@yogthos

You speak of West like there was some other countries blooming with coops ;)

These changes don't seem to be - pun intended - game changers. It's easy to start a run a coop in UK, just like any other business. Red tape is close to zero.

@kravietz well not strictly coops, but take a look at Belarus, they mostly kept the soviet model and have a pretty vibrant economy that's doing better than most ex soviet states.

@yogthos

Have you ever been to Belarus?

I was and I can tell you exactly how that "vibrant economy" looks on the ground.

@kravietz I haven't, but I have heard from others who have, and other ex-soviet places are doing a lot worse.

@yogthos

Ok, so I can tell you first-hand that the first experience when you enter Belarus by train is middle-aged women smuggling raw meat under their coats from Poland to Belarus. Agriculture is ineffective (still very much kolkhoz style) which leads to higher consumer prices.

Living blocks (общежития) and general infrastructure (roads etc) are in poor state, obviously underfunded.

One huge difference as compared to Russia is lack of visible corruption.

@kravietz well can't speak to this personally so I'll take your word for it :)

@kravietz but that does seem to be quite at odds with even what Bloomberg is reporting about it https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-27/belarus-s-soviet-economy-has-worked-better-than-you-think

@yogthos Ever heard the expression "Potemkin village"? ;)

Also read the paragraph starting with "Lukashenko's exception is now under threat".

@kravietz I mean the article is from Bloomberg, they've also been saying China's a paper tiger that's about to fold for decades, that's not really working out either. :)

@kravietz @yogthos I'd like to understand more why coops like Migros (2.2 million member) and Coop (2.6 million members) are quite alike to any corporation you can name... maybe it's a scalability issue?

@saper @kravietz I suspect so, people tend to naturally organize into hierarchies, and large scale organizations tend to have similar structure to them.

I don't necessarily see that as a problem. What's important to me is ensuring that everyone in the organization has a vote about the overall direction of the organization, and that profits are shared fairly amongst the workers.

@yogthos @kravietz coops are not about sharing profit among the workers.

@saper @kravietz there are obviously many aspects to cooperatives, but for me worker representation and profit sharing are the key ones

@yogthos @kravietz well... that's simply not true, sorry.

@saper @kravietz what would be your definition then?

@saper I join @yogthos question

@kravietz @yogthos cooperative is built to pursuit **members** business interests; not workers. There are workers' cooperatives, where members are doing the work, but this is just one of the forms of the cooperatives.

Building cooperatives, consumer (purchasing) cooperatives seems to be most common forms.

@saper @kravietz pursuing members interests is what I refer to when I talk about worker representation. Maybe we're just using different terminology here.

I see a coop as an organization where everybody owns a percentage of it, and they have a say in what they work on, how they work, and when they work.

I see everybody in a coop as a worker. People just happen to have different roles, but I don't see some roles as being strictly more important than others.

@yogthos @kravietz sorry, but that's wrong. Let's not waste time on terminology. If you think that #cooperative model is something worth pursuing, I'd have a look at the real examples of cooperatives run for example in Europe (those I have mentioned, cooperative banks, insurance companies etc.).

For banks, for example, one big disadvantage of a small cooperative bank (like many in Germany) is that single fraud case can nuke 10 years of members' efforts.

@saper @kravietz can you explain what specifically you think is wrong?

@yogthos @kravietz worker != member

@saper @yogthos

Corporations show many pathologic behaviours but they *are* effective.

I made my largest leap in career - I mean evolving from a stereotypical introvert nerd to an IT professional who can actually talk to people and be understood - while working for multinationals. They suck at other things though.

That last factor - distribution of enterprise's income - is probably what I'd like most about coops.

@kravietz @saper we can say the same thing about totalitarian dictatorships though :)

And you also have to ask what specifically they're efficient at. For example, corps have efficiently destroyed our ecosystem creating a real possibility humanity might go extinct in the near future.

Just because this was done efficiently, doesn't mean that's desirable.

@kravietz @saper this is a great article on the subject by the way https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

@yogthos @saper

Not defending multinationals, consumers are just equally complicit in destroying the ecosystem. Multinationals would be nothing without consumers *preferring* their products over cleaner alternatives.

@kravietz @saper of course, but that's precisely the problem humans aren't good at thinking about the big picture, and we tend to do what's convenient in the short term.

What we see now is a necessary outcome of what happens when you just leave things to market forces without any overarching planning.

Not gonna matter whether capitalism feels more liberating or not when we all go extinct.