| I am in favor of encouraging plausible, workable economic thinking. Jacobin is better described as leftist fever-dreams with roughly that level of connection to any reality. Could things work differently? Absolutely. Are they going to work differently because some hack gets off fantasizing about how in abstract theory, the services Uber performs could be better performed by a co-op that pays workers more? No. All the co-ops I've encountered or dealt with fall into one of three categories: * Non-functional, incapable of making decisions or delivering value. * Functional but completely unscalable. May depend on bizarro local economic conditions or be in one of the few cities where people are willing to pay 30% extra for pizza because it's a co-op. * Function, scalable, and does not operate much like a co-op at the level of service delivery. REI falls into this category. Uber works because it's functional, scalable, and reliable. You can go to almost any major city in the US, boot up your Uber app, and reasonably expect to get decent service. It is, abstractly, possible for a co-op to do that. You and Jacobin are completely, totally, 100% correct on this point. Things could be different and better for the people who Jacobin has decided matter. In fact, we all live in a framework where such a thing is possible! If only someone was brave enough to put their labor where their mouth is. Maybe the propagandists at Jacobin could... nah. They wouldn't go for that. They much prefer theory. |
No true scot? The definition of a co-op is a group organized to meet economic or social desires through jointly owned business. What does this have to do with any particular approach to service delivery? You appear to be defining cooperatives as some unworkable theoretical concept and then any actual successful example of implementation is an exception. Convenient!
Vanguard also falls into this category but is absolutely a cooperative.