Asklemmy

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.

Hey 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.

I think worker cooperatives are sometimes bashed too much but worker cooperatives are fundamentally a lower petty-bourgeois form of organizing. Cooperatives can only be an ally to the movement of the proletariat and not a driving force. That said, they might have minor use.

I have been thinking about how to sublate the lower petty-bourgeoisie into the movement of the proletariat. I think it would be cool for a bunch of workers in a worker's state to make a worker cooperative as a startup, make it big and then sell the cooperative off to the worker's state. As long as the land and the banks are owned by the state anyway, the worker cooperative would be financed and largely owned by the people indirectly anyhow.

But in terms of pre-revolution, worker cooperatives may help educate the workers who are part of it, and cooperatives can help ease the transition of class suicide for petty-bourgeois and labor aristocracy class traitors.

There's a bit of a trouble for educating the workers compared to unions due to the class situation and nature of ownership. But I think it would be less harmful for a small business owner to create a cooperative than to go out of business during an economic bust and with unexpected declassing become a reactionary blaming their debt on minorities.

I think the trouble is where to focus the limited time and effort of the communists. It's not that cooperatives are bad necessarily, it's just that it's more helpful and important to focus elsewhere.

I do think some communists get weird about strata other than the proles proper such as the reserve pool of labor, lower petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy. The foundation of the communist movement should be the proletariat but these other strata are not inherent enemies. There's not a fundamental antagonism of exploiter and exploited here.

Read Engels - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, especially the section on Owenism.

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 think that's Richard Wolff's whole thing. I think he's communist? At least socialist.

It can be difficult for coops to play on the capitalist market.

A company with a top-down hierarchy can make decisions much faster than an organization where the decisions are made ground up through internal democratic policies. The democratic process also very likely limits the co-op from doing shady stuff.

It's possible though, but it requires a really good community backing.

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.

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.