Everyone here seems to be talking about co-ops... And I'm really confused by the conversation in this thread, alas,

I worked for some years for a manufacturing company that was 100% employee owned. We were a multinational manufacturer for: wire and cable, aerospace, and medical. The company began around 1972, started the EO process in the early 90's becoming 100% employee owned by 2000.

The [National Center for Employee Ownership] (nceo.org) is a good resource for businesses looking at employee ownership. The most common ESOPs are manufacturing companies in the states last I heard at one of the nceo conferences.

The obstacles that I see, is that most companies have Investors. Obviously we all know what the investors want as they own the stock. It takes a generous leadership/company founder to sell their stock to the company for employee ownership. It's a long process with lawyers and other legal hurdles. Not impossible, but finding generosity in the white collar business class, especially today, is not common it seems. You must have initial generosity and care for your employees from the initial owners. They decide to go employee owned or not. They either see the investment EO is, or they keep greedy.

The founder of the EO I worked for sold his last stock to the company for the same price he sold his first stock (which in the ten-ish years it took to get to 100% EO, raised considerably).

Profit sharing is dope. Basically we all got an extra large paycheck every quarter. This company I worked for paid $3-$4 more per hour to start than any other manufacturing company in the area, and bennies began the day you were hired. They literally held financial literacy classes for all employees, to better understand our financial reports, as the company was super transparent. They believed that the best ideas come from the ones running the machines, and the founder often could be found sweeping floors of his shops to better know his employees and their struggles. In 2019, the company stock was valued at over $6K a share.

The original owner passed away, then covid hit, (I left) then the leadership changed to new people who never met the founder. It's gone down hill since. Im to be paid out this year, and the stock is half was it was when I left. I still carry a card with the original founders mission and values listed for the company. That card is no longer what they follow. It's been sad to see.

However, I still believe Employee Ownership is a solid pathway to restoring the middle class.

Folks who began in the 90s were retiring after 25 years with the company with $1-$2 million dollars in their esop accounts alone. I know what a Roth IRA is, what it means to diversify, and what dividends are all because of this company's financial literacy classes.

It also is possible a company becomes too big to support the EO model. This company was hitting that point around the time I left, they told us "we're hiring lawyers to make sure that it doesn't happen", but as I've watched the stock price drop year over year, yeah bet-

Because communists wont/can't orginize in numbers that would allow for it.

It can be difficult for coops to play on the capitalist market.

A company with a top-down hierarchy can make decisions much faster than an organization where the decisions are made ground up through internal democratic policies. The democratic process also very likely limits the co-op from doing shady stuff.

It's possible though, but it requires a really good community backing.

Co-op is using capitalism to fight some harmful effect of capitalism itself. Many Conmunist movements believe there are better and stronger alternatives.

This can be especially true for industries that are centralized by nature. You can't set up production ready silicon factory or power plant today to set up a co-op. The more practical alternative is to set up union to protect rights of workers.

Thats more syndicalist in nature, also the very idea is absurd. Why on earth would you willingly play the capitalist game with the capitalist rules when the entire system is rigged against the workers? What can possibly be gained? The way I see it if organizations like the IWW started making co-ops then the FBI would make sure they fail.

Something something they do sometimes

Employee owned businesses are the realization of communism within a capitalist society.

Right, but we want the whole system changed. Coops are inherently at a disadvantage in monopoly capitalism.

I think worker cooperatives are sometimes bashed too much but worker cooperatives are fundamentally a lower petty-bourgeois form of organizing. Cooperatives can only be an ally to the movement of the proletariat and not a driving force. That said, they might have minor use.

I have been thinking about how to sublate the lower petty-bourgeoisie into the movement of the proletariat. I think it would be cool for a bunch of workers in a worker's state to make a worker cooperative as a startup, make it big and then sell the cooperative off to the worker's state. As long as the land and the banks are owned by the state anyway, the worker cooperative would be financed and largely owned by the people indirectly anyhow.

But in terms of pre-revolution, worker cooperatives may help educate the workers who are part of it, and cooperatives can help ease the transition of class suicide for petty-bourgeois and labor aristocracy class traitors.

There's a bit of a trouble for educating the workers compared to unions due to the class situation and nature of ownership. But I think it would be less harmful for a small business owner to create a cooperative than to go out of business during an economic bust and with unexpected declassing become a reactionary blaming their debt on minorities.

I think the trouble is where to focus the limited time and effort of the communists. It's not that cooperatives are bad necessarily, it's just that it's more helpful and important to focus elsewhere.

I do think some communists get weird about strata other than the proles proper such as the reserve pool of labor, lower petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy. The foundation of the communist movement should be the proletariat but these other strata are not inherent enemies. There's not a fundamental antagonism of exploiter and exploited here.

The hell of capitalism is the firm itself, not the fact that the firm has a boss.

The forces of the market and of capital do not go away just because the workers own the company. In worker-owned cooperatives, the workers exploit themselves, because the business still needs to grow. They simply carry out the logic of the capitalist themselves on themselves, using their surplus value to expand the business's capital, and paying for their own labour-power reproduction. i.e., the workers all simply become petit-bourgeois.

There are extant organisations (some political parties, some NGOs) that push for more workers' cooperatives, and none of them are communist nor call themselves communist. If you believe in a cooperative-based economy, you are not a communist. I don't mean that as an insult, it's just a fact, the same as if you want, for instance, the current US economic system, you are not a communist. You can advocate for coops but you would fare much better in that political project if you didn't try to put it under the banner of something it's not, and something far more controversial than just "worker coops are good" anyway.