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?
  • communism@lemmy.ml
    1·
    6 hours ago

    The important thing to understand is that even if you hate capitalism, neoclassical economics provide provides a pretty useful framework for analyzing and understanding it

    It really doesn’t—which was Marx’s whole project as a critique of political economy, not “communist economics”, not “Marxist political economy”, etc.

    But my point is that what people call a “market” in neoclassical economics is literally just any situation where you have a bunch of relatively autonomous groups of people all trying to accomplish various goals all interacting with each other

    Communism abolishes the individual as economic subject, and the conflicts of interests found in a “market”. Communism abolishes exchange, and abolishes economies. So, no, there is no “market” in a communist mode of production, even by your definition.

    • bloup@lemmy.sdf.org
      1·
      6 hours ago

      So like neoclassical economics as a framework was formalized and developed mostly during the hundred years following Marx’s death so I don’t understand the idea that any of his criticisms were oriented at neoclassical economics, or could’ve possibly taken it into account.

      Communism abolishes the individual as economic subject, and the conflicts of interests found in a “market”. Communism abolishes exchange, and abolishes economies. So, no, there is no “market” in a communist mode of production, even by your definition.

      I have to be honest I’m not really seeing what you’re saying here because my definition of a market would include just like a neighborhood of people that has like a local nonprofit grocery store that is managed by the people who live there specifically so that people can have food and for no other reason. but maybe like a handful of people notice some problems with the way the grocery store is being run, but are having trouble actually getting people to listen to them so they decide to just show everyone what they mean by starting their own grocery store in the neighborhood too under the same exact community managed model. And I also understand that neoclassical economics gives me extremely powerful tools to analyze situations like that.

      I’m just curious is that sort of economy like completely incompatible with your understanding of communism? Also, I would appreciate it if you don’t say something like “well in capitalism ‘stores’ are places where people spend money so there’s literally no way anything remotely resembling this could happen in communism, not even if the food was free”