Comment on Why don’t more people start profit-sharing companies or co-ops?
rowinxavier@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This requires capital to do and the traits that drive having capital in the first place under capitalism also drive making capitalist structures to get more capital. It takes acting against your interests in capitalism to make a co-op.
That said, as a group a bunch of people could invest equally and have a fair amount of capital, especially with access to business loans. The key problem here is accessing finance and legal structures. The structure of an LLC is not really ideal for a co-op as it assumes individual ownership not group ownership. This can be worked through in a few ways but it is always a workaround, just something to make it work in the current system. The ideal would be some sort of shared, maybe creative commons, legal frameworks written up and cross checked by a bunch of lawyers. I think it could be done and very successful, but making that structure would require input from a bunch of people with experience with co-op structures. That said, once it is done they can all benefit for future endeavours and so can anyone else.
The other issue is culture. The USA has a culture of avoiding interdependence and being very individualistic. This is great for atomising workers and preventing unions, so it is encouraged from all capitalist sources including western media such as film and TV but also in things like which books are published and which are passed on. Nobody wants to produce media that will result in their own loss of financial wellbeing or status. Finding a way of shifting the culture is definitely a hard and currently unsolved problem.