My region is home to the world’s largest worker cooperative, Mondragon Corporation. Do you think worker cooperatives are useful to us? Why aren’t they more widespread? Could their growth be facilitated by new technologies like the Internet or Blockchain?
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The thing makes a cooperative a cooperative is private property relations. So cooperatives as such are not going to survive revolution.
That being said, cooperatives are useful under capitalism to maintain the lifetime of a dollar within a community. They are also useful laboratories of democratic forms for solving many different types of problems.
Unfortunately, they’re incredibly hard to build without a hoard of capital, they are incredibly hard to sustain when they are managed by members of the precariat who are always under survival pressures, and they rely on systemic exploitation, both domestic and international, in order to make it them economically viable.
So they are useful, and given an opportunity I would absolutely use the cooperative form to solve a number of community problems, but they are going to be mostly small, mostly short lived, very few and far between, and the largest are going to be deeply tied into systemic exploitation which means ultimately contradictory in their interests.
