The profit motive drives enshittification. Consumer coops are immune to it.
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Aaron (hosford42@techhub.social)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2024 03:50:10 JST Aaron -
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Aaron (hosford42@techhub.social)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2024 03:50:04 JST Aaron With the simple change of encouraging and incentivizing cooperatives as a business model, we can solve the vast majority of the dystopian-level economic problems we are currently experiencing.
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Aaron (hosford42@techhub.social)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2024 03:50:05 JST Aaron I'm sure I've missed some other good points in this thread. (Feel free to add them!)
The main point is: WE ARE DOING CAPITALISM WRONG.
#Coops
#Cooperatives
#Capitalism
#Socialism
#FreeMarket
#HumanDignity
#BestOfBothWorldsBrendan Jones repeated this. -
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Aaron (hosford42@techhub.social)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2024 03:50:06 JST Aaron For-profit companies abandon their customers and close their doors when there isn't a way to monetize. Consumer coops work with their customers to ensure their needs are met
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Aaron (hosford42@techhub.social)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2024 03:50:06 JST Aaron The stock market is a source of economic instability, market crashes, and, in worst-case scenarios, worldwide economic depressions. Coops don't participate in the stock market and are robust to economic instabilities.
#Coops
#Cooperatives
#StockMarket
#MarketCrash
#Recession
#GreatDepression
#MarketStability -
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Aaron (hosford42@techhub.social)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2024 03:50:08 JST Aaron For-profit corporations are the reason we have ridiculous levels of wealth inequality. Coops work against that.
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Aaron (hosford42@techhub.social)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2024 03:50:08 JST Aaron The profit motive drives ecological exploitation and the externalization of costs onto the environment. Consumer coops respond to the voice of the community.
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Aaron (hosford42@techhub.social)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2024 03:50:09 JST Aaron The profit motive drives worker exploitation. Worker coops are immune to it.
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Brendan Jones (brendanjones@fosstodon.org)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2024 03:58:12 JST Brendan Jones @hosford42 Small addition to this one: worker co-ops can still be for profit. They definitely solve self-imposed worker exploitation, as you said, but operating for-profit in a capitalist market there are still some negatives there.
E.g. they can still take investment that requires growth (because of interest), and while the co-op structure puts a cap on infinite growth, while competing in a capitalist market they’re still incentivised to grow for economies of scale.
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Brendan Jones (brendanjones@fosstodon.org)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2024 03:59:22 JST Brendan Jones @hosford42 I think. Not an expert here.
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Brendan Jones (brendanjones@fosstodon.org)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2024 06:55:02 JST Brendan Jones @hosford42 Definitely. If I could wave a magic wand I’d convert many companies to worker co-ops (and the rest any other form of co-op that suits!). It wouldn’t solve everything (still operating in a capitalist market, after all), but it’d sure be an improvement over the current situation.
Actually, come to think of it, if all companies removed external ownership of their means of production, would that still be a capitalist market? 🤔
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Aaron (hosford42@techhub.social)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2024 06:55:03 JST Aaron @Brendanjones All good points. At this point, anything that improves the status quo is worthwhile ti me. I'm sick of our corporate overlords, and I will fight them in whatever way I can.
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Brendan Jones (brendanjones@fosstodon.org)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2024 06:57:31 JST Brendan Jones @hosford42 I mean “removed external ownership” as in shareholder ownership. Not that people external to the workers can’t have some ownership (like could be the case in producer, consumer & platform co-ops, I think?).
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