I'm not under the impression that "the same system we have now but a bunch of worker coops" would be some kind of ideal society, but it's far and away a better business structure than the ones we have now.
What are the barriers to successful coops being established?
I agree with other comments saying that some of it is just ideological, but another big reason is that it's extremely hard to compete with large chains price-wise, especially if you are in the groceries business. So you end up catering to well off libs with a guilty conscience or go out of business. Chains and monopolies play dirty too and can fuck with co-op's supplly chain by bribing or threatening suppliers.
Presumably that would also apply to capitalist small businesses though
Indeed it does.
There are even more hurdles for a co-op though if you wanna pay everyone equally and well instead of exploiting the shit out of workers.
The first reason is probably along the lines of how strongly the idea of owning capital and parasitizing others so you can rest on your laurels is pushed as the highest "virtue" in American society, and how strongly it dominates the American cultural mythos as a dream or natural progression (and the corollary to this: the complete and utter absence of coops in the American conscience, like children are taught about the "virtues" of business ownership in school but nothing about democratic and equitable alternatives). The second reason would probably be the atomization and precarity of the working class, so even if a worker managed to scrape together enough capital they aren't likely to have other similarly fortunate and ideologically inclined workers to group up with. The third would be institutional barriers to establishing coops like the lack of legal frameworks (since the system expects ownership to be a discrete thing that's owned in whole or in static chunks by private individuals) or the general refusal of banks to loan to coop startups in contrast to their willingness to fund more normal autocratic and extractive businesses.
All these come together to mean most people don't know what a coop is or why it's better than the normal autocratic and extractive capitalist models of business ownership, of those who do most either lack the capital or the connections to form one, and finally even when you do get a group of people who are both educated about coops, want to form one, and have the resources to do so there is no institutional support to be found, which further raises the barrier to entry from the previous step.
Also I suppose starting a coop as opposed to a capitalist enterprise is basically an act of charity, legally you have the right to sole ownership but you'd need to have the ideological conviction to turn it down which a lot of people won't.
Yes, if you've managed to pull together the capital you need to start a business entirely on your own there is inherently that lure of self-interest, and if you don't have a group of people that you trust and value enough to share that with them (and who, obviously, are even interested in that area of work to begin with) trying to form a coop with a group of strangers entirely with your own funds and backing is a sort of act of charity and ideological conviction.
Like say I stumbled dick first into a winning lottery ticket tomorrow and I wanted to put together a coop to ensure that I'd have a somewhat secure and ethical way to keep making a living instead of throwing all the money into a stock portfolio and leaching off others: everyone I'm close enough to to feel comfortable trying to drag into that is scattered around the country and every one of them has wildly different fields and skill sets. I'd still set out to try but I'd also be stumbling in the dark because as far as I know there's no "so you've got the money to start a business, but the moral conviction to not want to be a bourgeois parasite? here's how to make a coop and find similarly minded people!" guide book.
It's just one of the core problems with coops, alongside coops being a sort of individualistic harm-reduction move within a capitalist economy (in that they're good for everyone involved and reduce the harm those people suffer as a result of the capitalist system, but they only do this for those personally involved, they're not a scalable systemic solution to reduce and eventually eliminate the destructive hegemony of capitalism). Although I will say that I believe coops as a model could well have a place in a socialist economy for things that aren't of critical importance to the economy (so industry, agriculture, healthcare, education, logistics, etc would all be state/community controlled, but restaurants, local gardens, entertainment, etc all have a place for coops and a framework for democratically allocating resources to those coops would probably be a good thing).
Unless you and 30 of your comrade workers all crowd into your local bank's loan officer's cubicle to all ask for a loan together lmao
Way better answer than anything I could muster, have my upbear
The average American has never heard of coops, and if they have it's like one weird hippie food store. Capital ownership is the default.
This isn't entirely by accident - when software engineers looked like they were getting coop-y ideas, capital made a huge push towards legitimizing VC as the default sensible way for them to operate - but a lot of it is just boring cultural inertia, and not that hard to push back against.
It takes a lot of money to start a business, and traditional investors don't want to touch co-ops.
As KobaCumTribute's said, there's the basic capital barrier. Like, literally not having the cash to start a business.
There's the "which one of us is going to be the traitor?" paranoia.
There's the local community/customer base that can straight up see "Co-op" in the name and think, "Isn't that commie shit? and nope the fuck out."
And probably the number one thing is... in most places, there's already private ownership of any service a community would want. So having some "new" business, even one that is a co-op, might not be seen as a welcome enterprise. Hard work would need to be done in the local community to figure out what is needed in a community and how a worker co-op organization would be better than a private organization.
