Topic: Richard D Wolff: Democratize the Corporations - page 3. (Read 515 times)

This sounds a bit like the organizational structure of food cooperatives:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_cooperative

However food cooperatives are a special case in that the owners / members are also the customers, so I'm not sure how well this concept can be applied to other businesses.



This sounds good in theory, but in practice the question will be where to draw the line on what to vote on. How much to produce? How to market the product? How the ads should look like? Running a business involves a lot of decision making and usually you delegate the concrete implementation of strategies to stratified levels of specialized management units for a reason.



I guess to some extend you see this with start-ups where founders and sometimes key members of the team get shares or options. The challenge that fully democratized corporations would face in this regard is incentivizing founders to actually start one. Why bother starting a corporation where you only own a fraction of the profits if you could start one where you can take as much as you want?



Profit doesn't need to be the primary focus but refraining from the usage of machines that could make a job easier doesn't sound practical. I don't think there's a farmer in the world that has complained about new equipment cutting his work time in half.

I think the votes of skilled, experienced or the best workers/customers in fields they are familiar with should be stronger. But we should be able to determine who is qualified or is best by rating them on how well they do their jobs, how satisfied people (especially customers) are about their works, how well/fast they do their jobs without compromising on good standards or without breaking any of the good rules... or without breaking too much rules.



Assuming a business want to vote on what new foods to start selling to their customers, how will they prevent voters from voting for bad/unhealthy foods? And how do they determine what food is actually bad/unhealthy, or what makes food bad/unhealthy? I think they will need to get the opinion of qualified people in that area, get the opinion of consumers on what food makes them healthy, full of energy, thinks clearly, happy etc. The consumers will need to explain how they really feel in particular period of time after consuming such foods. And people who are qualified/skilled/experienced in good food or nutrition should be available to verify/research/experiment on the claims to determine if the food do what people claim they do, with little to no side effects/problems to the consumers health.
So, such qualified people must have gotten lots of positive feedback or good reputations from users who have tried their  recommendations and have quickly become healthy/better on relatively cheap costs or for free. Their recommendations should be peer reviewed by other qualified people.

I think this and more can work pretty well with decentralized consensus driven businesses or companies. Can easily be corrupted in centralized system.

Everyone (worker and customer) should be rewarded according to how well they do their jobs. Just get everyone to agree on safe/good boundaries that should not be crossed, then reward them based on how well they do their jobs without crossing the boundaries

Marxist professor, Richard D Wolff lays down a plan for companies in a socialist economy. Here are some of the points he made about  "Democratize the corporations:"

- One worker, one vote
The decision about what to produce, when to produce, etc., is a collective decision instead of the top management decision. This means skilled workers have the same vote as the janitors.

- Workers-owners
The workers are also the owners of the company; therefore, they get to choose what to do with the profits.

- Not profit maximization
Worry about machines replace your job because it will lower costs? It's not a problem with this democratic corporation since the goal is to keep the workers happy.

Do you guys like this concept? I smell at least a part of the spirit is present in the DAO or DeFi. Feel free to comment

Source:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OzV6jtc9OQ
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc