Imagine if Amazon was run as a cooperative, and the money generated by the workers went to them instead. Amazon could literally hire 10 times as many people, and have each employee work 1/2 a day a week while getting the same salary they get now. The only reason that's not happening is because a guy named Jeff takes the lion share of the profits.
@yogthos On the other hand, could a cooperative build an enterprise attracting so many customers as Amazon?
@kravietz I really don't see why it couldn't, and even if not I still don't think that would justify Amazon
If it could, why it didn't? That's the first question I'm asking myself in those endless discussions where a popular but inferior X is compared to unpopular but allegedly superior Y...
@kravietz because US is not set up to facilitate cooperatives? The whole system is designed to foster businesses owned by the capitalists. Take a look at percentage of cooperatives in US, it's tiny, and getting things like start up loans is intentionally far more difficult for cooperatives.
Seems a bit weird to assume that the reason Amazon isn't a co-op is for any other reason.
We have a global market, they *could* have appeared in any other large economy like EU.
Yet they didn't, the closest to Amazon like Alibris however offer significantly inferior delivery times and service (first hand experience, I did switch to Alibris purely for ideological reasons).
P.S. not arguing, more of trying to understand it...
@kravietz still exactly the same problem though, most of EU is very much focused on fostering traditional style businesses as opposed to coops. If we lived in a world where cooperatives were the norm, then Amazon would've most certainly have been a cooperative instead.
UK has a very strong coop traditions and EU has multi-billion programs for fostering *any* kind of startups you wish.
Yet, there are few globally recognized brands that started here, not to mention being coops.
@kravietz well that's interesting because one of the things Labor is campaigning on is making UK more coop friendly.
For example, one of the platform promises is to provide workers with first right of refusal when the company is sold.
Again, the West is capitalist through and through. I don't think it's fair to claim that coops have the same opportunities here.
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.
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 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.