Workers are at risk of losing their job and having to find another which is situationally easier or harder depending upon their personal skills and experience. A small business owner can be out anywhere from a low 5 figures to 6 figures+ in cash, debts for unpaid rent commitments. In addition, the owner may well be stuck both inventory and equipment that is now of much lessor value.
Okay, I might miss something, but how exactly does a business owner who loses his business is any less at a risk than an employee losing his job ? Does being a business owner magically creates a permanent money revenue that sustain you once your business falls ?
I think we are defining risk in a way that is too broad here
Responding to these all together bc I think they all get at the same point. Narrowly defining "risk" as how much money is on the line is silly when business owners can typically absorb these losses without much impact on their actual conditions of life. I don't think I've ever heard of someone being homeless because their new business failed; but people get evicted from their apartments every day after losing their jobs and being unable to make rent. And that's another problem with defining risk narrowly in dollar amount terms, because dollar losses don't affect everyone identically. There is a huge difference, for example, in terms of life consequences, between barely making rent and not making rent. Not having the money to pay for basic expenses and necessities is a much more miserable situation than, say, Eric Trump's multimillion-dollar business venture failing even if Eric is "risking" a lot more money. His "risk" will not affect his life circumstances at all. And obviously I know that most business owners are not as affluent as Eric Trump, but I think the distribution of wealth in the US is such that people starting businesses generally, on average, have more of a cushion of affluence than people who work for a paycheck, particularly people working low-wage jobs and living paycheck to paycheck. And so, again generally speaking, I think that the risk of job loss is more of an existential threat to a worker than a business failing is to an entrepreneur. This isn't a mechanical fact because you have poor people who start businesses and affluent employed people (like me, when I lost my job I moved back with my Boomer parents and took advantage of their generational wealth instead of ending up homeless).
And this is of course not even getting into things that are outright unfair like the fact that business owners can take advantage of bankruptcy law, or that some classes of business owners face no risk of any kind because they'll be bailed out by the government.
Nope, my wife and I have always had one of us working sufficiently to make ends meet. We have been poor making minimum wage but we learned how to live cheaply when we had to.
EDIT: Homelessness was mostly not an issue until the Reagan years and even then it was a much more limited problem. It didn't really take on its current scope until well after my wife and I were well established.
You're a boomer (like my parents) and you grew up in very different economic circumstances, when the US still pursued something close to full employment and good-paying jobs were far more plentiful. Just using a random year but in 1970 the minimum wage waa $1.60/hour, the real value of that in 2023 dollars is $12.04. The federal minimum wage today is $7.25.
Anecdote: my dad had an entry-level job in a cannery when he was around 20 and it paid a wage that would be like $27/hour in 2023 dollars.
If you have never actually run a business that has at least 6 employees and sells products or services (not consulting), you will never understand what it is all about.
Lol clearly you've only ever worked for other people
Y'all really are one-trick ponies ain't ya? I could just as easily say you've never been one missed paycheck away from eviction so you don't know WTH you're talking about either. Please understand I am not saying that it isn't difficult or that a lot of hard work isn't involved in starting and running your own business.
I snipped some of your post here just for readability. If you believe we do have this technical capacity*, why do you think the capitalists of today not applying it themselves? I would think that if it were possible, it would already be in progress.
And now finally the interesting stuff. So first, I am not sure we have the capacity at this moment. I don't
know because I don't fully know how much productive force could be freed up by reorganizing society right now in this perfect, hypothetical chess-problem way. My sense is that we probably would still need a socialist form of organization of the economy for some time, to continue developing the productive forces, before we could transition fully to communism. But right now, at this moment, I think we could all be working probably, say, 20 hour weeks instead of 35-40 and still output the same level of
socially useful goods and services.
As for why the capitalists today are not unleashing the full capacity of the productive forces, there are many interrelated reasons. Part of the problem is that we are still fundamentally organizing our societies around the hierarchies of European manorialism. A corollary to this is that markets are massively distorted by the tremendous inequality of purchasing power that defines the global economy and basically all national economies as well. But the economy is not organized for maximum efficiency of production, it is organized for maximum efficiency of extraction of financial profit from the productive processes, which in practice leads to very different outcomes than we would see if the economy was organized for maximum efficiency of production, especially when considering that production takes place for sale to a market so grossly distorted not only by massive purchasing power inequality, but also by the externalization of the true costs of economic activities.
Now, finally, I do believe it is in progress. This part is a complicated topic and this post is already long, but suffice it to say I believe it is already in progress. I am not like some of my fellow Communists who see none of their values in operation in the world as it is today.
