Why are socialists today peddling cooperatives in the exact same way that the German Social Democrats did back in Marx's days, by having the state offer loans to any worker who wants to buy stocks in the company they work at? The state doesn't even have to give out loans because nowadays private banks happily lend out money to anyone who wants to invest in financial assets, because they create money out of nothing and they're too big to fail.
Corbyn's plan to pass a law that says that every enterprise in England that plans to close or sell it itself or if it plans to go public and issue out stocks, has to first offer its own employees the opportunity to buy the enterprise and run it as a co-op. This wouldn't change a thing. All it would do is inflate the value of the stocks because companies can make up any value that they want if only their workers are allowed to buy them. It would be better for workers today to take out a loan from a private bank and then buy stocks at market value.
This is Marx view on cooperatives:
Workers in cooperatives have in effect to organise their own exploitation for profit to be accumulated as more capital. They are not the way-out. As Marx pointed out, co-operatives ‘must reproduce everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system.’ And they do.
Marx even goes to say that stock companies are exactly the same thing as cooperatives, one is just a little more preferable than the other.
Mainly because it's palatable to spooked majority liberals who think socialism = gubbermand owns everything and forces you to worship daddy Stalin or go to gulag
It's also something that people who are not all that politically engaged or educated can easily wrap their brains around and understand without a ton of jargon or background, and can be seen as a "realistic" short-to-mid term step to get working class people used to owning and running an enterprise collectively.
Mason Campbell
But marxists never claim they are a way-out in themselves anyway?
Henry Russell
Cockshott never mentions cooperatives (or any praxis, really, not that I blame him as he witnessed the collapse of the USSR and his own tankieness), but applications built on his ideas could be used to coordinate networks of production for use with "doors" to cooperatives - the cooperative and mutual aid network give back and forth freely so long as the cooperative remains If you don't know about this and aim towards building it, however, then yes, cooperatives are indeed retarded praxis. Their only saving grace is in the case of credit unions because they don't wildly speculate with the money and can be forced to invest in local utilities, essentially making them both bulwarks against money leaving quickly (it can still diffuse out over time, though) and short term insecurity. Remember, the main reason why people today don't say anything or take any serious action is because they're not materially poor, but rather always in the limbo of being thrown into it if they express dissatisfaction. This isn't a "theory", it's what I see around me in real life. It's also why socialists can be completely correct about the need for socialism and be acknowledged as such in Burgerland while also being called "out of touch liberal arts college students", because it's true.
Jordan Wright
*so long as the cooperative remains financially solvent and is able to give long term contributions back into the network (by making money using the physical capital which the workers of the cooperative own and manage, and then using it to buy things according to what the communistic network needs, it provides an outlet to buy the neccessary MoPs to build up a broad, self-sustaining system of proto-communist relations).
Jeremiah Wright
yugofags and mutualists BTFO once again
Gavin Hughes
delet this
Benjamin Davis
You posted the answer yourself.
Why are you people so much triggered by co-ops? And honestly what the fuck do you expect from corbyn? He's a socdem, it's already a lot that he said that.
Austin Smith
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Isaiah Rivera
This is nothing new and socdems weren't the last bourgeois political factions to push for them either. Everyone from the State as-is to fucking Ronald Reagan thinks worker-managed capital should be pushed for (not kidding: youtube.com/watch?v=rJFcpRxju2g). As always the problem with the capitalist mode of production is not the existence of personified capital; a bourgeois class that only enacts the single function of administering and managing capital through pure muh privilege. The problem is the real forces that spring forth from commodity production and force society to become bourgeois to administer a solution.
Imagine if bourgeois revolutionaries under feudalism thought that they could assert their class interests through the democratization of a Lord's manor. This is the level of ignorance and theoretical bankruptcy we are dealing with when we talk to a "market socialist" or any other coop shill. Cooperatives aren't just a (seemingly) nicer flavor of capitalism, they fail to even provide a dent or entry point from which capitalism can be attacked. The death of the Chandlerian corporation is also exactly what American libertarians want (muh small businesses, muh voluntary association and decision making), which nets cooperativeoids and marksuccs on the left wing of capital alongside them.
Kevin Lewis
I agree completely that co-operatives are not socialism, in that they themselves do not constitute a socialist mode of production, nor do they eradicate the logic of capital. But I think its disingenuous to compare what Regan wanted (and got) with worker co-ops or worker owned enterprises. On the one hand, Regan's plan for "employee ownership" is at its core and obfuscating gesture. It conceals class power in that it pretends to give employees control over their workplaces but in actuality it does not. This is because the shareholder system is incompatible with democracy, since you literally buy votes. On top of that the workers themselves never saw any real control or even meagre voting rights since their shares were/are hidden in pension funds etc. and a representative is chosen by the fund to vote on behalf of the shares there.
Of course, the cherry on top is that even if workers were given control they would have to succumb to the pressures of the market and operate the company in basically the same way anyway, which I think is your point. But here I think it bears mentioning that if we reject Regan's pretend "employee ownership" and assert the need for true workers co-operatives we will find life getting measurably better for workers. Yes, they will be under the same pressures as before, but there are some real advantages. For one, collectivity is always stronger in numbers, the more organisations that go co-operative the better since workers in general share class interests. The more worker owned enterprises there are, the less likely they are to be undermined out of those collective interests by privately owned enterprises. As Dr. Wolff points out, a co-op is unlikely to vote to shift all their own jobs to Mexico or China, etc.
That said, even truly co-operative enterprises are still not socialism, as I mentioned before. But here's where I want to challenge your point vis-a-vis feudalism. Because capitalism did grow out of feudalism, not entirely in one fell swoop, but slowly through gradual productive changes. Of course, things really get going after the French Revolution but the process of capital accumulation and privatisation was present in mercantilism and formed the seeds within feudalism for the eventual realisation of capitalism. My stance is that co-operatives might play a similar role here. That they demonstrate, in nascent form, what an alternative to our present system could look like. Not that in the end communism/socialism will look anything like co-operatives really, just as our society doesn't look mercantile. But it opens the imagination and the possibility for people of an alternative. I think that's something to be lauded, especially now, when after years of a completely impotent left we're starting to see some slight resurgence.
Xavier Thomas
What part of "I'd rather work in a co-op than a corporation" don't you get? I'd prefer FLAC ASAP.
Jose Turner
nice try, left wing of capital
Nolan Collins
The Labour party also has plans for nationalisation and municipalisation of key industries. It's not Socialism, but it's a pretty huge leap for a country as classcucked as Britain (not to mention the Jezza and McDonnell are closet Marxists who probably want to go much further than that. As Marx himself concedes in your quotes, it's better than the alternative, and part of the class struggle is fighting for the small gains as well as the big ones, not just waiting for the revolution. Also, that's not how the Labour policy works. The workers aren't just buying stocks, they're buying the whole company before it enters the stock market. They most likely have plans for preventing the owners from arbitrarily raising the prices (if not they're fucking idiots).
Logan Ward
Such as?…
Blake Baker
ikr
sometimes this board is really dense.
Ayden Taylor
well if the lords manor was democratically run ? would it still belong to the lord?
Evan Rogers
also what mechanism do you propose for workers owning the means of production (central planning?)
Ryder Martinez
To approximate his idea: the serfs would elect a lord among each other that would manage the manor and then maybe step down later back to being serf. Obviously that's a bit silly, but this logic applies to the cooperatives, because the people working in them would be still wage-labourers.
Mason Clark
if you start a business with three friends of yours and at the end of the year you divide all profits equally, are the four of you wage workers?
Jonathan Hughes
Of course not, but the economy won't run on four-man companies.
Eli Diaz
the point being that the company i described is to all effects a cooperative.
Camden Ramirez
Feel free to call me a fuck, but I just want the living conditions for working people to improve, I'm down for anything that isn't neoliberalism. Neoliberalism must be crushed first and foremost, we can deal with the theoretics later.
Jace Howard
you indeed are a fuck(ing rose), but this is the starting point for everyone.
Tyler Ross
Yes, but not the only option possible, we cannot assume a cooeratively run company will be ran in the way everyone gets an equal monetary compensation especially since the division of labour would definitely persist and I doubt a company with 100 people assigned to do different things equal paychecks would not pass. Also there's one problem I didn't notice This actually can be regarded as a form of wage labour, except it has been abstracted in a way we don't notice it since in that four-man company the wage labourers are at the same time become the managers of capital administering the profits of that company. It's easier to notice that in a cooperative employing a lot of people(let's say it's the same one with 100 of them), which would had to accumulate capital(improving the machinery, etc) in order to remain on the market, even if featured a direct democracy with 100 people and equal wages.
Cameron Nelson
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Jackson Martin
i know, right? it's already being done badly. all currently existing large coops have these problems. that's because they produce for exchange and not for use.
at any rate i'm not even a marksoc, i'm just saying this is gonna happen as a transitional state.
