The overarching goal of communism is for laborers to own the means of production instead of an owning/capitalist class. Employee owned businesses are the realization of communism within a capitalist society.

It seems to me that most communist organizations in capitalist societies focus on reform through government policies. I have not heard of organizations focusing on making this change by leveraging the capitalist framework. Working to create many employee owned businesses would be a tangible way to achieve this on a small but growing scale. If successful employee owned businesses are formed and accumulate capital they should be able to perpetuate employee ownership through direct acquisition or providing venture capital with employee ownership requirements.

So my main questions are:

  1. Are organizations focusing on this and I just don’t know about it?
  2. If not, what obstacles are there that would hinder this approach to increasing the share labor collective ownership?
  • bloup@lemmy.sdf.org
    42·
    3 hours ago

    Have you ever considered that the model of free market under perfect competition in neoclassical economics doesn’t actually say that the market needs to be powered by the financial profit motive, just that the firms need to maximize their own utility? It’s just that in capitalism these get conflated because it’s almost always one and the same thing. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. If you have an economy composed entirely of mission-oriented nonprofit organizations for example that compulsively reinvest all their excesses and internalize all of their external cost, you can still analyze it as a free market under perfect competition, and ironically, it works even better than it does for capitalism.

    • communism@lemmy.ml
      3·
      47 minutes ago

      I am opposed to “maximising utility” because I am a communist. Production should serve needs, not production for the sake of production.

      compulsively reinvest all their excesses and internalize all of their external cost

      Ok, still exploitation.

      I can see that those are your political beliefs. You are welcome to have those political beliefs. OP is asking about communists, and communists do not want this, so this is rather orthogonal to the question.