The Community Company

From Random Hipatia

The community-company is a functional concept that I am not sure how well known it is. It is also a model I have in the past had some direct experience with. As an alternate to the corporate model, it holds some promise, but is also a particular peril which I like to call the pirate ship paradox, which I will explain a bit further down.

Where most companies operate almost like medieval castles, with walls erected between those who are within, or “employed”, and those who are not, a community-company often is itself immersed in a wider community and does not use such distinctions between those within and those without. Perhaps the first place to understand a cc is through the way they are formed and the documents they create. While most companies start with a charter, and end with an employees manual, the cc sets these aside and replaces both with a single instrument, sometimes referred to as a company constitution.

The constitution of a community company usually offers a definition of community and membership, as the concept of voluntary membership, rather than “employment”, is used. The constitution will also define how corporate officers are elected, what terms they may serve, and perhaps how other functional relationships with the organization will operate.

As a community-company becomes older, larger, and more resistant to change, they, like corporations, can fail in a number of ways. They can become a monoculture of groupthink, or fail by becoming an accretion of conflicting individuals and purposes. Unlike with failed corporations, when this happens people are free to leave a cc to spawn more vigorous or nimble new cc’s. Indeed, this is the most important freedom found in a community-company, the right to leave and form replacements, and it, as well as other processes or reasons for the dissolution are often provisioned for in the cc constitution.

The question of how to “map” a community-company into the commercial models permitted under existing laws is often the most complex aspect of organizing and maintaining a community-company. For the most part, they are usually functionally incorporated as if they are “employee owned” business, as this is the closest legal definition one can find.

To make community-companies function as an employee owned corporation, they will typically issue shares to membership. Often, this is done as a continual process, so those that are members for the longest period will receive the most shares. Other models involve shares which automatically expire over a fixed time period.

Electoral procedures in community-companies can very greatly, but the primary concept is that, at the very least, corporate officers, and, sometimes, managers, are elected by the membership, and on a temporary basis (or term). Elections are usually done either by direct equal vote of currently active “members”, or by shareholder vote.

In that cc’s can be and sometimes are created as “for profit” institutions (in fact, there has been some considerable study in the question of whether a “for profit” cc can be publicly traded as well) that can operate in the same greed rewarding marketplace as other corporations, this brings us to what I like to call the pirate ship paradox.

Indeed, hearing the call of the capitalists marketplace, it is easy to imagine a group of anarcho-capitalist “gentlemen of fortune” gathering together, electing themselves a “captain”, and then go raiding on the high greed of open markets. That they may exchange successful broadsides with traditional corporations and sink some into the oblivion of bankruptcy does not deny the fact that they themselves have become capitalists in the process.

The danger of individually organized shared ownership organizations to successfully outcompete the existing order has long been recognized. Well before Marx’s time, the aristocracies of Europe, already fearing the threat posed by emerging individual “peasant” landowners aggregating their properties together to compete with the local lord passed specific laws to prevent most forms of joint or collective ownership. Indeed, these same laws are what later helped in part to form the extremely bipolar world of 19th century capitalism that Marx found, where those who were once individual shopkeepers and craftsmen, offered no other option or means to compete, were reduced by the new capitalist owner of production to a status lower than slaves, and which we are seeing re-emerge in it’s most extreme and ugly form once again today.

That the community-company potentially can sink the corporate flagships of todays capitalists should not be viewed as or mistaken for a solution to capitalism itself. The lash of oppression for those victumized by the marketplace stings no less because there are many hands on the whip rather than just a few. Maybe I am an optimist, in that I hope that the community-company can help create the conditions necessary where the tyranny of the greed driven marketplace can itself be overturned, as well as sail on through to continue on the other side, for it would be failure to do anything less.