The profit motive drives ecological exploitation and the externalization of costs onto the environment. Consumer coops respond to the voice of the community.
For-profit companies abandon their customers and close their doors when there isn't a way to monetize. Consumer coops work with their customers to ensure their needs are met
The stock market is a source of economic instability, market crashes, and, in worst-case scenarios, worldwide economic depressions. Coops don't participate in the stock market and are robust to economic instabilities.
With the simple change of encouraging and incentivizing cooperatives as a business model, we can solve the vast majority of the dystopian-level economic problems we are currently experiencing.
@hosford42 Small addition to this one: worker co-ops can still be for profit. They definitely solve self-imposed worker exploitation, as you said, but operating for-profit in a capitalist market there are still some negatives there.
E.g. they can still take investment that requires growth (because of interest), and while the co-op structure puts a cap on infinite growth, while competing in a capitalist market they’re still incentivised to grow for economies of scale.
@Brendanjones All good points. At this point, anything that improves the status quo is worthwhile ti me. I'm sick of our corporate overlords, and I will fight them in whatever way I can.
@hosford42 Definitely. If I could wave a magic wand I’d convert many companies to worker co-ops (and the rest any other form of co-op that suits!). It wouldn’t solve everything (still operating in a capitalist market, after all), but it’d sure be an improvement over the current situation.
Actually, come to think of it, if all companies removed external ownership of their means of production, would that still be a capitalist market? 🤔
@hosford42 I mean “removed external ownership” as in shareholder ownership. Not that people external to the workers can’t have some ownership (like could be the case in producer, consumer & platform co-ops, I think?).
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