This would mean no less than breaking the foundations of capitalism and the autocracy of possession.
I’m not sure what solutions will work, but things can’t continue as they are. Having an economy that serves the wider community is preferable to one that pits people against each other for scraps after much of the wealth has been hoovered up by people at the top.
Absolute pie in the eye stuff. Companies will just leave the country.
CEO Pay Has Grown 90 Times Faster than Typical Worker Pay Since 1978, they have been scammed for the last 40 years (i.e. co incidentally when tax rates on the rich were dropped in the UK and US, and unions were hamstrung.)
Capitalism and democracy are polar opposites. When money is power those with money can buy whatever they want, including politicians. And when politicians know they can leave politics to get a cushy job working for megacorp it undermines democracy in its entirety – Why would anyone expect politicians not to work in their own selfish interests?
For corporations to become democratic they would need to become worker owned cooperatives. While theoretically possible and ethically preferable, it leaves the most important question up in the air. How do you take power away from the current corporate owners?
The unfortunate answer I think is going to end up being “by force”, because when you let rich people have a choice the decisions they make are only ever in their own best interests. We either require governments to start large scale nationalisation of everything from the railways to clothing manufacturing to energy production. Or we need a mass uprising of the people to force corporate owners, and their crony political puppets, out of power.
Is either scenario likely? I don’t know. I didn’t expect half the country to be unable to afford electricity or food, so I guess anything is possible during late stage capitalism.
Richard Wolff has a lot to say on this subject. Interesting guy
Based on some of the people I work with, giving control of a business to some of the workers would be a fast way to mass unemployment.
Things won’t change without social unrest. Something that in the U.K. and US, we are pretty useless at. Follow the French.
Not going to happen under capitalism I’m afraid
ITT: people moaning that a Capitalist society is rewarding Capitalism.
What used to happen (and this was 15 years ago for me) was that your organisation would offer you shares at discounted prices, or a Christmas bonus … anything to make you feel part of something. To make you give more of a shit. Now it’s just a salary and no job security with the expectation that you swallow their monthly “we’re all family” bullshit, while knowing that they’d fire your ass if it meant another 0.0001% worth of dividends to shareholders
You mean like a cooperative?
The article fails to address the only point that actually matters… Why would any set of investors ever agree to this?
They’ve stumped up millions of pounds of their own money to gamble on a business that has a 70% chance of failing in under 10 years.
Why would they hand over control to employees who haven’t invested _any_ money and might have only joined the company last week?
And if that _was_ the standard, why would they invest in the first place?
Since the days of fiefdoms there has been a constant struggle between the masses trying to lift themselves out of poverty and gain fair representation and a ruling elite trying to extract all of the wealth and power from the masses. Over the centuries the mechanisms have evolved but the fundamental dynamic has persisted. The problem for the masses has always been that it requires reaching extremes before action is taken to wrestle back what was stolen.
What we need is democracy to be at the forefront of everything. We struggled for centuries to get democratic systems in place at state level. The elite then invented the un-democratic corporation to act as a platform to begin expropriating wealth and power from the state and putting those resources into service of their own self interests, or rather the interests of the shareholders and board of directors specifically.
We should have been able to identify immediately that the corporation was a fundamentally undemocratic construct. They should have been made illegal, or had much tighter requirements and restrictions places on them before they were allowed to become what they are now. The have leverage over the very democratic systems we fought so hard to implement at the state level. It doesn’t really matter who you vote for these days because the largest corporations have more of an outcome on global policies and events than any democratically elected government. In many cases the politicians you’re voting for are auditioning themselves for roles in those very corporations once they have left office. Corporations compromise the limited democracy and power that we have. So the shareholders and boards of directors of the worlds largest companies essentially run the entire show.
There’s some good ideas in the article but I don’t think it goes far enough. The sale of shares in companies needs to be made illegal with immediate effect. No more stock markets. When you join a company you get given a single share which gives you a single vote on ALL company affairs. Be that on whether to outsource, annual bonuses, pay increases, effects on climate, who is elected as directors. Everybody votes. When you leave, that share is returned. No company is then going to vote to outsource all the jobs to the other side of the world. No company is going to vote to pollute the environments where the works now live. No company is going to vote to give massive bonuses to the directors and nothing for anyone else.
Wealth and power needs to be in control of the masses and in service of the masses. Anything else is exploitation of human and natural resources and is driven by greed and not necessity.
What a load of rubbish. Private companies can spend their money on what ever they want, if they overpay for their staff then more fool them, the owners have missed out. If they aren’t overpaying then all is good.
Why is this important to anyone?
Government organisations and those that have been bailed out or invested in by the public are fair game for pay arguments but private organisations can do what they like.
Can we democratise them in the same way NATO democratised Iraq?
All companies that control our basic things power/petrol/transport/housing etc should be uk based, and forced to keep the vast majority of that money in the UK.
There should also be extremely strict rules on building use and how long they can be left out of use.
Our housing problem is caused by allowing chinese/hong kong nationals to hoover up property as buy to lets.
Our high street problem is caused by land bankers holding onto the buildings and refusing to maintain them with no consequences, so they’re no longer fit to hold shops or offices
our energy problem is caused by not re-investing in the UK and allowing other countries to subsidise their bills from our pot
Our public transport infrastructure and maintainence is paid for by the public, and then the profits are collected by other countries to subsidise their needs
Private doesn’t necesserily = bad, but private ownership from other countries does.
Saying this thing gets you marked immediately by people as a socialist or communist, when all we want is for the unfettered greed and corruption of company executives to be kept in check. While employees literally cannot afford the basic amenities of life, executives pay themselves hundreds of thousands and indeed millions of pounds worth of bonuses, a pat on the back for a job “well done” when they work half as hard as the people at the bottom.
More utter horseshit from the left. Dear Lord when will it end.
Left-leaning policies require more government money to be spent on social projects than the government receives in taxes. That requires the government to borrow from the banks. The follow on effect is inflation or ever-higher taxes. No one likes high taxes so inflation is the only other way to reduce the loans. Inflation means wages stagnate for the vast majority of people.
This isn’t to do with capitalism, it’s actually to do with socialism! Stop voting in people who keep spending more than they earn.
Anyone ‘earning’ over £1 million per annum is literally stealing from their staff.
Whilst I might strongly agree, there’s are object lessons in (a) the entirely toothless Offices Of ***Fair*** Trading, and (b) the ongoing erosion of worker rights.
There is exactly zero chance currently, not without *radical* changes to the political system.
You can make companies that are owned by the employees
Big corporations are democratised.
They have share holders and boards or directors who vote on decisions.
Remunerations packages or CEO etc are proposed and voted for. If someone doesn’t perform they are dismissed.
23 comments
> democratise corporations
This would mean no less than breaking the foundations of capitalism and the autocracy of possession.
I’m not sure what solutions will work, but things can’t continue as they are. Having an economy that serves the wider community is preferable to one that pits people against each other for scraps after much of the wealth has been hoovered up by people at the top.
Absolute pie in the eye stuff. Companies will just leave the country.
CEO Pay Has Grown 90 Times Faster than Typical Worker Pay Since 1978, they have been scammed for the last 40 years (i.e. co incidentally when tax rates on the rich were dropped in the UK and US, and unions were hamstrung.)
[CEO pay vs worker pay](https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-has-grown-90-times-faster-than-typical-worker-pay-since-1978/)
Capitalism and democracy are polar opposites. When money is power those with money can buy whatever they want, including politicians. And when politicians know they can leave politics to get a cushy job working for megacorp it undermines democracy in its entirety – Why would anyone expect politicians not to work in their own selfish interests?
For corporations to become democratic they would need to become worker owned cooperatives. While theoretically possible and ethically preferable, it leaves the most important question up in the air. How do you take power away from the current corporate owners?
The unfortunate answer I think is going to end up being “by force”, because when you let rich people have a choice the decisions they make are only ever in their own best interests. We either require governments to start large scale nationalisation of everything from the railways to clothing manufacturing to energy production. Or we need a mass uprising of the people to force corporate owners, and their crony political puppets, out of power.
Is either scenario likely? I don’t know. I didn’t expect half the country to be unable to afford electricity or food, so I guess anything is possible during late stage capitalism.
Richard Wolff has a lot to say on this subject. Interesting guy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Wolff
https://youtu.be/Vl0UvnkbQ24
Based on some of the people I work with, giving control of a business to some of the workers would be a fast way to mass unemployment.
Things won’t change without social unrest. Something that in the U.K. and US, we are pretty useless at. Follow the French.
Not going to happen under capitalism I’m afraid
ITT: people moaning that a Capitalist society is rewarding Capitalism.
What used to happen (and this was 15 years ago for me) was that your organisation would offer you shares at discounted prices, or a Christmas bonus … anything to make you feel part of something. To make you give more of a shit. Now it’s just a salary and no job security with the expectation that you swallow their monthly “we’re all family” bullshit, while knowing that they’d fire your ass if it meant another 0.0001% worth of dividends to shareholders
You mean like a cooperative?
The article fails to address the only point that actually matters… Why would any set of investors ever agree to this?
They’ve stumped up millions of pounds of their own money to gamble on a business that has a 70% chance of failing in under 10 years.
Why would they hand over control to employees who haven’t invested _any_ money and might have only joined the company last week?
And if that _was_ the standard, why would they invest in the first place?
Since the days of fiefdoms there has been a constant struggle between the masses trying to lift themselves out of poverty and gain fair representation and a ruling elite trying to extract all of the wealth and power from the masses. Over the centuries the mechanisms have evolved but the fundamental dynamic has persisted. The problem for the masses has always been that it requires reaching extremes before action is taken to wrestle back what was stolen.
What we need is democracy to be at the forefront of everything. We struggled for centuries to get democratic systems in place at state level. The elite then invented the un-democratic corporation to act as a platform to begin expropriating wealth and power from the state and putting those resources into service of their own self interests, or rather the interests of the shareholders and board of directors specifically.
We should have been able to identify immediately that the corporation was a fundamentally undemocratic construct. They should have been made illegal, or had much tighter requirements and restrictions places on them before they were allowed to become what they are now. The have leverage over the very democratic systems we fought so hard to implement at the state level. It doesn’t really matter who you vote for these days because the largest corporations have more of an outcome on global policies and events than any democratically elected government. In many cases the politicians you’re voting for are auditioning themselves for roles in those very corporations once they have left office. Corporations compromise the limited democracy and power that we have. So the shareholders and boards of directors of the worlds largest companies essentially run the entire show.
There’s some good ideas in the article but I don’t think it goes far enough. The sale of shares in companies needs to be made illegal with immediate effect. No more stock markets. When you join a company you get given a single share which gives you a single vote on ALL company affairs. Be that on whether to outsource, annual bonuses, pay increases, effects on climate, who is elected as directors. Everybody votes. When you leave, that share is returned. No company is then going to vote to outsource all the jobs to the other side of the world. No company is going to vote to pollute the environments where the works now live. No company is going to vote to give massive bonuses to the directors and nothing for anyone else.
Wealth and power needs to be in control of the masses and in service of the masses. Anything else is exploitation of human and natural resources and is driven by greed and not necessity.
What a load of rubbish. Private companies can spend their money on what ever they want, if they overpay for their staff then more fool them, the owners have missed out. If they aren’t overpaying then all is good.
Why is this important to anyone?
Government organisations and those that have been bailed out or invested in by the public are fair game for pay arguments but private organisations can do what they like.
Can we democratise them in the same way NATO democratised Iraq?
All companies that control our basic things power/petrol/transport/housing etc should be uk based, and forced to keep the vast majority of that money in the UK.
There should also be extremely strict rules on building use and how long they can be left out of use.
Our housing problem is caused by allowing chinese/hong kong nationals to hoover up property as buy to lets.
Our high street problem is caused by land bankers holding onto the buildings and refusing to maintain them with no consequences, so they’re no longer fit to hold shops or offices
our energy problem is caused by not re-investing in the UK and allowing other countries to subsidise their bills from our pot
Our public transport infrastructure and maintainence is paid for by the public, and then the profits are collected by other countries to subsidise their needs
Private doesn’t necesserily = bad, but private ownership from other countries does.
Saying this thing gets you marked immediately by people as a socialist or communist, when all we want is for the unfettered greed and corruption of company executives to be kept in check. While employees literally cannot afford the basic amenities of life, executives pay themselves hundreds of thousands and indeed millions of pounds worth of bonuses, a pat on the back for a job “well done” when they work half as hard as the people at the bottom.
More utter horseshit from the left. Dear Lord when will it end.
Left-leaning policies require more government money to be spent on social projects than the government receives in taxes. That requires the government to borrow from the banks. The follow on effect is inflation or ever-higher taxes. No one likes high taxes so inflation is the only other way to reduce the loans. Inflation means wages stagnate for the vast majority of people.
This isn’t to do with capitalism, it’s actually to do with socialism! Stop voting in people who keep spending more than they earn.
Anyone ‘earning’ over £1 million per annum is literally stealing from their staff.
Whilst I might strongly agree, there’s are object lessons in (a) the entirely toothless Offices Of ***Fair*** Trading, and (b) the ongoing erosion of worker rights.
There is exactly zero chance currently, not without *radical* changes to the political system.
You can make companies that are owned by the employees
Big corporations are democratised.
They have share holders and boards or directors who vote on decisions.
Remunerations packages or CEO etc are proposed and voted for. If someone doesn’t perform they are dismissed.