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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

This model really should be expanded to just about everything. Revenue per employee ratio at Apple is $2.4 million a person or so. If that company were to shift from the present shareholder model to a cooperative model, its not hard to imagine labor seeing some substantial gains. Having more money in the part of the economy that actually circulates more of their income would probably bring on wider economic benefits as well, compared to the present where some of that revenue might go on to be parked in unproductive, perhaps even unhelpful, speculative investments like gold or oil.

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> Revenue per employee ratio at Apple is $2.4 million a person or so.

Seems net income per employee is only ~$120,000, though. The way you put it might leave people thinking they have $2.4 million to give to each employee, when in reality they have bills to pay.

I think doing any math on this number has issues when you consider Apple is sitting on 60+ billion in cash.

> Seems net income per employee is only ~$120,000, though.

Isn't that _after_ they paid the employees though?

WRONG - it should be voluntarily expanded to everything.

One dealbreaker for me and far-left thinking is the required authoritarianism of implementing their ideas in society.

If your ideas are so good, go start something yourself, and see if it catches on. If people still want to work for Apple, there must be a reason, despite the lopsided revenue distribution.

I have often had the same conversation with people in that spectrum, that people should just start coops if they feel like it but to not force me into them, and they tell me that it only works when all businesses are coops, ie workers own the means of production everywhere. Well, if it requires such a fundamental change to society, perhaps it's not actually a feasible solution at all?

Workers don’t have capital, by definition. How would they start anything significant, in general?

The current authoritarianism of the capitalist class is what keeps workers from having capital, by not paying workers the full value their labour produces. They enforce this with laws, courts police and armies.

Workers did in fact also start things themselves and got attacked for it. From monopoly practices to starve co-ops to coups, sanctions and wars against countries that collectivise.

The whole article and HN comment thread is about how people are doing this! Themselves! As the proletariat! So don't force me at gunpoint to do the same

In a few isolated cases. Very good, but not enough on its own.

Stop forcing me at gunpoint to give up a large portion of the value I create. And stop supporting your country forcing others at gunpoint to be like it.

You can always go to Venezuela, enjoy

Why should I not want my own country to be sovereign?

And why should I not want NATO to stop attacking Venezuela?

You can do it but part of the issue is that the market effectively silences you to begin with. Its like you are at a thermodynamic disadvantage when you are a coop bootstrapping the company with your own owned means of production, versus one that is able to sell itself off to speculative investors for capital to "growth hack" as they say. The experiment of seeing if it catches on would therefore always fail even if the idea was actually better for most people. I'm not imposing on anything, I'm just highlighting how logically it makes a lot of sense to spread wealth around, and yet the very nature of capitalism perpetuates it to the exclusivity of all else, collectively shared vs individually held benefits be damned. I can see why Marx thought the only path forward from capitalism to a collectivism would take a revolution. Greed is sadly more competitive in a free market business environment where natural wealth is divvied up into private ownership.

It’s a bit complicated, those companies can’t really borrow money (because the bank can’t seize the capital and fire the management of things go south). A friend of mine had her coop buy its HQ, that means the workers/owners had to personally borrow the money.

Don’t many apple employees get stock grants

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