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?
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!
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.
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 a fast food restaurant you partly owned. 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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
If successful employee owned businesses are formed and accumulate capital they should be able to perpetuate employee ownership
One issue is, that isn’t necessarily the priority the employee owners will have. I followed some news of a successful coop business where I lived, that sold the business because it had become worth so much that the payout was life changing money for all of those people, so they voted to take the money and potentially retire sooner rather than keep going as a coop.
Ahh fantastic point. There isn’t really an incentive for the individuals to maintain/perpetuate the institution.
Let’s be real. A company comes in and offer you a life changing, fuck you money that covers the rest of your life.
Very few people can resist that, me included.
I consider myself a socialist, but shit, I live in capitalism too and have bills to pay lol.
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.
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.
121·21 days agoHey OP, there is a reply from a user from lemmygrad.ml which you cannot see as sh.itjust.works has defederated from 'grad. Check out the post on lemmy.ml to see it.
Oh, I didn’t even realize this. Thanks.
Yea… I keep seeing lemmygrads replying to people who can’t see them because of defederation. Just because you can see someone, doesn’t mean they can see you/your reply, just keep that in mind.
Thanks, I also can’t see it. Discuss.onlinr should really federate lemmygrad
Read Engels - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, especially the section on Owenism.
The overarching goal of communism is for laborers to own the means of production instead of an owning/capitalist class.
No, the overarching goal of communism is to create a stateless, classless and moneyless society.
Employee owned businesses are the realization of communism within a capitalist society.
No. At best, you could say that coops are a proto-socialist element within a capitalist society. Firstly, I am using the term “socialist” as separate from “communist” here, and secondly, a proto-socialist element is a very different thing from an enclave of socialism within a capitalist world.
The simple problem is that capital is capital. A capital is a self-reproducing social relation that competes with other capitals in a sort of evolution by natural/sexual/artificial selection on the markets. The problem is capital itself, and the solution is to destroy capital. Creating a new type of capital that is less destructive, or one that operates under less destructive modes is fine for countries where development has not reached to the point that they can directly gun towards communism. However, for advanced, and especially late-stage capitalist economies, the task is not to pursue further development of market forces, because market forces have already matured. The task is to eliminate market forces (although this may take time).
Coops may give a more equal distribution of wealth amongst the workers, but the aim of the communists is to abolish wealth, because the very meaning of wealth is that a private individual gets to command the labor of others. That is the fundamental social relation that money embodies and facilitates. The only way to remove the power to exploit other people’s labor is to remove the ability to command labor. But if you cannot command labor, then money becomes worthless and your ownership of the coop doesn’t mean anything.
Are organizations focusing on this and I just don’t know about it?
Yes. A quick google search shows examples such as the international labor organisation
If not, what obstacles are there that would hinder this approach to increasing the share labor collective ownership?
Part of the fundamental problem is just that the bourgeois class is not stupid. They want exploitable workers and profits. If you deprive them of that, prepare to face their wrath as they abandon all pretenses of human rights or fairness or the sanctity of markets.
You’re proposing socialism.
Communism wants central authority.
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isn’t that anarchy?
I mean kind of yes but most people would not call them synonymous
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That’s two different definitions of Communism. Anarchist Communism can be likened to Commune-ism, ie a decentralized network of communes, while Marxists want Communism as a fully publicly owned and planned global economy, one that requires centralization.
Ah, gotcha. Thanks so much for clearing that up for me.
No problem! It’s a common misconception, even among Marxists and Anarchists, that both want the same exact society on a different time scale, when in reality it’s not really the same thing at all. Both are responses to Capitalism, but in different directions.
Thats so funny because you have it completely backwards. Communism, the end goal, is a moneyless, classless, stateless society in which hierarchy has ceased to exist. State socialism or “the dictatorship of the proletariat” is a interim step on the path to communism that aims to eliminate class and the social structures that perpetuate it.
Hierarchy would exist even in Communism, at least in Marxist conceptions. Class would not exist, but it won’t be until an extremely developed, extremely late-stage Communism where all distinctions in the division of labor can genuinely be moved beyond, well after class has been abolished.
I think long term we could find a place for those who wish to live in a decentralized commune free of hierarchy. I understand that the centralized vision of communist human progress essentially requires hierarchy but I think we will progress to a point where that becomes undesirable for a large amount of people. Eventually we will reevaluate what it means to even progress.
It’s more that eventually, in the far far future, as technology advances we may be able to erase it once and for all, but there’s no basis for being able to do so without it.
Imagine believing you can defeat capitalism without central authority.
Imagine not recognizing that central authority is the problem.
Central authority is a tool. In different hands it does different things, but if you disarm yourself you’ll lose.
If you do not choose your leaders they will choose themselves. We tried the whole leaderless, decentralized anti-authority thing throughout the 2010s. At best you might be able to collapse the central authority of the currently existing government regime, but what comes after that is always much much worse: civil war, invasion, or an even more repressive government regime. But, more likely, the movement will just collapse because it lacks the structure to actually sustain itself.
We need to be centralized and we need to be ready to assert our authority when the old one is destroyed, or we will lose.
Ok so lets say you get rid of the central authority in one fell swoop. What happens when the millions of people who really really benefitted from that authority or atleast believe themselves to benefit decide they want it back. Can a decentralized stateless society truly win political or military battles against them? I can tell you from history that everyone who has tried this eventually resorted to their own centralized authority in order to survive, failed, or both. Communist do not see centralized authority as good, we see it as a means to survive.
You know how a certain faction in the USA keeps screaming about "states rights?”
In my view, central and decentralized authority have their issues. And here come the down votes. The way the Russian voting system was explained to me by the good people of .ml makes a lot of sense and circumvents the worst issues of both.
Russian meaning Soviet, or Russian meaning the current electoral system? Very different.
Thanks for holding my feet to the fire. I believe current, but I could be mistaken, it’s been a long time since I read it, so forgive my sketchiness, but each region having elections until one person wins a final vote, to represent their constituency. I just checked Wikipedia and didn’t remember the representative voting part, so maybe my bad memory. Is there a post somewhere that compares and contrasts Soviet and Russian models?
Not sure about a post comparing the two, but the Soviet model was more comprehensively democratic, and functioned like this:
Thank you; as always, you’re very generous and informative. I have a friend in the mood to chat here, I will read and probably ask dumb questions later.
Therefore, socialism should be the ultimate aim.
It can’t be, really, as Socialism either progresses to Communism or backslides to Capitalism.
I truly believe a mixed economy is the answer.
All economies are mixed, the difference in designation of “Capitalist,” or “Socialist” depends on which aspect of the economy is principle, private or public. Communism is a post-Socialist society, a highly developed form of Socialism where private ownership becomes redundant and economically unviable.
Socio democracy and I’m onboard.
Edit: all socialist & communist dictatorship losers can go live in North Korea IMO. Read a history book ffs.
Edit2: my fault, I didn’t see I was on .ml Tank on tankies.
Social Democracy is just Capitalism with welfare, all of the “good” Social Democracies in the eyes of Social Democrats like the Nordic Countries depend on Imperialism to function and are seeing sliding welfare and worker protections as a function of being dominated by Private ownership.
America chose the route of social security and a mandated minimum wage instead of the state seizing the assets of robber barons and returning them to the communities that were responsible for their success.
You can see today exactly how well that worked out for the working class: minimum wage is below the poverty line and hasn’t been a living wage since the 70s, social security is being undone, and the government regulations that mandated a standard of living for working class Americans have been entirely dismantled.
This is the result of leaving the power within the capitalist class and allowing them to get away with their abuses without punishment: they do it again as soon as they get the chance.
Socialism IS democratic production, thus the political systems can reflect as such. Maybe more regional control, as I’m led to understand the Swiss cantons function like. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
The Swiss model isn’t Socialist, but I may be misunderstanding your comment.
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.
Just saw this on the news community. The linked article goes into some detail. I don’t know if these policies will achieve ‘full communism’ (or even if that would be a good thing), but education and health are good things for governments to focus on whichever way you look at it.
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.
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’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
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?
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.
- There are efforts to build emoloyee owned businesses around the world
- The system is pitted towards accumulation through antisocial behavior which is absent in democratic companies, hence they’re disadvantaged
- Communists and anarchists are revolutuonists, not reformists. The reason is that reform makes the inherently cruel system easier to bear and abolishment less likely.
- Some want to go the reformist route to try if it is actually achievable
- Most importantly and very evident in the US: 100 yrs of reform can be rolled back in one day. We’re seeing that reform is pointless.
Most importantly and very evident in the US: 100 yrs of reform can be rolled back in one day. We’re seeing that reform is pointless.
It also means swinging the other way takes a day. (Unlikely, but now far more likely than before.)
Absolutely not. Progressive politics arent easy to understand and need vastly more effort to implement than regressive politics. You’re arguing completely against history.
No they aren’t. A number of proposals have been kicked around for decades. There has not been the will to implement.
A number of proposals have been kicked around for decades. There hasniot been the will to implement.
That’s the point. A dictatorship of the bourgeoise will not implement progressive policies unless you fight hard for them. They will however, in the absence of resistance, implement increasingly reactionary policies in a heartbeat.
Political Economy is material, not based on the willpower of individuals. Reforms are hard to get because the ruling class doesn’t want them, and they control the levers that can enable them in the first place, hence why revolution is necessary.
In that case I suggest a history class.
There have been bloody protests over a long time, people died, there even was a revolution in france.
All for some small changes that are absolutely logical.
Now germany for example is reverting the 8 hr workday without any protests needed.
The ignorance of people is insane.
If conservatives can shape society with executive orders, progressives can as well.
Shaping change grassroots is great, but progressives don’t need to be bound by different rules than conservatives.
Edit: toning down my rudeness.
But again thats only technically true. There are no progressive majorities and fascist billionaires are manipulating the masses. Misinformation is ruling the discourse. What you’re sayibg is factually impossible at this point in time.
This is both rude and ahistorical, laws are passed based on what the ruling class wants. The ruling class cannot abide Socialism unless the Proletariat becomes the ruling class through revolution.
Watch your rudeness if you are going to be confidently incorrect.
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.
Join the IWW.
