Post a meme about small businesses
Fine I'll support big businesses
Fucking liberals can't even imagine a world where the workers seize the means of production lol
Unsuccessful capitalists are still capitalists and still need to be smashed. 🏴
And they're absolutely the worst. Not only are they constantly in a panicked state at the looming threat of being thrown back into the labor pool, all the tepid labor reforms the big companies sort of have to abide by don't apply to them.
DO NOT SMASH THE FAILED CAPITALISTS, THAT IS NOT APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOUR EVEN IF IT'S CONSENTUAL
Small business owners are the absolute worst. I worked for a few in my youth and they feel so entitled to exploit labour and get legit mad when they can't?
I took one guy to the labour board for unpaid wages, not even run-of-the-mill exploitation, and I thought he was going to get violent in the mediation 😬
Did you win? Sounds like you probably did if he got so 
about it. On the other hand, just because one of them throws a hissy fit at the drop of a hat or gets physically threatening doesn't mean they failed to get their way.
I knew and had to spend a lot of time with a former small business owner who lost her ~100 employee business and ended up living the worst nightmare of any capitalist: being a wage worker. Having to exist on the other side of the class divide and get exploited rather than do the exploitation went a long way in humbling her I think, though it happened a decade before I met her. But she still remained one of the most petulant people, totally unable to admit to having any fault or being wrong in any way and was always just so childish for the most asinine reasons. (Though to be fair I've also known life long proles with similar issues).
Small business owners really do put the "petty" in the term petty bourgeoisie.
I did win, lol. There wasn't much question that I would win - his argument was that I didn't give notice so he didn't need to give me my last pay cheque 🤷♀️
I had one get a $12M bonus for the three stores they owned while telling me they can’t afford a raise or full time because things are tight for everyone
Then left the check on the desk after doing an e-deposit or whatever - then leaving for the day at 12:30
Lol what's most hilarious about this is that if they are getting a bonus it implies that they are not actually small business owners, they are at best franchisees. So the business outsourced the risk.
Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois
That's right I'm posting Trotsky on .ml
The first small business owner I worked for got busted for human trafficking because one of his slaves died on the job. He was able to somehow maintain not only his business but also was able to go free without any consequences. I got out of there very quickly. From then on I internally scream whenever people start worshiping small businesses.
Let the small businesses follow the rules of their dearest 'freemarket'. Why should I interfere in the proletarianization of the petite bourgeoisie?
My city allows small business owners to have lower minimum wages and less benefits offered than big corporations.
There is a "cost of living" small grocer in town that has boogied up my old neighborhood. I'm glad if the workers are at least earning more money, but it's the same problem as a "good king" — good or bad, it's not like you have any real democratic control over your own workplace.
Where are we on co-ops anyway?
Co-ops are generally good and worth supporting. They are undeniably a better alternative within capitalism to the standard business ownership model and they can be great for raising worker's class consciousness. That said, the ones you might see in the imperial core or any capitalist nation are not a threat to capitalism itself (if they were, they wouldn't be allowed to exist). This is in part because they are always going to be fighting an uphill battle in a competitive labor market where all other businesses get to exploit their labor, forcing co-ops to operate at a disadvantage. Even as they are at a disadvantage especially compared to large corporations whose scale alone give them a massive advantage over all small businesses, co-ops in the imperial core still benefit from the primary contradiction of our age which is imperialism, the extraction of super-profits from exploited nations. Which means you will still have co-ops that are reactionary when it comes to dismantling capitalist hegemony. In other words, the workers of a co-op may jointly own their own business and the portion of the means of production within the purview of that business, but ultimately the means of production include all the economic inputs from the rest of the world, like the minerals that co-op must buy from mines in exploited countries or the basic food ingredients grown on land in the global south. This puts the material interests of even the most egalitarian first world co-ops at odds with communism. It has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread that small business owners occupy a spot in the social hierarchy where they are squeezed from both above and below in terms of their material interests, well this is also true of co-ops but perhaps doubly so.
In short, yes worker co-ops are good, and if you can support them over other businesses it's a good idea to do so. If you are fortunate enough to work in one, great. But don't expect them to have more revolutionary potential than workers unionizing. You will be disappointed if you think that worker co-ops are the vehicle towards socialism that some of their biggest proponents often like to say they are.
They cost money to open and run. Best case is a group of somewhat wealthy friends pool their money to start a co-op. Idk how lending policies are towards worker co-ops.
I worked in a metal fab shop and ppl talked about unionizing. I brought up a co-op or other employee owned models but they said 1 machine alone can easily be $500,000+ for a shitty used one and none of us could get that kind of money.
