Democratic ownership of corporations cannot work on a large scale...

Democratic ownership of corporations cannot work on a large scale. Just as we elect politicians to decide for us and represent our interests (supposedly), companies will always need CEOs and executives to make high-level decisions without input from the general worker population, which would inevitably make sub-optimal and inefficient decisions. Thus, socialism at its core is but a beautiful dream. Prove me wrong.

Protip: you can't

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fortune.com/2015/09/21/carly-fiorina-hp-ceo-business-record/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handshake
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_parachute
uk.coop/sites/default/files/uploads/attachments/worker_co-op_report.pdf
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Why not just elect a CEO type position collectively?
Have it be highly accountable and easily changed problem solved you faggot

That's why we have state socialism and central planning

Except people that have looked into it have found no real correlation between the success of corporations and their CEOs - the most hilarious example of which was Carly Fiorina

fortune.com/2015/09/21/carly-fiorina-hp-ceo-business-record/

Corporations LITERALLY reward CEOs even if they horrifically fuck up a corporation's economic health

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handshake

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_parachute

It's mostly comes down to self-attribution bias >If Corporation, Inc had a good financial year, that's because my excellent stewardship has seen significant improvements in its financial performance

By how do you reconcile the fact that many CEOs have rekted the company they ran, and did so because they had no vested interest in the long health of the company.

I'm open to criticism of democratically controlling workplaces but you can't say one run by owners are inherently more stable when so many of them have gone under because of ineptitude. GM comes to mind

Anyone got source on this music btw?

Direct democracy is shit though. Most people are too dumb and ignorant to make good decisions.

On a semi-related tangent: most of the surplus value of labor goes not into shareholders' pockets but into operating the company and expanding it. Even if a socialist society is established, people won't get all that much more than they currently do, unless they want the company to stagnate and disappear.

Even if that is the case, you still have yet to prove that the corporation is even a necessary entity.
I.e. why have corporations over smaller entities? over syndicates? &c.


That's literally wrong and you need to actually sit down and read Marx.
If that were the case then it wouldn't be surplus.
That's only the case because it's necessary to compete in a market. If you abolish the market force as the driving force behind production then you only expand in-so-far as it helps meet the demand in place.

Only because representative "democracy" in its current state essentially saps all need for any understanding about the political process. You have major decisions that affect you and your community relegated to essentially untouchable bureaucracies, and it's a crapshoot whether the politician and/or party you vote for will care enough about the issues that matter to you. So most potential voters are left in a state of learned helplessness, what's the point of voting? no-one does anything for me

It also ignores the point that democracy is only necessary because you can't count on the people making the decisions actually having your best interests in mind. If you remove profit-motive and make sure that the people making the decisions actually have their needs met, then they - like any other healthy human being - will attempt to make decisions that don't fuck over other people.

I don't know, I just think that democratic decision making starts to fall apart beyond a certain population size. I mean the Greeks had problems with democracy in cities with populations of ~30,000 and actual eligible voting populations of ~6,000-8,000 - now the US has what, something like ~700,000 people to every Representative?

This seems to imply the economy is still based in competition, meaning which company can produce more than their competitors, IE who can get the most surplus and achieve super profit by way of technical innovation and have a monopoly on it for as long as possible. At some point this could reach a ceiling, and if it doesn't this production for production's sake can still lead to things like Planned Obsolescence, instead of making things as durable as possible due to the profit motive.

This also assumes that companies, or co-ops, wouldn't, you know, cooperate with each other. Hell, even in current capitalism, companies buy each other out when the other one goes under, the only difference is it's to the detriment of the workers, and even the consumers.

Might want to check out "yugoslav turbofolk" on YouTube, though you're gonna have a hard time finding this one in particular (unless maybe you speak Serbo-Croatian).

*the next economy based on worker ownership, is what I meant.

What is the stock market? CEOs are not autonomous agents today, they are supposedly accountable to investors to maximize the monetary return on their investments.
Public companies would be held accountable to the public under some form of socialism and socialism would have a totally different system of accounting.


You have no idea how much of the economy is waste and pure scamming/overhead financial expenses

That's because most people do not have the time nor the energy to educate themselves, since pretty much all of it is spent at work. That's why we need UBI and/or a shorter working week.

Can you prove this?

Co-ops exist right now, and they hire managers and executives, just like shareholders do.

If you actually believed this, and believed that people didn't look down on you for being a worker, would that make all the hours you spend working with no control over what you do bearable? I suppose you could be stoic about it if you believed that it was necessary, but I doubt it could actually give you a meaningful life.

citation needed

uk.coop/sites/default/files/uploads/attachments/worker_co-op_report.pdf

Mondragon already has 80,000 employees.

Why? Two heads are better than one. Also how is a CEO supposed to know how his business works on the ground? You need the input the workers. There would still be managers in socialism, just no private owners. These managers would be elected based on skill, but their function would be administration, not executive.

People are dumb because that helps capitalism and repressing direct democracy. We need a transition towards it rather than expecting people on day 1 to be able to responsibly control their entire lives. Socialist state before communism.

Corporations at this point already use algorithms for risk management and resource allocation. There is no reason to think we can't do the same under communism. In fact, machines often make better decisions than humans and there is no reason to believe we cannot run the whole economy with a de-centralized network of machines deciding all the things that need to be done. As communism already requires a high degree of automation, there is no reason why people should have to obey a human manager when machines do it better and are entirely selfless actors.

Communism will be automated production of goods managed by machines while the few human laborers will have limited impact on the direction of anything. The manages will no longer be there to dictate, but to serve. We will have an economy that serves people.

Central planning doesn't work.

That's why we won't own corporations democratically. We will own communes democratically, and the property of corporations will becomes the property of a free association of workers.

There's no fundamental reason why it can't work.

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No, as
states, computation is already being used for economic management, and this is under capitalism. Why should it be different under socialism or communism?

Literally a fallacy

Whut about the soft budget constraint.

That can and is being eliminated with data. Planned economies always suffer from lack of data and poor decision making. Computers lack these problems. We need only build the software now.

No it doesn't. The more power is centralized, the least it serves the populations.

That's a problem of information. We no longer have that issue.

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