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Why does working class not simply eat the rich?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Answering as an American:
Because the working class understands that “elites” are a necessary decadence and side effect of free markets, and they are fine with billionaires if it means those free markets enable them to live like a king from the 1800s, and they are not consumed with narcissistic jealousy of people that have more than them. Plus they understand history, and they see how class wars worked out in the Bolshevik revolution.
I consider myself rich AF, because I have a roof over my head, AC, and healthy food to eat, which is RELATIVELY easy to come by in America. Tradespeople like plumbers and electricians are doing very well in America, and if they are reasonably fiscally responsible and save their money well, then they can retire comfortably after 15-20 years of work.
Many people all over the world understand all of this, and they clamor to immigrate to America.
between 15 and 25% of Americans are facing food insecurity. 25% of Americans are facing bankruptcy due to medical debt. 10% of Americans have no medical insurance. 63% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
That is not doing well, that is very fucking bad. And no, free markets do not require billionaires. We can get rid of all billionaires and distribute the money to the workers who actually generated that value, and still have healthy and relatively free markets.
Would you choose to be paid in stocks instead of cash? That's exactly what "distribute money to the workers" means: Workers become shareholders of their company and profit through dividends and increased stock value, but they also have the risks of no dividends and decreased stock value if the company has a bad time. Lots of companies actually offer these "employee stocks".
Yes, all workers should get stocks in the companies they work for.
I would take the stocks, but most people seem to prefer cash instead.
CEOs get cash as well, worker should get both.
This is already possible with many companys, but most workers choose 100% cash.
Not all that many. And it should be in addition to the cash, not an alternative. Workers should own at least 50% of all companies, and be able to outvote the board on any decisions that affect the company.
There is a better alternative to this, especially since a lot of the time this stock is virtual/ non voting stock which doesn't really change the power dynamic it doesn't give the workers control over the capital. The workers resonably should be equal owners for example in a worker co-op.
Beeing in a cooperative would come with a finincially liability. You participate in both profits and losses, you even sometimes have to provide additional capital if losses were too heavy, and it's usually not so easy to leave the cooperative. Not many workers want that. They want the upside, the profits, of course, but are not willing to accept the downside.
If there are limited liability business co op should also be allowed to be limited liability, also large losses where the business is in actuall cash flow trouble don't happen so frequently because they are generally less speculative, and have the option to instead of laying people off to reduce hours or pay temporarily. They largely don't even want the profits, they want to know the can live by their own therms, and work without being needlessly managed by people with no idea of the core business.
Even with limited liability, your shares on the cooperative are always at stake. The cooperative needs money to invest, which comes from their owners, which are the workers in that case (they trade a fraction of their salary to get shares of the cooperative, to participate in later profits). If the business fails, the money is gone and you would have been better of taking 100% cash. You have a combined risk of losing both your income and your savings.
Also, there a conflicts of interest. Look at automation, for example. A worker's cooperative would probably decide against automation, because the workers want to secure their own jobs, but in the long run the cooperative would go bankrupt as competitors could produce more efficiently and charge lower prices. That might be the reasons why such cooperatives are not very widespread.
So it's the same as getting virtual stock as compensation just that you also get control over how the business is run. Which in my opinion makes the business better, you don't seem convinced but you don't seem to have a good reason for why because ..
isn't really an argument against coops, similar shortsighted thinking can frequently be found in other forms of enterprise, if a private enterprise can rationalize automation a coop can as well and they can both fail to come to that conclusion. It's just that control over this automation is in the workers hand, and even if all the workers automate themselves away without finding other places to create value, the profit of that automation wouldn't be centralized quite so aggressively, because all (former) workers share in it. The workers fundamentally don't need to preserve their own jobs, rather they aim to preserve their livelihood.
I can offer a different explanation which partially explains their uncommon existence, which points again to the central conflict under capitalism, which is the unwillingness of conventional banks to approve credit for coops, making it much harder to start anything in the first place, particularly large capital investment like automation.
In the financial sector, cooperatives are very common actually. Germany has a long tradition of "Genossenschaftsbanken" - banks that are owned by their customers. In the US, there is Vanguard for example, the seconds largest investment company, that is also owned by their customers.
Well, customers, not workers. Businesses are successfull when their customers are happy and purchase their goods and services, and they pay also the workers salary. Those cooperatives can have an competitive advantage over other types of corporations, as they don't need to make external investors happy, and are less prone to hostile take-overs.
If workers have significant influence over the business strategy...yes, automation wouldn't kill their shares, but it would kill their jobs and their monthly income, and most likely the yearly dividend is not high enough to replace your salary (unless you are an old worker close to retirement, maybe).
There are historical examples of workers cooperatives, however. In post-war Germany, there were real estate cooperatives where, instead of paying rent, you build new houses and get to live in one of them in return. Today, these cooperatives also collect rent but instead of construction work new tenants are required to invest into the cooperative, to they kind of transformed from worker-owned to tenant-owned.