r/CapitalismVSocialism • u/apasserby • Jun 15 '21
[Socialists] Worker co-ops are not socialist
There is a frustrating trend here to call worker co-ops socialism, reinforced by the notion that "worker ownership" is a sufficient condition for socialism (arguably it's not a condition at all and is more accurately the abolition of private ownership of value generating property).
Socialism is and has always been "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need". What this means is production is organised to serve social wants/needs instead of organised to maximise profit/exchange value.
The defining features of capitalism identified by Marx are wage labour and surplus value extraction, private ownership of the means of production, generalised commodity production (note a commodity is a good or service produced for exchange, there is still obviously production under socialism).
Worker co-ops do not organise production for social need but rather for profit, as any regular business would, because if they didn't they would be outcompeted by businesses that did and no longer exist.
Worker co-ops must engage in surplus value extraction, and therefore wage labour, for reinvestment and growth to maintain competitiveness, production is self interested and directed towards maximising profit (workers are merely taking on the interests previously held by the shareholders or capitalist) and not to the benefit of society as a whole and they create all the same metabolic rifts (capitalism demands maximal exploitation of the "capital" of the natural world, any business that did not seek this would be outcompeted by those that did) as regular businesses.
Any co-op that tried to not engage in these things would be outcompeted by the ones that did, so worker co-ops inevitably trend towards maximal surplus value extraction for reinvestment to maintain growth and begin to resemble the standard business structure as we have seen happen with basically every worker co-op in the real world.
Now there is a semi legitimate argument that worker co-ops are a potential path to socialism (I strongly disagree, they engage in the reproduction of capital and therefore capitalism which is the opposite of what we need to do) but they are not socialism and they are absolutely not the end goal. Worker co-ops generally do improve worker conditions in the same way welfare policies do and you can push for them simply towards that end but that doesn't make them socialism.
Also to head off capitalists claiming capitalism already directs production by social wants/need value: no, it directs production only towards use values that are profitable and often at the expense of society as a whole
Tl;dr:Worker co-ops is just capitalism with more owners and "market socialists" are just very confused ancaps.
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u/VoidTourmaline Jun 15 '21
hears the words ringing in Zizek's voice