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?
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
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.