I was reading a book about employee profit-sharing schemes where employees of a company are given a certain part of the profit of a company and the book mentioned that Karl Marx opposed this kind of thing in his Grundrisse pub. 1858. I can't really see why he would. Isn't socialism all about workers getting their share of what they produce? Can someone explain this to me?
Most likely, Marx would be opposed to profit sharing because it dulls their revolutionary potential. Essentially, profit sharing is the means by which the bourgeoisie buy off the proletariat, without changing the fundamentally exploitative nature between the two. This idea taken to its logical extreme is known as "the worse, the better" - that is, the worse the economic conditions of the worker, the better they will be able to appreciate the inherent flaws within capitalism, and then rise against it.
If the profit-share is the entirety of the worker's income, it is then subject to mismanagement. A modern example would be the American salary "bonus." Lots of people foolishly planned around their bonuses in the 1990s. You know how it goes ... the numbers are sliding, the stock's a mess, upper management is dropping the ball every time it's thrown to them. The perfect solution is to spend $100 million on advertising and then tell your employees that it was hail in Saint Louis that killed their bonus. Oh, well. At least those folks have their base salary. But if they didn't, and the profit-share was all there was ... well, that would oblige a company to turn a profit. No Amazon, for starters. Forcing companies to turn profits, while it makes certain amount of intuitive sense, is just inhuman. Everyone knows commerce does its best work when it's not burdened by the obligations of reality.
You can’t eat your crops until they are grown. Businesses take longer than crops to grow and mature. Profit sharing encourages people to make suggestions which will increase the profitability of the company.
I dont see why profit sharing should be a problem,if the company loses money you get less,if its making more you earn more also,so the profit sharing should make the workers more productive,me thinks. maybe he was worried about workers becoming too rich,and then lazy.
Q25, I have one question. Are you from the US? This is an honest question since I noticed that companies are viewed in a different light in the US compared to the mnore socialist states of Europe. I venture to guess that the situation in the UK might be more similar to that of the US than lets say Finland or Sweden. I honestly grew up with the notion that companies are backstabbing money grabbing filthy things. And that we are not on this planet to generate profit. If profit is the no.1 factor of importance than indeed a share of the profit would seem rather a good deal. If profit is seen as something immoral, than you can imagine that profit sharing is also immoral. It is a state of mind.
