Topic: Richard D Wolff: Democratize the Corporations (Read 515 times)

Off, I bookmarked this that day but it got late and then I forgot about it.

As I said it, even before Marx there was cooperation between manufacturers or farmers, in different forms. From the Roman empire to the guilds in medieval times people have always associated themselves, although not for the utopian principles of socialism but in order to compete and gain an advantage against the competitors, the principles of power in numbers. The best example of this is all of Europe's old and let's call them traditional regional products, people from different villages were competing against other villages and they were forming different types of associations to get their products better known and sell more at a more expensive price. Cooperation in anything, from agriculture to manufacturing doesn't mean socialism, socialists try to forcefully show these as a product of their ideology but it's obviously false.

Good idea? ..as you asked..
Of course yes, it has been shown to work in the past it will work in the future, the problems that I was addressing is when you start to impose this cooperation on parties unwilling to do so and when you run a business on other principles than economics. At that point, it turns from cooperation into bankruptcy.

To build huge farms, let's say for a cocoa plantation, capitalists need to acquire a vast area of land in the first place. There are two options (1) rent, which is uncommon due to the small profit margin, and (2) buy, which IMHO is too expensive for most capitalists.

Thus, the farmers/landowners create a co-op to gather all cocoa crops so that the chocolate factory can process it. Farmers get paid based on how many tons of cocoa they can produce. They can also buy fertilizers, insecticides, etc., in bulk with that co-op to get discounts so that farmers can save more money.

Good idea?

People have tried various socialistic models for workers-owned businesses so many times already, and practice shows that they only work on a small scale. Corporations like Microsoft, Apple and Amazon have started as small private businesses and grew into the global giants, but co-ops can rarely become even a medium-sized company. And it's not like "teh evil capitalists" have some conspiracy to kill every alternative company, it's just that the model isn't competitive enough.

Agree fully, but I think the state of our society currently is having a problem with this, and instead of working toward a meritocracy corporations are being strongly influenced by those so-called diversity quotas and other left-wing political ideas.  The net result is that companies are not always hiring the right person for the job, and I find that to be a shame.

I haven't watched the videos OP linked to, but I have to say that socialism has been tried and it doesn't work.  It's not going to ever work.  There certainly are problems with capitalism, but I think it is far superior to socialism/communism/anything else currently in operation. 

That about sums up my feelings--socialism sounds so great in theory, but when put into practice it always falls apart into various abuses of power, unrest, and ultimately becomes a system which is inferior to capitalism.

Yeah, it works, but there is a problem, sometimes it stops working and all the socialist Marxist bs doesn't mean shit and 2000 people are left unemployed
https://www.ft.com/content/26740e3e-2aee-11e5-acfb-cbd2e1c81cca

Even in the case of Mondragon, there is no worker's vote, no matter how they try to paint it's still a corporation, it's still a place where if business fails workers get the boot, it's a place where only a few take decisions and the rest obbey.
Marketing sells, and just as people are willing to buy things made by individuals or fresh stuff from the countryside they also become clients of Mondragon because it's about the people, not profits ! Until it's not anymore!  


Hmm, agriculture, agriculture, and profits...
Agriculture is no longer profitable without machinery and pretty soon there will be no more workers, the heavy work will be done by only a few and the real battle will not be with the weather but with the caterers and the chain stores or merchants who buy your stuff. Farming has become a sector where efficiency means everything, a few cents will make the difference between survival and bankruptcy, what you need are no longer workers who know how to plow but salesmen, probably of all sectors I see it as the less capable of keeping its same number of employees for a long time.

Local cooperatives as they were well before Marx maybe, guild-like business again maybe, but on a larger scale and keeping all the teachings of Marx, nope. It hasn't worked in the past it won't work in the future.

You mean like this?

Source

To be fair, there are many famous cooperatives, including Mondragon et al., so the plan must have some merit in it. Perhaps it will works in agriculture as it's not profitable without massive scaling.

Oh, this time it will work! Of course, this time we have the perfect plan!  
It will certainly not fail like the other quadrilion times we tried!

My first reaction when I read the title was something like, how about we democratize your ******* my dear profesor.


Makes perfect sense, you have 10 designers and 100 janitors so the next car will come with triple screen wipers, two fridges, and no seatbelts or airbags because real men want to die like real men, not pussies who spend all their times in an office and are afraid of hard work that makes a real man.


No problem, you'll just end up producing stuff 10 times more expensive and you will not sell any and go bankrupt.
But that's when socialism kicks in since the entire company is owned by workers, there will be no bankruptcy, everyone can come with money from their own pockets and keep the business alive....hmm, I have a feeling this plan has a flaw but I can't pinpoint it.  


Of course, they aren't because they've failed. Every leader that embraced marxism didn't embraced the real one, that's why it ended in failure.

Imagine that you live in a world where homeless populations are swelling in numbers off of the working class being screwed 24/7.

Imagine that CEO's gave themselves the raises that were supposed to go to the working class over the past 4 or 5 decades.

Imagine that a campaign is being pursued to replace human workers with robots. Workers are under attack and have been for a long time to an indifferent and apathetic public that remains asleep and has not noticed.

...

Now imagine that one day those responsible for these anti worker policies came to you and said "let's give workers more power by eliminating powers traditionally held by CEOs or shareholders".

Would you believe they care about workers after they spent the past 50 years killing jobs, killing wages and otherwise attacking the prosperity of the working class to such a ridiculous degree that homeless populations were significantly growing in size?




I bet china won't adopt this. The EU won't adopt it.

Its a USA only proposal. Innovation and progress are what makes america's economy and gdp great. Marxist professors aren't proposing this because they want capitalism to succeed, their goal is and always has been the opposite.




Socialism routinely throws trillions of dollars at untested ideas with no proof of concept.

Capitalism demands both testing and proof of concept before throwing even a million dollars at ideas.

.....to what end?

these ideas have roots in anarcho-syndicalism, going back to the 1800s. they weren't invented to strip jeff bezos of power.

the entire reasoning behind worker self management is the conflict between shareholder and worker interests. why would workers be interested in self-management otherwise?


revolutionary concepts don't usually work like that.

Chinese billionaire Jack Ma was forced to step down from Alibaba.

One might say he stepped down so that the chinese communist "workers party" could take control of it, indirectly.

This is happening right now to existing companies in various forms.

One might say the SEC tried to do this to Elon Musk utilizing different methods to reduce the control and influence he has over tesla.

The media is also trying to do this to amazon to some degree. Trying to force amazon to utilize unions and accept other measures to whittle away the control Jeff Bezos has over it.

Did I miss the part of the discussion were it was suggested to apply this idea to existing companies? Serious question, one loses overview quickly.




Or suppose someone proposed creating a currency, using a radical method that had never been tried or tested before...

The goal isn't to improve status quo for workers.

Its to strip majority share holders like Jeff Bezos(amazon) and Elon Musk(tesla) of control of their own companies. (And there are worse implications.)

Remove intelligent and competent leadership. Replace with unqualified puppets. Innovation and progress stalls as a result.

If anyone cared about the implications, they could test this on a small scale, on a trial basis to collect data on how it performs.

When people propose implementing wide sweeping measures that have never been utilized or tested before on a large scale. Isn't it a tiny bit suspicious?

If someone proposed building a house, using a radical method that had never been tried or tested before. Would it sound like a good idea to risk everything on a one shot solution people know nothing about.

Would people be willing to gamble the stability of their economy and job markets on a "solution" that was never vetted through a testing process.

Sorry, I'm late to join the party.
I've been busy guessing the slots 

One person, one vote, is the principle of democracy. In the election, a billionaire vote weights the same as a peasant vote. Just like government-level democracy, not every decision requires a vote.

Relax mate. It's only an idea

Let's take UBI out of the equation for a moment, since this case is still at the corporation level. To change a government is the ultimate goal of this experiment.

There are some success stories other than the infamous Mondragon Corporation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cooperatives

Furthermore, Legend says that FC Barcelona is a fan-owned cooperative.

True!

I don't think anyone is suggesting that, it would be absurd. Worker representation at board level would not mean pick a random worker, or even consult every worker, merely have someone (or more than one) person there who represents the interests of the workers rather than the interests of the executives or the shareholders.

I may be cynical, but I suspect this is often a token PR gesture. Difficult to imagine a board discussion running along the lines of "We've made an extra $1bn this year!" "Great! Let's give half of it to charity!"

I'm not suggesting that companies don't have costs, of course they do. The question is more about whether companies should be run solely for the benefit of shareholders.

Yes, exactly. And if the company contributes to the wealth and well-being of wider society, too.

worker ownership doesn't imply every executive decision requires a company-wide vote. i don't see why they couldn't elect perfectly capable operational executives.

think of it this way. shareholders just extract profits from the company. they don't actually provide any value. so what's wrong with cutting them out? if the goal of a company is not to generate profit for shareholders but to provide a good living and workplace for its workers, what's wrong with that?

I'm sorry but these are the most irrelevant examples-you compare warm with soft. All that you have described will not return for the simple reason that it is a passed stage that has shown its inefficiency in comparison with the current model.

And for the rest - with the proposed scheme in the post, it is impossible to reorganize any of the existing companies because otherwise it will collapse in a week.
If you set a requirement for such an organization for new companies , there will not be a single successful example. People will stop wanting to start a business because no one wants to. Imagine yourself-you want to eat a salmon sandwich, but before you buy it in subway, you need to ask permission from your parents, your wife and children, all relatives. If you get it - then the employee at the checkout must get permission from EVERYONE in the company and only then if the stars converge you will get your sandwich.
Such a management system generates an unthinkable and unreasonable amount of both paper and organizational work.
And finally - do you really want a cleaner with an elementary school education to have a voice in decisions about the company's development? I don't want to because it's already not a company but an anti-cafe where everyone discusses [something] and then goes home without coming to a consensus.


Many companies are engaged in charity work. Many companies have salary grades and all sorts of bonuses for employees. Google, for example. Do you think that it is cheap and free to maintain an entire corporate campus? Everything in this world has to be paid for, either with money or without it. And you know very well that it is better to choose the first option than the second..

Imagine chinese communists sitting around a boardroom table. Smoking weed and brainstorming ways to convince americans to destroy their own economy. So that china can emerge as the #1 global power.

....

"Americans love democracy. Let's convince them granting unqualified, uninformed, uneducated and undisciplined workers executive power to make key business decisions is a good thing."

"Would they fall for that?"

"We spent decades lowering their educational standards. Feeding them unhealthy GMO food to stunt their intelligence. Bombarding them with cultural garbage like the kardashians in an effort to diminish their cognitive capacity and common sense. There is a chance it could be successful."

sure, as some sort of band-aid solution. it will keep people from starving in the streets, basically.

it's just not an answer to the systemic economic problems we face, especially with the specter of large scale job automation constantly hanging over our heads. it's a simple expansion of the welfare system, which itself only exists as a way to give poor people just enough to subsist. it doesn't fundamentally change anything. it's just a way to offset the effects of rising costs of living and rising unemployment.

If you leave it to the market to determine what is fair, in a society where there are more people than there are jobs, then this leads to exploitation. Should we really allow wages to be forced down to (or below) bare subsistence level? Should we allow monopolies and cartels? Medieval feudalism? Indentured servitude? Excessive inequality is bad for everyone. Rich people hoard money. Poor people spend all of it and keep it circulating in the economy. There needs to be something in place to act as a brake on the excesses of capitalism. Whether this should entirely be government responsibility, or whether it should start by changing company structures and cultures instead is open to question. But surely something is required. People who are more talented, have great ideas, have more drive etc, do deserve to be paid more. But the people at the bottom deserve to at least be treated like humans. Remember we are talking about people working long hours for low pay.

I agree with you on this part. If a job can be automated out, then do so. Inefficiency is stupid. But instead of removing a job and putting the profits in the hands of the already wealthy bosses, why not use the money instead to fund a job that benefits society as well as keeping someone in employment?

There are success cases and failures; it depends on which one gets cherry-picked. For me, if incompetent (and lack of commitment) people gather in a group to build something, they will fail whatever the system they use, and vice versa.

But Marxists argue that Leninism and Stalinism aren't pure Marxism, and the first Capitalism that replaced Feudalism ended in failure as well, so maybe after several trials, there will be a successful Marxism case. We just don't have enough experiments because of the deep love of Capitalism. Even Democrats are capitalist; they just pushed for more "socially responsible capitalism."

Err, you sound like a Marxist