#worker control

[solarpunkwitchcraft]

Workers in France Take Over McDonald’s to Distribute Food

Workers at a McDonald’s in Saint-Barthélemy, France took the restaurant under their own control so they could distribute boxes of food to people in the neighborhoods of north Marseille who have been living in increasing misery since the beginning of the Covid-19 confinement. The management of McDonald’s in France opposes the action, while at the same time they want to reopen restaurants everywhere with no regard for employee health.

To help meet the surge in demand, workers at the McDonald’s in Saint-Barthélemy, supported by a number of collectives and associations including the Syndicat des quartiers populaires de Marseille (Union of the Popular Quarters of Marseille), decided to take over the restaurant so it could be used to help in addressing the crisis. Shopkeepers, residents, and the food bank send food, which is stored in the restaurant’s walk-in cooler. The restaurant is also being  used to prepare and distribute boxes to associations and collectives, which are then brought to apartment building lobbies or left on front doors. All this is done with full personal protective equipment, including masks and gloves. There are also hand washing, coughing and sneezing protocols. For Kamel Guémari,  union member in the caucus Force Ouvrière (Worker’s Strength) said, “In this state of emergency, if we don’t take action for our neighborhoods, who will?”

[left-reminders]

How do you respond to the "if you want worker ownership buy a share" argument?

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.

-Daividh

[left-reminders]

If workers controlled the means of production in a for-need system, automation would mean vacations, not widespread loss of livelihood.

[left-reminders]

im still fairly ignorant about leftism sorry but from my readings of council communism it sounds very similar to syndicalism. what would u say are the main differences?

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.

All said, both tendencies involve near-identical final products in terms of organizational structure – councils/unions hollowing out the capitalist system from below and reforming society into linked confederations based on mutual aid, direct democracy, and a for-need economic system. When push comes to shove, a lot of it is just semantics debate. The unified leftist front that topples capitalism for good will have to focus on directly-democratic institutions of worker control in some very real capacity, and I think council communism and syndicalism truly get to the heart of this idea. 

[redshift-13]

Bernie Sanders’s plan for worker-owned funds isn’t just notable because it could lead us toward a democratized, sustainable, socialist economy. It’s also the product of a growing collaboration between the Left in the United States and the United Kingdom.

“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.”

.....

A very modest proposal, but an arguably necessary step on the road to the abolition of capitalism and its destructive legacies.

[democracyatwrk]

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

Kirk Vartan, founder of 10 year pizza businesses, presents on experience of converting to worker-cooperative in 2017.  April 2018

[left-reminders]

Are people really still surprised that LDR takes an explicitly anti-Stalin, pro-Luxemburg view of Marxism? I've made that position quite clear for a while now. When I say Marxism, I don't mean "the vanguard party will capture the state, the state run by the vanguard party will seize the means of production, the state will take over the functions of the capitalist class, anarchists will be suppressed, and the state will then somehow naturally wither away through this concentration of power". I mean Marxism as the understanding of history and political economy, as well as the notion that the people themselves must win the post-capitalist world. That means something firmly rooted in rule by the people; not something hyper centralized. Once the capitalist behemoth is taken down, state or no state, direct democratic worker councils should be the outlet to take us into a liberated world, not top-down managing by the vanguard party. You can make the argument that a state will be necessary to defend the transition, but there is no socialist transition if bottom-up control of the economy isn't at the heart of it all. The state cannot wither away if the economy it maintains is vertical -- and state capitalism is vertical, even when you put "the people's" or "democratic" or "workers'" in the title.

[left-reminders]