I’ve long felt that our best hope for a peaceful transition away from capitalism into a truly democratic society would be through the worker cooperative model. The best policy proposal I’ve seen for moving in that direction was the one put forward by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the U.K., but there are a myriad of ways one could go about establishing a cooperative sector.
The basic idea, for those who are unfamiliar, is that every worker is also an owner/director of the company. While there may be a hierarchical management structure for day-to-day operations, decisions about hiring, firing, raises, changes in production, and distribution of “profit” are made democratically by the workers. There’s a lot of information out there about this business model, but for today I’ll leave you with this excellent video. It not only describes how these enterprises work, but also the kinds of work that go into creating a co-op, what it takes to run one, and so on. Check it out!
Having not watched the video or read the links, forgive if this has been addressed. I see much of the problems in capitalism and other human follies stem from diffusion of blame. The people doing the worst things have all these layers of remove making their decisions feel reasonable. While local ownership is less diffusion of blame than parceled and leveraged shareholding, might that also lead to crappy decisions being made for short term gain? Not that we’re anywhere near needing to worry about it, but just, hypothetically.
I guess I don’t see how that’s more likely to happen under a worker/owner model.