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Comment by svanderbleek | Hacker News Reader

That's how economic reality should be treated. Our own reality is primary. We will take back our lives. What Jacobin is working towards is admirable. We believe in progress, that a better way is possible, and that the current state of affairs is suboptimal. We should encourage alternative economic thinking.

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I am in favor of encouraging plausible, workable economic thinking. Jacobin is better described as leftist fever-dreams with roughly that level of connection to any reality.

Could things work differently? Absolutely. Are they going to work differently because some hack gets off fantasizing about how in abstract theory, the services Uber performs could be better performed by a co-op that pays workers more? No.

All the co-ops I've encountered or dealt with fall into one of three categories:

* Non-functional, incapable of making decisions or delivering value.

* Functional but completely unscalable. May depend on bizarro local economic conditions or be in one of the few cities where people are willing to pay 30% extra for pizza because it's a co-op.

* Function, scalable, and does not operate much like a co-op at the level of service delivery. REI falls into this category.

Uber works because it's functional, scalable, and reliable. You can go to almost any major city in the US, boot up your Uber app, and reasonably expect to get decent service. It is, abstractly, possible for a co-op to do that. You and Jacobin are completely, totally, 100% correct on this point. Things could be different and better for the people who Jacobin has decided matter.

In fact, we all live in a framework where such a thing is possible! If only someone was brave enough to put their labor where their mouth is. Maybe the propagandists at Jacobin could... nah. They wouldn't go for that. They much prefer theory.

> * Function, scalable, and does not operate much like a co-op at the level of service delivery. REI falls into this category.

No true scot? The definition of a co-op is a group organized to meet economic or social desires through jointly owned business. What does this have to do with any particular approach to service delivery? You appear to be defining cooperatives as some unworkable theoretical concept and then any actual successful example of implementation is an exception. Convenient!

Vanguard also falls into this category but is absolutely a cooperative.

Workers at REI get sub-$12/hr. REI is structurally and technically a co-op. They are just a co-op that does not exhibit the benefits of a co-op that Jacobin would suggest will flow from being a co-op.

If it's structured like a co-op and exhibits none of the benefits of a co-op, what's been gained? I'm saying that co-ops generally have to sacrifice at least one of: structure, functionality, scalability.

> If it's structured like a co-op and exhibits none of the benefits of a co-op, what's been gained?

At least you've cut out Wall Street and co.

REI is a consumer-owned co-op, not a worker-owned one. The entire co-op is designed around saving consumers money, not making the workers more.

So yes, REI does deliver the benefits of a co-op to its owners - high-quality goods at a lower price than they would be unable otherwise be able to get. This is the entire point of a consumer co-op. Workers can also be member-owners of the co-op, and frequently are, but the benefits are geared towards getting better discounts on the goods REI sells. This is in addition to the implicit benefits of being an owner of the company and having a say in its direction.

So whats the difference between a co-op and a stockholder organization? Is it a stockholder organization with 1 stock unit = 1 member and you can issue stock for each new member?

But the prices aren't actually lower than what can be had elsewhere even with the dividend you get back each year. The primary benefits of REI is how easy it is to return products you don't like or don't have a need for and the fact that you can get a product the same day if you live near one.

The definition you just gave for co-op also includes any publicly owned corporation.

The economic or social desire is met for the owners, not for others. Perhaps I should have made that clearer.

and then there's John Lewis.

and a few others.

United Dairy Farmers based around Cincinnati is one co-op you might find interesting. They are an ice cream shop / convenience store / occasional gas station (I know it sounds strange) that has grown to ~200 stores in our tristate area. I wish there more info about them online.

http://www.udfinc.com/about-udf

The founder and family made Forbes' billionaire list.

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/10/S22J.html

You're confusing "economic reality" with "economic narrative". That's a superset of "capitalist narrative", "free-market narrative" (distinct from "capitalism"), and "socialist narrative". All parties (as you just did) spin their own stories about what ought to happen or why what does or should happen is morally justified, and all of these stories run up against the reality (measurable or unmeasurable) of coordination of supply, demand, and the interaction of voluntary and coercive power with that.

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