What happens to Corporations after The Transition

Editor’s Note: Another question from an interested person prompted this posting

What takes the place of a corporation?  A corporation is in its most basic form a group of people who come together to achieve a common goal.  The problem with current corporations is the lack of accountability for externalities and their profit profile (how the profit is distributed to the various members of the corporation).  Why would anyone who owns or runs a current corporation buy into this plan?
After the Transition to Copiosis, corporations cannot own money. They cannot own property. Corporations become nullified in Copiosis. That is, their structure is rendered obsolete. There may be some legal implications that will require working through to make this happen.

During The Transition, the value existing in a corporation is distributed to the owners of the corporation according to their ownership share of the corporation. So everyone with an ownership stake in the corporation is made whole. After that, the corporation as a structure disappears. What is left are the people and the material property once owned by the corporation. At that point, all entities where people come together organized to produce something within that corporation become cooperative groups of people working for a common goal. The assets of the former corporation become owned by the people best suited to own them.

Factory lines are owned by the factory foreman (just an example) or the supervisor, or Ops Manager of that line. Or maybe the line is broken up (not literally) and each segment is owned in a time-share by the people at each station along the line. So, for example, the woman responsible for making sure the welding machines at line point 10 owns the welding robot and its peripherals, the die, the tools, the computers and software managing that robot, the floor space along the line, etc. She owns all of that while she is on the line. When her shift replacement comes on, she transfers ownership of all those assets to her replacement.

Conversely, as I believe people who work such jobs won’t want to once they no longer have to earn a living, the coop may innovate automated processes that require no human involvement or minimal involvement (we’re already heading that way, especially in high tech wafer fabs) freeing up millions of people to do much more exciting and important things (such as building spaceships in orbit, livable communities in orbit, colonizing and terraforming other planets and other massive civilization-scale endeavors deemed “too expensive” today). They may also opt for simple human scale pursuits, such as raising and spending time with their kids. In either case, they are paid for doing so.

These new organizations are now governed by the Net Benefit calculation. By the way, coops are much more accountable to themselves than corporations. I think you’ll agree with that. As such the people inside them are much more serious about doing the right thing. So these newly-formed entities are much more focused on working in ways that minimize negative outcomes and maximizing positive ones. The spread between those two objectives determines how much each member earns according to her contribution. What were once considered economic externalities in capitalism are included and accounted in the Net-Benefit calculation, so incomes reflect every outcome, not just profitable ones.

Now, why would anyone “buy into this plan?” For one, it creates a much better world for their children and families. Crime, poverty, illness….all the crap we deal with the rich deal with too. All that goes away. Secondly, they don’t lose anything except their dominion over other people. They’re still wealthy, they still have the material possessions they bought with that wealth. If they can lead in an enlightened way, as a servant leader perhaps, they may even retain some of the prestige and authority they once had in the capitalist, top-down economy.

Some won’t want to let that go, but they won’t have a choice, the Transition makes it happen. Will they oppose it? Of course some will. But their opposition will provide the heat needed to get the fire of transition started: even the opposition plays a role in progress.