How do you expand a successful cooperative without recreating wage labor or punishing the founders?
Imagine two people start a manufacturing cooperative. They invest their entire life savings. They work eighty hours a week for four years. They take zero salary and live on bare minimums to get the operation off the ground.
In year five, the facility is finally highly profitable. They are overwhelmed with demand and need to bring on a janitor and a warehouse loader.
Under a system where private ownership is abolished and workers must collectively own the means of production, how are these new workers integrated? You face three distinct mechanical options. Each one unravels the core premise of workplace democracy.
You give the janitor and the loader an equal 25 percent share of the company and equal voting rights on day one. This mathematically punishes the founders. The founders absorbed massive financial devastation and took 100 percent of the risk for years. The new workers take zero risk and instantly claim half of the established wealth and control. No rational human will ever scale an enterprise or hire new people under these terms. Growth stops.
You force the new workers to purchase their equity share to fairly compensate the founders for the existing capital and machinery. Most working class individuals do not have the cash to buy into a highly profitable enterprise. By requiring a buy in, you lock the poorest and most vulnerable workers out of employment entirely.
You pay the new workers a fixed hourly rate without giving them equity or voting rights until they "earn" it over a period of years. The founders retain control and extract the surplus value of the new workers' labor to recoup their initial investment. You have just reinvented capitalism, wage labor, and the exact hierarchical exploitation socialism claims to dismantle.
If adding a new worker to a successful enterprise either instantly strips the founders of their earned equity, economically locks out poor workers, or deliberately recreates wage labor, how does a socialist economy scale successful businesses beyond the initial founders?