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?
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.
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
- Bootstrap with worker’s own investment, or
- Get investment from credit unions, or
- 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.
It makes sense that this is a limiting factor. However, I think it’s good that outside investors are kept out so that the business can serve the interests of its employees long term. Once the gears are in motion, I think it could work. Also, if these worker cooperatives were formed by people willing to work for basics like food and shelter initially, as well as equity, then they have a better chance.
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.
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 Capitalist 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!
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.
Got it. That makes much more sense. Thank you for the clarification! And very clear explanation
No problem!
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 the fast food restaurant you work in. 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.
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.
If you’re vegan you don’t decide to eat chicken just because chickens don’t eat meat. They’re still chickens.
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.
Yeah I don’t understand the metaphor, either.
Read Engels - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, especially the section on Owenism.
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.
I suspect a big part is tax and investment law.
A bunch of poors (like me!) who band together won’t have much capital to buy inventory or equipment. I doubt banks and investors would lend to the bunch of poors, since they have a non-standard decision making structure.
That’s gonna make it hella hard to get started.
Hard to get started, and not Communist, either. OP is confusing worker owned private property with the collectivized system of Communism, hence why though Communist orgs support cooperatives as less exploitative than regular firms, neither is the basis of Communism.
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 communists and socialists and anarchosts 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.
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.
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 people are allowed to come together and work on problems without asking someone else for permission first.
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
It really doesn’t—which was Marx’s whole project as a critique of political economy, not “communist economics”, not “Marxist political economy”, etc.
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
Communism abolishes the individual as economic subject, and the conflicts of interests found in a “market”. Communism abolishes exchange, and abolishes economies. So, no, there is no “market” in a communist mode of production, even by your definition.
So like neoclassical economics as a framework was formalized and developed mostly during the hundred years following Marx’s death so I don’t understand the idea that any of his criticisms were oriented at neoclassical economics, or could’ve possibly taken it into account.
Communism abolishes the individual as economic subject, and the conflicts of interests found in a “market”. Communism abolishes exchange, and abolishes economies. So, no, there is no “market” in a communist mode of production, even by your definition.
I have to be honest I’m not really seeing what you’re saying here because my definition of a market would include just like a neighborhood of people that has like a local nonprofit grocery store that is managed by the people who live there specifically so that people can have food and for no other reason. but maybe like a handful of people notice some problems with the way the grocery store is being run, but are having trouble actually getting people to listen to them so they decide to just show everyone what they mean by starting their own grocery store in the neighborhood too under the same exact community managed model. And I also understand that neoclassical economics gives me extremely powerful tools to analyze situations like that.
I’m just curious is that sort of economy like completely incompatible with your understanding of communism? Also, I would appreciate it if you don’t say something like “well in capitalism ‘stores’ are places where people spend money so there’s literally no way anything remotely resembling this could happen in communism, not even if the food was free”
I don’t understand the idea that any of his criticisms were oriented at neoclassical economics, or could’ve possibly taken it into account.
Many things happened after Marx’s death and his critique still applies to. There may well be reactionary theories formulated in the future that my current politics would take account of anyway. Neoclassical economics is a continuation of bourgeois political economy that Marx wrote against. Not to mention that Marxists who have continued Marx’s project after his death, have very much written against modern economists.
a neighborhood of people that has like a local nonprofit grocery store that is managed by the people who live there specifically so that people can have food and for no other reason. but maybe like a handful of people notice some problems with the way the grocery store is being run, but are having trouble actually getting people to listen to them so they decide to just show everyone what they mean by starting their own grocery store in the neighborhood too under the same exact community managed model
That sort of thing you describe is a common conception of what life ought to look like by a lot of anarchists, which is opposed by communists precisely because it preserves exchange, implies a division between town and country, and implies the preservation of many things which communism abolishes. It’s also worth noting that when we talk about communism as a mode of production we are talking about society as a whole; for instance, a kid deciding to start a lemonade stand in a communist society wouldn’t recreate class society as the kid is doing exchange.
A lot of communists stray away from “positive” concepts of communist society because it’s much easier to derive what communism doesn’t have than what it does have. We can, of course, look at humanity before class society, but a lot of things have changed since then, and it is unlikely that the abolition of class would lead to the primitive pre-class societies that used to exist. I’m disclaiming that not as a cop-out but because I think it would be facetious if I tried to give you an outline of what communist society would look like when really I don’t think anyone can know for sure. But, most certainly I can say that what you outline does not sound like something which would exist on a large scale in a communist society. Most communists believe that central planning is a necessary part of a communist mode of production, myself included. Deciding that you don’t like a “grocery store” and deciding to start your own sounds rather like capitalism, and suggests an individualistic economy rather than one where society as a whole collaborates. In a communist mode of production there is no economic distinction between individuals, between “grocery stores” as you call them, or between the individual and society. Like I said above, one person deciding to start a “grocery store” wouldn’t cause the rebirth of class, but if that’s happening on a large scale that doesn’t sound like you’ve achieved a communist mode of production.
“well in capitalism ‘stores’ are places where people spend money so there’s literally no way anything remotely resembling this could happen in communism, not even if the food was free”
Things being “free” doesn’t necessarily make it not a store or not capitalist, but a lack of exchange (among other things) does suggest communism, and I don’t think the concept of a “store” makes sense without exchange. The abolition of property abolishes exchange. For instance, a food bank is not communist despite being a site where items are distributed for free; its existence relies on the alienation of the means of subsistence from a group of people, ie the existence of property. (that is also ignoring the fact that most food banks rely on a voucher system, which again is exchange, but if we were to pretend that food banks just give away food to anyone who comes and asks)
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
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.
Have you ever considered that the model of free market under perfect competition in neoclassical economics doesn’t actually say that the market needs to be powered by the financial profit motive, just that the firms need to maximize their own utility? It’s just that in capitalism these get conflated because it’s almost always one and the same thing. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. If you have an economy composed entirely of mission-oriented nonprofit organizations for example that compulsively reinvest all their excesses and internalize all of their external cost, you can still analyze it as a free market under perfect competition, and ironically, it works even better than it does for capitalism.
I am opposed to “maximising utility” because I am a communist. Production should serve needs, not production for the sake of production.
compulsively reinvest all their excesses and internalize all of their external cost
Ok, still exploitation.
I can see that those are your political beliefs. You are welcome to have those political beliefs. OP is asking about communists, and communists do not want this, so this is rather orthogonal to the question.
I am opposed to “maximising utility” because I am a communist. Production should serve needs, not production for the sake of production.
Is that not what “utility” means? Serving needs?
The verb “maximising” suggests a measurable “utility” which can be “maximised”, rather than needs which are either met or not.
needs are either met or not
When you have hundreds of millions of people in your country, it’s not as black and white as that, even just logistically speaking…
I see “maximizing” in this context (describing utility) to imply doing it as well as possible.
Though I suppose, “optimizing” would be a better word to use.
I’m just curious what you think utility is and also who do you think is being exploited in economic institution that literally has to internalize all of the external cost? Also believe it or not I didn’t actually express any political beliefs here so I would appreciate it if you didn’t just assume that because I’m challenging you on your conception of things, it means that I disagree with your politics
what you think utility is
“Utility” is not a concept I subscribe to per se, unless you just mean use-values in the same sense Marx uses them. I am responding to the concepts you are using. In a communist mode of production, production is, in the famous quote, “according to need”; in a capitalist mode of production, production is divorced from need, and we find production for the sake of production.
who do you think is being exploited in economic institution that literally has to internalize all of the external cost
Marxists use the word “exploitation” differently to its colloquial use. “Exploitation”, in Marx’s critique of political economy, refers to the extraction of surplus-value. I’m not sure if you know what that means or not. I can explain it if you want but you can also look it up; it’s a pretty basic part of Marx’s critique.
Also believe it or not I didn’t actually express any political beliefs here so I would appreciate it if you didn’t just assume that because I’m challenging you on your conception of things, it means that I disagree with your politics
I’m assuming you’re not a communist because you don’t seem to be familiar with communist views, and seem to be advocating for/in defence of a mode of production that is not communist. I don’t know how exactly you label yourself politically but it seems based on this short conversation that we can exclude communism from the list of possibilities, meaning we disagree.
“Utility” is not a concept I subscribe to per se, unless you just mean use-values in the same sense Marx uses them. I am responding to the concepts you are using. In a communist mode of production, production is, in the famous quote, “according to need”; in a capitalist mode of production, production is divorced from need, and we find production for the sake of production.
Well, since you still haven’t told me what you think the word means in like a formal, well-defined, academic sense, I can’t really tell what your objection to it is. Like at the end of the day it’s just a word, and i have never actually run into a situation where if I thought about it for five minutes, I wasn’t able to actually reconcile the academic concept of utility with Marxism. And in practice, thinking about utility and realizing the highly arbitrary nature under which utility is realized under capitalism, is one of the main things that drew me to leftist economics in the first place.
Marxists use the word “exploitation” differently to its colloquial use. “Exploitation”, in Marx’s critique of political economy, refers to the extraction of surplus-value. I’m not sure if you know what that means or not. I can explain it if you want but you can also look it up; it’s a pretty basic part of Marx’s critique.
I certainly am not using it in a colloquial sense and in fact, I have been using it in the Marxist one the entire time which is why I described a market economy where literally all of the firms are compulsively required to reinvest the very surplus revenue you describe back into the firm itself. So again I’m asking you: in that situation, where is the exploitation?
And then the next important thing is to simply realize that such an economy, whatever you wanna call it (because for some reason you seem like you don’t wanna call it a market and I don’t understand why, but fine) is completely consistent with what is called a “market” in neoclassical economics, and so even if for some reason you think it’s really valuable to say that an economy stop being a market when everybody in the economy isn’t trying to mindlessly get ahead anymore, you can still analyze it as a “market” and resisting this extremely useful framework is only making your own life harder
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.
Huh. Someone I know is trying to start a business with a longer-term aim of a co-op. Business insurance for themselves is going to run 30-40k minimum per year!
Perfect example. Insurance is an entire industry of blood sucking middle men producing absolutely nothing.
Good luck to your friend. Sorry they have to support a useless leech corporation instead of, you know, paying that money to actual workers.
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.
The only state in my country that has a communist party in power has been consistently leading national rankings in education and health, so I guess they’re doing something right.
Hey, that’s great. I’m not sure it’s a way to reach full communism, but good on them.
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.
I understand the sentiment. I’m wondering about the efficacy of the strategies to achieve those end goals.
Join the IWW.
