Most employee ownership schemes in the US are not cooperatives or collectives, but Employee Stock Ownership Plans and Employee Stock Purchase Plans . Basically, they allows employees to either buy or earn stock in the company they work at. However, just like how buying stock on the stock market doesn't give you meaningful influence on a company (unless you get a whole lot), neither do these internal stocks. Workers have different amounts of stocks based on either tenure or how much stock they purchase from the company. I worked at a company where the stocks wouldn't even vest for 5 years.
Thus, workers' interests are bound to the company (since their assets are bound up in the company's value), without necessarily getting any control over it. So, ESOPs can undermine worker solidarity as actions that could impact the company's bottom line (like unionization or strike action) could then directly hurt employees' retirement assets.
If the workers could collectively use those stocks to elect a representative of the worker's shares you can generate class consciousness with it. The general idea being that you create class war in the workplace because having the shares creates a monetary interest in paying attention to company decisions and what your representative is doing, which means workers learning significantly more about how their company is run and the difference of interests between the workers and the bosses. The idea being that this would generate massive amounts of class consciousness.
Without that representation though it just leads to worker confusion over their interests. It leads them to assuming that they share the interests of the capitalists.
He was hiding his power level that’s why the CIA hit him with the dementia gun
Unironically McCarthy tried to implicate him during the Red Scare because he was the boss of the Screen Actors Guild.
It was probably really awesome crack tho. If it was modern quality it would have never took hold.
Every man a petty-bourgeoisie, the yeoman smallholder dream for all! :amerikkka:
On his most recent podcast with Radhika Desai, Michael Hudson said (admittedly kind of off the cuff) Clinton was a more anti-union president than even Reagan. Interesting perspective, not sure how I feel about it but I've been thinking about it since heard it.
Although I'm sure Reagan is just being really disingenuous here, regardless.
It is a path that befits a free people
So we're going to stop it at all costs
He was shouting out cooperative capitalism. Basically it's where liberals and capitalists sometimes say "Communism is wrong about production for profit and the marketplace, but they have a point about worker exploitation so we should support worker co-ops."
This might be slightly veering into sectarian territory, but what would really be the difference between market socialism and cooperative capitalism? Both advocate for a decentralized form of direct worker ownership of production with a market mode of exchange.
In short, because it doesn't solve the problem of producing things for profit rather than for the social good. It just sort of tries to ameliorate some of the symptoms of it.
Here's a good video that goes into the problems with worker cooperatives as a potential solution to capitalism.
True it's not a solution to capitalism but I'd still join a worker coop without hesitation over the bullshit I'm stuck in now.
Market socialism in a revolutionary society is a transitional step where the market is still used to allocate goods, but there is worker-ownership of production. When it has been practiced, the incentive to keep people employed and businesses open has been in contradiction with their market performance which led to a lot of inefficiency. I.e. poorly performing firms received subsidies and other forms of support which drained resources that could go to other things and encouraged poor performance (you could get paid to do less through those subsidies)
Cooperative capitalism is a worse farce. Worker cooperatives prove the important but limited point that, while capitalists need workers, workers don't need capitalists. Eventually, even a model worker cooperative within capitalism will either be a boutique outlet for PMC moral guilt and thus has a low ceiling for growth, or the workers will have to become their own exploiters in order to compete with capitalist-owned firms in the market. The later is still slightly preferable because the workers can absorb the share that goes to capital, but the tendency of the rate of profit is to fall! Finally, if worker cooperatives ever posed a big enough threat to capital they would quickly be made illegal.
There is no 'outgrowing' capitalism! One solution: Revolution!
