Professor Richard Wolff at Democracy at Work Los Angeles

It starts with coops,then individualist anarchists like Tucker. Soon they will be full on Ancaps.

Ok, so no one has played devil's advocate yet. How can co-ops help abolish the present state of things?

I don't think very many people understand just how cucked the American populace has become due to Cold-War era propaganda. The general public will never accept full on Marxism-Leninism. Never. They will avoid it as if it were the plague and resist it as if it were the Devil himself. The American people will not be open to the radical changes brought about by Marxism, at least not yet. Co-op, on the other hand, are a much easier pill to swallow. They're real. They're tangible. And they work, unlike Marxism-Leninism, which, in the eyes of the American people, has failed. Get them to understand the faults of capitalism, while offering a viable solution which, unlike an abstract concept like dialectical materialism, they can understand and actually see function in their own communities. Once you normalize worker ownership and self-management, people will be much more open to more left-wing ideas. The American people need to be eased into socialism, not thrust into a violent uprising. If you want a baby bird to fly, you can't just throw it out of the nest once it's born. You need to raise it, feed it, nurture it. And most of all, you need to extinguish it's fear of heights

Allright but how can slightly different kind of capitalism convince people of the ills of capitalism? I don't necessarily oppose creating co-ops but they have to operate in the present mode of production which makes working at them almost indistinguishable from working at any other capitalist enterprise. They have nothing to do with postcapitalism.

Current capitalist ideology is so powerful that it extinguishes the very idea that things could be different. That people can organise themselves and that normal people can change anything. Coops are a good start as long as they are embedded into a anticapitalist message.

This is exactly what Wolff does. His rhetoric is just as much anti-capitalist as it is pro-coop, if not more so. He brings up issues in the world and explains how the systematic issues with capitalism are to blame. Americans are so brainwashed that anything that isn't pure neoliberalism is a radical idea. It has to be a gradual transition or there won't be any transition at all. Also forgot to change my shitposting flag.

Can someone send him a link to the Soviet Cybernetics thread?

American Socialist Revolutionary Party when?

If Wolff was my professor I'd want my money back. Most of the things he says are heavily biased.

worker coops are a trojan horse toward socialism

Not so much as sleeping seeds. When the rest of society transforms, so will they - the cooperative alone cannot exist without its relation to the rest of capitalism while simultaneously supporting and feeding into this larger system of value production, hence the critique of "coops = socialism" people as preserving capitalism under a different name. The abolition of the firm as a site of value production is easiest with cooperatives, however, as their management structures are more liable to be decentralized and integrated into the actually-lived lives of people, thus ending both alienation and exploitation. From that perspective, however, it makes little difference whether the firm is a cooperative democracy or a self-managed bourgeois-owned firm like Valve, except for that the democracy of workers themselves makes them more liable to unionize or support their community (thus setting further institutional relations which evolve variously under a project of communization activity).