Woo hoo! My commie propaganda has arrived!

By the way, I found out after I had ordered it that this book is available as a free PDF if you diligently search for it. Oh well.

So the idea I wonder about is: will the revolution come by out-capitaling the capitalists? Do we buy/build the means of production rather than seizing them? Do we take business plans and organizations etc. and strike out the C-suite and replace every instance of “owner” with “members” — the members being the worker-owners? Do we replace boards of directors with workers’ councils?

Right now there’s a “labor shortage” that isn’t a real shortage at all. It’s a glut of crap jobs. Nobody wants crap jobs and with the pandemic on, many feel free to retrain and take employment elsewhere, where the pay, benefits, and company culture are better.

Capitalism loves to mistreat employees because they don’t deserve better, in its mindset. It doesn’t see them as generators of stolen labor. Worker-owned businesses with better pay, benefits, culture, and PROFIT SHARING?!?!?! Those stand a fine chance to out-compete capitalist enterprises for their labor. I mean, where would YOU like to work?

If you take all that money and respect that is currently funneled straight to the C-suite and executives and instead distribute it to the workers, what would you get?

I am learning about mutual aid cooperatives stepping in where governments fail us. In the motel model from the last entry, what if an education cooperative ran a school in the off-hours in the restaurant? This could become super important as more and more states refuse to let their schools teach science and history.

My home state has no recycling; could we form a recycling cooperative?

What else could we pitch in together on? It blows my mind how things like this are stigmatized as “other” when US pioneers and farmers know damn well about barn raising and volunteer fire departments. Pitching in together was how Indigenous people did things on Turtle Island. If I understand correctly, there weren’t necessarily rich people or rich families, but rich villages and tribes. That completely makes sense.

I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about these things, and I’m so ignorant. There’s so much theory, but I want to study practice. I want to study best practice, lessons learned. What worked and what failed. What basic principles are sound and what ones are shaky.

Surely somebody has done a basics curriculum, right?