this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1
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Could a worker-owned company sell itself to a single person, and become a company owned by one person?
That's called freelancing. That's already a thing and isn't an issue because the worker is getting the fruits of their labor - there's no capitalist making money off another person's labor.
Only if the workers agreed to, collectively.
Democracy would decide
Okay, and what if that single owner then hired some wage laborers who got no ownership stake?
You’d just have socialism that could drift into capitalism?
Also I’ll remind you that in a free market system, a single owner who doesn’t share ownership with his workers, has arrived at that situation through a combination of customer and worker choice. Workers choose to work for non-socialized companies all the time. And there’s nothing stopping people from starting worker collectives in our present system.
So if in the socialist system the workers are free to go capitalist, and in the capitalist system the workers are free to go socialist, then really they’re just two instances of the same landscape of choice. And it would appear the workers have chosen capitalism.
After running my own business for a while, now that I’m working a full time job for someone else I really appreciate how I don’t have to think about ownership and I can just go home.
My company even offers a worker ownership plan in the sense that I can purchase stock in the company at a reduced rate.
But I’m digressing. My point is this free choice boundary between capitalist cooperatives and socialist cooperatives, where in each system people can choose to enact the other. And the result of all that is that people have chosen capitalism. Not just governments, but companies and individuals. They’ve just decided it’s an easier life working for wages, than trying to start or join a worker’s coop.