From the recent Bad Faith podcast. Gonna read up on them. Seems like a decent first step towards full communism, with the added benefit of I don't think people have an immune response to the term.
"Democratize the workforce" is pretty close to "seize the means of production". I'll take it, for now.
I mean, what other concrete solutions would you put forward in USA? It's one thing to critique, and another to present an alternative.
Yeah, I'm inclined to be pretty generous towards his solutions simply because he's at least presenting solutions.
But it isn’t a solution unless he tells us how exactly we co-operatise the vast majority of the US economy - are Google, Apple, and the rest just going to let their workers do this? Are co-ops supposed to start fresh and compete with established enterprises? What about public sector work, how do you “democratise” a government job when you work for the bourgeois state?
Limited, partial solutions can be valuable as a proof of concept, as a means of normalizing a once-radical idea, as a way of developing improved ideas through trial, as a way of building worker power for larger solutions, etc. There's a real danger of dismissing anything that's not a silver bullet, and we shouldn't succumb to that.
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workers organizing en-masse like they did in the 19th-early 20th century is a more likely to happen (and revolutionary) concrete solution--as pointed out elsewhere, co-ops aren't exactly easy to start and operate at a disadvantage in a lot of sectors of the economy
the total number of brewery workers employed in worker-owned breweries probably wouldn't even be a large enough staff to operate a single budweiser brewery
and this is coming from someone who loves coops. but seeing all the libs in this thread pretending like they're a prescription from Marx and not a thing the ur-lib John Stuart Mill came up with is wiiiiiiild
ok so workers organize and...then what? what concrete goal would they be working towards? state ownership of all capital? just higher wages and nothing more?
Look, diversity of tactics good and I patronize worker-coops wherever possible and dream of one day working for one. I also am working to organize my industry. But acting like worker cooperatives have a basis in theory as a vehicle to socialism is wildly revisionist. I'm begging you to read John Stuart Mill or at least enter 'cooperative enterprise' into your preferred search engine.
Don't take my word for it, but off the top of my head workers organize and...:
On Turtle Island and in most of the anglosphere they organized around 8 hour workdays, 40 hour workweeks, ending child labor, receiving parental leave, etc. A lot of people died at the hands of the state and paramilitaries in order to make those changes to their workplace. The state and bosses bent to these demands in order to otherwise avoid a revolution or attempts at one.
Perhaps most notably, without the worker soviets in 1917 the bolsheviks are never able to seize or keep power.
Like what do you think it means to call for workers of the world to unite and seize the means of production, exactly?
It is one thing to sieze power. It is anothre thing entirely to have a concrete idea of how to organize the economy after taking power. And the very incentive for taking power depends on what exactly the end goal is.