yogthos

yogthos, 1 year ago

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.

yogthos, 1 year ago

Cooperatives still need a management layer just like any other large organization. Meanwhile, the reason that cooperatives don’t have to pay owners is also the reason cooperatives are unable to get the initial investment.

You keep repeating here that the advantages of coops should overcome exploitation, but the reality is that they don’t. We have over a century of history showing this. You just keep ignoring the elephant in the room here and repeating over and over how you think this shouldn’t be the case, while it demonstrably is.

Ussr won space race and lost the microchip race. The availability of cad systems created a big advantage.

I’m not sure what this has to do with the point regarding competition and innovation under a communist system. USSR could demonstrably innovate, and was doing so better than the west in many areas.

Capitalism is not inherently self destructive. Exponential growth is only needed if all investors should succeed. That’s not necessary.

Yes, it actually is and many books have been written on this subject over the years. It’s not just the exponential growth that’s the problem, it’s the whole capitalist competition which leads to capital concentration and monopolies. Capitalism isn’t a stable system. Winners of competition grow, and they become harder to compete with because it takes increasingly more initial capital to do so. A scrappy startup isn’t going to take on Amazon for example. And even in cases where new companies do better, the established ones can simply buy them out.

Capitalism will thrive when times get tough because the majority will choose to compete instead of cooperate. Cooperatives could create space for those who want to cooperate.

Based on the actual history of capitalism it does not thrive in tough times. Once again, I implore you to learn some actual history instead of just making things up. Spend some time to educate yourself.