Risk factor
One of the most common arguments that most of the people give in favour of the factory owners taking lion’s share of the profit is the risk involved in starting/running an enterprise. However does the risk factor hold enough justified a reason to take the share of somebody else’s hard earned labour?
I, in that case, suggest a different option. Why not the factory owner give in loan the capital to all the workers. In that case, the factory will belong to each worker and if the business fails and the factory owners(which now includes both the employee and the employer) decide to dissolve the business, each employee will eventually have to return their share of the capital invested to the capitalist.
This process however involves great risks to the proleteriat who have nothing to lose and have nothing to invest except for the labour. Considering this once again the concept of the state being the capital provider gains ground.
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The solution you have provided is sort of what happens in a ‘co-operative’ ( like say amul) but i have a completely different way of looking at this. I am assuming that this solution is targeted toward providing parity in terms of profit-earning between the factory-owners and the factory-workers. Anybody with socialist leanings (including myself) would try to look at it this way. However, where this analysis goes slightly wrong is that you are trying to provide parity in terms of money while it is more important for the state to provide parity in terms of ‘happiness’..unfortunately happiness has no metric..economists have come up with something called ‘human development index (HDI)’ which tries to model what i am suggesting and so, countries like Iceland score much higher than US despite having a lower GDP. It is important to realize that not every single person needs to be Bill Gates for a society to be happy. I cannot speak for others (nor am i an economist enough to make generic statements). If i take up my own case –>I am a phd student which means i could either be working in the R&D of some company or teaching in a college/univ..in either case, the establishment i am going to work for is going to ‘make’ much more out of ‘my efforts’ than i myself do BUT i have absolutely no problem with that as long as the money i earns ensures me a ‘decent living’ (which the money is for in the 1st place)….the same should hold true for a factory-worker, rickshawalla, sweeper..anybody..what we need to realize is that ALL OF THEM ARE IMPORTANT..the rickshawalla is just as important in terms of his contribution to the society as a phd..if his profession puts an upper-bound on his earnings then so be it, the government needs to ensure that even he can live a decent life out of whatever little he earns…economic disparity will be always there, however hard any government might try..state needs to create opportunities in such a way that even the weakest links can stand on their own..we need to make the ordinary man happy (or rather content) rather than making him rich…It is really sad (and the biggest success story of capitalism) that it has become tough to think about what one want in life without bringing money into the picture..even sadder is that the so-called intellectual ethnic groups in our society (namely bengalis, tamilians & marathis) have a total disregard for ‘dignity of labour’..in a perfect society every single person would be proud of what he does and no crorepati businessman/middle-class univ professor would need to fell sympathetic towards the ‘poor construction-worker’