this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Lefty Memes

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Why does working class not simply eat the rich? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by CombatWombatEsq to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Even with limited liability, your shares on the cooperative are always at stake. The cooperative needs money to invest, which comes from their owners, which are the workers in that case (they trade a fraction of their salary to get shares of the cooperative, to participate in later profits). If the business fails, the money is gone and you would have been better of taking 100% cash. You have a combined risk of losing both your income and your savings.

So it's the same as getting virtual stock as compensation just that you also get control over how the business is run. Which in my opinion makes the business better, you don't seem convinced but you don't seem to have a good reason for why because ..

Also, there a conflicts of interest. Look at automation, for example. A worker’s cooperative would probably decide against automation, because the workers want to secure their own jobs, but in the long run the cooperative would go bankrupt as competitors could produce more efficiently and charge lower prices. That might be the reasons why such cooperatives are not very widespread.

isn't really an argument against coops, similar shortsighted thinking can frequently be found in other forms of enterprise, if a private enterprise can rationalize automation a coop can as well and they can both fail to come to that conclusion. It's just that control over this automation is in the workers hand, and even if all the workers automate themselves away without finding other places to create value, the profit of that automation wouldn't be centralized quite so aggressively, because all (former) workers share in it. The workers fundamentally don't need to preserve their own jobs, rather they aim to preserve their livelihood.

I can offer a different explanation which partially explains their uncommon existence, which points again to the central conflict under capitalism, which is the unwillingness of conventional banks to approve credit for coops, making it much harder to start anything in the first place, particularly large capital investment like automation.