i've always wondered why someone hasn't started a non-profit business to start selling goods and services, in which they should be able to out-compete the for-profit enterprises, since they can sell at cost just to break even, or sell at less of a markup.

you could get one going, then use what would be the "profits" (since you can't keep them) as seed funding a second similar non-profit in a different industry, then a third, by then the 2nd one could seed fund a fourth, and so on and so on until eventually, you would have expanded into every industry. and over time, since you can always out-compete the capitalist, you would have monopolized every industry with non-profit enterprises.

depending on how you structured it, you could stipulate some kind of collective social ownership, or each industry could be run as a non-profit worker cooperative with workplace democracy.

i am sure there are a thousand little reasons why this might fail, but i don't see any big gotcha? it seems like a sound idea. i guess maybe the capitalists would be willing to run at a loss to try and stop you, but that's still a good outcome? maybe try to make it illegal? i am not sure how you could make it illegal to sell good and services at break-even prices. price controls, ok fine, we will just have more money for seed funding.

i guess TLDR the ability to run a not-for-profit business seems like a pretty big weakness for capitalism.

  • ImperativeMandates [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    There was one person with the correct Marxist analysis. I'd like to add three points.

    • to be a company in capitalism that competes on the market means you have to exploit your workers and not pay them for their work, this means your business will remain no stepping stone away from capitalism, but being part of the sphere of circulation

    • you forget state force (and capitalist forces). We have 800 years of examples that show when people try to be non capitalist oriented or suffer from its connected discriminations, that if they become politically dangerous or it is profitable and expedient, that their property gets taken away and / or they get crushed.

    • you might be interested in Mondragon

    • joshieecs [he/him,any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Yes, absolutely, you would still be a capitalist enterprise operating under capitalism.

      The idea here is a bit like "copyleft" which uses copyright law to "infect" any derivative works with the same copyleft license. So you are free to take the work (which may be worth many thousands of hours of labor value) and use it in some project or add to or modify it. But your modifications have to be released under the same license.

      So in this case, the original work generates a seed fund, instead of profits to capitalists, the derivative works would be the new enterprises created from the capital in the seed fund. Which they would then go on to have to build their own seed fund. This is all a trick of law. Using the non-profit law to charter a non-profit that functions this way, and any derivatives would have to adopt the same kind of charter.

      The state is the real killer here, because it could always modify the law to make such a scheme impossible. But it's hard for me to imagine how they could require businesses to operate for-profit without regulating either wages or prices. And in either case, I would argue that is a good outcome for the project!

      Mondragon was part of the inspiration for the idea. Though Mondragon is not a non-profit. That is the secret sauce, at least from my understanding of US business law. I think Mondragon is a great example of what can be done within the limits of capitalism, but the non-profit model goes one step further.