100% of the trouble with becoming a worker owned collective:

Worker: I want more pay / a share of the profits / a vote in how things operate

Owner: Cool, let’s make you an owner. Means sharing the risks too, tho.

Worker: lol no.

[THREAD]

This, of course, isn’t true of everyone. Lots of people are thrilled to get a shot at ownership even if they’re a little intimidated by it.

But maaaan is it true of a lot of leftist types that they’ll curse the notion of traditional employment...

Until the possibility of ownership makes the taken-for-granted benefits of a “job” suddenly seem very attractive...

That’s the chicken and egg problem with trying to hack capitalism with WOCs. At the early stages of a business, when things are uncertain and difficult, no one wants to share risk. So usually just one or two people share that risk to get things off the ground...

When things take off, those founders get stingy. And it’s kind of an understandable impulse: they took 90% of the risk, so why shouldn’t they take 90% of the reward if it works out? After all, workers wouldn’t have jobs without that risk having been taken...

Not to say this is fair; Bezos may have risked a lot in the beginning, but now he’s on track to become a trillionaire by sacrificing the bodies of his warehouse employees for wages that are kept low not b/c Amazon can’t afford it, but b/c the margin props up his stock value...

In that way, the rugged individualism of entrepreneurship, coupled with the small number of seed investors that launch businesses, creates monsters.

I think the small number of people accepting that large amount of risk in the beginning gives them a jaundiced view of humanity...

And they carry it with them into the marble halls of later fortune if they manage to succeed.

Maybe Bezos’ profit-hoarding is a “f*ck you” to everyone that didn’t believe in his dream and let him go it alone.

The origin story of evil is usually both bitter and relatable...

The “get mine” impulse of entrepreneurial individualism doesn’t regulate itself well. USA’s rare fit of broad prosperity under a progressive mood was the result of a World War. Other countries try to rein it in with taxes and regulation, and the results are mixed at best...

The solution between now & revolution, as I see it, is collective entrepreneurship. The creation of a solidarity economy on a foundation of shared economic risk & prosperity.

A strong social safety net would make this much easier, and that’s precisely why we don’t have one...

Because it makes entrepreneurship TOO risky for the masses. And then on the investment side, you have things like the accredited investor standard precluding mass participation in seed investment.

Founders and funders come from privileged classes, and that’s by design...

For all our American talk about being the land of the free and home of the brave, we plainfolk mostly live in prisons of economic fear.

Fear of destitution, becoming a burden on our friends and family, becoming an object of shame or ridicule in the age of social media...

And the only thing standing between us and that fear... is a paycheck.

As inflation and wealth inequality shrink those paychecks, we cling to them ever tighter. We reach in desperation for anything remotely resembling immediate security...

Unfortunately, economic self-determination offers the opposite: immediate risk.

That’s the terrifying elegance of the extractive economy’s design. It reinforces itself until it destroys most of the planet...

This is why I f*cks with @SarahTaber_bww ‘s quest to disrupt the status quo of electoral politics by creating viable economies in rural America.

There’s no escaping rugged individualism without a broad, lower-case-‘d’emocratic directive to free the masses from economic dread...

But as always, it’s a chicken and egg problem. Who will be the ones to jump first into the unknown of those economies and avoid the trap of individual entrepreneurialism by taking not just jobs, but ownership?

That’s the question the fate of the world hangs upon, IMHO.

/THREAD