My region is home to the world’s largest worker cooperative, Mondragon Corporation. Do you think worker cooperatives are useful to us? Why aren’t they more widespread? Could their growth be facilitated by new technologies like the Internet or Blockchain?
Keeping it short: yes; capitalism; no.
Slightly longer-form: worker’s co-operatives can’t compete on price with non-co-ops, so their stuff is invariably more expensive, so they are almost invariably niche. The exception to that comes, in cases like Mondragon, where they manage to establish broader dominance early, in some way. They can sometimes maintain that due to the inherent advantages such a position has; as far as I’m aware, that more or less explains the success of Mondragon.
On the niche side, a common pattern is for a worker’s co-operative to end up servicing wealthy (John Lewis in the UK, say) and/or ideologically motivated clientele. They get to feel warm and fuzzy about the relative lack of exploitation / alignment with their values, and can either afford the premium attached, or are willing to make unusual levels of sacrifice.
I don’t know much about it myself, but SFRY went big on worker’s co-operatives. It could be a fruitful area of reading for you.
There’s been some discussion about it in the Morning Star this month as well. See https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/can-co-operatives-play-role-transition-socialism and a lively debate in following letters pages.
This. Even if everyone involved is a dedicated incorruptible socialist, a co-op can’t grow beyond a very local level because it’s unable to compete with enormous companies who can use their superior supply chains to temporarily lower their massively inflated prices and push you out of the market (among other scummy tactics); unfortunately, most people living in capitalist countries aren’t able/willing to pay significantly more for an ethical option (especially since there’s no guarantee from the buyer’s perspective that it actually is ethical, similar to the existing “ethical” brands). You can’t win against the capitalists when they make all the rules. Revolution is the only way
I was just wondering, what if a (relatively large) bunch of socialists just decided to accumulate capital as fast as humanly possible by volunteering some of their time at a collectively owned corporation? At some point capitalist firms in a few small markets would not be able to compete, so the socialist corporation could gradually transition into a regular worker cooperative and start attracting staff with wages. Eventually the cooperative would grow so large that it would wipe out some of its competition and carve a stable niche, with the added benefit that it would be controlled by socialists. Finally, as the vanguard party starts a revolution, this cooperative would economically support it, and would eventually become a de iure government-owned company.
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