Thinking of Cuba and how a large portion of their workers are self employed through second jobs. Many of them seem to have an entrepreneurial spirit. Is there room for someone saying “I want to start a restaurant” and going to a workers council to see if the community needs it? My brother once said he doesn’t want socialism because it means “my dream of starting a business won’t ever happen.”

Is there a way for Socialism to accommodate an individual’s desire to initiate an enterprise without people getting exploited?

  • bananon [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Entrepreneurship is a very interesting phenomenon. Let’s ask, why does someone want to become an entrepreneur in capitalism? I think there are two main reasons.

    First, someone has a passion, like being an ideal chef, which is a hard ideal to achieve as a worker, because maybe they want to make X but the restaurant only serves Y. So, they make their own business to cook what they want.

    Second, someone wants to make money, and more importantly, not have their own value be stolen by an employer. So, they become their own employer to reap their full benefits, and if they acquire any employees later, reap some of those as well.

    In both of these cases, the act of starting a business is an attempt by the individual to liberate themselves from bondage under capitalism, to have control over what you do and ownership over what you make from it. Very good ideals that I agree with, but as an individual act that maintains the status quo, entrepreneurship only allows you to liberate yourself by joining the winning side and becoming a capitalist.

    In a hypothetical socialist society, I see no reason why your brother couldn’t start a business, so long as the workers have democratic control, himself included, and he does not exploit them by taking their surplus value as profit. In this way, starting a business is less of becoming a sole owner, and more of becoming a founder, sort of like how the creators of a government can make a democracy that can give power to people in the future who have no claim to its creation or ownership.

    A new question, however, is how many people would want to become entrepreneurs in a socialist society? If entrepreneurship is a means to achieve control over what you do and ownership over what you make, and socialism promises to do both of these things, you can just as well achieve these ideals by joining an existing socialist business. Now, if you wanted to do something but everyone else voted against it, then you have a reason to start your own business, but now your business is fundamentally different than where you left, filling a new hole that has never been filled before.