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.

If you're vegan you don't decide to eat chicken just because chickens don't eat meat. They're still chickens.

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.

This isn't really accurate, from a Marxist perspective. Marx advocated for public ownership, ie equal ownership across all of society, not just worker ownership in small cells. This isn't Communism, but a form of cooperative-based socialism. There are groups that advocate for worker cooperatives, but these groups are not Communist.

Essentially, the reason why cooperatives are not Communist is because cooperatives retain class distinctions. This isn't a growing of Communism. Cooperatives are nice compared to traditional businesses, but they still don't abolish class distinctions. They don't get us to a fully publicly owned and planned economy run for all in the interests of all, but instead create competition among cooperatives with interests that run counter to other cooperatives.

Instead of creating a Communist society run for the collective good, you have a society run still for private interests, and this society still would inevitably erase its own competition and result in monopoly, just like Capitalism does, hence why even in a cooperative socialist society, communist revolution would still be on the table.

If successful employee owned businesses are formed and accumulate capital they should be able to perpetuate employee ownership

One issue is, that isn't necessarily the priority the employee owners will have. I followed some news of a successful coop business where I lived, that sold the business because it had become worth so much that the payout was life changing money for all of those people, so they voted to take the money and potentially retire sooner rather than keep going as a coop.

According to the UK's Labour Party's report on worker co-operatives in 2017, the main difficulty is access to credit (capital). It makes sense since the model basically eliminates "outside investors". It has to

1. Bootstrap with worker's own investment, or
2. Get investment from credit unions, or
3. Have (national or local) government to back it up

Even in the above cases, the credit is often not large or cheap enough for the cooperatives to be competitive. (There are examples in the report that serve as exceptions, I highly recommend giving it a read.)

So at least from this, I'd think the appropriation of means of production would be more fundamental rather than being a simple result of some special way of organizing.

I think communists and socialists and anarchosts and broadly leftists do argue for cooperatives and workplace democratisation.

The reason they maybe don't do it enough is because those businesses in our present environment will get beaten by exploitation mostly.

Co-operatives by nature will sacrifice profit for employee conditions because they have more stakeholders (and shareholders) to be accountable to. Lower wages through exploitation will tend to reduce costs and allow the capitalist businesses to drop prices, and outcompete opponents and secure more investment capital due to higher market penetration, which will allow them to invest in their business, incl. Marketing and product development, and outcompete the more fair sustainable business, until they corner the market and can jack up.the prices and bleed consumers dry and push for laws/lack thereof to exploit employees and cut costs further.

In my country, the communist party (very watered down version of communism but still) is behind/aligned with most unions and they defend that companies should either be owned by the employees (co-ops) or employees should have a stake and saying on companies governance.

We have another left-wing party that even defends that failing companies should be returned to the employees, with government backed funding (loaned) if necessary to recapitalize the business and relaunch the company under employee governance.