There is no evidence of cooperatives being capable of out-competing the megacorps of today in a system already controlled by megacorps. There is no growing systemic pressure for cooperatives to overwhelm megacorps, only further proletarianizaton and social stratification.
Nature tells you the power of cooperative working, look at ants, bees, fungi. The fediverse is a smack in the face of Reddit, Unix in the face of Microsoft. These things only grow, never shrink. There are more people in credit unions in America than any private bank. There are so many cooperatives in the agriculture space you wouldn’t believe. Look up mondragon, the largest cooperative employer with over 70k employees. Look up IFFCO, the largest agriculture cooperative connecting farmers in India, which has a revenue of over $7 billion/yr. These are behemoths, a force for good. They are not being overwhelmed by megacorps, rather they overwhelm the megacorps.
I am not against cooperation, I’m a Communist. What there isn’t any evidence of is worker cooperatives like Mondragon being capable of working within systems owned by large megacorps and overpowering them and outscaling them. There’s plenty of evidence for Socialism.
We are not bees, nor mushrooms, nor ants. FOSS is fantastic, and has many benefits, otherwise I would not be here. However, the idea that we can carve a cooperative niche out in a system dominated by Capital is Utopianism a la Saint-Simon, Fourier, Robert Owen, etc, and this Utopian model has been discredited for centuries.
Nature tells you the power of cooperative working, look at ants, bees, fungi. The fediverse is a smack in the face of Reddit, Unix in the face of Microsoft. These things only grow, never shrink. There are more people in credit unions in America than any private bank. There are so many cooperatives in the agriculture space you wouldn’t believe. Look up mondragon, the largest cooperative employer with over 70k employees. Look up IFFCO, the largest agriculture cooperative connecting farmers in India, which has a revenue of over $7 billion/yr. These are behemoths, a force for good. They are not being overwhelmed by megacorps, rather they overwhelm the megacorps.
I am not against cooperation, I’m a Communist. What there isn’t any evidence of is worker cooperatives like Mondragon being capable of working within systems owned by large megacorps and overpowering them and outscaling them. There’s plenty of evidence for Socialism.
We are not bees, nor mushrooms, nor ants. FOSS is fantastic, and has many benefits, otherwise I would not be here. However, the idea that we can carve a cooperative niche out in a system dominated by Capital is Utopianism a la Saint-Simon, Fourier, Robert Owen, etc, and this Utopian model has been discredited for centuries.