Communism is When Workers Own Work

Why this concept is so threatening to capitalism

What is communism?

If you are an American you have been taught to hate communism from a very young age. But do you have a clear grasp of what you hate? Could you define it in a few words?

Howard Zinn writes:

"In the history of the human race, we have often seen certain words used to stop thinking, to end rational discourse, to arouse hatred, words which are murderous... The word Communist in this country has been such a word."

Zinn, Howard. Passionate Declarations: Essays on War and Justice. Harper Perennial, NY 2003. p. 266

The essence of communism is not complicated or hard to understand. Communism is an economic system where the workers own the means of production: Workers own work. Communism is an economic system where employees own their workplace. 

Capitalism, by contrast, is an economic system where private owners, we know them as the rich, own the means of production. The private owners are shareholders or wealthy families like the Kochs or Waltons, or wealthy individuals like Jeff Bezos. As the owners their only concern is extracting maximum profit from the business units that they own. As the owners, all business decisions are made to maximize profits for themselves.

Employee-owned enterprises aren't run to gratify shareholders. When workers own their workplace they can make decisions with motivations besides pure profit extraction. Workers have an interest in keeping their businesses running so that they can keep their jobs. Workers would not pay top executives like the CEO millions of dollars to protect the interests of shareholders. Workers have an interest in the long-term health and viability of their business enterprise. They are unlikely to pack up entire factories and move them to Central America or Southeast Asia. When workers own work they make different decisions than rich capitalist owners.

What's that? I think I can already hear all the anticommunists storming the comment section to say "Give us one example of this working, pinko." 

You've never heard of an employee-owned enterprise? They aren't that uncommon. In fact, 11 of the 100 largest private companies in the US are employee-owned.

That notorious communist rag known as the Harvard Business Review noted, "employee-owners have higher wages and net worths, receive better benefits, and are less likely to lose jobs to cuts and outsourcing during a downturn, compared with workers who don’t have ownership stakes in their organizations."

The country's largest employee-owned company is the grocery store chain Publix. They have more than 1,200 locations, employ nearly a quarter million workers, and made about $45 billion in revenue in 2019. Publix is the fifth-largest privately-owned company in the US. 

There are lots more successful companies operating here in the United States that already have employee ownership structures. There's Bob's Red Mill, 100 percent owned by its workers. Stewart's convenience stores in the northeast of the US have 175 employees who have become millionaires because of their employee ownership program. To pro-capitalist critics who say it's impossible to imagine such a thing - well, it's already happening. It's already successful. Employee-owned businesses tend to have better performance, more stability, fewer layoffs, and higher worker satisfaction than their mainstream alternatives.

I know my hardcore commies will object that employee stock ownership programs and the like are hardly the communist vanguard - and I agree. Also, you don't get a communist system by having a bunch of worker-owned enterprises competing in a capitalist system. But let's stick with broad strokes for now. 

Perhaps an even better example of employee ownership is the Mondragon corporation. Located in the Basque region of Spain, Mondragon is an organization made up of nearly a hundred different autonomous cooperative business units. Mondragon's workers own the entire kit and caboodle; there are no outside shareholders. The highest-paid executives in the organization make at most six times what their lowest-paid workers make. When individual units inside the organization do well, workers get a share of the profits.  Mondragon's workers get an equal vote on important decisions about company strategy, wages, and more. Mondragon employs about 80,000 people and made more than $11 billion in revenue in 2021.

The pro-capitalist propaganda system that we live in does not want you to associate communism with employee ownership. Part of the potency communism retains as a scare word is its association with totalitarian dictators like Stalin or Kim Il Sung. You are meant to associate communism with authoritarianism. You are meant to associate capitalism with freedom. This is hugely ironic.

Because in the capitalist system, we are never meant to notice how little freedom we have in the workplace. Think about it. When you go to work you have no freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly, no freedom from surveillance, no due process rights. Whatever Constitutional rights we have outside the workplace evaporate once we clock in. True, you have the freedom to quit whenever you want. But the boss also has the power to fire you whenever he wants - unless you're in a union.

The bosses have all the power at work because practically every American corporation is a top-down totalitarian organization. We spend huge chunks of our lives under the oppressive rule of authoritarian regimes every day when we walk into work. Is that freedom? No, it's capitalism.

So think about that the next time you hear someone say they hate communism. Because what they're really saying is they hate the idea of having any power at work to make decisions, to choose higher wages, to have freedom in the workplace. 

Of course, there is more to communism than just workers owning work. Karl Marx himself famously came up with the slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," an inspiring sentiment.

But I think this distinction, workers owning the means of production, is one of the most fundamental concepts people need to understand about communism. When you comprehend this core idea you can begin to understand why the people who run a capitalist society like ours hate and fear communism so much. Communism says that having rich people own and decide everything is unnecessary. A terrifying concept to the rich, but an empowering concept for the vast majority who exist in such a system.

This is why communism is vilified. This is why you, like me, have been conditioned to hate and fear the very mention of the word communism.

Workers of the world, let's make them pay.