Why on earth would you assume nothing else will change, when you've just changed the game-theoretic payoff table for every decision?
All that has changed is the power structure. The purpose of business doesn't change.
Huh? The purpose of a business used to be to make money for its investors. Now its purpose is to make money for its employees.
Or are you talking about some abstract "purpose of business" in general, rather than the purpose of a particular business? If so, by what mechanism does abstract "purpose of business" influence actual people's actual business decisions?
What are these incredible changes that will take place simply because we get rid of all these petty dictators and introduce democratic control?
I already gave you one example: they'll be more resistant to hiring, resulting in much smaller companies on average. Here's another: they won't be able to attract passive investors with promises of a share of the profits so they'll find it harder to acquire capital equipment, resulting in the economy shifting away from capital-intensive production. Here's another: deciding wages by vote means the ever-present conflict of interest between the few workers with high-demand skills, the few workers with low-demand skills, and the majority with medium-demand skills will tend to be resolved in favor of the medium-demand-skill workers, resulting in stratification of the economy into high-demand-skill businesses, medium-demand-skill businesses and low-demand-skill businesses, instead of each individual business having all those different sorts of workers in-house.
The elite few at the top will have an incentive to leave for greener pastures.
There is no correlation between CEO pay and the performance of the companies they work for.
CEO pay is a game. It's the emperor's new clothes.
Getting rid of all that dead wood will save a fortune.
When I say the majority has an incentive to pay the elite few at the top a whole lot less, I'm not talking about CEOs. I'm talking about every worker who gets much higher pay than typical workers: the doctors, lawyers, forensic accountants, engineers, geologists, actuaries, pilots, air-traffic-controllers, what have you -- all the people who aren't employed in sufficient numbers to outvote a majority who see their high salaries as tempting targets.
The company will shift to doing things in a way that requires fewer top experts.
Top experts? How many companies have "top" experts?
All the top high-tech companies. But "top" compared to the whole world isn't the point; the people who are top experts compared to the other workers within the company will be incentivised to leave.
There will be need of people with expertise and if they can convince others that their expertise has special value and this is true then any good democratic body will pay them for the expertise.
If the decisions are made rationally, yes. But the experience in Spain in the 30s is that businesses in anarchist-run regions tend to be full of ideologues who feel experts should be willing to work for the same pay as everybody else.
... they'll have an incentive to reduce the pay of everyone but themselves -- to reduce the pay of suppliers, the pay of investors, the "pay" of customers (i.e. what customers receive per dollar they spend), and the pay of potential employees
How does a company pay workers less when all the other companies are paying them more?
You're assuming your conclusion as a premise -- your contention that the other companies are paying them more is precisely the point in dispute. In any event, I take it that was a response to "potential employees" being in my list. Even in the unlikely event that the other companies really do pay more there's a very easy way for a voting majority in a company to pay them less: by paying them nothing and not hiring them. (That's why I described those people as "potential" employees -- if the anarchist business actually hired them they'd have been actual employees.) I'm talking about all the folks that the business would have hired if it had been capitalist but that the workers who own the business choose not to hire. A society where the vast majority of workplaces operate on democratic principles is probably going to be a society with a very high unemployment rate at the same time as it has vast numbers of understaffed companies -- a society where a poor man who wants to work but who can bring to the table only labor and no capital gets turned away, over and over, by voting majorities of worker-owners who aren't willing to just hand him equal ownership of their own business's capital.
Why exactly are you singing the praises of dictatorship with such enthusiasm? Would the world be worth less if we got rid of all the dictators?
Why exactly are you having this conversation with me? Are you trying to persuade me? Or are you using me as a foil so you can preach to all the readers who are members of your own choir, and/or reciting your catechism to yourself to try to convince yourself to keep believing in it? You know perfectly well that I don't regard a top-down-management business as a dictatorship, since I already told you why the term doesn't apply. So for you to claim I'm singing the praises of dictatorship is just blatant reality avoidance. Assuming you're sincerely trying to persuade me, do you think telling me I'm in favor of something we both know perfectly well I'm not in favor of is likely to persuade me that you're right? Or do you think it's more likely to just persuade me that you're an idiot?
In the event that you're preaching to your choir, do you think telling them that I'm in favor of something you know perfectly well I'm not in favor of is an honorable preaching tactic?
In the event that you're trying to convince yourself by reciting a religious formula, have you considered trying freethinking for a change?
Once the person you're debating has told you why a capitalist company isn't a dictatorship, you only have two reasonable options. Either quit calling a workplace a dictatorship just for not being the anarchist workplace of your dreams, or else
argue the point! Explain why I'm wrong and it really is a dictatorship even though a company boss can't make law, can't have employees shot or jailed, and can't stop his competitors from hiring them away. Simply ignoring all objections and continuing to talk as though it were an established fact that it's a dictatorship is not a reasonable option.
