this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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I think there needs to be a mix of cooperative ownership and state owned industry. State owned industry does a good job providing basic services everyone needs that have to be done without a profit motive. Private industry under cooperative ownership can provide nice to have things on top of that.
The capitalist model has no place in decent society, and it's not necessary for anything. While corruption exists in all human societies, it's at absolutely stratospheric levels under capitalism. There was inequality, but there simply weren't people like Musk or Bezos running around USSR.
Changing systems demonstrably does have a huge effect on society. You can just look at what happened to post Soviet republics after introduction of capitalism. The same people who behaved decently under the communist system turned into oligarchs overnight. It's pretty clear that capitalism is in fact the problem. Communism might not be the ideal system, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.
Yeha, that doesn't sound bad at all. But in that scenario:
cooperatives would still need to accumulate wealth in order to provide complex services, like car or chip manufacturers. Innovating on engines, processors, GPUs, phones... Requires large investments and risk.
Everyone wouldn't be paid the same in those cooperatives, so workers still depend on their company being fair.
Like any democratic system, it would be prone to corruption. Internal bribes could happen to benefit some members over others. Low skill workers could vote to have a system that removes personal incentives from high skill roles, pushing them to other companies.
Cooperatives could still bribe the government.
Just because they are a bit more socialized, it doesn't mean they won't break when corruption touches them.
Public companies providing the basic services with no competition is another problem. No competition means no incentive to improve or be modernized. There's no frame of reference on what's a good service.
Plus, there's nothing scarier in my opinion than a corrupted and authoritarian government. A corrupted and absolute power? No thanks, not a risk worth taking. Every government can be corrupted but when it happens to an authoritarian one, shit hits the fan.
Cooperatives accumulating wealth is not an issue because the wealth is distributed fairly amongst the workers. Cooperatives avoid wealth concentration with individuals which is the issue with capitalist relations. When people working at a cooperative make money, they spend it on things they need which recirculates it back into the economy.
The idea of a cooperative is not that everyone gets paid the same, but rather that everyone has a stake in a business and runs it democratically. Mondragon is a great example of a large real world coop, if I recall correctly they have a cap of 10 to 1 for max pay. So, the highest paid person cannot be paid more than 10x of the lowest paid. If they want to be paid more then the base pay has to go up.
I think accepting the fact that corruption is part of a human society is the sane position to take. Corruption will happen, but its effects can be mitigated, focusing on mitigation is pragmatic.
Meanwhile, regarding public companies, there natural monopolies because some things require huge amounts of resources to do, and meaningful competition is not possible. I gave an example of Amazon earlier. Nobody can compete with Amazon because of the scale. However, state owned companies don't have to be exclusive, if a coop thinks they can add value in that area I don't see why that would be discouraged. The idea would be to provide a lowest common denominator baseline. There would be a minimum standard that's provided by the state, and people can improve on it.
I think a government of an oligarchy is much scarier because it doesn't even pretend to have interests of the public in mind. This is what capitalist societies ultimately devolve into. Here's what a decades long policy study had to say about the US system:
It's a government by the rich and for the rich, the interests of the public are completely ignored whenever they conflict with the interests of the rich. That's the government you should be scared of.
Any system becomes scary when it reaches dystopian levels.
Going back to the main point, I thought you meant that the problem was wealth accumulation in general. In cooperatives, accumulating wealth is necessary for handling complex services. However, the same issues that happen in capitalism can also happen in large cooperatives. Companies can start bribing the government for their benefit, even if it goes against the environment or the interests of the majority of workers. Like a cooperative that does AI could bribe the government to relax AI restrictions, which could fuck the market for other cooperatives.
So I think even if we don't agree in how to implement a more socialized system, we both agree on:
We're just in a different point of the spectrum. My perspective is that we need to start moving towards a social democracy, it is the best migration to improve the conditions of the workers without being disruptive on what works today.
Right, there will always be problems within human societies no matter what kind of clever system people come up with. I think the goal should be on creating systems that mitigate the worst excesses and keep society stable.
The problem with competition is that it directly leads to wealth concentration, and the problems you keep raising. As companies compete then some companies will lose out and others will gain their market share. Successful companies end up growing through this process. And the bigger the company gets the more initial capital is required to compete with it. This is a problem for both capitalist enterprise and cooperatives.
However, I think that cooperatives mitigate the problem in an important way where wealth distribution is more even. If a cooperative becomes a monopoly, it will still distribute wealth it generates fairly within the cooperative. And I think this also helps with the overall corruption problem because now you don't have wealth concentrated with a few individuals that can use it to have disproportionate influence on society.
I'm personally skeptical there is a real path towards the kind of social democracy you speak of in a society where there is mass wealth inequality. Public opinion is largely determined by the media that's owned by the oligarchs, and people's votes are swayed by sleek political campaigns that need large amounts of funding. Since the government is already captured by the rich, there is no path for the government to pass legislation that would make it more difficult for rich people to exercise their influence over society. Hence I don't really see how reformism can work in practice.