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?
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.
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.
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?
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Something something they do sometimes
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.
I think that’s Richard Wolff’s whole thing. I think he’s communist? At least socialist.
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.
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.
If you’re vegan you don’t decide to eat chicken just because chickens don’t eat meat. They’re still chickens.
Yeah I don’t understand the metaphor, either.
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.
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.
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).
I think breaking down concentrations of power a returning it directly to those most affected by it on a local basis aligns more with that stated goals. I think utopian communism obscures the attainable and effective ways of morphing the structure of our political reality.
Except how are you going to change society without some form of power, which forces you to use the state? I wouldn’t call it utopian what they were describing, while anarchism to me sounds more utopian. Without the power to defend yourselves, the power of capitalists, current, former, or foreign will destroy you.
Mores against concentrations of power, the folk wisdom to spot and unwind them and a taboo against abyone concentrating inordinate power onto their persons. A rejection of collaboration with those who wield leverage to orchestrate others intobdoing their bidding. A taboo against the trade of a human’s future labour profits. A taboo against non-working shareholders or any third party get a cut of profits. Destroy stock markets.
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.
Lol no.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Got it. That makes much more sense. Thank you for the clarification! And very clear explanation
No problem!
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:
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.
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.
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.
