#worker control

Answered this question a while back. It’s a bad strategy because:


1. Most workers do not have the means to buy shares to the extent that they could have any real power. That requires wealth.

2. Shares are undemocratic because your ability to influence is, as per usual under capitalism, fundamentally based on how much you own. True democracy is one person/one vote. Anti-capitalist mobilization shouldn’t be centered around an undemocratic idea.

3. This wouldn’t upend the ownership pattern that divides humanity into elite owners and dispossessed non-owners. With the latter exploited by the former, class society would still linger on even if a sizable number of workers were able to take this strategy.

4. Since socialism is understood to be an entirely different economic mode with an entirely different set of production functions (just like how capitalism and feudalism are different modes), there would need to be a social revolution among the masses in order to take us through this shift, and that means anti-capitalist activity outside of the voting booth and outside of the system’s defined limits. Share-buying challenges nothing, neither in an ideological sense nor in a material sense.

They’re actually wicked similar tendencies. There are a few differences, though.

Council communism uses Marxist perspectives and methods of analysis (historical materialism, etc.), whereas syndicalism generally does not. (”Generally” being the keyword there – Greg is a syndicalist with a Marxist perspective, for example.)

Syndicalism is understood pretty much exclusively as an anarchist tendency, whereas council communism is not necessarily anarchist. In cases where council communism supports a transitory “dictatorship of the proletariat” state, it opposes centralization and Leninist conceptions of the vanguard party, seeking full direct democracy in the economic base in an attempt to wield the state for the benefit of the proletariat; syndicalists don’t advocate for this transition period.

Workers’ councils are defined as setups of spontaneous organization born in times of revolutionary struggle, whereas syndicalism relies on trade unions that exist before the struggle really takes off. For this reason, many traditional council communists argued that trade unions could only be reformist in nature and that separate revolutionary councils would instead be created by class conscious workers in times of tense material conditions; this also led many of them to refuse to work with reformist individuals or organizations of any sort (which I think is silly). Syndicalism posits that unions will become increasingly revolutionary as workers develop class consciousness.

“Capital has been put on notice.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the Left is no longer content to regulate capitalism. Instead, leaders of socialist movements contending for state power are now seeking to transform the landscape of ownership, redistributing wealth and power in the economy by democratizing company ownership.

Bernie Sanders’s support for worker ownership funds, announced last week, is the latest ambitious commitment to the new politics of democratic ownership. If implemented, this would be a vital institutional turn towards, in Sanders’s words, “an economy where workers feel that they’re not just a cog in the machine — one where they have power over their jobs and can make decisions.”

Though the details of Sanders’s plans are still under discussion, the implications are clear. The plan would require businesses to contribute a percentage of stocks to a fund controlled by employees. In turn, the fund would pay a regular dividend to workers while making them a powerful voting bloc in corporate decision-making.

By rewiring income and control rights at the company level, gradually dislodging ownership by capitalists (typically with control exercised through extractive financial intermediaries that act as their agents) and empowering labor, the funds would help reshape how the economy operates and for whom.

There are important details to debate, particularly how the dividends would be distributed. To coincide with the Sanders’s announcement, Common Wealth, a UK-based think tank designing ownership models for the democratic economy, published research by Lenore Palladino, a senior economist at the Roosevelt Institute, on the distributional effects of worker funds. Critically, it shows that for the 1,345 corporations that reported sufficient information who would likely be required to establish a fund under the proposal, granting 10 percent of dividends per employee would have meant an average payout of $2,725 per worker. If a higher percentage of companies were owned by workers, this payout could be even higher.”

.....

Converting to Worker Co-op A Slice of New York 2017