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 co-op has a certain harder floor on how much it will cut labor value costs, yep. A private corporation will cut labor costs to below basic needs, eventually. Workers will not do that to themselves, generally speaking, and will push back long before that. Regimes in which wages are maintained due to things like promising better in the future are generally predicated on imperialism, i.e. the worst tendencies have been temporarily foisted onto the imperiakized peoples of the world. But that is temporary: eventually it comes home. We see that happening now through neoliberalism. Wages don’t keep up with inflation, social programs are cut, and a resurgent labor (and social) movement is combated with bureaucracy, police, and jail while poverty is criminalized. Left to its own devices, capitalism is constantly in crisis.
I believe that most people don’t want socialism. But the people who do could create a network of coops and share their resources however they like.
Most people have absolutely no idea what socialism is and are only familiar with flimsy capitalist propaganda against it. For example, the arguments you’ve made against competition are addressed in the basic foundational texts of socialism and have been known to be false for at least two centuries.
Capitalism constantly teaches the basic need for socialist responses. The only question is whether we can organize more effectively and faster than capitalism’s solition: naked fascism. Liberals that adopt the pretense of opposing it adopt obviously milquetoast strategies that end up empowering fascists and murdering the left.
There are many markets where businesses can be bootstrapped without capital.
No such thing. Even pure knowledge workers require basic materials to support their work like computers and a space to work in. The exceptions are where the employer has offloaded even those costs, which is an effective wage reduction, not a change to how production requires capital.
Why not enter those markets and have the best margins by offering the best products?
The point I already raised addresses this. Your scenario is, “what if fixed costs were negligible?” The answer is that this leaves variable costs, i.e. labor, and capitalists will cut labor costs below what co-ops will bear, eventually. And again, if co-ops were more viable under capitalism this would already have happened.
There is only a limited need to cut costs if a product doesn’t compete on price.
Every product competes on price when it becomes a commodity, i.e. the vast, vast majority of things and services sold. At least, until monopoly takes over. Exceptions are just minor exceptions that eventually disappear due to commoditization.
Somehow you see all the reasons why coops are hard but you beleave sharing could easily resolve the conflicts about scarce resources.
Establishing successful coops would allow socialists to show that their values are rooted in reality, especially because it is difficult.
Somehow you see all the reasons why coops are hard but you beleave sharing could easily resolve the conflicts about scarce resources.
That’s funny, I don’t remember saying that.
Establishing successful coops would allow socialists to show that their values are rooted in reality, especially because it is difficult.
I invite you to respond to the content of my critiques of co-ops
OK, I exaggerated. You wrote that beach houses could be shared or distributed in a lottery.
You have clear arguments why coops are not an option. My point is that you can transfer them onto socialism. In socialism, there is a higher floor on worker compensation because workers don’t accept being exploited. But then how do workers deal with their country having less goods available?
If you can handle it as a country you can handle it as a coop.
