I want create an organisation (or work for an already created one) that provides support to companies that wish to be worker-controlled and certify those companies such that people can choose these companies when making purchasing decisions.
The needs I can immediately see are clear organising agreement templates for the company guaranteeing worker control, worker ownership scheme policy templates (e.g., when a worker leaves), and worker voting policy templates. Perhaps after an organisation has implemented these controls, they may be listed as a certified worker-controlled establishment.
Background: I’m a anarcho-communist and when I need to consume, I would love to give power to worker-controlled institutions instead of capitalists. I have found few databases of worker-controlled businesses and none that were providing any goods/services I would actually need on a usual basis. I’m a corporate lawyer (fuck me) so I understand the governance required to distribute profits within a company. I don’t see an organisation providing guidance to new businesses started by workers who want to keep their interests where they should be, returning profits to workers.
Do you have any thoughts on this, comrades? Worth the effort?
In the west, this is because the west has genuinely priced its working classes out of existence. One can call it “greedflation” (and sure, it primarily is), but it also is a symptom of an economic system which draws much of the wealth and labor of the globe into these overpriced imperial cores, devaluing and exploiting on an even greater level the lives of those elsewhere; a symptom of the broader picture of these imperial cores exporting their debt across the world and artificially maintaining their own currencies’ value increasingly through threats and violence more than anything else; and of course, also a symptom of the neoliberal modern system wherein the former monopolies of production (mercantilism) have considerably shifted outside of the imperial cores, and what remains within is the typical “American-style” or late stage capitalism- bottom-line, shareholder-dominated, rentier capitalism, a sort of “slash and burn/disaster capitalism” that the classical liberals were explicitly against (but which Marxist analysis explains).
As for that, while I’d not quite call it “virtue signalling” (it’s little different, but the intent is genuine), the simple fact is that it won’t change the system, hell, it won’t even band-aid the system. And so long as all the levers of the imperialist world system or even domestic finance remain under capital’s control, it is- less effective even, than trying to swim up a waterfall.
I’m not saying that there can’t be some tiny good done, for some individual lives. Just like any (genuine) charity or outreach that much is true. But end of the day it all can be undone (and will constantly be stuck trying to swim up the waterfall- predictably, at the bottom of the waterfall), when the system is utterly and overwhelmingly in the hands of the capitalists. Whether it be through taxation, inflation, all the countless forms of rent and interest charged within capitalist society, through their dominance over the political processes (regulatory capture, corporate welfare, etc- the list goes on) you will not even make a dent within the system this way.
It’s not a bad thing to do. But it’s just charity, it does not fix the problem.