/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

You may be onto something here.

Because incels wanna LARP as Lenin rather than address current conditions

>>2834694
>If we did manage to replace every company with a cooperative, would that not still be some kind of proto-Socialist position, albeit with markets still intact?
Think you get a kind of "socialization" with that, and you might call that proto-socialist, but the firm can still be run according to the profit principle. But that can also be true with nationalized industries. This has been tried on very large scale, but maybe these states were really reshaping capitalism in some kind of way into a modified bureaucratically managed form of state capitalism.

The problems with capitalism go well beyond just the traditional ownership structure of a private firm, but also have to do with the existence of private property in general, generalized commodity production, the anarchy of production, etc. A kind of co-op based market socialism would be a definite improvement and could be an important stepping stone to building communism, but it couldn't be an end goal.

>>2834694
>If we did manage to replace every company with a cooperative
and how are you going to achieve that? if the government does it, then you need as much political will as it would take to nationalize industries. a more bottom up approach would require an active engagement with and development of the productive forces in the here and now.

aside from this, it does not make sense either to have these cooperatives freely standing apart from each other. they should be coordinated towards greater organization and planning. this is important both strategically and ethically. the former as it affords a cooperativist movement certain affordances, like the ability to smoothly proliferate new cooperatives. higher organization also allows the development of safety nets for cooperatives during times of crisis, bolstering the superior stability that can already be found in cooperatives. on the more "ethical" side of things, we want to minimize the adverse effects of excessive competition between cooperatives. they need to be held accountable to each other as well as the general community. on this point, it should be pointed out that cooperatives by their very nature already have a greater degree of accountability than other businesses, as workers are much more likely to be average members of the community within which they work, and any increase in surplus value extraction by the cooperative directly damages their person. still, it is foreseeable that market pressures might make things difficult. vertical organization of cooperatives also affords an overlayer of increased cybernetic planning which may provide the seeds for a more planned economy

putting these points together, it becomes clear that we need to organize a federation of cooperatives that is focused on capturing the economic sector starting at the local level and working itself upward. some ideas from municipalism is may be strategically complementary here as well. maximizing the capacity for localities to reproduce their means of subsistence, we arrive at a system that is anti-fragile and resistant to crises from without as well as excessive tendencies towards centralization from above. ive elaborated a bit more about the virtues of localism as a strategy here >>2811736

in order to really appreciate the relevance of this strategy to contemporary times, i recommend checking out veblen as well as nitzan and bichler's capital as power framework. when we move beyond the hitherto all too common assumption that economics and politics are separable entities, it opens up the imagination for new possibilities

Because MLs are just temporarely embarrassed imperialists that want to support their hekin nation

Ultras told me running major tech companies as cooperatives, such as Huawei, is actually evil social imperialism.

>>2834694
Because that would do nothing to remove the anarchy of production? What even is this question

>>2834694
>Why does the left not focus on cooperativization rather than nationalization of industries?
Pretty sure that's been the focus of the Corbyn/Bernie style movements.

The thing is though, full nationalized industry is far superior (and efficient), as it a technically in the sense, owned by the whole people, instead of isolated worker groups, whose interest is their stake in a single enterprise.

The USSR held the position (barring some people), that full state ownership is superior to cooperatives. Even collective farms were only transitional in original conception to eventual full state ownership.

>>2834694
Cooperatives are not incompatible with state-monopoly capital. The federation of worker cooperatives would be dependent on a central state trust of industrial monopolies, land and finance anyway.

>>2834732
Anarchy of production is not the only issue to be resolved, and I believe it could be resolved with worker coops anyway. The greater point is to eliminate exploitation, alienation, and increase local democratic control of workplaces.

>>2834753
>Pretty sure that's been the focus of the Corbyn/Bernie style movements.
I don't know if I would call it a focus. Even as someone that was following their campaigns closely, cooperativization was never really a central pillar of their policy proposals. I think this is a shame, because I think people might be very receptive to the idea of making workplaces more democratic.

>The thing is though, full nationalized industry is far superior (and efficient), as it a technically in the sense, owned by the whole people, instead of isolated worker groups, whose interest is their stake in a single enterprise.
Maybe, but an enterprise owned by a state is still not technically democratically controlled. Democracy is most functional in smaller groups, which is what makes cooperatives so appealing. It would at the very least reduce alienation. Perhaps a middle ground can be reached between these two positions?

>>2834778
Read Hilferding and Bukharin. The petite-bourgeoisie aren't really independent businesses anymore but dependent on state management, monopolies, finance, rent and so on. So worker cooperatives are not really a problem.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1910/finkap/index.htm
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1917/imperial/index.htm

>>2834783 (me)
Concretely, you could have a power plant managed by the state, a garbage disposal service managed by the city and a coffee shop cooperative which is dependent on loans from the city. People get weird about the different levels of abstraction and management here.

>>2834694
>Why does the left not focus on cooperativization
Ideological dogma. That said dividing economy between these two would be more flexible than having nationalized former small businesses resulting in poverty and suffering.

>>2834694
i've been saying this for a long time but they get mad at me and post refutations from 100 years ago

>>2834712
>an important stepping stone to building communism, but it couldn't be an end goal.
actually a good goal isn't something vague, amorphous, preposterous, irrelevant, delayed, that may or may not happen in the far future like "the end of all exploitation" but something specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-scheduled like "ask 10 co workers if they want to strike by 5pm on Friday" or "Take the first steps to start a mushroom growing cooperative within the next year" or "Start a self defense training program with your local comrades within the next 2 months"

Those are goals. They exist in the short term and have immediate utility. The long term stuff is more of an ideological carrot on a stick that's always dangling just far enough that you can't bite it, in order to keep you going. everyone hates me when i say this but they have no counter args.

>>2834810
>everyone hates me when i say this but they have no counter args
The best counter argument is the way the worker's movement went in the 20th century where both ML states and Western social democracy/organized labour just rested on their laurels and ceased striving to move further towards a new form of society. The result was that they stagnated, became apathetic, and were made vulnerable to a successful bourgeois counteroffensive that put is in the situation we are today.

>>2834778
>Democracy is most functional in smaller groups, which is what makes cooperatives so appealing. It would at the very least reduce alienation. Perhaps a middle ground can be reached between these two positions?
yes. i am >>2834715 and the model of democracy i suggest is one starting at the cooperative level which is then stratified by workers councils. i think focusing not simply on production but also reproducibility of local communities is also important, and for this local cooperatives would need to work together at that level forming municipalities

btw here is a rough sketch of the sort of organization that i would like to see built. some of the priorities are peculiar to the nature of my faith so you can ignore that. does anyone have any suggestion or concerns

>>2834783
this is also true. it is questionable whether or not we are really living in an "anarchy of production". i think marxism is probably more accurate than neo-classical economics, but it does not feel like many maxist leftists are really paying attention to how our mode of production has changed since marx wrote capital. still it is dangerous if cooperatives are built as though we are living in an anarchy of production and such is how business should look like. broader organization is important ..

>>2834813
for social democracy and organized labour the issue was that such movements did not have the power to maintain such a state of affairs. strategic objectives will always be inefficacious if there is not also means for them to sustain themselves. this is one of the reasons why i emphasize reproducibility and genuine collective sovereignty to so much. for ml states their bureaucrats were a problem as well as of course international pressures

I agree. But we should differentiate from socialism and call it something like "cooperativism" maybe? They can then compete on a socialist market to maximize use value.

This is a ridiculous, moralistic application of socialism. Capitalism works the way it does is because its laws of motion dictate it, not because of the moral failure of a few individuals. If exploitation is nothing but relationship between two isolated individuals, then we have no way to make sense of monopoly capitalism, imperialism and the "labour aristocracy" or really anyone who is not strictly a capitalist, but is clearly involved in maintaining capitalism, including but not limited to fascist gangs/secret police, corporate managers and propagandists of capitalism.

Cooperativism also overlooks the contradiction that pushes capitalism towards decline. If capitalism is exploitative by nature, means that it must rely on the exploitation of labour. As competition leads to technological development and the increased augmentation of labour by machinery, the share of capital to labour keeps rising, which at the same means that the relative share of labour employed in production keeps dropping, leaving capital less and less labour to exploit while having to maintain a large number of machinery against it. This leads to two tendencies that are very easy to articulate politically: first capital tries to keep wages artificially low by importing cheap labour or waging direct class struggle against unions and second when it fails to keep wages low, it starts engaging in self-cannibalism as it lets one part of capital maintain profits by absorbing and destroying another part of capital. This latter process is what is commonly called monopoly capitalism and is exemplified by the infamously predatory business practices of Blackrock or the AI bubble from which capital hopes create a rentier economy that can permanently turn a profit without having to invest in real production or much labour, to the point of quasi-religious insanity ("AGI").

The only answer to these suicidal tendencies is state ownership and state financing which can create capital, circulate capital and direct production even if it doesn't turn a profit, because such an economy is ultimately guided by political demands instead of economic laws.

Cooperatives are by necessity relegated to the field of small businesses. A cooperative is basically a joint-stock company where shares are equally distributed among employees. Private investors are unlikely to invest in such a company where they would have to contend with employee shareholders who will always prioritize providing moderately high living standards over maximizing profit. This leaves to raise capital on their own, an impossible task for wage workers not just because of their reduced ability to raise capital, but also the lack of coordination between most workers who are mostly concerned with competing on the labour market and have no time for anything else. It's not impossible, but at that the level of an individual who dedicates much of his adult life to raising enough capital to start a small business is usually only able to mobilize and only willing share his wealth with the people closest to him, his family members and as such business exclusively financed by workers usually turn out to be a family business largely owned and controlled by the patriarchal head of the family.

As said before, a cooperative is unlikely to receive major private investment and workers are very rarely able to organize themselves at such a large scale just to become collective mini-capitalists. This leaves the state as the only possible sponsor of cooperatives and proves its superiority. The few existing large-scale cooperatives like Mondragon or Huawei were created by the state based on ideological considerations of the Francoist dictatorship or the CPC superseding class struggle.

Cooperativism is a fossil from the 19th century when in many places the countryside was still dominated by small producers instead of large capitalist and working masses. Even then small producers were at many times reluctant to even just share their property with their village community. The agricultural cooperatives of Soviet-style socialism had to be created using intimidation and violence by the secret police because it was the only way for the socialist state to accumulate capital for industrialization. OP's fetish for dismissing AES and Marxist socialism by latching onto a forgotten and failed 19th century ideology that used to compete with Marxism leads me to believe that his mind is infected by left anti-communism.

>>2834856

OP here.

My argument for cooperatives is institutional, nor moralistic. I am not asking for a moral recalibration, but for a recalibration of the property relations. If you can change the property relations inside a firm, you can also change the class structures. This isn't about bosses being mean to workers, it's abolishing the wage relation at the point of production. Exploitation is not about morality, it's about surplus extraction, and cooperatives help to reduce this exploitative relationship.

I never claimed cooperatives alone would be enough, neither did I claim that cooperatives should be an end goal. Cooperatives in a capitalist world are still embedded in competitive markets and can be squeezed, which is exactly why I'm arguing they need to be paired with structural changes and not abandoned. The broader strategic question is whether expanding cooperatives wouldn't serve to effectively build counter-power and chip away at monopoly capital and imperialism. Even a purely Leninist state seizure, were it to emerge today, still has to confront the reality of a globalized, financialized monopoly capitalism. The cooperative path, perhaps paired with nationalization, could be a way to build an international worker-controlled economic base.

I am aware of the suicidal tendencies of capitalism. Again, I never claimed that a purely cooperative-based solution would resolve this. I am arguing that cooperatives can create an entirely new set of relations to property that ultimately benefits Socialist projects. I would like to see a mix of nationalizations and cooperativization as a way to resolve this suicidal tendency. But I also think that the left should focus more on cooperativization in general, because it is woefully missing from economic discourse.

I also don't think that cooperatives have to necessarily be small institutions, either. There are large cooperative projects that are successful. Mondragon was also not a state project, it was created by a technical school. The fact that it operated under Franco's corporatist legal umbrella is a point in favour of cooperatives and their ability to resist fascist corporatism. I think we should incentivize the creation of and protection of cooperatives as a way to create a more widespread, alternative power relation system. Ultimately, though, your point is about private investment. Again, the real solution is a state-backed mechanism that supports cooperatives, and I believe that is more politically achievable in the current political landscape.

You're also making a false equivalency. Forced collectivization in the USSR was violent state accumulation on the backs of a peasantry, not a democratic, voluntary cooperativization of an already-proletarianized workforce within Capitalism. We have new cooperative movements in the 21st century that didn't exist in the past century. Cooperativizing tech giants and tech monopolies would be an incredibly useful political and economic project and a step in the right direction towards alleviating alienation.

Also; rude. I never dismissed AES or Marxist socialism. I do believe, though, that a strong central state requires a strong labour tradition to prevent it from backsliding into revisionism. I think cooperatives can cultivate this working class solidarity. We're so used to seeing companies and corporations as monolithic, soulless creatures that exist to exploit and accumulate capital. Cooperatives would not operate like this. They would incentivize cooperation and foster working class solidarity.

>>2834894

Also, to be clear, as OP, this was my only other post in this thread.

>>2834778

>>2834856
>If exploitation is nothing but relationship between two isolated individuals
no one said this
>when it fails to keep wages low, it starts engaging in self-cannibalism as it lets one part of capital maintain profits by absorbing and destroying another part of capital
yes we live in the age of cannibalism where companies are more focused on sabotaging their competitors out of existence and consolidating an even more totalizing monopoly, with the state aiding in this process. profit has become less important than differential accumulation, and they are not the same thing. debt and credit is everywhere now. aside from this there is also artificial scarcity and a whole host of other strategies that are employed by capitalists in order to avoid a crisis of overproduction. all of the crises of recent memory have been financial crises, which are not the same thing. oh and of course the monopoly capitalist actually enjoys crises because they take out competitors and leave open more room for capitalization. that is partly why there is a tendency for bourgeois governments to engage in practices that actively encourage inflation. with the dynamics of sabotage and artificial scarcity, deindustrialization has become rampant. look at the iran war for instance. america with all its budget is struggling to fight a country that runs off of a fraction of its military spending. it is a struggle for the united states to even build missiles now. needless to say, if we lived in a real economy, this would not be possible, but of course we do not

it is unclear whether this cannibalism is at all sustainable. however, if it is sustainable, it would result in one monopoly eventually getting hold of all of the productive forces as well as the state. the end of capitalism would then be the state becoming a corporation. as it stands, that corporation will be the dictatorship of a single epsteinite billionaire rather than a worker's dictatorship. leftists can choose which one they prefer. if this cannibalism is not sustainable, then it would be beneficial to establish kernels of genuine productivity for when the house comes crumbling down and western nations no longer have the imperialist superprofits to secure the subsistence of their citizens. such a condition would lead to a major crisis followed by either a revolution or further capitalization (accelerating to total corporate capture of the state). in either case, cooperatives could play a positive role in response to whatever comes

>It's not impossible, but at that the level of an individual who dedicates much of his adult life to raising enough capital to start a small business
cooperatives do not get started by individuals, and it is in fact preferable that they do not. it is true that the proliferation of new cooperatives is an issue, but this is why it is imperative that they organize into their own federations rather than simply operating as separate entities. cooperatives should work together to cannibalize existing corporations, leveraging their affordances wrt to sustainability that other business strategies are incapable of capitalizing upon

>leads me to believe that his mind is infected by left anti-communism
socialism has never happened in developed nations. what has happened instead has always been fascism. at the end of the day, if you do not own any capital, you do not have any right to determine anything. the original bolsheviks robbed banks for a reason. aes also often had the historical support of peasantry and national bourgeois. it was never simply proles

>>2834854
i have thought about calling my idea "[something] cooperativism" before, but the word simply has too many syllables. as workers do technically own the means of production in such a system, you might as well just call it socialism

>>2834856
>This is a ridiculous, moralistic application of socialism
He's not making any moral claims here

>A cooperative is basically a joint-stock company where shares are equally distributed among employees
You're describing co-ops under capitalism which is a dishonest comparison. SOEs under capitalism are also not something desirable under socialism given that they are for-profit ventures.

>This leaves the state as the only possible sponsor of cooperatives and proves its superiority.
Yes ? How exactly is this a refutal. OP is not arguing for workers to buy out their shares of their companies.

>OP's fetish for dismissing AES
>leads me to believe that his mind is infected by left anti-communism
National developmentalism is not communism anon

>>2834813
>The best counter argument is the way the worker's movement went in the 20th century where both ML states and Western social democracy/organized labour just rested on their laurels and ceased striving to move further towards a new form of society. The result was that they stagnated, became apathetic, and were made vulnerable to a successful bourgeois counteroffensive that put is in the situation we are today.
that affirms what i said. it does not counter it. resting on your laurels is the opposite of having several realistic short term goals that you relentlessly pursue.

>>2834944
>is not communism
the ruthless criticism can only say what communism is not, and "the real movement to abolish the present state of things" must not be one single easily decapitated method, but several method working in tandem towards the same goal

Coops should be a focus by the global North that can easily acquire its own capital and labour intensive industries. Unions make more sense for the global South or capital intensive industries like car factories

>>2834732
Coops in practice tend to form federations, so they do erode our current model of competition between firms. Regardless it is a nice first step even if it isn't enough

retvrn?????????

>>2835051
These movements and governments had realistic short term goals. They had shit like winning new contracts, raising wages, expanding production in X and Y sector, etc. They led to stagnation because they weren't in service of any broader vision of social transformation. Just incremental improvements within the existing paradigm.

Would it be possible for a socialist state to have some industries be nationalized while others cooperativized?

>>2835110
> They led to stagnation because they weren't in service of any broader vision of social transformation. Just incremental improvements within the existing paradigm.
They stagnated because their leadership became revisionist and they were always weak to imperialism. But we are in century 2 of AES now. Century 1 was a prototype. It took 3 centuries for Christianity to conquer Rome. How long will it take for Communism to conquer the globe? I cannot say, but an ounce of theory is worth a pound of practice, as Engels said, and each failure is a lesson. And I don't think the reason they failed is because they had too many realistic goals and not enough vague amorphous ideals. I respect a person who starts a cooperative much more than I respect a person who posts all day who larps about a revolution that is not close to happening.

fucked up my reply twice, refresh and the others will go away

>>2835121
>an ounce of theory is worth a pound of practice

this is what pseuds actually believe

>>2835115
>Would it be possible for a socialist state to have some industries be nationalized while others cooperativized?
commanding heights: nationalized monopolies
small commerce: decentralized cooperatives

>>2835126
how many revolutions did he start

>>2835126
Yes, he never led an army or became a head of state, him and Marx are worthless, socialism is meaningless before Lenin made it work

>>2835130
>Yes, he never led an army or became a head of state, him and Marx are worthless, socialism is meaningless before Lenin made it work
Engels actually fought in 1848 German bourgeois revolution with August Willich but you're right Lenin made it work. Why? because he understood that an ounce of practice is worth a pound of theory. This is why he was willing to do the NEP even though it didn't sound theoretically pure.

>>2834694
its a lot more important and effective for the general public good to nationalize key industries than making them cooperatives, coop benefit only the people working in it, nationalization benefit all the citizens and allow a democratic guidance of the economy

>>2835148
And how did that 1848 revolution go?

Cooperatives aren't managed in the democratic interest of the working class but the profit interest of a given group of workers. It could have a place in a socialist economy but would have to rely on mass cybernetic and nationalized industry and it stands in the way of progressing to a labor based currency/credit system; and also complicated linprog planning because we don't set end prices at clearing rates. Also cooperatives only really make sense at the end of the production chain.

>>2835204
read the rest of the reply, that wasn't the main point.

>>2835277
the criticism of cooperatives for existing in a capitalist economy is the same as the criticism of AES for existing on a capitalist planet is the same as saying "so you want to improve society yet you live in society and are forced to act within society? curious!" it's just a dumb way to attack the real movement in favor of some idealist global simultaneous overthrow of capitalism, wage labor, the commodity form, and exchange value everywhere at once.

>>2835115
This is called a smychka

>>2835129
>>2835130
>the value of a political theory lies in how many revolutions the theoretician personally started
by this logic the CIA is the ultimate revolutionary theorist since they have started hundreds of color revolutions.