Studies show that cooperatives tend to be bigger and last longer than traditional hierarchical capitalist business.
The same faggots who like to attack cooperatives as an unworkable model ignore the massive failure rate of traditional business. Half of all the glorious small business entrepreneurs fail within the first 6 months. Most of the rest fail within the first 2 years. It's hardly the ultra-stable model they like to think of it as.
It's not so much that the democratic element fails. The problem is the motive that cooperatives operate under differs from the traditional corporate structure.
Traditional corporation are profit-first organizations whose primary goal is to extract value on the behalf of the owner/shareholders. Thus, they will take any measures they can get away with in order to satisfy this goal, looking for any way they can to cut production costs and maximizing profits. Actually modifying the production process is messy, has a high cost of investment, and often will only yield marginal benefits. That leaves two primary means by which corporations can alter their profit margins: change the sale prices or modify the labor costs. The former strategy would be expected in a traditional economic model, as companies compete with one another to keep prices at a level that allow for profitability but remain appealing when stacked up to a competitor. The reality however is that companies have shared interests in keeping prices at a certain range to create a situation of artificial scarcity. That means that price variation only goes so far, and often has to be a slow and calculated process. Thus, you are left with altering labor costs, which is the easiest strategy given that there is no current shortage of labor that MUST fill the roles as a matter of survival. Traditional corporations can make perhaps some of the biggest, easiest, and most immediate improvements to their profit margins by lowering labor costs; doing things such as cutting benefits, increasing hours, reducing wages, laying off workers than shifting those responsibilities to the existing workers, etc.
Co-op's primary concern is to create value for the sake of the workers (in the form of higher wages, better benefits, and reduced hours) and buyers (in the form of lower prices and better service). They must remain competitive under market conditions, but in accordance with their stated purpose, they often cannot make the cuts in labor costs necessary to keep up with corporations that drive their workers like slaves. This is somewhat compensated for in the fact that profits do not end up concentrated in the pockets of the men at the top, but it also means that the co-op participants must be willing to make some concessions to stay competitive. That requires the majority of the participants to be rational about what is and isn't feasible as to how the co-op can serve their collective self interests; essentially self-limitation for the preservation of the organization. Thus, while the conditions they create are far and away better than the alternative, co-ops should certainly not be fetishized as some sort of "peaceful path to socialism from within capitalism."
Also pure and simply people sometimes don't understand how to operate co-ops. There's not nearly the resources or education available to council and teach people how cooperatives should be run. Managing a cooperative is something that I have never heard a business student ever mention learning about, and there seem to be very few literary references on the topic. That's not even taking into consideration that they don't receive nearly the same protections under law, receive significantly fewer tax breaks, and almost never receive bank loans for startup or expansion.
I direct them to this report.
Sounds pretty successful to me.
thanks for reiterating what I said here
oh somebody already beat me to it
Sabotage, infiltration, destabilization via "scramble phase" techniques, agent provocateurs, loaded language, emotional manipulations, propaganda.
Unions of co-ops that utilize their collected funding to provide the initial resources necessary for workers to start their own new co-ops are the future and will pave the way to suffocating private industry with worker owned industry.
Full speed ahead comrades!
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literally only by technicality. There's just no other way to have a business in this society.
again, what other option is there in this society?
Well actually, this isn't necessary, co-ops can be a pay per sale thing.