It’s a meme
Directly seizing I don’t think would end well. I think it’s one of the short comings of communism.
Encouraging employee owned companies is where it’s at. But to be honest I’m not sure how you would incentivize that.
You incentivize the same way unions are growing now. Just show people the benefits and constantly shout it from the highest mountain tops.
So bb, tell me more about those sweet, sweet employee-owned companies for other readers’ benefit.
Tell me more about how employee owned companies are better at long term planning. Tell me more about how they’re concerned about balancing profit for survival’s sake with societal good. Tell me more about how they participate in the benefits of the free market via competition while not becoming all-consuming, profit-driven monsters. Tell me more about how they avoid stakeholder-chosen, sociopathic leadership in favor of leaders wanting the best for the company’s mission and its employees. Tell me more about the coffee shop branch that was shut down by its company and reopened as an employee-owned cafe. Tell me more about AAA. Tell me sweet nothings, bb
(And yes, I’m explicitly not talking about communism because it’s an emotionally charged concept, and i want to focus on things maybe people don’t know so much about)
A better case for worker cooperatives is just pointing out they satisfy the moral principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. The workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs, but in a capitalist firm, the employer holds sole legal responsibility for 100% the corresponding legal claim to the positive and negative result of the enterprise while employees receive 0%. In a worker coop, this mismatch is corrected
Encouraging employee owned companies is where it’s at.
What did you think “seize the means of production” meant?
But to be honest I’m not sure how you would incentivize that.
Oh, that’s simple - you get rid of the police.
Seize the means of production comes from a conceptually separate part of anti-capitalist critique then workers’ control/workers’ self-management. It is common to conflate these two strands of anti-capitalist thoughts. It is technically possible to have common ownership of the means of production without workers’ self-management and workers’ self-management without common ownership of the means of production. Universal worker coops only requires abolishing wage labor not private ownership
I don’t think the person I was responding to is ready for this level of analysis, okay?
