Co-ops are often dismissed as attempts to create islands of socialism. But building democratically controlled tech infrastructure can be part of a wider movement for working-class power.
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co-ops are great especially for fresh foods. You buy in bulk and split between families. Something like half a dozen and buying fruit by the crate makes sense. along with like buying a whole cow.
This is a very long wall of text with very little information in it.
Three questions:
- Whats the actual goal?
- Can cooperative compete with regular comapnies?
- Can it resist the issues that plague large corps?
Co-ops are often dismissed as attempts to create islands of socialism
I’m sold! When do we start?
I’m in a very rural part of the USA. My electric, telephone(landlines which I don’t have), and internet are all coops. They are all very efficient and inexpensive. I’m very happy with them.
That should be the norm everywhere
Right now. Just grab some of your friends and sign onto contracts to buy and share things together.
Food coops are the most common. I imagine tools would also be pretty easy to jointly own.
Just grab some of your friends
That would require friends…
Yeah, this shit. We CAN use capitalism against itself. Why the fuck aren’t we doing more of it? Nothing is stopping us from creating industrial collectives. Crowdsource that shit!
We need better financial tools to allow employees to take out loans to purchase companies from owners and form worker cooperatives.
I know of some examples of employees that purchased from owners:
- Sexy Pizza in Denver
- Pizza Shuttle in Milwaukee
Italy does this! They have a strong worker commune culture on the region they make the parmesan cheese at.
In some places it’s fairly common. Check out this network of 257 cooperatives in Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
Too few places. There’s a cluster in Italy as well.
Which one(s) are you referring to?
Maybe some of these ones?
Why the fuck aren’t we doing more of it?
Because we’re stupid.
Because we’re stupid.
The availability of capital for this type of organization, the capital concentration on the opposing side and its market power is what’s holding us back.
To elaborate:
Coops are fundamentally anti-capitalist, they’re socialist. Why? Because they threaten to change the capitalist model where only people who hold significant capital get to decide how to profit from most workers’ labour, to a model where most workers decide that democratically and equally own their workplaces. If coops are to become the dominant firm structure, it means no more Zuckerbergs or Thiels wielding unimaginable power over hundreds of thousands of employees directly* and the rest of the economy indirectly. This means that the people in this position of power today would do everything they can to stop coops from taking significant root. Since they are the VCs that dole out capital for startups, that means no capital for coop startups from them. It also means applying every market and non-market leverage they have to kill any coops that threaten to become viable competitors.
This doesn’t mean we can’t start coops and make them successful. It does however means it’s much more difficult than starting a normal capitalist-funded startup. People who are in a position to attempt it probably should. I think a lot of capable, professional tech comrades would join and work a lot harder than they would at your typical startup. But it would still be an uphill battle without gov’t support which already goes to capitalist tech corpos. This is why this battle has to go on multiple fronts. One is creating coops where and when possible. The other is unionizing existing corpos to gain labour power that can be leveraged to curb the oligarch’s power. The third is fighting at the political level for state funding for coops and labour rights. Those three reinforce each other in increasing the economic power of employees (workers) both at coops and traditional corpos relative to the power of the oligarch (capitalist) class.
* For example forcing their employees to develop software for digital addiction instead of working to eliminate misinformation on the biggest social network in the world at the threat of termination.
I’ll be really interesting to see how people try to hide the source of their wealth / power in a world where everything is co’oped.
Yeah I know. :(
If only there were a way to seize the means of production and redistribute the wealth…
Added a bit on that. 😊
This is why this battle has to go on multiple fronts. One is creating coops where and when possible. The other is unionizing existing corpos to gain labour power that can be leveraged to curb the oligarch’s power. The third is fighting at the political level for state funding for coops and labour rights.
I can get down with that
