Hey Comrades,

I've been mulling over the idea of starting a 'business' organized on socialist lines as best I understand them. While my interest in socialism is budding I'm aware of the difficulties (impossibilities?) of trying to create a grassroots guild-type organization within a capitalist system, but the idea still interests me because 1) I'd like to shift my primary means of income from a private company to one grounded in collective ownership, and 2) I have a strong desire to try to practice principles of socialist organization and life to the best of my ability.

Without much specialized knowledge or personal capital (broke college student atm) my ideas are pretty much limited to providing a service myself, then bringing others in as the customer base becomes large enough to provide worthwhile opportunities to others as well. The critical socialistic elements I’ve identified so far are below:

• Collective ownership of all business assets
• Equitable collective management and decision-making
• Zero capture of ‘surplus’ labor value, i.e. each worker works for themselves and directly gaining the financial fruits of their labor
• A minimum standard of financial return for all workers (i.e. $35K/yr) to be held inviolable, beyond which the workers may through democratic mechanisms, appropriate collective funds to any purpose deemed appropriate.

I’m looking for any insight into any part of this thought process, including the desirability of creating an organization like this from a socialistic view. I have plenty of ideas beyond the barebones list provided, but I thought I’d bring this here and see what those who are better-informed on socialist and feminist theory might think of it. Thanks!

TLDR: starting a guild-type commercial enterprise aimed at practicing socialist practices in our wonderful capitalist world for the sake of gaining experience in practical socialist organization. Looking for insight from a socialist lens as well as ideas about how to create such an organization.

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Marx and Engels wrote that communism is the real movement to abolish the present order of things, but the present order of things—capitalism—has the day-to-day advantage over us and uses it, forcing its ideas on working people at work, through all forms of media, and in every part of our daily lives.

To organize against capitalism, communists need to have a strategy for projecting our ideas. We also need an approach to making our ideas the basis for organized work and building organizations suited to pursuing and developing our politics.

How should communists seek to project our ideas into the world? What obstacles do we face? And which of the many approaches to anticapitalist organization provides the best path forward to defeating capitalism’s project of exploitation and oppression?

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Featured Speaker Mark J. is a communist organizer, writer, and educator in eastern Kansas. He is a founding member of Firebrand.