I am a worker-member of a (financially) successful worker co-operative in the UK. Basically, the analysis that @CommunistWolf provides is fair and accurate:

• we are very niche, operating in a niche area of technology with high-paying public sector, charityh sector, and international body clients e.g. the UN, various transparency movements etc.
• We compete with the mega consultancies e.g. Deloitte who charge more, do poor quality work, pay their “junior/low-grade” workers poorly but also have a highly paid chief-consultant tier who are paid many times the workers in our co-op
• We have kept wages “low” for our service, in order to sustain the co-operative longer term and we distribute surplus value at the end of the financial year via a payroll “bonus”, subject to our rules that we don’t distribute more than something like 50% of the profits in order to keep an emergency fund for if we’re not profitable for a while, buy some better staff benefits etc.
• While our wages are substantially lower than those of our corp-sector contempraries, for our service, we’re also more highly paid than a lot of workers. Our current salaries are about £43k and we’ve voted to aim to raise these above inflation towards the £60k mark as part of our next plan to compensate staff fairly and keep them in the co-operative. My romantic partner works just the same hours I do, for a megacorp in the financial sector, with far fewer staff benefits, and is paid a value just over half of my salary.
• our “social wage” in the co-op is strong working conditions for the most part, although there are some contradictions which are playing out which limit the effectiveness of these. These contradictions are really derived from the fact that we compete on the market, so any worker benefits or flexibility we gain for our staff must be confronted with the material reality we need to bill X amount to clients and meet our running costs. We do have some strong policies which have emerged from our workers such as menstrual leave for women workers, unlimited sick days and bereavement leave (balanced against a long-term sickness policy), flexible working patterns etc.

In short: I believe co-operatives are a weapon in class war, especially in areas where highly-educated workers can coalesce into pooling group resources, but they are nothing more than a tool and they have their limits and problems. It’s the same as being in a Trade Union; definiteyly don’t discount it and use this as a vehicle for working class politics, but the working class ultimately need a vanguard party drawing together workers from co-operatives, unions, protest movements, etc into a coherent political and revolutionary force.

One reality I have faced is that worker co-operatives may be approached from many different political angles. We are broadly left leaning in our co-operative, however I am the only Marxist Leninist. There are a few anarchist and socdems, but some of our ex-members were openly Conservative and viewed worker co-operatives as an extension to being “self-employed” or “running a business”, rather than being worker centric. There are also a lot of libs who like co-ops, but also lack the materialist and class analyses of other things and can’t break out of the “everyone should just form a co-op” mentality (note: this is less a reflection of my direct colleagues and more something that becomes apparent when engaging the rest of the worker co-operative or broader co-operative sector)

I would never discourage comrades or workers from forming co-ops, and my co-op’s structure, democracy, and staff compensation levels have allowed me to frame discussions with non-radicalised friends and colleagues in other organisations to e.g. direct them towards unions or get them to start questioning how the money they make for their corp is a lot more than what they receive in compensation. As noted, they’re a tool for damage control and for demonstrating the labour theory of value and illustrating how corp structures are oppressing even relatively well compensated workers.

Worker co-ops are a good alternative to regular company layouts, but I warn that plenty of LeftComms on the far left side and plenty of libs on the right side of this argument both think that worker co-ops will create paradise. It’s important to recognize that this isn’t the case. To keep workers co-ops indefinitely and undialectically would mean to continue perpetuating the capitalist system. A good workers co-op with a Union is a great place to work, not very Revolutionary tho bc after these people receive their concessions they are less likely to Revolt. On the other hand I could understand people saying it makes them more Revolutionary because their self-governance and self-reliance makes them less reliant on the capitalist state and they will have had experience with stealing away concessions from capitalists, which is something that we should support. But I feel that in the US at least, plenty of Union workers and Co-ops are vaguely liberal and not very revolutionary, also I need to mention that like Communist Wolf said it’s much tougher for these companies to succeed and compete against bigger companies or even just smaller ones that just treat employees worse, pay them worse and have lower prices. Overhead and profit margins are everything in a capitalist society and unfortunately treating employees well and giving them rights and good pay comes at a cost that many other manufacturers and retailers won’t pay for.

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.

I think worker cooperatives have to be part of the solution. The way I see it is that state owned industry is responsible for handling common concerns such as infrastructure, energy production, education, healthcare, basic food production, and so on. These are things that everyone needs, and they should be done without a profit motive.

On the other hand, things that are nice to have can be handled by worker cooperatives. This is where you can have a regulated market economy akin to what we saw in Hungary with Goulash Communism.

Short answer: yes, cooperatives are extremely useful.

Long answer: cooperatives can be used as a way to test how a socialist/communist workplace could possibly look like, while at the same time bettering the conditions of the workers, and is a great way to both democratise the workplace and at the same time build a framework for when a socialist revolution occurs. Though obviously under capitalism cooperatives are limited in what they can do, they still need to make profits and play along with the system, so basically making the workers take the place of the capitalists, so they by themselves aren’t going to initiate a revolution or inact socialism, but it is objectively better for the workers in the meantime, and can be analysed and observed to prove that people can run the nation themselves without the need of class hierarchy. As for why they aren’t widespread: my theory is it’d obviously upset the bourgeoisie (as well as possibly posing a threat to them with the people gaining more power in the economy) if every single business was a cooperative, they want all that wealth to themselves, same reason as to why social democracy never works in the long term, especially if it starts gradually veering more to the left then it’s supposed to, anything that benefits the people too much at the expense of the bourgeois class, will be gotten rid of as quickly as possible by the wealthy by any means necessary, the only time it’s left be is if it isn’t a threat to the bourgeoisie, so a single cooperative or two in a city/town, isn’t gonna do much in the grand scheme of things, even if one of those cooperatives is very successful, and so the wealthy leave them be. There’s also regional differences, some places are unfortunately more individualistic or tribalistic/campist and so cooperatives are going to struggle a lot more in those regions, some governments simply don’t allow cooperatives or any form of democratic workplace to begin with, cooperatives can be very difficult to start in most areas - either due to larger companies being nearby or due to bureaucracy, most people haven’t even heard of a cooperative or how it works, the international media rarely talks about them - and if they do it’s quite brief and suger coated in liberal language and so nobody really pays attention to it, etc. but other then that I’m not a hundred percent sure. As for the internet and Blockchain aiding the growth of these policies: yes, the internet especially so, and as much as I dislike crypto as a whole for what it stands for - and being a capitalist tool for the vast majority of the time, I do realise it serves a purpose under our current system. It’s permissionless, open source, community run (for the most part), and in the case of Monero as an example, it’s anonymous and somewhat power efficient compared to other cryptocurrencies, as well as being able to run on most computers, so it can be of benefit to let’s say, people living in dictatorships that are hellbent on opressing anyone in regards to banking for whatever reason, or surveillance states as another, and can also be used to fund “risky” - possibly revolutionary - organisations without the governments or large banks being involved and seeing that transaction, or in this case, aiding a cooperative to be even slightly more public owned by using open source software and community ran Blockchains instead of the banks. There’s also other uses I can list off, but they’re more general and less important to a socialist movement in comparison to unions and cooperatives and parties, so that’s the general gist, crypto and Blockchains are very much a capitalist tool, built under a capitalist system, and predominantly contributed to and invested in by capitalists (especially if we’re talking about the larger cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc), but for certain people it can be quite useful - sometimes immensely useful - and can possibly aid socialists to some extent with it being community run, permissionless, and open source, so it depends on the context and circumstance mostly. And the internet is an obvious one, especially with services like the Fediverse and Matrix, End to End Encryption helps with privacy, running you’re own server helps with privacy as well, as well as not relying on a giant cooperations permission to host certain data/content, chats, people, etc. decentralisation can help with delaying buyouts, although not entirely prevent it long term, it’s only a matter of time before at least half of the Fediverse gets bought out by capitalists and companies, and open sourcing something is always a good thing, and gets people involved, as well as trusting the service more. The internet allows transfer of knowledge, ideas, conversations, and cooperation/planning across the entire world in almost an instant, and I’m not even mentioning all the other benefits the internet can bring, especially if it’s run by the people, so it’s extremely useful for any form of socialist movement. These all can help in the daily lives of people, which I’m always for, but none will do much in the long term if not apart of a larger movement, and most progress through reform and gradual change always gets rolled back one way or another with time anyways, so these ideas must not be the be all end all of it. I probably missed somethings but - I hope my thoughts added to the conversation just a little bit. Happy may day comrades! ✊

The thing makes a cooperative a cooperative is private property relations. So cooperatives as such are not going to survive revolution.

That being said, cooperatives are useful under capitalism to maintain the lifetime of a dollar within a community. They are also useful laboratories of democratic forms for solving many different types of problems.

Unfortunately, they’re incredibly hard to build without a hoard of capital, they are incredibly hard to sustain when they are managed by members of the precariat who are always under survival pressures, and they rely on systemic exploitation, both domestic and international, in order to make it them economically viable.

So they are useful, and given an opportunity I would absolutely use the cooperative form to solve a number of community problems, but they are going to be mostly small, mostly short lived, very few and far between, and the largest are going to be deeply tied into systemic exploitation which means ultimately contradictory in their interests.

deleted by creator

Can’t see any from here 🎱