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Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the reasons is that there can be too many people implied in taking decisions.

Another reason might be that if somebody is a co-owner with many others in an enterprise, he might not feel motivated to work.

In socialist countries the quality of most products and services was poor because no one cared and no one fel obligated to do a good job, since the enterprise was owned by all the people. Instead there were many small thefts from the workplace.

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In normal stock companies all (voting) stocks vote, and those can be distributed globally to all sorts of people and institutions who have no idea about the reality on the ground.

By comparison the decision-making in cooperatives is much better grounded in reality and has fewer disinterested and uninformed participants.

It's not about voting, it's about vision and taking decisions to accomplish it. That's why companies have a CEO, CFO, CTO and many managers.

What if I told you you could have the CEO elected by the workers, rather than randos whose only interest in the business is making money off of it?

Yes, that's how it works for larger cooperatives where direct democracy can become problematic. Even in direct democracies in societal level, presidents are typically elected, and there are ministers and managers by necessity. The same goes for cooperatives.

It's one person one vote applied to the corporation. In principle there's no reason why we should demand any less democracy inside corporations than what we demand in societies at large.

It's curious how many of these comments in this post could be reframed to be basically: "democracy can never work" or "democracy is clearly an inferior system to feudalism".

Interesting! A lot of people wouldn't want to live in a feudal society but are OK with working in one.

I guess it's all about inertia.

One of the largerst supermarket chains in Spain (Eroski) is a Coop and IMO they have the best service overall. Maybe not the chapest but cheap, their white label brand has very good stuff plus very clear and well though nutritional information, good variety, etc.

Brando Milanovic wrote up a pretty clear-eyed description of the problems with worker-owned enterprises, even in states that market socialists look to as better examples such as the former Yugoslavia [1]. He speaks with some authority, as both an economist and someone who worked in one of those. To me, it seems like there are important unsolved problems with worker-managed enterprises at scale (exceptions like Mondragon notwithstanding), but I’m speaking as an armchair observer. I agree with the aims involved (workers should enjoy the full fruits of their labor and have control over their working conditions), but it seems there are still challenges to scaling this sort of organization up.

1. https://glineq.blogspot.com/2021/11/socialist-enterprise-pow...

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