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.
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.
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.
I'm envious of those, they're all over the state but they're only out in the sticks.
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.
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.
Socialism is about societal ownership. A coop is not societal ownership. It is still private ownership in practice.
How many tech workers own shares in their company? Are those companies socialist?
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.
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.
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").
The private owner here is a co-op. Not socialist.
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.
The definition of socialism is not, and never has been, "workers owning the means of production."
A coop still meets all the characteristics of capitalist entity:
- privately owned
- for profit, with profits going to shareholders
If you think coops are socialist, then you must also think any company that has more than 1 shareholder is socialist.
If you think private ownership (which coops protect and uphold) is allowed under socialism, then you don't understand what socialism is.
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.
here are the 7 cooperative principles. please explain how this is capitalism? https://www.electric.coop/seven-cooperative-principles%E2%80...
> 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.
But best of luck!
If you can explain to me how a co-op, which is a privately owned, and for-profit business structure, is not capitalist, I am all ears.
P.s. Definitions are important. Hand waving them away as "semantics" is a common trick of the ignorant.
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.
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.
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.
See how easy it is to make assertions?
> you are just somebody who argues on the internet
Says, the guy arguing on the internet lol.
> a natural contrarian who thinks they are right about everything, while being totally wrong
Says the natural contrarian who thinks they are right about everything, while being totally wrong!
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.
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.
It’s because non-competitive markets are a market failure [1]. Not amelioration.
Source? Because unless America, much less Wyoming [1], are not “shaped by regular capitalist rules,” this statement is false.