this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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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] 3 points 5 days ago (3 children)

In terms of communism, as dreamt up by Marx and Engels, you can only turn a completely capitalist economy into a communist one. This has never been achieved, shortcuts have been taken. All communist states in existence have either turned authoritarian or to dust. So in my view, there aren't many communist movements left in the world. They may use the word but either M&E wouldn't like them or they don't really have a lot of support behind them. No support, no money. Capitalists have a lot of money. People with a lot of money tend to have the ear of their leaders. If an investor is interested it'll be real hard to go for an employee-owned model (excluding models with free publicly traded shares). If investors are not interested, the business may be failing and employee ownership is the last hurrah before the end. Capitalism tends to come up on top.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago
[โ€“] [email protected] -5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (5 children)

If you're vegan you don't decide to eat chicken just because chickens don't eat meat. They're still chickens.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 5 days ago

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

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