They are by far our best bet at solving large coordination problems through price signals. Even though they are far from perfect. I do believe that free markets require capitalism (i.e. profits go to the owner of the capital rather than those who do the labour). But nothing there is against strong regulation, collective bargaining, and anti-trust. Nor is there anything about companies being soley beholden to their shareholders.
Also, 'free' markets can only exist with a whole bunch of regulation, and even then some markets (e.g. emergency care) can never be free.
You can't influence the course of the company (hence the 'beating drive out of you' comment I made). I am not root-causing the issue and putting the blame on leaf-level folks, just describing it. Quite the contrary.
I was riding a gBike (single-speed for those who aren't familiar with one) ~10 years ago with my friend and I told him this bike is a perfect representative of Google's culture. No matter how hard you pedal it goes the same speed.
There do exist worker-managed companies under capitalism, they consistently underperform. There also exist (and have existed) worker-managed companies under various forms of socialism, those were an utter disaster (for the workers themselves, for the environment, for business productivity, for overall societal welfare, for human dignity, the list goes on).
> How can you have "drive to win" if you are just an employee of a company, and have no stake in it?
Bonuses, raises, equity.
Of course, according to a metric, how much money I can make out of an investment, without having to do any work, they underperform!
> There also exist (and have existed) worker-managed companies under various forms of socialism, those were an utter disaster
This is simply not true. Where it was a disaster, it was for the similar reason, workers didn't have the stake in the company.
> Bonuses, raises, equity.
Possibly but you have no say how these things get distributed, and they still are only a small portion of what the investors get.
> According to Virginie Pérotin's research which looked at two decades worth of international data, worker cooperatives are more productive than conventional businesses. Another 1987 study of worker cooperatives in Italy, the UK, and France found "positive" relationships with productivity. It also found that worker cooperatives do not become less productive as they get larger. A 1995 study of worker cooperatives in the timber industry in Washington, USA found that "co-ops are more efficient than the principal conventional firms by between 6 and 14 percent".
Coops don’t have the same incentive structure as external-investor-beholden corporations, so they don’t pursue “growth at all costs”, but rather survival at all costs (job preservation), and then growth where appropriate (pie expansion).
It’s kind of like the trade off between authoritarian regimes and democratic regimes. One is fast but flimsy, the other is slow but robust.
To start a business you need capital, if you have enough on your own, you do not need a coop, much more difficult to convince a group of people to risk together unless they’ve all had previous experience with one another.
> Bonuses, raises, equity.
And significant ones, too. None of this "Hey, you saved the company $1M, here's a $500 bonus!" bullshit.
I once had a founder privately lament to me the this employees don't play to win, and don't "treat the company as if they owned it," and it took all my willpower not to fire back with: "Dude, you're the sole shareholder with 100% of the equity, what do you expect?"
See problem, fix problem. Don't bring it to management. They are just going to tell you to fix it and then take the credit. Protesters confuse me, they are appealing to the cause of the problem for help and redress.
It blows me away how people bathe themselves in hierarchy. Its almost like oxygen to them. Of course, many anarchists become authority figures because of their raw affinity for getting shit done without asking for permission to think.
Great theory when it's just a little quip. Not so great when it comes time to put into practice.
I have a problem, one of my coworkers is being lazy, he isn't cleaning up after himself and his mess is becoming a general hazard (slipping, fire.) I try to tell him to fix it but he's not concerned about the risks and tells me to fuck off. I can clean the mess myself, sometimes, but I have my own work to get done and he can create new mess a lot faster than I can clean it. I could try to organize other workers into a lynch mob.. err... I mean struggle session- wait no... I mean "intervention", but this asshole isn't responsive to social pressure and the people I work with don't have the stomach for violence...
You know what solves this neatly? Going to management. And if that fails, going to government regulators.
People love to talk about how capitalism (or free market) solves the tragedy of the commons, but it actually doesn't. The only way to solve it is to make people care about commons by giving them a say in managing it, i.e. socialism.