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.
Some people argue that. Also we did industraial and agricultural sabotage to them. Threatened to annihilate the world and and did several wars with them. So not exactly a fair test
How was agriculture sabotaged?
I can find a article fomer cia agents talking about how they did it. They would det fields on fire, break important farm equipment stuff like thst.
Was that enough to turn the country into a net importer? I thought the general mismanagement was the bigger problem.
General mismanagement? They went from a feudal dirt based monarchy to the first spacefairing civilization in a lifetime. Their management was far better than ours. We just had a head start and the power to do more evil.
And yet China managed to survive. Of course there are external factors but it's important to know which internal decisions could have led to success.
Processors, internet, renewable energy, etc. Maybe winning the space race prevented success in other areas?
Stalin should not have stopped till the sea. China is willing to do what it takes to win. They have cut deals with evil countries to get resources to allow them to become the next hegemony. The US might never have stayed on top for quite some time if China had not seized the means of production
The atomic bomb, Stalin had to stop.
But that suggests that capitalistic meddling brought the sovjet union down. The primary question should be how the sovjet union could have kept the lead.