My region is home to the world’s largest worker cooperative, Mondragon Corporation. Do you think worker cooperatives are useful to us? Why aren’t they more widespread? Could their growth be facilitated by new technologies like the Internet or Blockchain?
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.
I was thinking about using cooperatives as an attack mechanism that would materially help the revolution, rather than a way to improve working conditions. The idea is that such a cooperative could be based on volunteer or hybrid work, accumulate capital and develop supply chains very fast, sell at extremely low prices and use decentralization and various economic incentivization schemes to resist threats from the economy and outcompete capitalist firms.
During the revolution, the cooperative (which would be controlled by socialists) would provide material aid, disrupt key supply chains that it should have already taken over, etc. After the revolution, the cooperative would become a state-controlled company, minimizing the time to transition and thus reducing the associated risk.
I’d really like to research how viable this strategy could be, maybe some of you could give me some insight :)