Abolish the overtime exemption for computer systems analysts, computer programmers, and software engineers. Make it unprofitable to extract labor until someone dies. All other actions are impotent.
Most western countries are democracies because people got fed up of being exploited by dictators (sometimes called "kings"), removed them and setup a system in which they elect who makes the decisions. This system has issues but is less bad than dictatorship.
Yet, companies kept their hierarchical power structures.
Workers should decide who makes the decisions. If they don't wanna invest time into selling their product, they hire a salesman. If they want somebody to make long term projections, plan what gets worked on and communicates with other teams, they hire an assistant. And they decide how much he gets paid according to how much value he actually brings them.
Managers should be assistants.
Let's have MORE companies, not fewer.
Put in strong escalating taxes to incentivize cooperation between small companies instead of bowing to the math that encourages consolidation otherwise.
But if there's no private ownership, how would the different companies in the market get created and exist?
Don't let a bad implementation ruin a good idea. Instead, look at what specific ways the implementation fails to learn for next time.
The more interesting question is: Can communalism work without the community having a deep attachment to the idea? The Hutterites achieve that through religion, but if you threw a group of random people together into a similar economic situation without some kind of strong belief system would they endure or would it quickly devolve back to what we see in the broader economy?
It's not (just) about a bad boss. It's about somebody being in a position of power who captures the entire value you produce (sales, IP, patents) and decided what fraction out of it you deserve.
> But if there's no private ownership, how would the different companies in the market get created and exist?
I don't see the problem. Every company starts with just a few people, maybe some machines, maybe some real estate. The issue starts when these people call themselves "founders" and everybody else becomes an "employee"[0].
Even though they are all doing the same work, employees get paid per unit of work, founders capture the remaining value produced. And then they hire "managers" who should be there to help workers be more productive but instead end up serving their own goals (see the Gervais principle).
And yes:
1) the founders took some risk in starting the business. They should get rewarded based on the amount of risk and their investment. Not in perpetuity.
2) some companies need a large up-front investment. Similarly, the investory should get rewarded based on invested amount and risk, not by owning a large chunk of the company in perpetuity.
Key point: as time goes on, the amount of work done by regular "working class" people completely outstrips the initial investment. The reward should go to people doing the actual work.
[0]: literally meaning "person being used"
Sure, the difference if whether the hierarchy is determined from the top or bottom. Top leads to unfair benefits for the top layer. This is called exploitation.
> wide variety of reasons
Can you give me examples?
Did you notice I specifically said decisions should be made democratically?
Are those two not in direct conflict?
Please, stop pattern matching, and actually consider what I wrote.
RMS said whenever he promoted software freedom in the US, everybody pattern matched on communism and he had to explain the difference between voluntary and compulsory. This is the same problem.
This is related: https://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-a...
I don't know if it's right or wrong (and to what extent, most natural systems are complex with a multitude of factors influencing them) but I can easily imagine a similar principle applying to companies.
If you wanna expand by starting an office in the next town over, you need a way to communicate with it, otherwise it's just a separate business with a cash injection to start.
So you have a point.
But the core issue stands - the power hire/fire people, determine their salary and also capture their entire economic output leads to a power imbalance.
- A bunch of examples here: https://old.reddit.com/r/cooperatives/comments/p23rxr/what_a...
- Some more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_ownership
- Oxide computer company - idk how exactly the ownership works but AFAIK all workers except sales have the same salary.
- The early idSoftware AFAIK worked similarly with all 4 core gamedevs getting paid the same
Note that nothing says everyone has to get paid the same, it just ends up happening in some examples.
You can tell we're not talking about communism because the previous commenter said "economic system", whereas the whole concept of an economic system vanishes with communism. It does not imagine an economic system would serve a purpose when scarcity is no longer a constraint. Hence the whole no state, money, or class thing.
You, yourself, literally wrote the original description of what we are talking about. How did you manage to end up so confused?
> Did you notice how communism was always about central control with only superficial or absolutely no elections?
And no. That sounds like you are thinking of a dictatorship. Probably a dictatorship at the hands of a political party that includes "Communist" in the name, granted, but thinking of that as communism is like thinking the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.
Communism is science fiction that is imagined on the same basic premise as Star Trek. It is not about central control. As before, it rejects the idea that a central control (the state) would even remain. Marx and Engels hypothesized that the proletariat would have to temporarily seize control from the capitalist elite in order to usher in communism, but even if you somehow managed to confuse communism with their work, that isn't really central control either. What they pictured is still closer to being a democracy, except one that that excludes the bourgeoisie, similar to how women were historically excluded from democracy.
All that said, co-op businesses have seen slow but steady growth for decades now.
Wrong on many levels. They don't capture your entire value. They don't decide what fraction you deserve - that's what the market decides.
>Even though they are all doing the same work, employees get paid per unit of work, founders capture the remaining value produced. And then they hire "managers" who should be there to help workers be more productive but instead end up serving their own goals (see the Gervais principle).
False, they don't all do the same work. Some people do more valuable work than others.
Explain.
> They don't decide what fraction you deserve - that's what the market decides.
No, they decide based on what they can get away with given the market situation. Do they pay the maximum the company can afford? No, they pay based on a negotiation in which they have more power and more information.
> False, they don't all do the same work.
You open a shop, you do the restocking, you man the cash register. Then you hire your first employee. He does the same thing. You own the entire company, he doesn't even a fraction.
You start a software company with a few friends. You write code, do marketing, talk to customers. You hire your first employee. He does one or more of those things. You own 100% of the company, he owns 0%.
> Some people do more valuable work than others.
Yeah, sure, how many times more productive can one person be than others doing the same job? Jobs doing real positive-sum productive work are typically within low multiples, maybe one order of magnitude. Jobs of people who are in positions of power which allow them to capture a percentage of their "underlings" output pay orders of magnitude more.