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.
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.