Cooperatives and counter economy

supremereality.us/home/thread?id=cooperatives-the-counter-economy

Hey guys, officecuck user here

In our day to day lives of wage-slavery under capitalism, we get up each day and go to work for a capitalist boss making him money. While left(ish) thinkers from Proudhon to Carson to Wolff to even Cockshott (albeit as a transitionary phase to cybernetic planning) have promoted workers coops, there has been no concerted effort to promote this idea.

Advantages:

1. We get to quit being wagecucks for a capitalist and work for ourselves. Although we are still cucked by a greater capitalistic economy competing with our coops, we at least are free of an immediate capitalistic boss, CEO or manager.

2. It takes away profits from the bourgeois. One of the greatest ideas of a coop-economy is that every dollar of profit made by the alternative coop economy is one dollar less made by huge capitalist corporations. It is an immediately practical form of building dual power.

3. It leverages one of the few actual freedoms we have under capitalism: consumer choice.

Objections: Now I know some of you have objections to this on the basis that its too similar to the old utopian socialists who tried to make coops. Its still market based and still capitalist. The difference is that this is not the end all be all, just a stopgap. In the same way universal healthcare etc does equal socialism but does make the lives of workers better.

Cooperatives will not bring the revolution but they will make the experience of work better right now. Yes there is the danger that it will instill a petit bourgeois mentality in the workers in more successful cooperatives, or in industries with higher profit margins such as tech. However this is cancelled by the fact that there should be a NETWORK of cooperatives which offer discounted rates to each other. There should be a leftist search engine/portal, a cooperative ‘amazon.com’ where the workers coops can all list their goods, services, and job listings and buy from/cross promote each other. Similar to how black nationalists say ‘buy black’, we would say ‘buy counter-economy’. Basically any time a left person or other workers coop goes online to buy something including services they would check that site first, in order to see if it has it. This would circle money back into the counter- economy, growing it and conversely shrinking the economy of the bourgeois.

Now as a cockshottist myself I forsee that once socialists seize power (whether through election or other means) we will basically forcibly mutualize the remainder of the economy from the bourgeois, institute direct e-democracy voting, and start building an electronic planning/labor voucher system which will eventually transition the network of cooperatives to a cybernetically planned economy. But I digress. The point is almost every leftist can agree (except leftcoms who will just sit around doing nothing like usual and accelerationists obv) that building dual power is the way to go. Unionizing simply leads to compromise with the bourgeois for better benefits. Coops give works control of their immediate enterprise NOW, as opposed to waiting for the revolution which might not happen for years.

What do you guys say, is this the new praxis?

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Other urls found in this thread:

ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2018/08/02/venture-capitalism-versus-venture-communism/
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Hey OP, how do you see the interaction between unions and co-op management playing out?

They'd also be more likely to come to the support of the workers were a revolution to occur.

Co-ops becoming significant sectors of the capitalist economy is a worthwhile goal so long ad they are sufficiently radical and have at least a baseline understanding and acceptance of Marxist theory. Same with strengthening unions and so on. It's true leftists often dismiss these as "reformist" too quickly but if Co-ops and stronger unions aren't radicalized and if there is no truly leftist workers party to represent and fight for them then they do fall into reformism fairly quickly

what a retarded question. Co-op management is the workers why on earth would they need a union

That's a vague normative claim
I'm interested in the nuts and bolts

Right now unions will exist in co-ops primarily I think because co-ops freqeuntly have non-owner employees. There is a disincentive under certain conditions to include new worker-owners because you dilute the profit share, which seems systemic to the co-op economy. While worker-owners have secure, higher paying jobs than their bourgie counterpart firms, the incentives are to create a certain level of worker-ownership that maximizes the profit split across that group. In a capitalist firm, the owner may actually hire many more people, but at lower wages, because more marginal benefits accrue to him directly. The worker just needs to be profitable to increase his mass of profits, though of course declining marginal productivity may squeeze his profit rate which will be the deciding factor of his level of employment. But for the co-op the ceiling may be lower, because though a worker may be profitable, for an offering of equity to make financial sense to the other worker-owners the new worker-owner has to add more to the total mass of profits than the individual profit share before he joined. So say profits are $8, and you have 4 worker owners. Their profit share is $2 each. If they add another worker, and he produces profits of $1.5, their profit shares are reduced to $1.9. But if the new worker-owner produces $2 of profit, then the shares are maintained. If he produces more than that, the shares are increased.

Of course there are many cases in which rapid growth is occurring and so adding more workers is necessary, and the worker-owner WILL represent an increase in profit share for everyone. But there are also many cases in more mature, large companies where margins are already small and growth is low. In those cases further worker-ownership can seem less desirable than exploiting temporary or permanent employees. Of course, in cases where that may generally be not allowed like Yugoslavia you see the pernicious effect of systemic, high unemployment. I’m not “against” co-ops, but I don’t think they are a long-term solution.

This is the reply I left on your website. Re-posting here for more views.

Yes, worker coops are something we can work on NOW, but they are hard to get started. How do you get capital to get started? Most workers don't have much in savings and they don't want to risk it on one business. You also can't get a loan from a bank. If you go to a venture capitalist, they will want shares in your business, which makes it no longer a coop.

I think "Venture Communism" is the way forward. The venture commune will spurn off many worker run enterprises.
~Venture Capitalists are not interested in extending loans to start-ups. What they want is equity – they want shared ownership of the firm. And ideally they want a controlling stake in the firm. The problem with a loan, from their point-of-view, is that it can be paid off. At which point, the firm is entirely ours, and they have no further claim on the profits that our labour creates.

~Equity capital is essentially exploitative. And this is why Venture Capitalists want it. And since they have a monopoly on the supply of Capital they demand it, and get it.

~Venture Communism is a type of voluntary workers association, which supports the collective accumulation of Land and Capital. It has 2 key institutions: worker co-ops and the commune itself.

~My feeling is that finding commercial success is the least difficult condition to meet. You eventually find commercial success if you fund a sufficient number of business start-ups. So really this is a numbers game. It will eventually happen given enough attempts.

Blue text and image copied from ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2018/08/02/venture-capitalism-versus-venture-communism/

I think there is an easy way to get the commune going: we could just take over a credit union! The benefits of taking over an existing institution are that we have instant access to capital and all of the systems are in place (IT, HR, accounting etc.)

1. Find a large credit union that has open membership, but not many members vote
2. Get all your radical friends to sign up
3. Get all the radicals to vote commies onto the board of directors

That's it! Now the credit union can extend loans to buy up the means of production. These assets are then rented to newly formed worker coops.

Since the venture commune is a credit union, it can also have its own payment system. Once we get large enough, we can have our own payment system like Visa, Mastercard of Alipay. This system will give a discount to purchases made from businesses within the commune, encouraging the growth of the commune's businesses.

now you're talkin'
great thread

not much to add except it's hard to meet people irl that wanna do this. u think making a peertube channel would be a good start to find interested people? i don't wanna self-snitch before it gets started but i also wanna shoot my shot

What do you mean by peertube exactly

That's what Benjamin Ward and others said. It's an old mainstream econ argument against co-op society aimed at Yugoslavia, back when it still existed: Worker-owners care about a high profit-rate per worker whereas capitalists care about high total profit and so the capitalists will push towards producing/hiring more and accept a low marginal profit as long as it means total profit is big, and the high Yugo unemployment rate was seen as proof of that claim.

But according to Sraffian analysis, the neoclassical assumption of capitalists systematically approaching a marginal profit rate near zero is wrong, and normal capitalists do tend to maximize their marginal profit rate. Given that the Yugos are not the only example of high unemployment in history, maybe there was another reason for that: a lack of more centralized coordination of resource management.

If the standard story about Yugoslavia is right, you can still rescue idea of a co-op society with the Market Anti-inflation Plan that David Colander and Abba Lerner proposed in the 70s. It treats raising prices like pollution and lowering prices like erasing pollution and enables a market to trade "pollution" permits, so the aggregated price level doesn't inflate, prices remain flexible, and monopolists are pressured into producing more and cheaper.

On one hand

On the other hand, dual power does mean at least a rival economy as a means of support for an insurgent class.

But for most industries trying to compete with monopolies without

1. not succeeding after not being able to get the requisite capital and access to market to expand
2. being crushed by explicit and consistent bourgeois sabotage in the miracle situation where you do end up being able to become a competitor.

Tbh, entire enterprises and subsequently supply chains need to be co-operatised in order to secure working class power on actually strong terms, which requires the kind of power over enterprise that a state holds.

This requires expropriation by the proletarian movement at which point in the movement begs the question of why we aren't going for total expropriation.

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I've read about this years ago. How would it work if the firm says it produces goods of different quality at different times? For example, suppose Intel makes the XYZ321 processor in 2016. In 2019, Intel has enough market power to increase prices. If they increase the price of XYZ321, then they get hit with the tax. Instead, what they can do is discontinue XYZ321 and instead release their new fancy processor, the ABC123, at a higher price.

What you describe is relevant for an inflation policy that is directly linked to the prices of specific products. In the 1930s, Benjamin Graham proposed such a scheme in his book Storage and Stability. He was aware of the issue you bring up, so his proposal only covered a basket of resources that can be standardized precisely enough so the room for this trickery is very limited, like steel and coffee beans. MAP isn't linked to specific products, but money flows: what a firm pays for inputs and salaries and what it sells the output for.

And cucked by the MCM cycle and market system, but if you get rid of class in your workplace you also get rid of a lot of alienation which means people get an idea of what socialism would look like. Having direct control and seeing the production process, talking to fellow workers, etc means people are prone to come to the conclusion that planning is better than markets. If you have not just a worker co-op but a consumer co-op as well then you are there in microcosm.
That and it's a non-retard accelerationist path because it lowers the rate of profit. Pushing for reforms isn't a solution either but it's a useful tactic to hurt profit by taxing corporations.
Ew, not really. It's important to make co-ops competitive regarding price/convenience because "choice" is mostly a question of the consumer's means.

you mean what is the platform? decentralized p2p youtube

i figure i'd make a channel like muke except not a twink and not censored by the platform itself

the only problem is that there's the very real possibility that the only people that are going to watch it/assist me are soup spooks, i mean all this stuff is right/good and needs to happen yesterday but how do you organize the community around some beneficial self-agency

wtf I'm an ancap now

This is always this issue with certain ideas like this. Maybe some casual leftist interested in theory more than anything considers a new strategy that utilizes tech, or maybe they're interested in propagating certain forms of property organization like co-ops as a strategy, but in either case they don't have kinds of expertise that would greatly help. Like knowing anything about computers or creating a platform, knowing anything about relevant processes to creating innovative or uncommon legal entities, etc.

And they don't know how to find skilled people who would be interested in helping, if they're capable of being found. So you just have ideas people floating around thinking "this could be really helpful but I have no fucking idea how to get it started".

This is a bit of a strawman, there are significant sections of the ultraleft that will (critically) support such a strategy. Same with communist accelerationists, which has nothing to do with "making things worse" as you seem to imply.

Was meant for

OP is mad that he isnt baws
t. definitely not working in an office job and definitely not in a neoliberal sitcom called Australia
Joking aside, I would quip that if the bourgies say shit like "closing down the factory if government doesnt come to the party (eg tax audit, compliance and safety)" just co-op the c*** of a joint if not nationalise it! Too many times I have heard of stories of factories that had been shut and relocated for breaches up to and including paying proper wages. The authorities were just helpless by a mere name change and relocation at the time. Co-oping could also function in services and would have been very helpful before the mass call centre offshoring of 2000-2008 (ish) by retaining the call centre staff in the country. It was a sad state of affairs, call centre work was a great opportunity to start working and get great pay with great working conditions and a co-op would have likely kept many call centre jobs locally. Co-ops could even function in financial and legal services while removing the unspoken 12 hour salary day, especially at the larger firms.

This thread needs to not die, maybe should even be stickied

It should at least be cycled. It's weird that there's a cycled gender crit thread but no cycled co-op or cybernetic planning threads (the cockshott thread should probably be cycled too). You think we'd be concerning ourselves with economics more than endless idpol bullshit. You know, since we're communists and all.

That is not a coop then. I am no lawyer or accountant and I do not know how exactly state in which you live in define coops, but coops can not just give people classic employment agreements.

>That is not a workersco-op then.
ftfy

Sometimes unions create co-ops, but it is probably a consumer co-op IIRC

What the hell is difference between workers co-op and co-op?

What is consumer co-op?

If doing stuff like this actually gets off the ground it would have the added benefit of proving to people communist/socialist type economics can actually work.

In practice co-ops frequently have non-member temp employees due to variable demand/output. It's is a serious problem for the long term survival of co-ops as it tends to result in them becoming standard firms over time if measures aren't taken to block or reverse this tendency. Part of the problem is that co-op members usually have to buy in to the firm (how this is done depends on the organisation of the firm), the mondragon corporation for example, has members buy into the firm by basically taking a loan from its bank, which is then repaid over time via the garnishing of wages. Obviously this isn't all that practical for short term workers, and yet is somewhat necessary in the context of capitalism in order the prevent the liquidation of the firm by hostile parties.

Unions can play a major role in the prevention of cooperative degeneration by giving non-members more bargaining power, thereby discouraging the expansion of a non-member workforce. Unions can also assist in the coordination between co-ops and help prevent competition between such firms.

Literally a firm owned by those who buy from them. It's cancer and not a all useful from a communist perspective.

(sage for double post)

suppose you wanted a non-traditional-capitalist ISP in your community, where the goal is to keep the internet as inexpensive as possible and meets the demands of you, the consumer, but you also wanted the workers to be treated fairly and have at least some ownership in the business

would you choose a worker cooperative, where the workers democratically decide to rip off the consumers and charge as high prices as possible (and apply ridiculous bandwidth/data caps) like any capitalist business?

would you choose a consumer cooperative, where the consumers democratically decide what to set the prices and what the plans will be, decide who and how many workers to hire and fire and negotiate their wages?

would you choose a worker-consumer hybrid cooperative, where the power is divided between the workers and consumers in an attempt to obtain the best of both worlds by maintaining fair prices, wages and workers' benefits/severance packages?

youtube.com/watch?v=nQYseo_ZJtg

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I didn't say I was against hybrid co-ops, just consumer co-ops, which hold no transformative potential whatsoever. I think there's something to be said for forms of interlocking ownership between co-ops as it encourages large cooperation and moves the entire network in a communist direction, rather than just being another way of organising capitalist production.

Should be:

On the counter economy side, for instance in manufacturing after offshoring the workers could track the model and serial numbers of the goods that were produced while the factory was onshore. To protest the offshoring the workers could encourage the public to buy the goods that were made while the factory was within the country. Another aspect could be an aftermarket whereby the workers in their workshops could produce parts for the goods that were produced locally as well as produce upgrades like the Japanese automobile aftermarket. For example lets say the fridges from XYZ that were produced from 2010-2014 domestically could be promoted by unions and manufacturing workers as well as the former workers producing crafted motors, doors, handles, shelves, modifications and upgrades. Modifications and upgrades such as energy efficient motors, touch pad doors, custom colouring in and out, extra compartments, refurbishments etc. Pretty much a whole new industry.

Depending on your geographical location and socio-political climate if the bourgies have promoted and abetted mass immigration from hyper-reactionary nations to the extent of considerably stagnating wages and diluting the workforce as it happened in the hospitality sector in my *geographic location* it could be beneficial to learn to cook home made fast food like hamburgers, chips, schnitzels etc. That would likely stifle the slave wage shops and likely to create new food outlets. Now, the arrivals from hyper-reactionary countries dont seem to sympathise with a workers paradise and tend to side with the local reactionaries even to the point of altering the balance of the electorate from progressive and holistic to lean to conservative and exploitative.

I for one would support deplatforming the meme economy of the boomers and their pets as well as pardoning hyper-reactionary arrivals once they realise their folly ingrained in their culture (such as a caste system) and sympathise with the cause. It may be better for them to know about workers unions and their rights.

The right word is not deplatform, its something like pulling the rug from under them or debasing.

Sorry

Although I agree that worker co-ops are superior, I would disagree that consumer co-ops are cancer. I would still maintain that democratic control of the MoP represents a step forward from private ownership. The probably with a publicly traded corporation is precisely because of the preference toward the rich, those with more buying power to hoard shares and therefore votes, along with the profit incentive to maximize return on investment. Converely, a consumer co-op can be and often is organized in a democratic fashion where no owner member has more votes than another, regardless of dividends paid out. Furthermore, this arrangement ensures that the people in control of the overall productive forces, while not actually the workers themselves, are the people receiving all or nearly all of the goods and services thereby eliminating some of the perverse profit extraction and consumer predation incentives that exist in publicly traded corporations.
Ideally, these consumer co-ops would have union representation for workers to ensure that the workers have a collective bargaining agreement with the co-op at large, ensuring their well-being beyond just the interest of the general consumer.
Again, I'd like to stress that I agree that the worker co-op is better, and that socialism is better than both, but I think you're being too dismissive of consumer co-ops when they represent a step forward from traditional capitalist prodiluction in that they ameliorate a few grievous examples of externalities and consumer predation.

There are two different solutions to this problem:

Solution 1 is outlined here
A venture commune (which could be a consumer coop) owns the means of production and rents them to the worker coop. The rental agreement can include price controls. eg. if the ISP offers internet access for $10/month, the MoP are rented to them at $5/month. If the ISP raises the price of internet access to $20/month, the MoP are rented to them at $16/month.

Solution 2 is outlined here
The MoP are owned by the worker coops, but they all participate in a Market Anti-inflation Plan.

>Joke: consummer coop owning all shares of Internet Inc. company
>Broke: internet cooperative, free to accept any profitable deal from e-gigants
>Woke: People directly owning fiber optic cables they need and picking internet provider trough Fibercoop Anonstreet on occasional meetings.

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I believe that this cause of yugo's unemployment problem can be proven by historical data from countries of Warsaw pact. "dekulakization" is the term of transforming farmland into coops and creating, as it was called back then, socialist farmer class. These farming coops helped a lot in prevention of creating reserve army of labour.

The hypothetical worker-consumer coop would only be needed in cases of monopoly, and thats assuming the coop workers aren't more socially conscious than simply maximizing profits at all costs

forced schooling is what creates this problem, user.

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