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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

“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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

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.

Ok, to put more clearly, I have no definition of "utility" and therefore no objection to it. I am objecting to what is implied by the term "maximise utility"; in a communist mode of production, nothing is "maximised". The implication in that phrasing suggests to me that it refers to an intention to maximise some measurable productivity, which is not communist.

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?

Investing surplus-value into the firm itself is exploitation... The workers still extract surplus-value from themselves. What's not to get?

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

I never said that such an economy is not a market. It is a market, which is why I am opposed to it.