this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Antiwork
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We're trying to reduce the numbers of hours a person has to work.
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We talk about the end of paid work being mandatory for survival.
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If unemployment rate is the key, why not create so many worker cooperatives that everybody can have a job?
A worker cooperative is just another business, albeit one where ownership is distributed among the workers. It still functions within the capitalist system and must follow its dictates. They start with capital, employ wage laborers, and must create profit to survive.
I mention this because really your question might as well be, "well why don't people just start more businesses to make more people employed?" The answer applies to co-ops as well: because unemployment is controlled by making it more costly to do business, forcing a need to cut costs (usually starting with labor) and often simply failed businesses. Co-ops are not free from this, they need capital to survive just like a capitalist-owned business.
The only way to free ourselves from this system is to expropriate control of the businesses and put it into workers' hands, which necessarily happens under the same conditions under which we could eliminate artificial unemployment (control of the state).
Put another way, we need to control the means of production, not be minor players still at the whims of capital.
Edit: I should probably mention that there's more to it than this but it requires getting into the weeds of Marxist theory.
Thanks for your detailed answer.
I wouldn't call it capitalism but markets. How can you escape markets, even if you control a state? Some people argue that the soviet union broke due to low oil prices.
Have you considered that coops need less capital to survive? When doing business becomes costly, coops could be the only businesses that survive. They could then keep unemployment rates ar zero while making profits.
If coops are more capital efficient and the proletariat definitionally doesn't own capital that means...
There is no amount of efficiency that is more important than momentum. Consider the robber barons. I could make a perfectly effective business but they could just bribe a senator to get a tax cut and beat me. The market can only evaluate one data set and lying cheating and stealing all fall outside the scope of that.
What does that mean? That managing a successful revolution is easier than managing coops?
Why is it important that the proletariat owns capital? Deconstruct your requirements and find a way to achieve your goals. If you try to achieve something that people want then there is a way to get it.