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.
@kravietz there are plenty of cooperatives of all kinds out there however. Unsurprisingly, most of them exist in places that have infrastructure to help cooperatives get up and running.
It's kind of strange to me that you don't consider the obvious answer to your question.
@kravietz of course they exist, Mondragon is a great example of a large scale coop that focuses on high techhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
There are also plenty of smaller coops doing tech stuff. Myself and my friends have a coop where we do software development.
Ok, but this Mondragon looks like a classic "guild of professionals" that work in B2B environment.
I also operate in a kind of a infosec consulting coop, but that's also B2B and very narrow field.
I'm wondering why there's no consumer-facing coops that sell books and are able to deliver them in a few days?
@kravietz I could ask why there aren't any real competitors to Amazon in general though.
The way capitalism works on paper we should see a robust ecosystem of companies all doing what Amazon does as opposed to a single monopoly.
So, why do we see giant megacorps in every sector, instead of many companies competing.
This part is easy: because it's more effective to run a large enterprise, either private or state-owned. All enterprises naturally tend to grow through merger or acquisitions (capitalist), or nationalisation (socialist).
In socialism everything was a single state-owned enterprise and there was no competition, which was seen as wasteful by Marxian economy.
They later re-introduced it but concealed under name of "socialist emulation".
@kravietz state ownership doesn't preclude competition though, USSR had plenty of competing design bureaus for examples.
I do think that straight up competition is wasteful though. It's much more efficient to have friendly competition and share the findings from each approach.
Also, worth noting that USSR beat US in many tech areas, so clearly the system produced better results in terms of research and invention on limited funding.
As you remember, we can continue this argument for hours, but I disagree.
The problem is that progress in USSR was very narrowly directed: into defence industry.
At the same civilian production was severely underdeveloped and consumer good either weren't there or their quality was utter crap and well behind anything produced in the West.
Classic economy of shortage...
@kravietz sure, but you also have to remember that NATO was pretty much designed to bankrupt USSR.
That part worked, but now US is stuck with a giant war machine that's become a huge part of their economy and it's bankrupting them as well. So, a bit of a Pyrrhic victory there if you ask me. :)
Look at how US infrastructure is unraveling now due to lack of funding, in a lot of ways it's already worse than USSR.
@kravietz I really think the future is starting to look pretty grim for humanity.
Large areas around equator are already becoming unlivable, it's possible that billions of people are going to have to migrate within decades.
Now consider places like India, China, and Pakistan who all have nukes. I think a nuclear war is a very likely scenario there as the climate continues to break down.
@yogthos Why do you think I've been always into speleology? ;)
@kravietz living in caves eating fungus is a pretty likely scenario for the survivors :)
On the other hand global nuclear war will solve both the population problem and counteract global warming, so there that I guess?
There's no such thing as "world population problem", scientifically.
That's an idea pursued in 60's by elitist circles like Ehrlich and Club of Rome who preferred to keep their California mansions not "contaminated" by "human pest" from developing countries. I have a copy of Ehrlich "Population bomb" on a shelf here, that's his language.
"Population carrying capability" etc were just ideas to support this contempt towards less privileged.
@kravietz sure, I think the real issue is that wealth is being concentrated with the tiny amount of the population, and these people are psychopaths and are guilty of crimes against humanity in a very literal sense.
Fossil fuel industry has spreading misinformation about the climate change for many years. Billions of people are going to be affected by their actions in the coming decades, and we're looking at human suffering at an unprecedented scale going forward.
Caves aren't particularly friendly places to live with average 4-8°C and 100% relative humidity.
But this might be not even necessary in long term, read this https://www.quora.com/What-happened-to-the-radiation-that-was-supposed-to-last-thousands-of-years-in-Hiroshima-1945
Not that I'm encouraging nuclear conflict, but you have to be prepared for everything granted the amount of aggressive idiots at power...
@kravietz indeed, tangentially this is a fantastic book :) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/164154.A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
@yogthos I've read it like 20 years ago ;)
@kravietz yeah it's been a while here too, absolutely loved it though
Many of my academic colleagues who understand how serious the situation is are deeply depressed. I'm trying hard to find tools and narratives that help humans and other people keep struggling to rescue what we can. It seems to me many other people here are doing the same. Distributed communication systems are part of that. The fediverse (like UUCP or Fido before it) can run across radio modems between isolated nodes, if we need that. Dance, people: dance like you mean it, and don't stop until we find a better way for all living things.
This is simply not true, Bolshevik's objective was *always* a world revolution, spread by any means available, be it military force, propaganda or sabotage. USSR was created literally by forcefully conquering republics split from Russian Empire, including Baltics, Ukraine, Caucasus etc with classic scenario being small Bolshevik party "requesting support of mighty Red Army". In 1920 Bolsheviks tried to conquer Poland this way, but lost.
@kravietz look at the history of escalation though, NATO practically always drove the arms race with USSR responding reluctantly, and look at NATO expansion over the years.
It's pretty clear who was more eager to spend money on the military there.
The history of escalation started in 1917 with Bolshevik promising violent world revolution and pursuing it at all means.
> look at NATO expansion over the years
It's countries *asking* desperately for NATO protection from openly imperialist Soviet Union, and then Russia.
This is precisely the sentiment most of Eastern Europe had in 90's while Russia - who just finished bloody intervention in Afghanistan - started another bloody intervention in Chechnya and threatened Baltics etc.
@kravietz we've talked about this before, I'll point to Latin America as an example of what US has been doing during that time, and it's a lot worse than what Eastern Europe in the 90s. Pinochet and the Contras are good examples.
And not defending what soviets did here, just pointing out that NATO is just as guilty of all kinds of atrocities.
@kravietz it was practically always the West escalating the arms race and USSR following though.
And I agree that it was a battle of ideologies, but my point is that the victory the West achieved came at the price of creating the war machine that has a life of its own now.
And it looks like US is likely to go the way of USSR in the coming years.