[alphonsegaston]

There's already a solution for this - worker ownership of companies with corresponding democratic rights.

We've just emerged from an era where benevolent tech companies were supposed to stand up for us and reflect our values. Instead, they put on a polite face, said the right words to us, and then did whatever served their interests irrespective of our concerns. Repeating this scenario is foolish and only going to worsen the situation.

[djsumdog]

I like the fictional future on Mars in the Kim Stanley Robinson novels where there are no companies, but co-ops. Your time goes into the co-op and everyone owns a portion of that for life.

This is a greater dramatic shift and I'm not sure if we'll see it in our lifetimes, but it would be nice that, even that first high school job at a cinema would earn you shares in that company equal to the time you put in, for life. In some ways, that would make more sense than basic minimum income.

[erikpukinskis]

It will happen. The limiting factor is we need to get the friction for forking an existing co-op down close to zero. Unfortunately most people who work for a co-op still think of it as proprietary ("this is my co-op, and we don't have any openings right now. If you want yours you have to start your own").

Intellectual resistance from co-opers isn't the main bottleneck though. Management infrastructure needs to be all digital and open source, and forking needs to be technically easy. That means the accounting, staffing, and operations procedures all written out in code, rather than in QuickBooks on some computer in the stock room. On github, with one-touch deployment to Heroku, or some equivalent. Ethereum maybe.

Once we're there I think it will be fairly easy to sell the employees on the "you should spend some time training people who are forking your business" concept, since they are (mostly) already amenable to anarchist (you don't really own anything) values. At that point it will be viral and anyone who is providing ops and logistical support for that ecosystem will get very rich.

[throwaway71958]

>> It will happen.

As someone who was born and raised in the Soviet Union and spent the last 20 years in the US, I hope to dear god this doesn't ever happen. I don't know where else I'd have to emigrate if it does. To Mars maybe?

What you're describing is essentially "collective enterprise" or "kolkhoz", where nominally you own a share in a venture, but in practice you don't own shit, and as a result you don't consider it "your own", and as a direct consequence of not actually owning property, you just can't bring yourself to care. This gives rise to a lot of unsavory and damaging behaviors: from not actually working all that hard, to outright stealing. They had a saying in the USSR: "Everything belongs to the kolkhoz, so everything belongs to me." So who's to judge you if you e.g. steal a couple of tons of kerosene to heat your hothouse in winter?

Communists had to _shoot people_ who had even a modicum of entrepreneurial skill ("kulaks"), and take away their property in order to get the rest to join after the October Revolution of 1917. I suspect that's how things looked to the revolutionaries back in late 19th century. They've never experienced their proposed ideology on their own hide and therefore did not see its rough edges and downsides. All of this collectivism in the US can exist only as a part of a broader staunchly capitalist economy, and then only during the "good times" when people's needs are more or less met and they can spare some energy on pursuing ideological purity.

All of this discussion about communist ideals from people who have never experienced anything anywhere close to what it's like is like a bad nightmare to any Eastern European who actually has a first hand experience living under a communist regime. Truly, those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

I, for one, will sacrifice everything I've got to prevent any even remotely communist development of events here in the US. Yes, that does include not considering Bernie "Money grows on trees" Sanders seriously. Communism does not work. It never did work. It never will work. I'm 100% certain of it.

Cue people explaining to me that the "USSR never actually had communism" and "you're holding it wrong". You're missing the point.

[igk]

I model you a bit like my father, who grew up in a Soviet satelite state, if he had ended up in the US instead of a country with strong socialist history: he will argue for free education, basic income, national healthcare, nationalization of infrastructure and resources (all of which are pretty socialist ideas), but will immediately revert to referring to kolkhoz and aparatschiks if any politician or activist openly endorses socialist views.

The main point where I will agree with you is that USSR and FORCED anything is wrong. But what would be so wrong in expanding and evolving the cooperative model and letting workers owning their companies become the norm? To me it is all about making that the more efficient way to run a company, so people do it voluntarily. This could be accomplished by changing some of the laws regarding liability, taxation etc to reflect their intended purpose (or by going full way to corporate personhood and making something like a transnational impossible, i.e. if you want to do business in that country, you need to get a "corporate passport"). The current US system is broken. USSR was broken. Let's try to mix and match and add new things. Marx was probably right in his diagnosis of the fatal tendency of capital to consolidate and turn free market capitalism into crony capitalism. The efficient solution to this seems to be the german, scandinavian, canadian mixture of the two. Heck, even china on the more dystopian side "works" because they combine the two

[erikpukinskis]

You were flagged, but I don't see any rule violations so I vouched for you. I share many of your same fears. But your argument is a slippery slope argument, so I can't really argue against it. Maybe you're right, and the worker-owned Pizza co-op down the street from me will slide into Stalinist authoritarianism. We'll see. I think the fact that it is voluntary and you are at will to choose an ownership-based enterprise instead is a key difference from the Soviet Union.

I'll also point out that the vast majority of U.S. employees don't have ownership stakes and they still show up to work and work hard. Many people (retirees, the rich, other do-gooders) even work hard for organizations and don't get paid.

I appreciate your recounting of history though, and share your concern. The biggest fear I have is that decentralization of operations will make it easier for exploitation of workers on a small scale in secret. I also do share your fear that my understanding of how much resources will be needed is off because I grew up in a country where those resources were presumed.

But these fears are not enough to stop my work. Capitalism has led to my neighbors in the Bay Area being regularly shot, and that's a real problem I am dealing with today. So my concern over those shootings is greater than my concern about the theoretical future ones you are cautioning against.

You're wrong to assume that us naive Americans have no idea what it's like to see your friends and neighbors be shot for political reasons.

[throwaway71958]

The point is that your pizza co-op can only exist as a non-dominant form of organization in a wealthy society. Once it becomes the dominant form, everything goes to hell. There isn't a single country in the history of this civilization where this wasn't proven true. Now, you could argue that we're not "cultured" enough to live onder such utopia, but my retort will be that you need to figure out a way to experiment with it at scale first without subjecting everyone to what you think (but, obviously, not _know_) is better. As they used to say back in the day in the Soviet Union "test it on dogs first". Even Lenin (patron saint of communist revolutionaries and a murderous dictator) ended up realizing he's wrong about collectivism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy

"Exploitation of workers" is actually the greatest thing about the West. Those workers wouldn't even be able to care for themselves if they weren't "exploited", and by creating the societal pressure to do so, through moderate poverty (very few people in the US know what real, actual poverty is), and general disapproval of leisurely lifestyle, you motivate people to be productive, which ultimately benfits society. Then, once they acquire a modicum of wealth and property, they get to "exploit" others by paying them a mutually agreed upon fee in order to have some work done.

I'm technically a "worker" who is quite happy to be "exploited" by my capitalist overlords, as long as I get paid a few hundred thousand dollars a year. Sure, they make millions, and I make much less but so what?

[Apocryphon]

People here are arguing for more companies like REI or Mondragón, and you are talking about proletarian revolution in a situation completely different from the economic and social devastation caused by World War I. This is completely premature hysterics.

[meheleventyone]

Workers co-ops predate the USSR, one of the oldest the Co-Operative Group was founded in 1844 and is still going. Whilst what you say sounds terrible it's also far from the only working model such organisation could follow.

[BadassFractal]

Thank you for sharing that.

[r_smart]

There's nothing that precludes people from creating employee owned companies now. Where I live there are several of them, and there's the possibility that the one I work at is going to transition to that.

If they don't exist in large numbers now, I'd have to think there's something about them that makes them struggle to be viable. Human nature most likely.

[matt4077]

Every German company with more than 500 employees is required to have 1/3 of board members elected by the employees. Above 2000 employees it's 1/2. For these, and smaller companies as well, there are more requirements to allow participation in the decision-making process "on the ground".

It's hard to measure the effects, but it's generally thought to have at least lead to less-bitter labor conflicts, because there's constant communication between the parties.

[eli_gottlieb]

>This is a greater dramatic shift and I'm not sure if we'll see it in our lifetimes

Many industries (and I don't mean natural food stores) have had cooperatives for decades. Agriculture is a big one, but industrial cooperativism is very real too. There are even already a few tech firms run as cooperatives.

The way to push the shift is to build a cooperative corporate structure which allows neatly for outside investment without compromising the interests of the worker-owners.

[throwaway29292]

If the root cause of this problem is that

-companies violate privacy rights to gather more big data

-more data translates to more investment (I'm seeing this happen at my current company right now)

-VCs, who are the top of the food chain, are the ones pushing for higher returns (like any rational actor would do)

-then shouldn't the government step in and regulate this area?

Define standards that would limit the amount of funding/valuation based on 'user as product'?

[alphonsegaston]

The root of the problem is the authoritarian structure of modern enterprise. I know many good people who work at bad companies, who, were they given the chance to have their say, would change things wildly for the better.

[HarryHirsch]

You'd rather say that at-will employment and especially the tight labour market outside tech enables the authoritarian structure of the modern workplace.

[alphonsegaston]

No, I meant expressly what I said.

A democracy cannot function when it harbors inside itself a system in which the survival of most people is determined by something organized like a dictatorship. The poor conditions in the modern labor market have been engineered by these authoritarian systems in collusion with the governments they corrupt with their outsized wealth and power. It's intended to disenfranchise people politically and economically to ensure a small class of oligarchs maintains control of both systems.

[dredmorbius]

At-will employment, tight labour markets, etc., are a significant part of that engineering.

I suspect you and HarryHirsch are in violent agreement.

[eli_gottlieb]

Eh, I can totally imagine a cooperative that monetizes user data.

[matt4077]

Of course the government should do something about it. But I'd bet most people would agree that killing or stealing are immoral, even in the absence of laws against it. In fact, every one here has, on innumerable occasions, not stolen something even though they could have been sure they wouldn't be caught.

Your game theory applies to people as well: if you find a wallet on the street, it doesn't make sense to give it back to the owner.

And yet, you'll find many people who do give it back. That's because we have evolved emotions such as altruism, or empathy. Those are still useful, even when most of morality has been formalised into criminal law, because societies tend to work better (and are more fun) if you can trust people, at least for the small stuff.

There's no reason we shouldn't expect corporations to follow a similar path,

[throwaway29292]

True, some corporations might be altruistic, but probably not all. Murderers still exist in society, and for those we need laws to guide everyone. If all laws and police disappeared suddenly, I think it would take less than 5 years for societies to descend into complete chaos. Laws still seem necessary?

[matt4077]

Absolutely – and in the case of corporations, I'd say there is still a lot to do to improve the law governing their behaviour. But since chances for that seem to be quite low currently, and because even a perfect legal system cannot always capture every eventuality, there should be certain behaviours that are generally frowned upon, just as there are for people.

One example I recently heard was from a woman who was fired after attending her husband's funeral. That probably happens less than a dozen times per year, and might just not warrant a law. It still shouldn't happen.

(The problem, of course, is that with people our sense of morality is largely guided by other peoples' reaction to our behaviour. Corporations will never have the same sense of shame, and the closest analogy – boycotts – rarely work)