From the recent Bad Faith podcast. Gonna read up on them. Seems like a decent first step towards full communism, with the added benefit of I don't think people have an immune response to the term.
"Democratize the workforce" is pretty close to "seize the means of production". I'll take it, for now.
It doesn't make sense to me that workers would exploit themselves -when there is noone at the top taking their surplus value. They would take it.
It’s not themselves they would be exploiting sure. Well, let’s say they make tantal capacitors, a) would they care about supply chain? B) if they do, what would happen if they’ve tried to ethically source it? C) do they benefit from patent system and trade deals?
if the whole world collapsed into coops that would be fine, as it will quickly equalize value/labor relationship, sans military/trade deals, would be nice. So largely positive, but critical support
Well this is the point, any principled worker operated business would be immediately pushed out of the market by bigger enterprises with lower costs who are A) exploiting their workers directly and B) exploiting workers further down the production chain either directly or indirectly
Nah exploiting their workers is precisely the opposite effect, as coop can provide higher salaries, if everything else is the same, the owner doesn’t take their chunk away. The source exploitation is much bigger issue, I agree.
Edit: also capitalist sugar sponsor can make competing business operate at significant loss to outlive them, now that I’m thinking about uber:(
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Well, that’s largely the issue with military, no? Which is why there is an inherent danger to socdem policies without anti-imperialism largely. They could just vote for the guy(*or gal) who will fund some paramilitary in some country to bash some skulls.
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In capitalist framework the solution via tnc is even more obvious, it is exactly what neolibs harp on about, except they ignore imperialism: investing in countries where labor is cheap causes them to not become so cheap, and profit rates of investment to gradually equalize across the world, and then drop to 0, ushering something akin to worldwide crisis of capitalism. Two issues here are: power imbalance by means of guns (which neolibs are oh so happy to ignore), which can freeze this process completely as we see in global south, and two: we don’t have time, because climate change :(. The mechanics of the process, be it gradual spread of coops (I don’t think it would be unsuccessful tbh) or sudden worldwide rebellion are kinda two steps ahead of the central issues, as I see them (but may be I’m too third worldism pilled). But still, preliminary work on coops is great, so.
In a vacuum, sure, but you're skipping to the end-game of a capital market. Unless a co-op has a monopoly, the nature of the capitalist system they're in will still end up influencing their decisions, sometimes in downright anti-social ways.
If there are two competing co-ops, one whose workers are willing to vote themselves a paycut in order to out-price the competition will win. Faced with a recession, the one that decides to democratically slow production and/or fire their comrades will win(maybe they'll draw straws?). Co-ops still must respond to market forces or die. Faced with a lawsuit, or environmental regulation, or whatever really, the logic of co-ops is scarcely different from capitalist firms.