I’ve known a few in the U.S., and even worked at one. Maybe people won’t become billionaires doing this, but why wait for a complete overhaul of society to implement more of what are good ideas.
I’d also like to see more childcare co-ops, or community shared pre-k schools. Wheres the movement to build communities and pool resources around these business models in the US? In short, co-ops are the closest socialist/communist business model that’s actually implemented in the U.S., so why are more leftists not doing this?
The kind of people who would start a business (to enrich themselves) and the kind of people who value co-ops and employee-owned businesses (to enrich others) does not have much overlap. I love the idea of coops, but I do not have the skills or ambition to start any kind of business.
Human greed is the common point of failure in any of societal systems. In any system … capitalism, socialism, religious, commune, authoritarian … the common thing that holds it together is concentration of power. The problem that it suffers from is … concentration of power.
No matter what group you create, power eventually gets concentrated to smaller groups of people and it only attracts a certain group of individuals who only understand the need to want power and control over everyone and everything to the detriment of everything else.
Once we find a way to build a societal system that is able to distribute power and keep any one or group of people from dominating everyone else, then we might have a chance of developing a sustainable civilization. In the meantime, no matter what you want to call it or do with it, if the end process just concentrates power to a small group of fallible ignorant humans, nothing will ever work.
Do you think it would be viable to make it law for a business to slowly start becoming a coop once the founder had made a fixed amount of money (say, mil.s of dollars) from it?
I actually tried to do this with a bar I owned back in the day. It was exciting / hopeful.
It went into effect January 1st, 2020. January for bars is rough because people do “dry January” so we hoped February and March would be good.
We all know what happened. It didn’t survive. Spent a good year or so continuing to pay wages and healthcare out of my own pocket, but I hit a point where I had to call it (mostly because I ran out of money and couldn’t get any more loans).
I plan to try again in the future, once I have the loans paid off and some padding saved again.
I also dream of a day where somewhat self-sustaining communes become more prevalent. Everyone living together on a shared plot and exchanging goods & services instead of money. Maybe it’s a pipe dream? I don’t know. I feel like it’ll become necessary over the next 4 years though.
This is what I’d want to do (the bar not the commune) if I won the lottery.
So yes I agree with the top post here, it’s lack of access to capital that limits this. Farm cooperatives happen because people own farms. It’s very difficult to grow these from the bottom. You would have to buy your share, with money or work.
We need more co-op businesses and also more entrepreneurship from the bottom and small business grants can help with that. You can’t only yank wealth from the top, they got it from us, we can make more and keep it in our communities.
We’ve gotten so far away from that communal living spirit, culturally. Look at the way people get into snits with their neighbors over little things like fence repair or whatever. It’s been a long time since people depended on the folks next door for survival, and we’ve forgotten how to give a shit. It can be relearned, and there are little candles of that spirit burning here and there still. But it ain’t the old days in the farming village anymore.
Hippie 1: Right now we’re proving we don’t need corporations. We don’t need money. This can become a commune where everyone just helps each other.
Hippie 2: Yeah, we’ll have one guy who like, who like, makes bread. A-and one guy who like, l-looks out for other people’s safety.
Kyle: You mean like a baker and a cop?
Hippie 1: No no, can’t you imagine a place where people live together and like, provide services for each other in exchange for their services?
Kyle: Yeah, it’s called a town.
Hippie 1: You kids just haven’t been to college yet. But just you wait, this thing is about to get HUGE.
Poor communities already do this to support each other. They watch each other’s kids. They run errands for each other. They don’t keep track and charge cash and create an LLC. But community support is real.
They are run out of business, most simply.
The operation that does not focus their profits on building further capital and establishing monopoly will fail in the arms race of those that do.
For example: there are countless community and public efforts establishing childcare and pre-k through pooled resources. They are in direct competition with things like Bezos’ childcare academies. (Personal anecdote: they bought out my kids’ building for public pre-k and evicted them.)
And a successful co-op will get pressure to be bought out like a start-up. (Often starts as a great way to expand! Then the expansion changes the culture, the new location feels corporate and the original location is later shut down and left vacant. -Also personal anecdotes for a grocery co-op and an employee owned operation I once worked at.)
I am sorry, but what does bought out mean? The person running it simply didn’t have to sell. If you’re saying “money was too tempting”, then isn’t that an inherent flaw in any Marxist Leninist theory in practice? So let’s say, the business wasn’t run by someone who cared enough about others and got greedy, so why not start one where you pick the right people? If you can’t do that, then why should any state ever cede over production to workers? How would we ensure greed doesn’t take over then?
If you’re saying “money was too tempting”, then isn’t that an inherent flaw in any Marxist Leninist theory in practice?
HA, yes, yes it is. Marxist Leninist works most effectively when everyone is moralistic and considers the larger picture. It doesn’t work when you have a world of selfish money grubbers. Notice which system is winning today?
I’d like to see you own a small business and get offered 10x its value by a large corp. Then you can see whether you want to maintain your praxis or retire on a nice beach somewhere the rest of your life.
Marxist Leninist works most effectively when everyone is moralistic and considers the larger picture.
Which is why it can never work
In the one example with the grocery co-op: I can assure you, few if any, of the people involved with the co-op were Marxist-Leninists, let alone comfortable with Marxism or the ‘S’ word. So that was kind of a critical flaw in any Marxist-Leninist theory in practice.
A lot of people practice forms of community action without having any sort of class consciousness. A wealthy philanthropist can offer a bunch of money with strings attached and people will jump at the promises without second thought and rarely keep up with the follow-through.
Point I was making nonetheless was these operations tend to exist under seige from competing and profiteering interests. If I remember correctly the grocery co-op was having issues making the skyrocketing rent payments for the commercial lot. That was the problem the money solved: the one created by the landlord.
So in a sense I was saying ‘the pressures of capital tend to be too great’ than money being tempting or greed from the community.
Not every business needs to expand, though. There are quite constrained markets for very specialized goods or services. I know several B2B companies that have 10-20 employees, serve several dozens up to few hundred rather small, regional customers, and they’re perfectly happy with that.
People who would start co-ops are usually decent and don’t care about profits that much. They wouldn’t exploit their workers or other obvious strategies that would put profit more important than wellbeing.
All the companies that don’t care about this have much less costs. Thus the companies that don’t care about morality can offer lower prices than the co-ops, and since most customers care about that more than anything else, the co-ops are driven out of business much more often.
