How do they decide whether to buy it or not ?
By voting ? If so, this would still be imposing a decision to (some of) the workers.
Would these unsatify workers be allowed to leave the company and make their own again ? This would be back to capitalism, in a way.
I have a few points to make here.
1. Why would the unsatisfied workers simply walk out? That is assuming walking out is even an option in a communist society unless there is another workplace that requires their specific skills. People don't leave the country because their favoured party didn't win the election. I don't think they'll leave their workplace over a faulty machine.
2. By saying that the new machine is too expensive you've already made this situation Capitalism coded. If this is a worker co-op under Capitalism then the workers will do what the Capitalist owner would've done, save as much money as possible and worry only about the bottom line.
But even if it's not coming out of their own pockets we can still imagine that the new machine is hard to acquire in a Socialist system. But I don't believe this situation should lead to such a wide division because the condition of the machine and it's impact on output is an objective fact.
3. We have examples of this situation working out in real life. Publically traded companies are quite literally publically owned. They do it by breaking up the ownership into shares and then have individuals own those shares, because it's not true Capitalism without a tinge of individualism and alienation.
The majority shareholders meet once per year to vote on major issues and hire the executive management and then leave the company upto the management. Of course this is a very Capitalistic model since the company is owned by investors not workers and shareholder bottom line is the deciding factor in everything.
But the point is, there can be a million ways to manage public ownership.
and the workers are free to leave if they disagree with the decision.
How is this any different from the same problem in Socialism? Even there the workers may get dissatisfied from the majority's or management's decision and leave the socialised workplace. Maybe in some cases they may not have a choice because there is nowhere else to go to, but that's also true for many workers in Capitalism. They'll have to keep working with the faulty and potentially dangerous machine because their owner doesn't want to replace it and they cannot leave for elsewhere.
Also you seem to be confusing worker co-op under capitalism with a workplace under socialism. In the latter situation the worker is not tied to his workplace via personal capital investment because private ownership as a concept does not exist. Depending on how the system is organised workers can move between workplaces and jobs. But each time they are the ones who have the final say on their workplace. (Or atleast they should)
I would add that the workers can join each others the express their disagreement, and even threaten to abandon the company.
This is what unions are (or rather were) for.
If the workers can have a say because their work is necessary then we have already contradicted the assumption that Capitalists should have the final say. In which case we might as well take this situation to it's logical conclusion and establish socialism.
Unions are a stepping stone towards communism. It's the slippery slope of allowing workers ever more power until they take control of the economy itself and abolish private ownership in the hands of few.
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Finally, you also have a very naive view of capitalists, you seem to think they just do nothing all they long and a paycheck falls in their pockets at the end of the month.
This might be the case for some, but not for most. Most capitalists still work, not with their hands sure, but management, economic decisions, logistics, finding clients or parteners, etc, is all necessary work, and yes, capitalists often do lots of this themselves.
I'm glad you made this point. I don't claim that Capitalists do not work, they do work. Sometimes A LOT. But they are still humans and there's only so much work that you can do in a day.
The issue is that their earnings do not come from that work itself but from Surplus Value accumulated via the virtue of owning the means of production. Jeff Bezos is not a billionare because he works 20 hours a day. He is a billionare because he can extract value from the millions of hours of work done by Amazon delivery people every day.
A counter example is, again, publically traded corporations. They are run entirely by a professional managerial class. They make good money sure but it's still salary. Some actual owners do nothing but invest money that they already have and count the profits.
Marx's theory does not make this a moral issue. That's why Engels differentiates Scientific Socialism from Utopian Socialism. They pointed out systematic issues in the very logic of Capitalism and why it can't be allowed to reign freely. People took notice and that's why most governments today have some left wing economic policies.
The issue is systematic. The logic of Capitalism inadvertently leads to poverty if left unchecked.
I know what I really want, I don't need Marx or anyone else to tell me what my problems and needs are.
The idea is for people to understand how the system works. They can draw their own conclusions. Ho Chin Minh, leader of the Viet-Min , when asked about the state of poor education of workers in his country and their ability to understand marxist French intellectuals, said that despite their education workers can understand this stuff better than the intellectuals because they are actually living the consequence of surplus extraction and see it with their own eyes.
