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Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
Yondoza @sh.itjust.works

Why don't communist movements focus on creating and nurturing employee owned businesses?

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:

  1. Are organizations focusing on this and I just don't know about it?
  2. If not, what obstacles are there that would hinder this approach to increasing the share labor collective ownership?
154 comments

  • 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

                  • What you have described is the pure moment of input costs lowering (and you're confusing surplus value with price, 50 being surplus would also imply 10 in variable and 10 in constant, so 70 would be the input for company 2 if you simplify for the sake of example absolutely no tool usage in company 2). However, unless company 2 has a pure monopoly on chairs, this lowering of cost of production would also apply to other chair companies, and costs would lower. When wood prices are low, wooden chairs cost less than when wood prices are higher.

                    Further, the TRPF isn't really about competition, or even surplus value. That's one-sided. The TRPF is about rising organic composition of Capital, ie as c increases in ratio with v, or c/v. Competition pushes for this, as increasing automation can allow temporary advantage (as you've somewhat shown) before other companies follow suit. What you've shown is one company lowering the ratio of c/v, ie lowering the costs of their constant Capital over their variable, but that would imply that this company should never reduce wages nor increase automation as a rule.

                    In order to outcompete, constant Capital must rise in ratio, as it can lower prices of production below what others can offer, even though this raises c/v. Hence total profits rise, but rates of profit trend downwards.

                    Your argument would only hold true if this was the final part of the process and competition didn't exist for company 2, allowing them to charge monopoly prices and never worry about increasing automation and productivity.

                    Now, the rate of profit falling is often wholly combatted by increasing exploitation, or e=s/v. This, however, gives rise to stagnating real wages while the Capitalists get ever wealthier, sharpening class contradictions.

                    • It sounds like it's similar to saying climate change isn't real because the weather was colder one day, when in actuality the theory of global warming is describing an ongoing process and tendency of the temperature to increase in the overall system overall long period of time, it's not a day to day weather phenomenon you can describe with a singular slice of time.

                      • Sort of, not quite. The TRPF is closer to saying "if Capitalists continue to automate and improve production, ie if c/v increases, ie if the organic composition of capital increases, then the rate of profit will fall unless exploitation, ie s/v, increases."

                        s/v can be increased in a number of ways, from increasing intensity, to Imperialism, ie using far more brutal exploitation in foreign countries.

                        Climate Change is similar in that the TRPF is a tendency, and temperature vaires on a daily basis, but the key difference is that while the TRPF does exist, ways of countering it temporarily also exist, while Climate Change isn't "countered" when it gets colder for a day. It's similar, but I wanted to point it out.

                        Also, absolute profits and the rate of profit are different, absolute profits have been rising, and rise most by producing and selling more. This is why c/v must rise in Capitalism, you can't just keep stagnating.

      • 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.

    • 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 like people are allowed to come together and work on problems without asking someone else for permission first.

154 comments