They would strenghten our links by common interest making a powerfull and cordinate agent
We would gain independence from the financial crumbling system
The money would be distributed more equaly letting cooperstivist have stable and large families
The money would be inverted locally, not deslocalization
Comunist failt because it was everything for the people without the people
Capitalism has failed the same way centrslizing all the money and power
The only way to deal with this system und is make every person responsable of their action while work by a common groupal interest
You will have even more incentives since all the workers share the benefits of their business
Take the basque country as example 12 % of the people work in a cooperative and 26% the pib of basques is due to the productivity of cooperatives
And was born the same way , facing a demografical replacement by spaniards , and as a united minority they helped each other briging life to the biggest coperatives of the world
Why cant we do it? Why cant we help eath other breaking this corrupt system ?
Are coperatives the ultimate redpill?
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They are a tool for achieving socialism, but not socialism in of itself. Iirc Lenin has a great passage on the cooperativist movement in post-Revolutionary Russia being a good thing but not possible without the political power of capital being overthrown first.
The primary issue with cooperative formation from below is actually visible in the Basque country, which is that there grows an incentive within the organization to find other means of exploitation by hiring employees or contract workers who aren't worker-owners, so that the worker-owners effectively become a new group of shareholders. Better than the current arrangement, but with its own contradictions in the anarchic market system giving rise to this kind of behavior. There can increasingly be an incentive not to dilute currently existing shares of profits with new worker-owners.
This can be avoided by favorable legislation which incentives the expansion of cooperatives, offers employees buyout options with state loans, or mandates cooperative ownership. Otherwise there will be an incentive to exploit, and to exclude, and so cooperatives can end up being reactionary special-interests. I like cooperatives, and I think the left should try to own their successes, but they also need to be oriented towards ideological, political goals beyond maximizing their own share value. This includes the above, the cooperatives need to be ideologically bound to expanding cooperative businesses in the economy. They don't necessarily have a built-in incentive to do that, just to defend their own enterprise like any other business, so I think it has to be a culture that is associated with them, they basically need to be "infiltrated" or have their formation by driven by leftists in order to build leftist culture in the burgeoning institutions from the beginning.
"Communism" is not a synonym for "Marxism-Leninism", even if M-Ls would like to think so.
However, if you are a reformist type, it is true that cooperative business is a good way forward, since they make socialist ideas culturally acceptable.
Literally worse than capitalism.
no, they're very easy to turn petty booj
Central planning couple with coops is the the ultimate redpill.
I'm fascinated by the interaction of coops and unions. Ideally, the union would act as a weapon to make capitalist enterprises less competitive and the coop would act as a shield to protect workers who face retaliation for union actions. By working together they could present a real danger to capitalism that they can't on their own.
This is it. We need to find the synthesis. How can a strong cooperative movement lead into Cockshottist planning?
What about cybernetic indicative planning with coops?
Can you enlighten me on what indicative planning is?
This video misses the most important benefit of cooperatives. Enterprises do not inhabit a sterile economic sphere. They are entities with political significance as well. If serious socialist reforms are ever proposed through the political system, or if workers wish to force such measures through a labor movement, traditional corporations will defend the rights of the owning class above anything else. They will try to get their assets out of there as quickly as possible, thereby sabotage the enterprises and bring economic ruin to the arising socialist society. Worker cooperatives will have much less of a problem going along. While they do maintain the worker-owner distinction by virtue of taking part in the capitalist system, this alienation isn't embodied in different persons. It is united in the worker-owners of the enterprise. A transition into socialism is nothing but the transition from one economic interest of the individual (to extract surplus value) to another of his interests (to hold direct agency over his labor).
What people often miss when discussing worker cooperatives is that they do not have to be isolated. Instead you should think of them as being part of a broader cooperative movement. This movement will have its own channels of communication, and through them be able to act as a united front against mere capitalist interests and for the direct fulfillment of worker's desires.
We simply need to reach a certain critical mass in the cooperative movement for this to become possible.
Of course it will be resisted as being cartel conspiracy by capitalist interests, but this can be countered by scientifically demonstrating clear economic benefits from more integrated cooperation, or simply by asserting the egoist desire of the population to see things organized this way. That's one way we could transition into socialism.
To make the change from commodity exchange to a labor voucher system we should engage in a politics of decommodification. Goods ought to one by one be considered inappropriate for the commodity form, and transition into direct planning. Labor vouchers then present themselves as the logical distributional mechanism.
Another challenge might be the atomization of worker cooperatives. To overcome this problem we should spend considerable attention developing a praxis that reconnects artificially divided interests within a single network. My impression is that such work would already be useful right this moment. There are plenty of local cooperatives and other spontaneous initiatives that have no idea that they are part of a larger economic body. We should spend attention making them aware of each other and integrating them in a single digital network. Next to this, we should simply try to ensure close ties between worker cooperatives as they are founded. Something that would definitely be good is a mutual fund to create new worker enterprises. It wouldn't be difficult to convince the government to help us out in that. Cooperatives are nice and cuddly.
Whoa now you've gotta elaborate on hot takes my pal
Oh, so effectively Dirigisme.
Maybe it would be a form of micro-indicative planning. Instead of applying indicative measures onto an economic system (subsidies, grants, taxes, and so on), they are applied on each enterprise individually by all other enterprises. This would take the form of directly rewarding the workers of enterprises that perform well (according to whatever metric) with more material benefits, social encouragement and opportunities to reproduce their methods.
Tbh the transition from capitalism to socialism should include a mutualist/marksoc stage.
I agree with this but there's nothing specifically mutualist/marksoc about this. State planning plus coops is already socialism. This would be more like the transition from socialism to full communism.
Whenever a cooperative gets large enough it becomes a corporation.
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If there are significant sections of the economy run by coops rather than by fully socialized planning then it isn’t socialism. A coop is still privately owned after all, just by a group of workers rather than a group of porkies. They also operate for profit and produce commodities. They’re a definite improvement over capitalism but they aren’t quite socialism either.
I see what you mean but I never quite understood why people here consider coops to still be private property. I mean, yes in the traditional sense of the word they are private property but when we analyze what they are can we really say they are? Why can't we just say they are collective property? Even if it isn't state/public property it still is of the workers, owned by them and worker by them. They aren't private property. Also what do you mean by "fully socialized"?
What they are is private property, as in property owned by a group of private individuals for their own economic benefit rather than being owned by society as a whole.
Owned collectively by society as a whole, not just collectively by a handful of people.
Why should the entiriety of society own and benefit from them if only said workers of that business work there and manage it?