A workers cooperative is using a socialist mode of production to organize and run a private business.
Marx didn’t think so. You still produce commodities for the purpose of profit. You just become your own capitalist.
I made this a separate comment because it’s so common and also so absurd. Richard Wolff is wrong about this. A socialist mode of production where workers produce commodities for profit 🤣
You fundamentally misunderstanding capitalism if that’s what you think.
Profit exists in both modes of production. The difference is that in a capitalist mode, workers are over-exploited to maximize profit for the owner. In a socialist mode, workers are not over-exploited and the profit is shared between the workers. In a capitalist mode, increasing profits are prioritized above all else, while wages are minimized as much as possible. In a socialist mode, workers decided democratically how much to put towards their wages and how much to reinvest back into the business; increasing profits year over year is not the priority, the well-being of the workers and business is.
I think you are the one who fundamentally misunderstands Marx’s critique of capitalism if that is all you think capitalism is.
Sure there is a contradiction between the classes, in the form of their conflicting interests, but there is also a contradiction in commodity production itself, in the materialist superstructure that makes up the concepts of money, wage, profit, etc. The ultimate goal of socialism is to do away with the value-form. Because the value form produces a contradiction between the exchange value and the use value of a product. Things are exchange values of each other under Marxist theory if they both contain the same socially necessary labor time. However, not all things which contain the same socially necessary labor time are necessarily of the same use value, indeed use value is not a quantitative metric but a qualitative one, and is the actually useful metric for human flourishing contained in an item. Diamonds and Uranium might both take the same labor time to get out of the ground, but how much of each do we need? Socialism ultimately hopes to provide people with use values, things they need, not simply trade things of equal labor values. If you don’t handle this you get into crises of overproduction.
The second contradiction in cooperativism (again these are textbook Marxist critiques not things I pulled out of my ass, you can actually search for the word cooperativism in Marx’s work, that’s what he calls it) is that workers still participate in a race to the bottom competing on working conditions. Two firms both make X. They each compete each other down in their profits until the profit is near 0, that is the tendency of profit to fall. Now how do they outcompete each other? On wages. On hours. On safety standards. Etc. one corporation willing to work harder, for less, less safely, will outcompete the other. That’s what he means when he says the workers become their own capitalists, and thus their own oppressors. They will democratically choose this even as a cooperative, because the system of capitalism oppresses them to do so, else they are outcompeted and go out of business.
Marx didn’t think so. You still produce commodities for the purpose of profit. You just become your own capitalist.
I made this a separate comment because it’s so common and also so absurd. Richard Wolff is wrong about this. A socialist mode of production where workers produce commodities for profit 🤣
You fundamentally misunderstanding capitalism if that’s what you think.
Profit exists in both modes of production. The difference is that in a capitalist mode, workers are over-exploited to maximize profit for the owner. In a socialist mode, workers are not over-exploited and the profit is shared between the workers. In a capitalist mode, increasing profits are prioritized above all else, while wages are minimized as much as possible. In a socialist mode, workers decided democratically how much to put towards their wages and how much to reinvest back into the business; increasing profits year over year is not the priority, the well-being of the workers and business is.
I think you are the one who fundamentally misunderstands Marx’s critique of capitalism if that is all you think capitalism is.
Sure there is a contradiction between the classes, in the form of their conflicting interests, but there is also a contradiction in commodity production itself, in the materialist superstructure that makes up the concepts of money, wage, profit, etc. The ultimate goal of socialism is to do away with the value-form. Because the value form produces a contradiction between the exchange value and the use value of a product. Things are exchange values of each other under Marxist theory if they both contain the same socially necessary labor time. However, not all things which contain the same socially necessary labor time are necessarily of the same use value, indeed use value is not a quantitative metric but a qualitative one, and is the actually useful metric for human flourishing contained in an item. Diamonds and Uranium might both take the same labor time to get out of the ground, but how much of each do we need? Socialism ultimately hopes to provide people with use values, things they need, not simply trade things of equal labor values. If you don’t handle this you get into crises of overproduction.
The second contradiction in cooperativism (again these are textbook Marxist critiques not things I pulled out of my ass, you can actually search for the word cooperativism in Marx’s work, that’s what he calls it) is that workers still participate in a race to the bottom competing on working conditions. Two firms both make X. They each compete each other down in their profits until the profit is near 0, that is the tendency of profit to fall. Now how do they outcompete each other? On wages. On hours. On safety standards. Etc. one corporation willing to work harder, for less, less safely, will outcompete the other. That’s what he means when he says the workers become their own capitalists, and thus their own oppressors. They will democratically choose this even as a cooperative, because the system of capitalism oppresses them to do so, else they are outcompeted and go out of business.
So no, I understand this material. You do not.