In many ways, I think that a worker's cooperative is a much better legal structure for a software firm than a corporation.
I assume that Valve generously grants stock options to its employees, like most other Silicon Valley firms. This, combined with its interesting management structure, makes Valve a worker's cooperative in practice but not by law.
I suspect that if Valve lived in a jurisdiction with legal protections for worker's cooperative, that it would be one.
If I would have finished reading to the end before commenting, I would have had my questions answered. Valve does not grant ownership to employees. However, excess profits are distributed to employees for the most part, which does make Valve a de facto worker's cooperative.
Yanis does discuss the standard arguments against a worker's coop: malfeasance, access to capital, and scalability.
I grew up in an area (Saskatchewan), where for a long time the largest "company" was a cooperative. Access to capital is probably the main reason why Silicon Valley firms are not worker's cooperatives. But that can be solved by granting worker's cooperatives the same legal privileges as corporations. Instead of selling shares, they sell "bonds" which do not pay interest but instead pay a fraction of profit. This is in practice no different than buying insubordinated shares, like those sold by Facebook or Google. Such shares do not give you a "proper" shareholder vote, voting shares are held by the founders.
I think the command economy part of communism (the governance form) is probably the biggest problem libertarians have with communism. I don't think they have anything against equal partnerships between large numbers of people.
Oddly, that part came mainly from capitalists; the early-20th-century Marxist idea of "scientific management" of a centralized industrial economy was closely modeled on scientific-management ideas from large industrial conglomerates.
There was a period when large industrialists were arguing that having many competing companies is inefficient, and instead managing a large, integrated industrial sector via scientifically/mathematically sophisticated methods was the future. That was one argument against anti-trust laws: that breaking up large companies would just decrease efficiency. The only thing the communists really disagreed with was what should be done with the profits of these trusts.
> biggest problem libertarians have with communism
is ignorance of communism et al actually means. At least for the masses of "don't tax me bro!" tea baggers and other modern bandwagon, pseudo libertarians.
I assume that Valve generously grants stock options to its employees, like most other Silicon Valley firms. This, combined with its interesting management structure, makes Valve a worker's cooperative in practice but not by law.
I suspect that if Valve lived in a jurisdiction with legal protections for worker's cooperative, that it would be one.