/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Cooperatives are not the be all end all of socialism let alone political practice. This was the same mindset of Proudhon who wanted to create credit unions and workers cooperatives and such and thanks to him it was indeed popularized but look at where that brought us? I'm sure he would be proud of that Spanish company that's a cooperative, one of the largest in the world, but that's not politics and that's not gonna thrust us into socialism. That's just one aspect, the more general aspect is for workers to seize state power.

They are based but cooperatives formed under wage labour will still have to be dissolved under the dotp I think

Coops are a preferable alternative to small businesses. They cant compete with walmart or amazon, but they can eat away at the economic power of small businesses. This in turn proletarianizes the petit bourgeoisie while in turn helping the proletariat who refuse to work for amazon. The economic incentives of working for coops instead of smolbznz are much better. As for what should be done to damage big bznz, unionization is important. Threats of working for a coop could hypothetically provide an incentive against shitty business practices by big bourg

>>670928
you can use them to help build dual power though no? At least some of them depending on class character?

>>670933
very based and surprisingly serious take

Objectively, they result in higher wages, more productivity, and most importantly of all they are less likely to fail compared to capitalist business startups. Theoretical claims that they somehow can't compete with capitalism, while interesting, do not appear to hold when confronted with empiricism.

They are the seeds of the new society.

The co-op must be combined with the Party.

>>670933
>This in turn proletarianizes the petit bourgeoisie while in turn helping the proletariat who refuse to work for amazon
It's the opposite, it bourgeoifies workers and raises prices generally like small businesses do

Co-operatives – especially co-operatives in the field of production constitute a hybrid form in the midst of capitalism. They can be described as small units of socialised production within capitalist exchange.

But in capitalist economy exchanges dominate production. As a result of competition, the complete domination of the process of production by the interests of capital – that is, pitiless exploitation – becomes a condition for the survival of each enterprise. The domination of capital over the process of production expresses itself in the following ways. Labour is intensified. The work day is lengthened or shortened, according to the situation of the market. And, depending on the requirements of the market, labour is either employed or thrown back into the street. In other words, use is made of all methods that enable an enterprise to stand up against its competitors in the market. The workers forming a co-operative in the field of production are thus faced with the contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism. They are obliged to take toward themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur – a contradiction that accounts for the usual failure of production co-operatives which either become pure capitalist enterprises or, if the workers’ interests continue to predominate, end by dissolving.

Producers’ co-operatives can survive within capitalist economy only if they manage to suppress, by means of some detour, the capitalist controlled contradictions between the mode of production and the mode of exchange. And they can accomplish this only by removing themselves artificially from the influence of the laws of free competition. And they can succeed in doing the last only when they assure themselves beforehand of a constant circle of consumers, that is, when they assure themselves of a constant market.

Within the framework of present society, producers’ co-operatives are limited to the role of simple annexes to consumers’ co-operatives. It appears, therefore, that the latter must be the beginning of the proposed social change. But this way the expected reform of society by means of co-operatives ceases to be an offensive against capitalist production. That is, it ceases to be an attack against the principal bases of capitalist economy. It becomes, instead, a struggle against commercial capital, especially small and middle-sized commercial capital. It becomes an attack made on the twigs of the capitalist tree.

>>670934
This requires that workers have direct lines of low to no interest credit that'll help them start cooperatives and grow them. This also requires the conditions to be put in place to both finance capital and industrial capital to be seized which requires a worker's government. For me one of the countries closer to socialism than any other in the world is Vietnam, more than Cuba or China. They have a huge cooperative economy alongside the regular corporate one and State owned one. The government has the ability to seize whatever capital is necessary for cooperative businesses to start and take off on their own. If you understand this you'll understand what it'll take for your cooperative dream to be possible. It'll take a clearly communist power to be able to do what is necessary for this to happen.

Reactionary

>>671065
>Reactionary
At least you're using that word wrong in a novel and interesting way lad

Small mercies

>>670939
>most importantly of all they are less likely to fail compared to capitalist business startups
Where are the coop alternatives to big tech? Coops never try anything innovative, that's why they are less likely to fail. Most coops are cafes or otherwise only use low skill work.

Based if subserviant to the GOSPLAN, cringe if economically independant

>>670918
>Can they provide a stepping stone towards socialism?
Absolutely. I see them as more than necessary in NEP phase for poor countries.

>>671190
That's a dubious claim, got a source for it?

>>670918
At best a stepping stone, at worst a form of subsuming the political struggle of the worker’s movement through petty economic reformism. They try to resolve the contradictions of capitalism by making a more perfect one, thus reifying capitalist society as a whole.

>>671078
You sound like a tankie and I say that as a Leninist. Elaborate on how worker ownership is a lie. Do you mean to say you prefer collective public ownership of the means of production? Because that still will be governed by the proletariat.

>>670918 (OP)
>What are your thoughts on cooperatives? Can they provide a stepping stone towards socialism?
They definitely can, as has been observed in material reality.
Here is a good documentary on the Chinese socialist revolution which depended on a communist party with a proletarian line and specifically mass work in regards to agricultural cooperatives. At least half of the video is about the revolutionary cooperative peasant-workers and their key function in establishing Chinese socialism.

>>670918
they would be good if achieved but they suffer from all the political problems as socdem which is the booj will crush them if any "counter economic" movement of coops actually starts gaining traction in the US. you cant erase class struggle

based yugoslavia communism

>>671760
No, in fact Tito's Yugoslavia model stood in the way of the real potential of letting cooperatives act as a transitory mechanism that springs right into communism.

>>670918
It depends. If it's not for profit, based and appreciated. Vice versa.

coöps are a useful stepping stone, but they need to be connected by a cybernetic planning system and some kind of political system, say a Party. that way they don't compete with each other, only with capitalist firms

>>671789
profit is essetial for expanding the coöp

>>671801
Do you even know how ö sounds?

>>671842
it's the grammatically correct English spelling. like naïve

>>670918
A step in the right direction, and something that can help build dual power, but in the abolition of the present state of things they too will not be around. Wage labour is still wage labour even if the workers own the business.

The problem with coops is that they don't survive their own success. Workers of a profitable co-op have every incentive to hire newcomers instead of letting them join the co-op, eventually turning into bougie shareholders of a regular exploitative business.

So, on one hand, no, they can not and will not help us reach socialism. On the other, there's nothing inherently wrong with co-ops themselves, the problem is the capitalist system they're embedded in. They should be praised and promoted as a demonstration of the benefits of worker self-determination, with no expectation placed on their revolutionary potential.

You miss the point. If you can build a cooperative with some workers, then it means you and your worker-friends are somehow organized. And if the workers are organized, then they do not need to begin a cooperative, they can continue organizing and demanding whatever they want at a regular capitalist factory.

>>672314
Retard

>>672317
What is retarded? You can't organize workers at an existing factory and somehow magically they will organize to build cooperatives…

>>672332
No one said this.

>>672317
actual materialism in a thread full of idealism is retarded?

>>671921
Co-ops need to be a part of a larger, state-like system that disciplines them to maintain their even ownership. They basically need to be in something like a larger holding company that has rules conditioned by stakeholders not in the cooperatives. Corporate governance can be very flexible in its design. You can structure the bylaws to have veto positions, and give a veto to all workers (employees, contractors and working members) on adjusting the rules to allow for picking up the ladder. Temps and contractors may be allowed to an extent, as in people who are brought in to do work for a short period without the same control rights, but they should be given a profit share and a level of participation appropriate to their transient work.

But as for OP’s question, I advocate for co-ops here a lot but I’ll be honest, I do think that the advance of climate change is making the window for building a base of co-ops as a political force shrink. I think it’s still useful to build that base where possible, but I’m also starting to feel like there may be more opportunity in the future for a more or less Leninist style direct take over of the state. But it may be precipitated by some very nasty events.

>>672314
>If you can build a cooperative with some workers, then it means you and your worker-friends are somehow organized.
That isn’t true. Take where Mondragon’s development was really successful, which for me was their bank. The bank actually went out and organized people for the sake of building new cooperatives to lend to, it had business development divisions and incubators within the bank that actively sought out people with certain skills to teach them how to make a cooperative, and even trained them by placing them with other cooperatives that were members of the bank. The bank had no reason to organize labor unions, but it had a reason to organize new cooperatives. It was because for one it wanted to lend to them, but also because the member cooperatives of the banks wanted to have supply chains secured and the bank was their big mutual savings account to spend on that stuff. So they supported each other and grew the Mondragon network for their mutual benefit.

It has been incredibly hard to replicate that kind of thing in other cases, at least with the sustained growth Mondragon was able to achieve. But that is how organizing can be injected into a group of workers from outside by an entity that is structurally interested in cooperatives rather than unions. Without the bank’s efforts, the workers in the region were just so many disconnected people working in trades or being employed by others, but the bank organized them on its terms. And as it grew it became a magnet for people to organize themselves around because people became familiar with it as an institution.

>>671296
It would be interesting to see how they define technical innovation. If he does have a source its still not that damning because co-ops tend to be lot smaller then fucking Amazon or whatever. Local mom and pops aren't generally known for their massive technological innovations.

>>670988
/thread

Marx addressed cooperatives all the way back in Capital, so I don't know why we're having this discussion right now. Volume III, p264. I think this is the text, I'm a bit lazy to re-read. What I got is that coops are a positive reconciliation of one of capitalism's contradictions, that being social nature of labor vs private nature of ownership. But they're no gateway. Just like shareholder companies, except those are negative reconciliations.

>>675329
In the USSR, Stalin's times, because they couldn't just expropriate the peasantry for complete control over the economy, they create kolhozes. They were coops, in agriculture. The plan was to slowly engulf agriculture by state companies too. The kolhozes were producing commodities, but as Stalin described, it was under socialism and it was really serving the interests of the people, so it was a good solution. Co-ops under capitalism? Hell the fuck not.

>>675333
> Co-ops under capitalism? Hell the fuck not.
I think people should disambiguate the boundaries of “capitalism” as compared to nascent “socialism”. The USSR existed in a world system of capitalism, so even if it was “socialism” it was no more so than other microcosms of it within a capitalist world system. The question is what is effective or capable of growth. I think implicitly a lot of Marxists feel like nation-states are privileged here, like they are the boundaries of socio-economic systems, but I don’t think this is true. States are theoretically the pinnacle of sovereignty in the world system of nation-states, but I also think that is what the nation-states themselves want you to believe. Even for liberal legal scholars, there is a pretty common understanding that there are jurisdictional ambiguities, and that the sovereignty of the nation-state is composed of so many interest group and jurisdictions which constrain its ability to exercise sovereignty. Like, the modern liberal state often has vast powers at the center to make sweeping changes, but it rarely exercises those powers because of all the overlapping powers that constitute it and their interests in the state. More often than not the liberal state is almost defined by the fact all of its participants want to simultaneously give it ultimate power while not allowing it to exercise that power. The ruling class want the benefits of the all powerful state without unleashing it because it could pose a real threat to them, and they’ve seemed to feel that way throughout history always fearing the possibility of a tyrant while also willingly empowering some of their class to extract and coordinate the activities of the group for mutual self-benefit and defense.

I say all of that because I think what is important isn’t whether cooperatives exist in a capitalist nation-state, but whether the working class is able to carve out an identifiable, defendable, and reproducible (ideally capable of growth) social form with its own kind of jurisdictional powers to compete with lateral ones. Co-ops in the abstract aren’t that, but nothing is. Concretely what exists is the question, or what is actively being built. I think co-ops could be a part of something that is socially revolutionary, but they haven’t been thus far because people often just think of them as businesses.

>>672936
What has Amazon even innovated? "One-click shopping"? They've done precisely fuck all other than dodge taxes and consolidate the market.

>>675517
To go anywhere with coops you have to do the entire "eco-system" coop-banks, coop-producers, coop-distribution and coop-friendly-governments that make coop-friendly laws, that are enforced by coop-legal-teams. And lets not forget coop-friendly-education. It has to have a coop-version of the entire economic circuit, so that money can circulate in it indefinitely without ever having to go through hands of capitalists. The coop system has to be able to internalize the surplus and the value-add it creates to grow.

When you have build this coop-ecosystem, you can't see it as an economic fixture, something that can run as long as you like. Market forces will concentrate wealth within some coops of the system. Those coops will go rogue and strive to revert to capitalism to consolidate that wealth. You have to invent another ingredient so that it leads to socialist politics and socialist economic planning.

>>675726
> To go anywhere with coops you have to do the entire "eco-system" coop-banks, coop-producers, coop-distribution and coop-friendly-governments that make coop-friendly laws, that are enforced by coop-legal-teams. And lets not forget coop-friendly-education.
Lol I think I get what you’re saying but to that extent I don’t even like the word “co-op” because I think it is a narrow, business-like term for a more fundamental ontology of what otherwise might just be called “democracy” or something. But the reason I focused on states and such before is because I think socialists underestimate how flexible the legal structure of corporations can be and their interrelationships. The bourgeois class wants it that way because it is freeing for them, and I think it can be the basis for dual power like institutions. The left just focuses on old lost battles in this regard, like rules around political parties or unions. Not to say those shouldn’t be pushed, but the left focuses on them a lot when they’re already a point of weakness as they’ve been so heavily co-opted and guard railed. But other ways of owning and controlling things mutually haven’t been. Like with co-ops and what you were saying about wealth concentration. Co-ops that have been financed by syndicates or co-op banks (like in the case of Mondragon’s credit union mentioned earlier), the way they’ve consolidated into a larger group has often been through something like a holding company, or a weak confederation that has minority stakes in the co-ops or something. I think this is a faulty approach. The co-ops should actually be tied to the bank not through equity, but by an agreement or series of agreements that agree to finance the cooperatives under the condition that the bank owns all the fixed assets. So the co-ops don’t own any property, from the very beginning all the significant property and capital investment is through the larger group buying it on behalf of the co-op and renting it to them, and then all the co-op’s workers (including any temps or contractors) are voting members in the larger group. The rent from the fixed assets can go to funding “social programs” for co-op members, like housing arrangements or healthcare or education subsidies or whatever.

I think this achieves a couple of things. First it makes sure that the larger cooperatives are in effect having the power of their size mitigated because they may have a lot of fixed capital tied up in the ownership of the larger group, so even if they’re very profitable or have a large mass of profit the little and mid-sized co-ops have a lot of leverage over them as the mutual owners of the fixed capital they use, but also this leverage could be used to periodically enforce the breaking up lof arge co-ops into mid-sized or small ones to protect the leverage of the larger group of co-ops. In addition, I think it potentially turns the members against their own cooperative in the case it is trying to leave the group or something. The group provides “social services” to the members, not the coops. So if the huge Google coop has some upper strata of employees that wants to break away, but the average employee is relying on the social services of the group for their housing and children’s education, then they might vote against leaving. Basically, you want to diffuse power in the sense that you are creating more loyalty and political/economic ties for the average member to the group rather than the individual co-op, though the individual co-op is still necessary and important, and you’re also trying to remove some of the power of the individual co-ops in terms of property ownership while still allowing them independent power in day to day operations.

>>675874
Oh, I forgot for some reason, the big one would be retirement. If you can have pensions secured by the group then people will be afraid of leaving. And the group has a growth mechanism in that the more property it acquires (ie the more income it generates through rents applied to coops) the more social services it can provide and the more secure things like pensions are.

>>675874
No, financialising coops is a really bad idea, higher abstractions in finance are additional obfuscations from the real relations of social production than just money and property. That is bad, because it makes the hole thing less transparent to workers. Our ultimate goal is an economy where none of the relations are obfuscated. Marx briefly states this in the Gotha program. Labor power is to be quantified in units of time and represented as labor certificates. There also should be a holey separate account for gifts of nature as material balances. Accounting for stuff so to speak.

The even greater folly with your plan is that you would make the coop eco-system vulnerable to financial power. Wall street could do a financial crash, that would make the coop system go belly up, force it to sell off it's assets far below exchange value, while wall-street itself is protected by bailouts.

Hard rule 1: no financial abstractions unless you control the state and the currency.

Hard rule 2: the capital assets that are generated by the surplus that the workers in the coop system donate has to be 100% untouchable for private capital owners, indefinitely.

>>676054
>No, financialising coops is a really bad idea, higher abstractions in finance are additional obfuscations from the real relations of social production than just money and property.
I don't know what obfuscation there is, and I don't think of it as "financialisation". The co-op property is socially owned, it's owned by everyone in the system, but control of operations is on the shop level. The larger cooperative, which I'll just call the "commune" for ease of reference, isn't making a business out of buying and selling assets per se. It doesn't intend to sell anything, that would be bad for it because it is mainly interested in buying productive capital for the use of a co-op, which in the case of everything except for buildings isn't going to resell at a profit. It's going to want to buy capital assets that it can be confident it will continue to be able to deploy with a co-op, otherwise it will just be creating a dead weight on its books. Like in the way Honda doesn't want to buy plant and equipment it will have to sell, because its business is producing cars. The commune generates income by neither owning cooperatives through equity nor loaning them money, but owning their productive capital and extracting what is effectively a tax from them. But it makes it worth the deal because:
1. the co-ops can't find capital elsewhere so they don't have many other options
2. ALL the co-op members have ownership and control of the commune, and they receive income and benefits back for the "tax" levied on productive capital.

>The even greater folly with your plan is that you would make the coop eco-system vulnerable to financial power. Wall street could do a financial crash, that would make the coop system go belly up, force it to sell off it's assets far below exchange value, while wall-street itself is protected by bailouts.
I'm not sure what you mean, the commune would be mostly divorced from wall street (I say "mostly" because it may issue bonds or something, but that isn't specific to wall street. That is just debt to the public, states issue bonds as well). It wouldn't have to own equities or anything. Its exposure to the financial sector could just be confined to money markets, but that is true of every corporation and states as well. That is just how everyone meets short term cash flow needs.

>Hard rule 1: no financial abstractions unless you control the state and the currency.
I think the commune should have its own currency.

>Hard rule 2: the capital assets that are generated by the surplus that the workers in the coop system donate has to be 100% untouchable for private capital owners, indefinitely.
You can't make that a rule. That can be a goal, and I think it's a good goal, but it can't be instantiated unless private capital owners have been significantly subdued by a communist system, which is a chicken and egg thing. You need to make your system resilient enough that it doesn't shed capital back into the capitalist sector, but that's a structural and political issue. It's something you just have to struggle to make a reality, any rule would be a dead letter as soon as it is advantageous for some group to not follow it anymore.

>>676171
>I don't know what obfuscation there is, and I don't think of it as "financialisation"
But it is. "the commune" is a holding company. The bourgeoisie is more knowledgeable about these things than workers, who'd be put at a disadvantage.
>I think the commune should have its own currency.
Unless control of the state is yours, you can't issue currency, by necessity it would be redefined as a financial asset, akin to a stock certificate.

I'm not accepting this deal, because this is an end to you not a means. For me the end is to accumulate enough means of production and political power to bootstrap a socialistic , money-less, planned economy. Replicating too much of the capitalist business structures does not lead towards the desired end.