Asklemmy

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.

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.

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.

According to the UK's Labour Party's report on worker co-operatives in 2017, the main difficulty is access to credit (capital). It makes sense since the model basically eliminates "outside investors". It has to

1. Bootstrap with worker's own investment, or
2. Get investment from credit unions, or
3. Have (national or local) government to back it up

Even in the above cases, the credit is often not large or cheap enough for the cooperatives to be competitive. (There are examples in the report that serve as exceptions, I highly recommend giving it a read.)

So at least from this, I'd think the appropriation of means of production would be more fundamental rather than being a simple result of some special way of organizing.

In my country, the communist party (very watered down version of communism but still) is behind/aligned with most unions and they defend that companies should either be owned by the employees (co-ops) or employees should have a stake and saying on companies governance.

We have another left-wing party that even defends that failing companies should be returned to the employees, with government backed funding (loaned) if necessary to recapitalize the business and relaunch the company under employee governance.

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.

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 idea for a lot of communist ideologists is we don't need these hyper competitive corporations. The end goal isn't "higher GDP" (or more salary), it's "better quality of life". I think most unions are like that.

Hey 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.

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.

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.

Read Engels - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, especially the section on Owenism.

The overarching goal of communism is for laborers to own the means of production instead of an owning/capitalist class.

No, the overarching goal of communism is to create a stateless, classless and moneyless society.

Employee owned businesses are the realization of communism within a capitalist society.

No. At best, you could say that coops are a proto-socialist element within a capitalist society. Firstly, I am using the term "socialist" as separate from "communist" here, and secondly, a proto-socialist element is a very different thing from an enclave of socialism within a capitalist world.

The simple problem is that capital is capital. A capital is a self-reproducing social relation that competes with other capitals in a sort of evolution by natural/sexual/artificial selection on the markets. The problem is capital itself, and the solution is to destroy capital. Creating a new type of capital that is less destructive, or one that operates under less destructive modes is fine for countries where development has not reached to the point that they can directly gun towards communism. However, for advanced, and especially late-stage capitalist economies, the task is not to pursue further development of market forces, because market forces have already matured. The task is to eliminate market forces (although this may take time).

Coops may give a more equal distribution of wealth amongst the workers, but the aim of the communists is to abolish wealth, because the very meaning of wealth is that a private individual gets to command the labor of others. That is the fundamental social relation that money embodies and facilitates. The only way to remove the power to exploit other people's labor is to remove the ability to command labor. But if you cannot command labor, then money becomes worthless and your ownership of the coop doesn't mean anything.

Are organizations focusing on this and I just don’t know about it?

Yes. A quick google search shows examples such as the international labor organisation

If not, what obstacles are there that would hinder this approach to increasing the share labor collective ownership?

Part of the fundamental problem is just that the bourgeois class is not stupid. They want exploitable workers and profits. If you deprive them of that, prepare to face their wrath as they abandon all pretenses of human rights or fairness or the sanctity of markets.

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-

Something something they do sometimes

It's really hard to generalize about leftist groups. The communists that feel this way have formed co-ops, or are cooperating with anarchists to do something like syndicalism (focused on unionizing existing businesses).

But the methods to start and grow businesses in a capitalist country inherently rely on acting like a capitalist. Getting loans requires a business plan that makes profit, acquiring facilities and other businesses requires capital. Local co-ops exist because they can attract members and customers that value their co-opness, but it's very hard to scale that up to compete at a regional level. It's not impossible, but it's hard to view it as an engine for vast change.

Communists that focus on voting are delusional (in my opinion) but like all reformists they view the existing government as the mechanism to make widespread change.