[gruez]

>We pay all workers their fair share of the socially necessary production time.

What is a "fair share"? Suppose we're in a SaaS business. Does someone working in customer support earn more or less than a SWE? What makes the difference (or lack thereof) fair?

>If the organization needs surplus to invest in equipment, we requisition it from the production with consensus from the workers.

What is a "consensus"? What if 2/3rds of the people want to invest but the other 1/3rd doesn't? Would they forced to contribute? Are how are you going to "out maneuver the pudding headed capitalists" if you can only seek to raise capital from your employees?

[barfbagginus]

Many businesses know how much they'll lose if they don't do customer service, and know how much they'll lose if they don't do software engineering. But most businesses keep those factors hidden from the customer service and engineers. And they try to give as little as possible to both, and give as much as possible to investors and executives. You're okay with that, but don't think it could be any other way. Why?

Just calculate your opportunity costs, talk about it transparently, and negotiate socially necessary contribution factors for each department and each role. And sure, there will be departmental politics as each department tries to argue that it's much more critical to the business than another. But with openness, that's much better than that absolute f*ery we see in most companies. In most companies only the executives have access to that level of information, and everyone else is f*ed.

Consensus means everyone agrees or nothing happens. My team is four peeps, and we're pretty good at persuading each other into consensus, especially since we're open about our profit sharing and tend to make good cases for our initiatives. If we can't all agree then we don't do it, and just live with it.

And the pudding headed capitalists are gone. I took them to the curb with a number of maneuvers that I might want to write up one day, but may not have been strictly legal. And even with all of that, I tried very hard to accommodate them. But they burned me, and I went nuclear. Things were much better after then.

Once you no longer have any exploitative extractive sunnuvab**es around, you think they're going to make money just by having money, it's pretty easy to be open and honest, and reason through things.

[gruez]

>Many businesses know how much they'll lose if they don't do customer service, and know how much they'll lose if they don't do software engineering. [...]

>Just calculate your opportunity costs, talk about it transparently, and negotiate socially necessary contribution factors for each department and each role.

How does this work in practice? Going back to the SaaS company example, the company arguably wouldn't exist without SWEs, but could theoretically limp along by ignoring all customer support tickets (see: google). Does that mean the opportunity cost is 100% for SWEs and therefore they should get 100% of the revenue?

>Consensus means everyone agrees or nothing happens. My team is four peeps, and we're pretty good at persuading each other into consensus, especially since we're open about our profit sharing and tend to make good cases for our initiatives. If we can't all agree then we don't do it, and just live with it.

That works well with a small team where you're all friends, but how do you prevent bad actors from using their veto powers from sabotaging the group? eg. hungary and poland abusing their veto powers to block proposals that all other EU members support? As the group gets bigger the chance that you have a bad actor is going to increase.

>And the pudding headed capitalists are gone. I took them to the curb with a number of maneuvers that I might want to write up one day, but may not have been strictly legal.

That doesn't answer my question. You're at a capital disadvantage because you can only raise capital from employees and only if they all agree. That might be fine for a capital light companies like a consultancy, but you can't possibly expect the workers at a nuclear plant to stump up the entire construction cost of the plant.

[barfbagginus]

Sorry, the truth is I don't have very good answers for how to manage large asset industries except to smash their assets and raid whatever value we can, and shift them into community trusts and small cooperatives.

I'll attempt to think of a model for

1) A fully open source saas that needs ethically sourced capital to build a data center

2) A community that needs capital for a nuclear power plant

I'm not entirely sure that we can't just obligate Capital holders to give the capital to the workers. So for example in the case of the nuclear power plant where the workers are to stump up the capital, they could visit the estates of the wealthy people living in the area, and requisition the capital. That's kind of like taxes. Or a protection racket.

In the interest of the conversation, I will try to think of strategies that don't involve violence or refactoring of the rule of law. But keep in mind that significantly limits things.