Co-ops are fascinating to me as an alternate evolutionary branch of capitalism. Like the marsupials to the placentals. Also like the marsupials, in most cases where co-ops compete with regular capitalist businesses they go extinct.
I'm afraid I don't understand. My state is chock full of co-ops that compete with their corporate counterparts.
Hell, there's (at least) 3 separate co-op grocery stores in my city, they each compete with an Aldi, and multiple local grocery chains in their respective neighborhoods.
> My state is chock full of co-ops that compete with their corporate counterparts
Same, and we’re deep red. My power company is a member-owned co-op. It’s cheap as hell (6.8¢/kWh for wind) and doesn’t enjoy burning down the state as a hobby.
That may well be what tends to happen in the large-scale economy, but in my personal experience, co-ops crowd other businesses out over time because they are far less likely to piss me off and alienate me. At this point "co-op" has become a pretty strong quality signal: it's not going to be flashy, and it might be a little inefficient, but it will always be decent.
In the short term dictatorships usually are superior to democracies because they can move fast and have less stakeholders to satisfy. So a capitalist business will usually beat out a co-op. That doesn't mean that society as a whole gains.
Co-ops are just the way that socialism can exist in a capitalist society. And while capitalist businesses can usually undermine them using all the tools of capitalism, notice that co-op workers are usually happier and paid better, co-op customers are treated better and receive better service, and the community suffers less from having a co-op in the area.
> co-op customers are treated better and receive better service
I’d argue this is because a co-op can attract higher-quality workers for less than a purely profit-minded shareholder-owned business. (Similar to companies with a unique culture.) Generalise the model and you’ll get the co-op equivalent of the 70s-era UAW running roughshod where they can.
I think alternatively/additively they may be more responsive around firing ineffective staff, and a culture of productivity. When workers/managers directly pay for their co-worker's unproductiveness, they have an incentive to replace opposed to simply hire more additional staff.
It is the worker owning the mean of production, so i don't think you can do more socialist than that to be honest, it's almost the definition of socialism (communism for fellow europeans).
You can find some differences between western co-op and the socialist ideal (mainly, you still have hierarchy and a power structure mostly determined by how much you make), but to me it seems mostly academics.
This is one of those cases where subtly different definitions of technical words are being used in contradictory ways. A very common definition for capitalism vs socialism in Leftist spaces is concerned with power and economics, with socialism being when labor has the power to dictate the allocation of capital, whereas capitalism is where capital has the power to dictate the allocation of labor.
A more political definition looking at government is "socialism is when capital is allocated for the benefit of the collective, capitalism is when individuals are granted exclusive ownership of capital to allocate how they choose".
Note that a worker's co-op meets the first definition of socialism, and the second definition of capitalism.
That's a bastardized interpretation of what socialism is.
Socialism is defined by social ownership. The society as a whole owns production, rather than individuals or groups.
A coop is a just group that divides up ownership among all the workers, not the society/community. The division isn't necessarily even. And the workers don't necessarily have 100% ownership between them. For example, there are coops with publicly traded stock.
A coop can be, and often is, still privately owned.
If you're definition of socialism is "Workers owning means of production" (which by the way, is not and never has been the definition), then every FAANG is a socialist entity for awarding their employees shares.
There is a full spectrum of left ideologies that call themselves Socialist, so your claim of "is not and never has been the definition" is flatly wrong. Collectivists and Syndicalists, in particular, are Socialist schools that are strongly onboard with worker co-ops (typically described as trade unions running their businesses).
And FAANGS are not owned by their workers, full stop. Less than 5% of Google's shares are owned by employees, and most of those shares are owned by management. Bezos personally owns more Amazon shares than everyone else in the workforce combined, Meta is well known for being in a strange situation where Zuckerberg personally owns more than half of all voting shares. Vanguard owns more shares in Netflix than the entire workforce combined. Apple has negligible employee owned shares.
Your misinterpretation comes from a willful twisting of the words "workers" (does not typically mean "the founder personally") and "owning" (which is typically understood as "having control over" rather than "maybe could break the tie between a handful of investment firms").
Maybe more precise to say "not mutually exclusive with free market exchange", 'capitalism' (as a socialist would define it) is primarily an ownership arrangement.
How are co-ops anti-capitalist? They appear to me no different than a shareholder or partnership. Are most law firms socialistic in that they have partners who work for the firm getting a share of its profits?
"capitalism" is simply a way to organize an enterprise. an enterprise can participate in a market without structuring the organization as a capitalist enterprise. free market != capitalism. american-style capitalism consists of a political system that supports the capitalist enterprise structure.
a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole
The community is normal understood as the complete body politic.
A partnership is not socialistic. Lawyers are capitalistic in most books, but they have partnerships.
The organization of a business doesn’t matter in capitalism. Capitalism, boiled down to private property and market. A co-op competing with other companies largely without price control is just as capitalistic as IBM or Google.
your opinion about the semantics of "coop" and "socialism" is wrong. most semantic debates are worthless anyway.
every socialist i know and have read agree that a coop is a socialist organization, and we will keep creating these enterprises as an alternative to capitalism, until one day, ideally, the capitalist corporations won't be able to compete in the job market with the coops, forcing them to socialize their ownership and power structures. despite whether you think it's socialism or not.
> every socialist i know and have read agree that a coop is a socialist organization
Every unicorn I know thinks leprechauns are real.
A coop protects and upholds private ownership and distribution of profits to their shareholders. That's not semantics.
Socialism does not protect private ownership. Socialism does not distribute profits to shareholders (because there are none). That's also not semantics.
If you want to have a non-semantical conversation, the onus is on you.
ok, well you have no idea what you're talking about, so if you think that a coop is capitalism, then i'm gonna use that ignorance to my advantage, and convince everybody that coops are capitalism. psyop coops on the capitalists. thanks for the great strategic idea!
lol keep on arguing on the internet about stuff you don't know anything about, comrade. and use poor debate tactics, like "Every unicorn I know thinks leprechauns are real." will really get you far in life.
Multiple people here have told you that your understanding is incorrect. Now you've resorted to straw man so... I think deep down we all know who is talking out of their behind.
two people, you and some other guy who is also wrong and doesn't know the 7 principles of coops based on his comment (you still haven't argued about how those principles are capitalist, so pretty sure the onus is on you anyway). there are plenty of examples in the other comments on this post supporting my opinion. being a contrarian doesn't mean you're right.
and re: strawman, i just met you at your level after you used the logical fallacy: "Every unicorn I know thinks leprechauns are real." it was pretty clear at that point that you weren't going to have a reasonable conversation. i apologize for not pointing that fallacy out directly and instead i said, "well you have no idea what you're talking about". i could've been more graceful with that, or just ignored you.
anyway, thank you for sharing your (wrong) opinion about whether or not a coop is socialist.
"being a contrarian doesn't mean you're right" - oh the irony
You never had an argument beyond "I'm right and you're wrong" lmao.
I asked you to respond to specific questions like:
Explaining how a privately owned, for-profit org (a coop) can exist in a socialist world. You ignored it and have now devolved to emotional responses only.
i'm not responding to those comments because you clearly aren't informed about the definition of socialism, particularly the nuances and the debates that leftists have about this definition all of the time. nor do you understand what a cooperative is. it's not worth my time to go tit for tat in a debate if we're not operating on the same knowledge, and you're not willing to learn.
you are just somebody who argues on the internet, a natural contrarian who thinks they are right about everything, while being totally wrong. i call it the hacker news contrarian effect. it's quite amazing to witness. good day, sir.
>in most cases where co-ops compete with regular capitalist businesses they go extinct
After seeing time and time again the success of workers of bankrupted companies pulling up their compensations and unemployment benefits to rebuild the company in a co-op model, I wonder if it's not the opposite.
"Money attracts money", and I don't think it's too crazy to think that if everybody had access to low-interest credit under the same conditions as the big players, this model would be the norm, rather than the exception.
"Everyone has access to low-interest credit under the same conditions as the big players." just sounds like a fantastic (in the fantasy sense) recipe for inflation as the underlying capital and goods sought remain constant but the monetary supply increases. In addition to potentially creating something resembling another 2007 financial crisis worth of mispackaged bad debts.
Central banks fought the 2007 crisis by increasing the monetary supply of a receding economy, so I don't see how removing the intermediaries and having the central bank itself allocate the resources in a fair way could make things worse than they are now.
I'm not talking about letting people borrow at 0% to spend in food and utilities. What I'm thinking of is a system where the path from business plan to business isn't determined as much by the amount of capital one already has, which is what causes the usual corporate structures to be formed in the first place: those who assume "all" the risk in turn receive "all" the benefits.
That often doesn't reflect the real stakes at play. Investors can have a diversified portfolio (and often plenty of spare capital for more tries), while workers invest 100% of their work on the same company for years or decades. The co-op model is more natural but the dynamics of money make it more rare than it should be.
REI competes with corporates just fine in the US, a country so capitalist they still ask everyone it they ever were associated with Communism before they let them visit - more than 2 decades after the fall of the USSR.
