It's interesting that your idea of a free society is forcing businesses to organize in a certain way. Doesn't sound very free.
You're reading that in to what I said. Look again.
"We could, for example, alternatively have a free society where most firms are collectively owned and managed by their workers."
I do not in any way advocate for the use of force to achieve this, and you have assumed I did. Tho I did not mention it, my philosophy is explicitly voluntary. I argue that it makes economic sense for workers to organize in this way, and that they should do it for their own benefit.
> You're free to create a firm collectively owned and managed by workers right now, nothing is stopping you.
Yes you are right I can. That's what makes this plan great! It is voluntary and doable today. However what I want to achieve is not just one more co-op. I want to live in a society where all of the goods I depend on are mined, manufactured, and delivered by cooperatively run firms. To achieve that level of change I have to go on the internet and talk to nerds about why it's so great for all of us to do this thing. So that's what I'm here to do. You may have misunderstood my comment as a complaint that I want the government to fix my problems for me, but again that is a misunderstanding of my position.
EDIT: I am doing things in the real world to achieve these goals too (see my profile), I only make the point about talking about it online because I tire of the “go do it then no one is stopping you” line. I am on HN to discuss theory with theory nerds.
That is, do you take issue with the fact that one person, employing many, profits much more than the people he employees or that he profits much more than his fellow man on the street?
The question of the self employed person making huge profits is another one. I advocate for a somewhat selfless mindset (beyond meeting basic needs for your well being and happiness). So if a single individual can make huge profits, that means it's costing the customers a lot of money. In my mind, a person making a lot of profit could save a lot of people money if they shared how they are solving these problems, and recruited others to help with the effort. So that might look like: make their project open source and help others join in the effort to make their solution more accessible. I see this as best for society.
What then of the food and shelter this entrepreneur requires? As long as food and shelter are hard to come by, the entrepreneur will be incentivized to withhold their solution from society and keep charging high prices to ensure they meet their own needs.
The solution I see is for society to provide for the needs of all. This can happen by ensuring that food and shelter are abundant. If we do that, we can see more developers and entrepreneurs willing to share what they know for the benefit of all. I believe that if executed well, this strategy can lead to a better and more innovative society than one in which every person is incentivized to withhold their knowledge from others.
Going back to your original question - it's not that I take issue with a single business owner earning a high profit, it's that I think we can do better. Instead of a few earning high profits while others freeze to death on the street, we can provide food and shelter to all, eliminate material poverty, and do this all while innovating faster. But to do so, we must drop the self-centered individualist mindset and think about how to both look after ourselves while also looking after others. We must think as a community instead of atomized individuals.
Simplest counter example is labor unions. There was in fact a huge campaign to dismantle labor union power in the United States. Look at the way labor power was limited by state force in the 1947 Taft Hartley Act for one example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act
Meanwhile in Germany every big company legally must have representatives from the union on the board of directors. A lot has happened since Adam Smith and some of it was "masterminded" on both sides. For example the "organic" work day was 14 hours long until labor activists fought and in some cases died for the 8 hour work day. We have made many decisions about the structure of businesses in USA and unfortunately much of it favors the accumulation of power at the top to the detriment of most people.
Finally, we must recognize that no matter what structure we have, we can always imagine better ones. And we can apply the same effort and pressure to make change as has happened in the past.
Anyway let's say you have a society where all the firms are worker self directed. It makes sense for firms to form broader organizations that represent different interests. So for example lets say you have an industrial zone on the edge of a geographic region. There's a shipping port, some bridges, electrical infrastructure, etc. All the firms in the area depend on this infrastructure to operate. And because they share this common interest, they have formed a regional cooperative made up of delegates from each firm in the region. When they need to make a decision about when to perform major infrastructure work, it is decided at one of their regular meetings. The delegates are not their to make their own decisions but to bring with them decisions made at their firm's meeting on the matter. If the delegate agrees to something their firm's people actually do not like, their people can recall them.
So the regional cooperative holds a regular meeting and there they decide they are going to build a bigger bridge and then decommission the old one. All the firms in this regional cooperative keep their money at a credit union which was set up specifically to represent these firms. They need to rustle up $500m to pay for this. They discuss how to raise the funds. There is a particularly big firm that will benefit substantially from the new bridge. They put up $50m on the condition that the bridge will have tolls and they will expect to be paid back $30m over 30 years. The rest of the firms together put in another $50m. The industrial zone regional cooperative takes their $100m to the broader regional cooperative which represents a large geographic region including several major cities which benefit from the industrial zone. The broader cooperative agrees to stake the other $400m for the bridge improvements with the agreement that the industrial zone regional cooperative will pay it back over 40 years.
So yeah. That's generally how you manage that. You can look up Murray Bookchin, David Harvey, and Richard Wolff if you want to know more. Also look up Zoe Baker on youtube.
If you don't like my made up scenario, maybe look up how ITER or LHC get their funding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Funding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost
EDIT: Of course ITER and LHC are not workers cooperatives, just examples of how people delegating funds could make decisions.
Similarly, early and late stage venture funding and other forms of funding different companies would also take a haircut, probably (not much with a 10% tax above 100M, yes with a 100% above 100M). Which would suck for people who like medicine and electricity
> ITER and LCH
Yeah governments absolutely can fund things. The question is should they fund everything. And you should note that they weren’t funded by “workers councils”.
dude we have regional workers councils it’s called state legislatures and they absolutely do fund stuff. We even have decentralized hierarchical councils - city and county govt! And they do make infrastructure decisions! What they don’t do is fund chip development or factory scaling. And even the things they do fund they offload the decision work to experts (not workers).
My point is not that The State should fund everything. It is that groups of people can elect delegates and those delegates can make decisions for us. I don't want them to be made by a centralized state but instead by voluntary collectives. Basically I advocate for worker owned collectives to manage the production that those same workers depend upon. This would I think lead to more freedom with less exploitation. Those workers would have dominion over the profits they generate, rather than the current arrangement where that control is traded for a wage. I believe this could lead to a world where all people accumulate enough wealth that they no longer need to work to survive. But that can never happen if an elite class siphons off all the workers' profit to spend billions on pet projects for amusement.
Did anybody say there was anything magical about workers? Since you are asking this question you must think that there is something magical about owners so why don't you tell us about that first?
> why wouldn’t they just be corrupt themselves
How would that corruption play out?
But to provide you a basic answer to advance the conversation more immediately: People must be educated to follow any society. We've never expected the checker at Home Depot to understand logistics of her store. But this is due to the division of labor, not a limitation of the human mind. When people imagine a totally different society this tends to include schools which raise people for that society. And so every person would be taught more about how all the bits fit together and how to make decisions collectively. As I said, many different schemes have been proposed and tried for what system would work best. But someone like Murray Bookchin would suggest that different regional cooperatives can make their own decisions about how best to organize. I would be remiss not to mention the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque Region of Spain. They're a federation of cooperatives with a total revenue of 13B Euro ($16B) in 2013. They do big industrial stuff, finance, retail, and education. [2]
However I realize I am talking about how really big decisions get made. Maybe you're asking about individual firms. It's past my bed time but for that look at how cooperatives are managed. This history of a grocery coop in San Francisco is very interesting. [3] Here's a list of other Bay Area cooperatives. [4]
[1] https://social-ecology.org/wp/1994/09/what-is-communalism/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20170606172106/https://www.rainb...
let’s say workers now control Amazon. all of Amazon workers. But it turns out Amazon AWS is a big part of Amazon revenue, the workers know jack about that, they either delegate authority to some aws experts and now as bans the same problem again if they ruin it. And you’re also assuming worker cooperatives wouldn’t follow profit motives - wouldn’t they? Workers want money. You want to abolish profitmotive but won’t do that. Workers could totally abuse monopoly or regulatory capture by vote
Second: It is my bed time and I regret that I cannot continue to answer by way of conversation, but I would suggest reading link [1] in my above comment if you want to see an overall picture of how such a society might be organized.
In XIX century, Russia was already THE superpower in Europe (which was everything that counted back then). Everyone else was afraid of her. She was poor, but it's possible to be poor and a superpower at the same time - you just need huge population to milk, and spend the bulk on your budget on military. Having a massive territory that's basically impossible to conquest and occupy no doubt helped as well. It meant that even if they lost a serious war, like they did against the Japanese, it was ultimately without major consequences.
Communists just continued with that modus operandi. They built oversized military, nuclear arsenal, top-notch global spying and propaganda aparatus, while the population supporting it was forced to work for peanuts - not to mention tens of millions who worked in concentration camps for free, and who either died there or had their lifes broken because of it. Even with all this ruthless inhuman exploitation, the Soviet model was just inferior and ultimately couldn't keep up with Western market-based democracies.
In that school, students learn to work together not just to solve problems, but also to determine justice (under guidance from adult teachers).
In a world with bosses and workers, we are teaching everyone to do as they are told and follow orders. But we could, I believe, see a much better world if we teach everyone to be community leaders and collaborators.
> Another, if we are imagining a different society, is to make sure our educational system teaches every student the principles of worker self-management
what are those principles? Yeah modern work absolutely crushes the soul, but ... how else do we make the heckin .1% tolerance raw materials in the heckin factories? Where’s the room for improvisation or self driven innovation if you’re a line worker in a butcher shop? Seems hard. Not sure black panther community leadership is gonna help.
The board seats are not about "better orders" (tho that may be another benefit) they are about ensuring the needs of the workers are represented in board decisions. For example if the Amazon warehouse workers had representatives on the board, they'd get bathroom breaks and better pay. The only reason I mention workers making more decisions is if you want to eliminate the board entirely.
> what are those principles?
> Not sure black panther community leadership is gonna help
I know most people do not watch the videos I link (obviously), but it sounds like maybe you did not watch the video. If you want to know what principles I think would help, I really recommend the video! It will be better than me trying to tell you from memory (esp because I am sleepy). It's a great piece of history and it shows some ideas that would help make all students better community leaders and cooperative workers.