocery store that is managed by the people who live there specifically so that people can have food and for no other reason. but maybe like a handful of people notice some problems with the way the grocery store is being run, but are having trouble actually getting people to listen to them so they decide to just show everyone what they mean by starting their own grocery store in the neighborhood too under the same exact community managed model. And I also understand that neoclassical economics gives me extremely powerful tools to analyze situations like that.
I’m just curious is that sort of economy like completely incompatible with your understanding of communism? Also, I would appreciate it if you don’t say something like “well in capitalism ‘stores’ are places where people spend money so there’s literally no way anything remotely resembling this could happen in communism, not even if the food was free”
I don’t understand the idea that any of his criticisms were oriented at neoclassical economics, or could’ve possibly taken it into account.
Many things happened after Marx’s death and his critique still applies to. There may well be reactionary theories formulated in the future that my current politics would take account of anyway. Neoclassical economics is a continuation of bourgeois political economy that Marx wrote against. Not to mention that Marxists who have continued Marx’s project after his death, have very much written against modern economists.
a neighborhood of people that has like a local nonprofit grocery store that is managed by the people who live there specifically so that people can have food and for no other reason. but maybe like a handful of people notice some problems with the way the grocery store is being run, but are having trouble actually getting people to listen to them so they decide to just show everyone what they mean by starting their own grocery store in the neighborhood too under the same exact community managed model
That sort of thing you describe is a common conception of what life ought to look like by a lot of anarchists, which is opposed by communists precisely because it preserves exchange, implies a division between town and country, and implies the preservation of many things which communism abolishes. It’s also worth noting that when we talk about communism as a mode of production we are talking about society as a whole; for instance, a kid deciding to start a lemonade stand in a communist society wouldn’t recreate class society as the kid is doing exchange.
A lot of communists stray away from “positive” concepts of communist society because it’s much easier to derive what communism doesn’t have than what it does have. We can, of course, look at humanity before class society, but a lot of things have changed since then, and it is unlikely that the abolition of class would lead to the primitive pre-class societies that used to exist. I’m disclaiming that not as a cop-out but because I think it would be facetious if I tried to give you an outline of what communist society would look like when really I don’t think anyone can know for sure. But, most certainly I can say that what you outline does not sound like something which would exist on a large scale in a communist society. Most communists believe that central planning is a necessary part of a communist mode of production, myself included. Deciding that you don’t like a “grocery store” and deciding to start your own sounds rather like capitalism, and suggests an individualistic economy rather than one where society as a whole collaborates. In a communist mode of production there is no economic distinction between individuals, between “grocery stores” as you call them, or between the individual and society. Like I said above, one person deciding to start a “grocery store” wouldn’t cause the rebirth of class, but if that’s happening on a large scale that doesn’t sound like you’ve achieved a communist mode of production.
“well in capitalism ‘stores’ are places where people spend money so there’s literally no way anything remotely resembling this could happen in communism, not even if the food was free”
Things being “free” doesn’t necessarily make it not a store or not capitalist, but a lack of exchange (among other things) does suggest communism, and I don’t think the concept of a “store” makes sense without exchange. The abolition of property abolishes exchange. For instance, a food bank is not communist despite being a site where items are distributed for free; its existence relies on the alienation of the means of subsistence from a group of people, ie the existence of property. (that is also ignoring the fact that most food banks rely on a voucher system, which again is exchange, but if we were to pretend that food banks just give away food to anyone who comes and asks)
Why does a worker-owned coop need to grow? Are you presuming they take outside investment / capital?
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.
Have you ever considered that the model of free market under perfect competition in neoclassical economics doesn’t actually say that the market needs to be powered by the financial profit motive, just that the firms need to maximize their own utility? It’s just that in capitalism these get conflated because it’s almost always one and the same thing. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. If you have an economy composed entirely of mission-oriented nonprofit organizations for example that compulsively reinvest all their excesses and internalize all of their external cost, you can still analyze it as a free market under perfect competition, and ironically, it works even better than it does for capitalism.
I am opposed to “maximising utility” because I am a communist. Production should serve needs, not production for the sake of production.
compulsively reinvest all their excesses and internalize all of their external cost
Ok, still exploitation.
I can see that those are your political beliefs. You are welcome to have those political beliefs. OP is asking about communists, and communists do not want this, so this is rather orthogonal to the question.
I am opposed to “maximising utility” because I am a communist. Production should serve needs, not production for the sake of production.
Is that not what “utility” means? Serving needs?
The verb “maximising” suggests a measurable “utility” which can be “maximised”, rather than needs which are either met or not.
needs are either met or not
When you have hundreds of millions of people in your country, it’s not as black and white as that, even just logistically speaking…
I see “maximizing” in this context (describing utility) to imply doing it as well as possible.
Though I suppose, “optimizing” would be a better word to use.
I’m just curious what you think utility is and also who do you think is being exploited in economic institution that literally has to internalize all of the external cost? Also believe it or not I didn’t actually express any political beliefs here so I would appreciate it if you didn’t just assume that because I’m challenging you on your conception of things, it means that I disagree with your politics
what you think utility is
“Utility” is not a concept I subscribe to per se, unless you just mean use-values in the same sense Marx uses them. I am responding to the concepts you are using. In a communist mode of production, production is, in the famous quote, “according to need”; in a capitalist mode of production, production is divorced from need, and we find production for the sake of production.
who do you think is being exploited in economic institution that literally has to internalize all of the external cost
Marxists use the word “exploitation” differently to its colloquial use. “Exploitation”, in Marx’s critique of political economy, refers to the extraction of surplus-value. I’m not sure if you know what that means or not. I can explain it if you want but you can also look it up; it’s a pretty basic part of Marx’s critique.
Also believe it or not I didn’t actually express any political beliefs here so I would appreciate it if you didn’t just assume that because I’m challenging you on your conception of things, it means that I disagree with your politics
I’m assuming you’re not a communist because you don’t seem to be familiar with communist views, and seem to be advocating for/in defence of a mode of production that is not communist. I don’t know how exactly you label yourself politically but it seems based on this short conversation that we can exclude communism from the list of possibilities, meaning we disagree.
“Utility” is not a concept I subscribe to per se, unless you just mean use-values in the same sense Marx uses them. I am responding to the concepts you are using. In a communist mode of production, production is, in the famous quote, “according to need”; in a capitalist mode of production, production is divorced from need, and we find production for the sake of production.
Well, since you still haven’t told me what you think the word means in like a formal, well-defined, academic sense, I can’t really tell what your objection to it is. Like at the end of the day it’s just a word, and i have never actually run into a situation where if I thought about it for five minutes, I wasn’t able to actually reconcile the academic concept of utility with Marxism. And in practice, thinking about utility and realizing the highly arbitrary nature under which utility is realized under capitalism, is one of the main things that drew me to leftist economics in the first place.
Marxists use the word “exploitation” differently to its colloquial use. “Exploitation”, in Marx’s critique of political economy, refers to the extraction of surplus-value. I’m not sure if you know what that means or not. I can explain it if you want but you can also look it up; it’s a pretty basic part of Marx’s critique.
I certainly am not using it in a colloquial sense and in fact, I have been using it in the Marxist one the entire time which is why I described a market economy where literally all of the firms are compulsively required to reinvest the very surplus revenue you describe back into the firm itself. So again I’m asking you: in that situation, where is the exploitation?
And then the next important thing is to simply realize that such an economy, whatever you wanna call it (because for some reason you seem like you don’t wanna call it a market and I don’t understand why, but fine) is completely consistent with what is called a “market” in neoclassical economics, and so even if for some reason you think it’s really valuable to say that an economy stop being a market when everybody in the economy isn’t trying to mindlessly get ahead anymore, you can still analyze it as a “market” and resisting this extremely useful framework is only making your own life harder
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
