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Capitalism is a failed experiment
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
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This sounds great in theory, and in a simple farming society it would appear to make sense: the farmer digs up a turnip in the field they own with the fork they own. But how might it work for something like TSMC where the workers are producing semiconductors?
According to a certain well known site they have 73090 employees with total assets of $204.22 billion. Split equally that's $2,794,089 each. So let's suppose TSMC has a socialist epiphany and now every employee is equally a near triple millionaire.
What happens if they need to employ someone new, taking the number of employees, obviously, to 73091? Would that new person have to buy their $2,794,051 share before they start working? Or is that share simply taken off the 73090 and given to the new guy?
Or what if one of the 73090 decides now they're a multimillionaire that they don't ever need to work again and cash their share in? They walk away with $2.7m in their pocket. Where did that money come from? Did the 73089 all have to buy their share off them?
In your hypothetical the workers have collective ownership of the company and would have some kind of democratic or consensus-based decision-making process. They would manage their assets through that process, rather than simply dividing things up into equal shares. If - through whatever decision-making process they happen to have - they decide that they need more workers then they would simply recruit more workers.
If someone wants to quit then they can quit, and take whatever severance package was decided on by whatever decision-making process the workers happen to have. Collective ownership doesn't mean everyone has an equal slice of the pie that they can just take as they please, it means everyone has a say in what happens with all of it. You have an incredibly individualistic view of the world and its sabotaging your understanding.
I'd just like to say that it's not necessarily their fault, this is the world we live in and it's hard to imagine another.
Why can't the workers get paid a living wage, while the rest is invested into the company or community to also benefit the workers? If a new employee is needed, the money can come from there