Property developer and CEO Tim Gurner: “We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, 50 percent in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”
A worker cooperative is just another business, albeit one where ownership is distributed among the workers. It still functions within the capitalist system and must follow its dictates. They start with capital, employ wage laborers, and must create profit to survive.
I mention this because really your question might as well be, “well why don’t people just start more businesses to make more people employed?” The answer applies to co-ops as well: because unemployment is controlled by making it more costly to do business, forcing a need to cut costs (usually starting with labor) and often simply failed businesses. Co-ops are not free from this, they need capital to survive just like a capitalist-owned business.
The only way to free ourselves from this system is to expropriate control of the businesses and put it into workers’ hands, which necessarily happens under the same conditions under which we could eliminate artificial unemployment (control of the state).
Put another way, we need to control the means of production, not be minor players still at the whims of capital.
Edit: I should probably mention that there’s more to it than this but it requires getting into the weeds of Marxist theory.
Thanks for your detailed answer.
I wouldn’t call it capitalism but markets. How can you escape markets, even if you control a state? Some people argue that the soviet union broke due to low oil prices.
Have you considered that coops need less capital to survive? When doing business becomes costly, coops could be the only businesses that survive. They could then keep unemployment rates ar zero while making profits.
If coops are more capital efficient and the proletariat definitionally doesn’t own capital that means…
What does that mean? That managing a successful revolution is easier than managing coops?
Why is it important that the proletariat owns capital? Deconstruct your requirements and find a way to achieve your goals. If you try to achieve something that people want then there is a way to get it.
There is no amount of efficiency that is more important than momentum. Consider the robber barons. I could make a perfectly effective business but they could just bribe a senator to get a tax cut and beat me. The market can only evaluate one data set and lying cheating and stealing all fall outside the scope of that.
Markets don’t really mean anything nowadays outside the context of capitalism. It’s a place you sell commodities and where there is a presumption of competition. Where does competition come from when production is not capital-driven (and then profit-driven)? The capital valorization process is still there and therefore the slew of horrors forcing humans to destroy each other so there can be 7 brands of blood diamonds.
Socialists have different perspectives on markets after there has been a socialist-won revolution. All of us know they are imbued with capitalist relations, the question is about how they might be used transitionally.
You can skip markets through nationalization, for example. A nationalized power grid operates better and more cheaply than those that operate as markets, for example. Or running a transit system. Maybe nobody needs 7 brands of bland diced tomatoes. That kind of thing.
The Soviet Union broke due to constant and merciless capitalist violence. Everything else is just responses in that constellation, like failing to sufficiently oppose that violence. A simple example is the decimation of the Soviet population by the invading fascists - the genocidal capitalists that were gladly supported by other capitalist nations so long as they thought they would destroy the Soviet Union. This hollowed out the conveyer belt of competent political actors and is why Kryschev came to power and was able to maintain it for his wing of revisionists (possibly the only time you’ll hear me use that term unironically).
Co-ops would likely need more capital to survive, as they’ll be less preemptively brutal towards their workers (themselves). This means lower rates of profit, requiring a larger scale of operation. Co-ops are often driven out of business by capitalist competition, where the organization of production is forcefully focused onto increasing profits by reducing what is paid for inputs: tools, materials, and labor. Co-ops are forced to operate in the same market and therefore risk going out of business when a competitor undercuts them in prices by 50%. This is one of the reasons that China forces the creation and maintenance of several worker co-ops and is careful about unions. They want those businesses to succeed and export, as China’s strategy is to accept most forms of capitalist exploitation in order to draw productive capacity into its borders. They know that co-ops generally need help to survive.
Competition is inherent to our existence. Not everybody can have a house of gold or even live on the coast. How do you allocate scarce resources? Competition is everywhere.
Nationalizing supplies only hides the true prices and will create a grey market for undervalued goods. Problem is that most goods will be overvalued because, as you write, only capitalists are incentiviced to reduce costs.
No leadership can overcome the misalignment of incentives. The sovjet union could have had better leaders but which resources can they use if managers don’t dare to cut costs?
Coops can be more competitive when workers understand that they are not only compensated with money to consume but also influence. At least the unemployed should be willing to participate.
If workers cannot be motivated to support coops, how can socialism be sustained?
Some people argue that. Also we did industraial and agricultural sabotage to them. Threatened to annihilate the world and and did several wars with them. So not exactly a fair test
