Worker Cooperatives
If you absorb enough basic Marxist ideas to arrive at the idea that profit, as a concept, is fundamentally a product of exploitation, you might, like me, become interested in the question of whether it’s possible to run business enterprises that rather than seeking to maximise surplus through exploitation, seek to socialise the surplus by distributing it among the workers and the broader community. This is more or less the premise of worker cooperatives, which have a long history. Why are they not everywhere?
hypothesis: worker cooperatives in service industries can’t scale
For industrial enterprises it’s possible to make a fairly simplistic case for cooperatives among the specific class of people who have access to a small amount of capital, and potentially a considerable capacity for sweat equity, which is that cooperative governance can turn a swath of competitive small enterprises into a unified medium scale enterprise that can share fixed capital and operate at a higher economy of scale, reducing costs and increasing surplus.
The argument is compelling, but unfortunately fairly naive to the global economic conditions, which have shifted hugely over the last hundred years. Industrial capitalism, which made enormous fortunes in the first two thirds of the 20th century, came to a staggering halt with the stagflation crisis of the 70s as the global exports market became saturated. The Defeat of the Workers Movement
Since the introduction of the ‘neoliberal’ solution to these problems throughout the 80s and 90s, the service sector has become increasingly dominant in the wealthiest countries.
Source: Our World In Data