I’m all for higher minimum wages, unions, paid leaves and other forms of worker protection, but it seems like the most forms of worker protection focus on maintaining a division between an employer(s) who owns the business and the employee who makes money for the business but does not own it. IMO, this division is unethical and exploitative because it denies the worker the full value of their work.
Are there any political or social movements that push for policy or legislation that makes all businesses to be worker owned cooperatives?
I’d think that in an entirely and perfectly Anarchist society the concept of value relations wouldn’t exist as they do today for the idea of where the value ends up to make sense. Can any theory readers point me the right way? In a purely abstract sense, what happens to labor value and use value in a fully collectivist mode of production?
Critique of the Gotha Programme is a Marxist text, not an Anarchist text, but considering we are discussing Use-Value and Exchange-Value, it is extremely useful still.
"Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase “proceeds of labor”, objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another."
Value exists as a measure of inputs and outputs, as you cannot have output exceed input. This avoids the chaos of undefined value. Additionally, however, production is no longer directed for profit, ie exchange, but instead to fulfill Use-Values.