Simply believing in something doesn’t make it viable. You have to look at the history of cooperatives, how they operate under capitalism, and how they fare against capitalist companies. People have been trying to achieve what you’re proposing for many decades with little to show for it. You need to address why that is and why you’re so convinced that it can be different given all the evidence to the contrary.
The other aspect you need to consider is that capitalist companies will always have an advantage over cooperatives because they are much more willing to exploit the workers. The willingness to exploit allows the company to increase profit and market share, so competition fundamentally favors such companies. While you could argue that workers would prefer to join cooperatives, reserve army of labour ensures that there are always enough workers to go around. And of course, traditional companies can always temporarily improve their working conditions to run a cooperative out of business. We even see this dynamic with traditional companies competing.
Meanwhile, competition is perfectly possible under the communist model. For example, USSR had plenty of different design bureaus that would compete with each other. The difference was that it was friendly competition, and results were shared. The system was more efficient than capitalist competition as evidenced by USSR leading the space race.
Communism is prevented by people buying into the current capitalist model. Traditionally this has been the case because the standard of living in the west was relatively high due to the fact that most brutal exploitation was done in the countries the west subjugates. However, we are now reaching the stage of capitalism where exploitation is turning inward and people in the core of the empire are seeing their living standards deteriorate. As this process continues going forward, more and more people will reject the system.
Communists understand the inherent self destructive dynamic of capitalism and that you can’t just paper over these problems with cooperatives.
That’s complete and utter nonsense. First of all, revolutions happen when significant parts of the military choose to side with the populous against the ruling class. Second, modern military runs on logistics. If the workers do not support the regime then fuel won’t be delivered for the tanks, food won’t be delivered to the troops, and so on. Fighting a civil war is completely different from invading other countries.
Meanwhile, this notion that cooperatives don’t have to be dominant is also nonsensical. As I’ve repeatedly explained to you here, the whole system is designed to make large scale cooperative movements a nonstarter. What you’re proposing here is a fantasy that’s based on your lack of understanding of how businesses actually work under capitalist system. You have this romanticized notion that’s completely divorced from the real world. I highly encourage you to educate yourself on the subject instead of arguing out of ignorance based on your made up idea of how things work.
There very much is a unified capital owning class, but it’s not unified in the simplistic way you seem to imagine it to be. The capital owning class is unified by their shared class interest. It’s not bunch of people in a room doing a conspiracy. It’s a bunch of individual actors acting in their own interest, and they all favor certain types of policies because it provides a common benefit for the capital owning class.
The relationship between a capitalist and a labourer is that the labourer sells their labour to the capitalist in return for a wage. The capitalist wishes to maximize their profit which means paying as low wage as they can while the worker wants to maximize their wage and get as much value out of their work as they can. This is the fundamental contradiction between the interests of the worker and the capitalist.
Under capitalist rule, it’s the capital owning class that holds power in society. This is precisely what analysis of many decades of policy in US shows:
If the cooperative structure does not threaten class interests of the oligarchs then it’s not achieving anything of value. And if cooperatives actually started cutting into the profits of the capitalists then it would be in the shared class interests of the capitalists to fight cooperatives.
You continue to argue a subject that you have superficial understanding of. Perhaps spend a bit of time actually learning about how political economy works before trying to form ideas on how to improve it.
Communist revolution has nothing to do with the level of industrialization. Cooperatives would not be taking over as the dominant form of labour organization as long as a country is ruled by the capital owning class because that wouldn’t be in the interest of the capital owning class. If capitalists were willing to give up their wealth and power without a struggle than revolutions wouldn’t be needed in the first place. It’s kind amazing that you don’t understand this basic fact.
A communist revolution will abolish capitalist relations and allow creation of a government by the working class for its own benefit. If communist relations could be established via cooperatives without using violence then that would’ve happened already. People have tried doing this for over a century now with nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, communist revolutions have actually allowed workers to seize the means of production and turn them towards the benefit of the working masses. At this point I honestly can’t tell if you’re just trolling here.
A communist revolution would fundamentally restructure the way society operates which is a far more valuable goal than establishing a network of cooperatives which simply allows people lucky enough to work in these cooperatives to cope better with capitalist repression. These two things aren’t even remotely comparable, and abandoning freedom for all workers because it’s just too darn difficult is a cowardly position to take.
I’m not saying we’re just going to abolish work, but we absolutely could be working far less if we structured our society differently. We’ve had an explosion of automation since the industrial revolution, yet people still work just as much as they ever did. A lot of the jobs we have are just make work jobs. There’s a whole book on the subject even.
Also, the way we do things under capitalism is dreadfully inefficient. Nearly half of the food produced is just thrown out, lots of new goods are sent directly to landfills to keep pries up, there’s shit like planned obsolescence. All to keep the consumerist society going so that a handful of oligarchs can keep raking it in. Not only does this create shitty living conditions for the majority, it’s also fundamentally unsustainable and what’s driving the current climate crisis.
The focus of a socialist government should be to ensure that the purpose of work is to produce things that we need collectively such as infrastructure, food, housing, healthcare, and so on. Producing things should be seen as a cost to society, and we should focus on making things that last and can be repaired. Consumerism needs to be abolished.
He is a literal rapist, but people like you don’t want to acknowledge it because you have no morals. Go to your workplace and try touching shoulders like that on your coworkers, let me know how long before your rapist ass gets fired for sexual harassment.
Again, you’re not the first person to think of this. In practice, it turns out that it’s much easier for traditional companies to secure funding under the financial capitalist system. That’s the world we live in. Lots of people are trying to run cooperatives in all kinds of different ways. In some cases, like Mondragon, they do manage to grow big, but in general systemic pressures favor capitalist structure.
The reality is that it’s much more difficult to get the initial funding for a coop than a traditional company, and it’s not that lots of people haven’t been trying different approaches including the hare brained schemes you floated many times. The fact that you just keep repeating something that’s demonstrably false means that there’s no point continuing this discussion. Have a good day.
There is plenty of collaborating evidence to her claims and what you think she had to gain from chuds like you making her life hell as result I have no idea. You’ve exposed yourself as an utter piece of human garbage here.
Would probably be easier to go back to using animals at that point. You can make crude batteries without high tech manufacturing, but they’re going to have low energy density and likely gonna be made out of toxic stuff. So not ideal for vehicles.