This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work, responding to another Ask Prof. Wolff
question from our Patreon community. This one comes from Brandon Desiderio, and he
asks about conversion—converting capitalistically organized businesses, hierarchies, into democratic
worker co-ops, where the workers are their own employer. One person, one vote. We've
talked about that often, and I want to take this opportunity to respond to Brandon's question.
Let me begin by doing it, not so much as how we ought to think,
but how it's actually already happening, and look at the motivations leading people
to make these conversions, and have been doing so for years. The story goes roughly like this:
Small to medium businesses, 25 to say three or four hundred employees,
these businesses go on for decades and then they reach the point where those who own them—those
often who started and developed them over time—reach 65, 70, 75 years of age and wish
to retire. They've given a lifetime of work. They've produced a successful growing business,
but their children are on to other lives and don't want this enterprise. If they're not corporations,
then they have no one else to give it to. If they become a corporation, then they are leaving the
legacy, if you like, of their enterprise in the hands of anonymous shareholders
who will do lord knows what with their enterprise. If they sell it to another
enterprise, same problem. They don't want to do that. They don't want to put
into jeopardy the lives, the incomes of the people they've hired over the years,
of the community that's been a good host, that needs the business, needs the tax base, and so on.
Guess what… Yeah, they decide their best course of action is to sell their enterprise to the workers
as part of a conversion of the enterprise from a top-down hierarchical capitalist enterprise
into a democratic worker co-op. And notice the logic. There's something better in the short and
long run about doing that. That's in the minds of those elderly folks who make that decision
with the businesses they've built up. But I think the argument is: It's better for all of us.
And that's an argument we can make and we can win.
It goes like this: In capitalism, businesses are run by people who are in it
for the profit. Profit is their bottom line, profit is what they're in business for. Profit is
how they're judged successful, failure to generate profits is how they are judged unsuccessful.
But the vast majority of people don't get profits. The vast majority of people involved in any
enterprise are 1. The employees, 2. The customers, and 3. The neighbors in the community where the
enterprise is active. That's a large number of people, almost always much much larger than
those who stand to profit from the business (the owners and the shareholders). So, democracy means
that those who depend on the enterprise (that large number), have a stake in it, have a right
to make decisions because they're affected by what this enterprise does, what it becomes.
It is not democratic if a tiny minority (shareholders, owners) make the decisions
and make them to benefit their income (i.e, profits), rather than
the job security and income of the vast majority (the employees). So if you believe in democracy,
if you believe in a certain notion of fairness and social justice, then capitalism isn't what
you ought to be for. Something else is, and that's a very powerful argument we ought to make.
Here's another one: Social change doesn't usually happen because folks decide not to continue in one
particular arrangement and move to another which, for example, they might think of as superior.
No, history tells us that people tend to get stuck in the old ways. There's always a risk of going to
something new, and you know the problems of what you got, and you don't know those to which you
might switch. So when switches happen, when change happens, when one system gives way to another,
it's usually the following reason: The old one, the one that's passing, is the one that is no
longer tolerable. People make revolutionary changes when they can't stand the situation
they're in. It's less the attractiveness of where they're going to go than it is
the intolerability of what they've been stuck in. So our job is less to persuade people that
a democratic worker co-op economy is better. We should do that, but that's not the crucial thing.
Capitalism is in deep trouble these days, perhaps more than at any time in its history.
Questioning and challenging capitalism is on the rise everywhere—here in the US too. The system
is imploding. Its own contradictions, all the problems it's kicked down the road, they're all
coming back and demanding resolution. What's beginning to happen is that people are finding
the capitalist system’s failures and difficulties and inequalities and instabilities intolerable.
The racism, the billionaires looking down the street to people without a home,
all of that. The failure to cope with COVID. These are extraordinary system breakdowns. Our job is
simply to say, “Look, there is an alternative.” We happen to think it's better, but whether it is or
isn't, you're going to have to find something else to get away from something that is clearly busted
that isn't working for the majority of people, who increasingly know it and see it.
And here's the last point, Brandon, because you bring up the contradictions with China.
Right now, the provocations by the United States of China are extraordinary. The difficulties,
likewise. The hostilities, growing. The bitterness alongside it.
The Chinese do their things that we don't approve of and vice versa. No one here is pure. No one
here is the good guys and the bad guys. But the danger of another cold or hot war is obvious.
Profit has driven most of human history in the last three centuries. It's looking really
bad where it's driving this silly competition over who's going to be the biggest economy,
who's going to be the fastest growing one. I think we'd be far better off if the United States and
China, governed hopefully in both cases by worker co-op based enterprises,
could see a common objective, and that is to develop the poorer majority parts of this planet
(Asia, Africa, Latin America, in particular) to overcome the legacy of difference
between the rich and the poor, the North and the South, the center and the periphery,
to overcome it on the grounds that we will all be safer and happier in a world not divided
in the way that imperialism and colonialism reshape the world. We have to reshape it again,
and a post-capitalist system based on solidarity, on democracy, and on sharing is probably
the best shot we have to get through this period of conflict between China and the United States.
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