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Why don't communist movements focus on creating and nurturing employee owned businesses? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by Yondoza@sh.itjust.works to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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The overarching goal of communism is for laborers to own the means of production instead of an owning/capitalist class. Employee owned businesses are the realization of communism within a capitalist society.

It seems to me that most communist organizations in capitalist societies focus on reform through government policies. I have not heard of organizations focusing on making this change by leveraging the capitalist framework. Working to create many employee owned businesses would be a tangible way to achieve this on a small but growing scale. If successful employee owned businesses are formed and accumulate capital they should be able to perpetuate employee ownership through direct acquisition or providing venture capital with employee ownership requirements.

So my main questions are:

Are organizations focusing on this and I just don't know about it?
If not, what obstacles are there that would hinder this approach to increasing the share labor collective ownership?

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[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml 12 points 2 days ago

Central authority is a tool. In different hands it does different things, but if you disarm yourself you'll lose.

If you do not choose your leaders they will choose themselves. We tried the whole leaderless, decentralized anti-authority thing throughout the 2010s. At best you might be able to collapse the central authority of the currently existing government regime, but what comes after that is always much much worse: civil war, invasion, or an even more repressive government regime. But, more likely, the movement will just collapse because it lacks the structure to actually sustain itself.

We need to be centralized and we need to be ready to assert our authority when the old one is destroyed, or we will lose.

this post was submitted on 17 May 2025

202 points (95.1% liked)

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