I have long mused that there needs to be a differently structured way to do what bandcamp does (soon, did). Who has experiences with those structures that can still deliver technically? Co-ops? Values-first companies like iFixit? Non-profits?
The problem is that these structures are often self-defeating. A B-Corp has no incentive to grow, so B-Corp often don't grow.
Had Bandcamp restructured into something like a non-profit foundation, that might have been pretty cool. Maybe even being musician owned.
Wow, actually brilliant idea to keep out the nasty investor-owned firms away!
> The Mondragon Corporation already appeared in Robinson's earlier Mars trilogy, as one of the Terran groups involved in the colonization and terraforming of Mars; the coop is also portrayed as the inspiration of both the bogdanovist movement [52] and the libertarian-leaning Praxis Corporation[53] two of the main forces leading the revolution for the independence of Mars.
Red Mars was one of the best sci-fi books I've ever read, but Green Mars starts pretty slow so I didn't get very far into it. I think I'll start the trilogy over.
Agri-Mark is a "producer co-op," which means that it's owned by dairy farms. There are also very successful "consumer co-ops," as well as "worker co-ops."
There are many nice things about co-ops:
- They can be economically competitive.
- They're democratically run. (Larger ones often elect a board and/or appoint management.)
- They're strictly voluntary associations.
There are also reasons why you don't see more co-operatives:
- They don't have huge incentives to scale. There are plenty of amazing grocery co-ops, for example, that have one or two excellent stores but no desire to expand.
- They raise capital through their members. Details vary, but they tend to scale more like bootstrapped businesses than startups.
But a musicians' producer co-op could absolutely build something like Bandcamp. It would be a lot of work, and it would require some genuine organizational talent.
A lot of the big open source foundations (the Linux Foundation, the Apache Foundation, etc) are essentially producer co-ops for open source software, even if that's not what the paperwork says.
I think we should absolutely build more co-ops, for things that really matter.
What's contentious about unionization is that the unionizers want to take over an existing organization that's already survived and become profitable. That's a lot easier to do than it is to build a company with that (or any other) structure. (And it's going to be contentious no matter how it's organized.)
Edit: You may not feel entitled to earn what you make, but others might just call that loser talk and no capitalist would ever say that.
Of course it does. Why would labour settle for anything less than every last cent (within some reasonable margin of error) of value that it produces? Labour is highly mobile and holds all the power. Labour is able to produce value even without capital. Capital, on the other hand, doesn't function without labour. You are simply not going to keep labour around to maintain capital operation if you don't give back all the labour value it produces.
In practice, we can also demonstrate that this is the case as even when unions roll into town – which really reenforces how much power labour wields – you never see the needle move more than small percentages that are within the margin of error. A $10 per hour job might be able to push for $11 per hour, but never does a $10 per hour job suddenly jump to a $100 per hour job.
Does that mean company is exploited by its workers if it generates no profit?
If you simply mean the company underpay its employees, how can you come to that conclusion? Looking at market values? Lines of code?
> it is objective reality.
Care to elaborate? business give people jobs, and therefore the business becomes an exploiter? Objectively
Maybe centuries ago that was true. In the modern economy, workers are already extracting the full amount of value they generate[1]. Profit for a business comes from the additional value its capital is able to generate on top of the labour value.
[1] Within reason. The market is never perfectly efficient. Sometimes workers see slightly less – sometimes slightly more – but not anything hugely out of line.
Can you provide a concrete example of capital generating value without the involvement of any labor?
Not all the way there, but surprisingly close.
Let's face it: labor is soon to be obsolete. All economic models that include labor will become antique notions, similar to factoring in horsepower.
Gonna be a rough road: all folks in power can think of is, how to keep workers slaving away at something, anything, so long as they don't revolt.
People in the US have consumer items, pointless dictatorial jobs, and insane stress from having the welfare state stripped for parts by venture capitalists. We aren't even enjoying what we have even though materially, a good fraction of the population have more than so many others. If you lose your pointless job, you lose your home, healthcare, and transportation and are considered a surplus person.
These are all political choices.
If we fix some baseline combination of quantities of "labor" and "capital", and compare it to some later combination where both have been increased, there are a number of possible differences to take.
There are V(l_0, c_0) , V(l_0 + dl, c_0), V(l_0, c_0 + dc), V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc).
One could call V(l_0 + dl, c_0) - V(l_0, c_0) "the contribution from additional labor", and V(l_0, c_0 + dc) - V(l_0, c_0) "the contribution from additional capital", or one might call V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc) - V(L_0, c_0 + dc) "the contribution from additional labor" and V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc) - V(l_0 + dl, c_0) "the contribution from additional capital".
In a linear approximation, these two ways of assigning quantities to these names for quantities, could be the same. But I wouldn't really expect them to be the same in practice, at least for large values of dl and dc. (note: I am using "dl" and "dc" instead of \Delta l and \Delta c, because it is more convenient to type. I don't mean to suggest that the changes are extremely small or infinitesimal, as might be suggested by using the letter d instead of \Delta.)
As such, I think that "the additional value that an additional amount of capital is able to produce" is a meaningful value if "quantity of labor" is held constant, and that "the additional value that an additional amount of labor is about to produce" is a meaningful value if "amount of capital" is held constant.
When both values are changed, then how much to attribute the increase in value produced to, is I think inherently somewhat ambiguous, but also not a completely meaningless question.
Given the four values V(l_0, c_0) , V(l_0 + dl, c_0), V(l_0, c_0 + dc), V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc), assuming that all four of the differences I mentioned previously are non-negative, then clearly the additional value from either cannot reasonably be said to be more than V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc) - V(l_0, c_0). Nor, I think, can the value attributed to the change along one axis, be reasonably estimated as less than the minimum of the differences along that axis. Also, I think probably a more reasonable upper bound on either contribution, is the maximum of the two differences for the respective axis.
Now, maybe your goal is to talk about the deserts, rather than causes? But if we are talking about what things are causally responsible for how much of something is produced, I think it's pretty clear that this analysis in terms of differences of these 4 terms, is on the right track.
The core claim is that simply buying things and managing things produces value all on its own and it's transparently false as if the thing wasn't produced, you couldn't buy it.
The other core claim is that there's a legitimacy to the idea that if you buy something that is socially useful, you get to derive the exclusive right to the fruits of it which makes no sense.
If the employer is paying you more than the value you would generate without being attached to them, then you're benefitting from that substantially. If your earning potential would be $1/hr on your own, but by joining ABC Corp you are leveraged and can earn them $3/hr and be paid $2/hr, then is that exploitation? To me that seems like a fair exchange that is mutually beneficial and grows the pie for everyone. And to be clear, ultimately the fact that you can earn more when attached to a business derives from the fact that you are able to wield and command some of the resources that the business is capitalized with, which you otherwise would not have access to.
The immediate objection will be that the surplus value is not typically fairly split between the employer and employee; maybe in some cases that's true? But from what I've seen, that's not as true as it may sound at first. The majority of people are able to earn essentially zero unless they are attached to a Real Job(tm), because most people at least in modern society have absolutely no idea how to optimally generate value on their own: there's a reason people get so upset when they're laid off or fired, it's far from trivial to figure out how to make your own money, it's much easier to just find another job. And the margin on labor costs are typically not >50% in most industries, which means that the actual divvying of surplus value is not really that abusive, it's a lot closer to the situation I mentioned in the first paragraph than most anti-capitalists would suggest.
I'm sure a lot of people would reject my framing altogether, and argue that it's only because we live in a capitalist society that it's so hard to get by without joining a company, or they'd argue that even if my logic holds workers deserve a lot more than an equal split of the surplus value, but I think this at least explains where a lot of us who do think capitalism works are coming from. It's not an unconsidered position, even if people disagree with the underlying moral framework.
One thing to keep in mind is that the US GDP is ~20T, if everyone made an equal amount before taxes, that would be somewhere around 120k (a little more or less as workers are about half the economy).
You can see from that comparison that the level of exploitation is far higher than than you supposed.
That doesn't even make sense. This sounds like your language compiler must implement a bunch of optimizations mine doesn't.
Unions seek to organize the affairs and interests of a unit of labor to extract a fair share of productivity for the people actually doing the work. The alternative is all that value gets captured by C-suite or investors, with decreased mobility of the people doing the work into the class of investors.
Unions also have a side effect of creating a selection pressure against exploitation of your workforce to attain profitability. Without the unions spooking the management drones, you get things like Walmart and McD's going and outsourcing what was previously done via payroll to State benefit programs.
With you thusfar. Business is generally something engaged in by two individuals consisting of an exchange of value in good faith projected to leave both parties coming out ahead.
>that you deem to be satisfactory to obviate the need for state welfare benefits...
Specifically severed this to illustrate how little it takes to go from uncontroversial to "what are you on?" As an employer in the United States there is an implicit assumption you are engaging in business in good faith. This was part of the reason things like minimum wages ended up being a "Gentleman's Agreement" like affair. If you couldn't even keep up with Federal minimum wage, that reflected poorly on you as a business operator.
>the mention of which in this context is a non sequitur.
The mention thereof is far from a non-sequitur. Given that there is no dearth of evidence that the fact that places like Walmart and McD's have worker populations disproportionately represented in State Benefit's programs, up to and including HR supplied documentation on how to on ramp to said programs; that a preponderance of the evidence at least suggests at some level this is reflected in some aspect in the grand corporate calculus of "How do I get the most for the least?" When it becomes a part of your Corporate Strategy, we have issues.
Outsourcing your workers living expenses to the American taxpayer is not acceptable.
Deliberately paying people a wage so low, then handing them a "how-to" guide for food stamps is deliberately tilting your extraction of labor far more in your favor than the worker's, because you're turning around and telling the worker "Don't forget to file for <insert welfare program here> this month in your off time!" After all, I'm sure employees were not encouraged to engage in this activity on the clock.
So you're absolutely right. I come from different priors. You should have your shit straight enough as an employer to keep your employees contributing to, instead of being doled out to from, the tax rolls.
If you cannot do this, you should be strongly disincentivized from doing up to and including paying extra corporate tax to recover the costs of the people you're stiffing.
Back to the original topic at hand. How does a Union try to "take over" a company? A Union can't by definition, because at that point, the company would be a co-op. The Union is fundamentally limited to acting as an extraction to divert value delegation in the counter management/investor direction. The Union still has no implicit control outside of "you do what you want, but this group of laborers is not playing ball unless..." and channeling it down through a handful of savvy, experienced, and one can only hope, good faith represeentatives.
In no way shape or form does that line up with your contention that a union "takes over" which with it suggests taking possession of the assets and investments that make up the company.
Part of the blame there lies with the government allowing corporations to offload their labor costs onto it. That's one of many ways in which the government gives handouts to corporations which is the literal antithesis of the market economy.