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?

  • drhead [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I don't really think that everyone is thinking of that. Keep in mind that entrepreneurial spirit often gets conflated with innovation/invention, as in, a lot of people want to start a business because they want to make something new. And this is definitely an aspect of entrepreneurship because of how often new business ideas have some sort of twist that they think will give them an edge in the market.

    I would say the correct attitude would be that if, in an example, Mr. Kalashnikov has a dream of starting an enterprise to design a machine to make it easier to trim lawns, then a socialist society should a) have a mechanism for determine if this is beneficial for people, or that we at least have the resources to chance it; and b) help Mr. Kalashnikov find comrades with similar interests to help, and c) provide startup capital in some form. Capitalism provides these in the form of the free market (which only very roughly approximates consumer benefit), and the other two are his problem but in return he gets full control. So what mechanisms do we provide that still provide outlets for individual initiative?

    The whole "one guy with an idea" thing often is a trope to the extent that it is used to justify autocratic workplace power, but that's not a reason that we shouldn't have systems in place for people with ideas to put them into action, we should just provide more equitable ways to do it. And when you think about it -- why WOULDN'T we want to extend this to the masses? Think of how many people throughout history "had an idea", but had no capital to put it into action? We could actually somewhat reasonably make it so that virtually anyone with an idea has a chance to create an enterprise out of it. We could potentially get a lot more innovation with such a system.