this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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Why don't communist movements focus on creating and nurturing employee owned businesses? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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?
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[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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 a fast food restaurant you partly owned. Is that kind of what you're saying?

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Got it. That makes much more sense. Thank you for the clarification! And very clear explanation

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

No problem!