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by furgooswft13 1703 days ago
This is all bog-standard bolshevik/communist propaganda dressed up in modern lingo. Your "co-ops" are just "soviets" (literal definition "council"). These "worker councils" were officially democratic as laid out in various USSR constitutions, and even the names of some communist bloc countries such as East Germany (German Democratic Republic) and North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea).

In practice of course, none of the freedoms of decision making we typically ascribe to western democratic nations existed despite these labels. The reason, as always, is that significant coercion and force is required to get people to give up control of their property and wealth. This inevitably leads to not only authoritarianism, but also wealth being transferred to the state instead of the people.

1 comments

No the co-ops I'm talking about are businesses democratically run by their workers and they exist in the current economy with out coersion. Ever heard of Mondragon? 80,000 worker owner cooperative operating out of Spain for decades. Had an Equal Exchange chocolate bar? King Arthur Flour?

There's no reason you couldn't write the laws of business structure in such a way that all businesses have to be run democratically by their workers. Essentially you do away with the partnership, LLC, and Corporation and replace it with the worker cooperative. What you get is an economy of democratically run worker cooperatives competing with each other in a free market economy. No central planning. No government control. And this is different from the worker councils you're talking about which are, essentially, an effort at democratic, distributed economic planning.

Laws imply coercion and force, by definition.

If you and your hippie friends wanna band together and start a commune somewhere and commit mass suicide (or something), I got no problem with that. Just don't force everyone else to join you by gun point (the logical endpoint of enforcing laws).