The boss needs you, you don't need him!
Labor is entitled to all it creates
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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A loan would give partial ownership to the loaning party, right? Until the loan is paid off? Is the difference between that and external shareholders that the payment rate wouldn't be tied to profits but be constant instead? Or is the difference that you can pay it off eventually? I'm having a hard time seeing how a loan is fundamentally different from shares.
Loans are temporary and typically involve less oversight than shareholders.
Also a key difference is that if an already established co-op decides to take out a loan/etc, that decision is made democratically.
Bonds. Look into bonds. It is often how communities raise money for big infrastructure projects.
So companies shouldn't put up ownership or assets as collateral for loans like you would with a house loan?
I mean, I guess they could? I was just trying to bring up a solution that I haven't seen anyone else in this thread mentioning. Bonds.
Municicpal bonds are used all of the time to raise money. What is a municipal government, if not just an organized group of people in a community?
If people want to enrich their community with a business, but don't have the means, they could relatively easily create a non-profit, and use community bonds (and other fundraising methods) to get the money they need to start the business. If/when that local business succeeds, the people who invested (i.e. the community at large) get a piece of that. success The people who own the business, all the way down to the people who work there day to day (who likely also own a piece of the business) benefit when the business does well. Those profits are re-invested into the community, rather than being siphoned off by a massive corporation like Walmart, never to be seen again. The community as a whole owns and operates the company, usually by democratic rule of some type.
This isn't some kind of pipe dream, it's happening right now in communities that have still managed to remain tight knit (often people of color, and other marginalized groups who have historically had the deck stacked against them).
Only would only those in the community be able to invest in bonds? Otherwise big investors would invest in promising ideas. Who is in a community? Who is the community for a global operation?
I like the idea, but I think it'd be really hard to apply to things like tech or businesses with global infrastructure.
I'm not sure what you mean... This is already a thing that happens and is happening. You could choose who the bonds are available to if you want to avoid a corporation or single entity buying them all up. Or have rules around maximum % ownership, things like that.
In terms of worker-owned co-operatives, and all that, If you want to understand how something like this might work on a larger scale, look into Germany's laws around employee ownership/participation, in corporations, as well as the Mondragon Corporation in Spain
Edit: Here's a link about Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
I suppose it depends on what is the collateral for the loan. Technically I think you could take out a business loan where the collateral isn't the business or its assets, but practically speaking what else would be used? Is the founder going to use their own personal property as collateral? Almost certainly not if they also have to share the profits of success.
For that matter how would banks work? Anyone working at the bank would share in the profits of loaning the depositor's money? That doesn't seem to follow the spirit of "sharing in the fruits of labor". The depositors are the ones laboring to earn the money, why should someone working at a bank get to profit from the interest earned on the fruits of their labor?
A solution to that would be the depositors earn the profit from loans, but then we're just back where we started. The more you can deposit and loan, the more you earn and labor becomes less and less significant. Also, what of the banker's labor then? Are they just paid a wage and have no share in the profits of the loans? That sounds very similar to a typical company today where the shareholders reap the profits from wage workers' labor. Will bankers be the working class of this new society?