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As I understand it, during the 1970s Swedish economist and co-architect of the Swedish welfare state Rudolf Meidner proposed a radical plan whereby every year businesses with more than 50 employees would issue shares worth 20% of their profits to networks of Wage-Earner Funds, which were controlled by local authorities and trade unions and could not be sold.

The plan was initially proposed as a means of preserving the principle of wage solidarity that underpinned the Swedish welfare state, whilst also ensuring a source of funding for social programs. Basically the idea was that workers would be paid the same for doing the same work regardless of the profitability of the firm they worked at. This ultimately fixed wages for workers at a rate that small businesses could afford, which massively benefited larger businesses who had the advantages of greater economies of scale, whilst not having to pay their workers a larger share of their profits, thus concentrating more wealth at the top.

This policy was designed to target this concentration of wealth, whilst not jeopardising the capital that these businesses needed to operate the way typical corporation tax did. It also would have preserved opportunities for entrepreneurship, given that they only effected larger businesses, and once they started taking effect the transition to worker's ownership would have taken a long enough time for the entrepreneurs behind the venture to have been amply rewarded for their investments.

A side-effect of this policy was that, over the course of several decades, that vast majority of Swedish businesses would effectively be owned by the Wage-Earner Funds, and by extension the trade unions.

Understandably these radical ideas were widely criticised by the business community, non-socialists and the right-wing of the Social Democratic Party, and when the plan was put into practice is was heavily watered down, eventually being abandoned in 1992 when the Social Democrats lost power.

What would have happened if it had been fully implemented as intended, and what would have to happen to do that?

Off the top of my head it would seem that it would have created a decentralised socialist system with a strong focus on market socialism, municipalism, and syndicalism.

More information:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/12/22/a-visonary-pragmatist/

http://persistenceofpoverty.blogspot.co.uk/p/blog-page_15.html

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/sweden-social-democracy-olaf-palme-assasination-reforms/
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