Well, that's what I meant by my European coworker - perhaps his country has found a socialist balancing point that maintains a level of capitalism that somehow doesn't tip into power cascades concentrating power around Capital. IMO that wouldn't be a liberal capitalist society though, that would be a socialist-capitalist society, which perhaps the Netherlands and Nordic countries are, I'm not too familiar. With the level of privatization striking Canada, I think it'll end up like the USA.
If we're gonna take a look at places, where I'm really interested in watching is the PRC, Cuba, and Vietnam. Capitalism managed to beat the Soviet Union, will it to any other remainders from the era, or will the conversion to state capitalism create a strange equilibrium? In any case it's not like the PRC is doing much better in terms of worker's rights, you still have to justify your existence through labor there more than you do in the aforementioned Nordic countries.
Personally I'm thinking the solution will be establishing parallel forms of mutual aid and organization with the goal of making the State and capitalism obsolete and moot. Why would I buy food when my neighbors and I grow and share more than enough? A stretch goal but I don't see any other path. At least trying to reach it makes for lots of fun projects like gardening, homelabbing, setting up federated software, etc.
Further reading: Walkaway by Cory Doctorow, The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin, The Anarchist Cookbook by Keith McHenry (and look into Food not Bombs, Food not Lawns etc while you're at it), and various solarpunk copium like "A Half-Built Garden" by Ruthanna Emrys.
I wrote it, and I invite you to tell me why I'm wrong - genuinely. I'm here for the conversation. I don't know how else to write on something other than authoritatively. If I'm wrong on the internet, people will definitely tell me!
In person, I'll hedge of course, it's a natural part of conversing and inviting people to share.
Arguing whether someone is permitted to speak on a subject sounds like it would take as much effort as simply discussing the subject itself.
How did you identify how businesses are worker-owned? Curious how it compares to other verification methods e.g. what my co-op had to go through to get a .coop domain as determined by these guys: https://identity.coop/policies/ Wasn't too hard or anything, just wondering what people are looking for to verify co-op-ness
For categories, I guess software engineering would go under "other?" Did you find many services co-ops? I'm aware of a couple other software engineering co-ops/collectives in Europe but none in the USA. Seems to be a bit barren for some reason.
> I don’t want a vote on whether or not my bakery puts sesame seeds on the bread. I just want to buy a loaf of bread thanks.
You have an illusion of choice right now between sesame or non sesame bread through the low-resolution "voting" mechanism of the market, which doesn't actually consider your desires when counting votes, merely the profitability between your desires and a supplier's margin. If you like sesame, but if it's not profitable enough, too bad, no sesame for you. "They can charge more," "someone will fill the niche," yes we've been told that about capitalism for the last century, yet it's never been true, so I guess it was a lie. Think of all the products people want that we just can't get anymore because some big org decided we can't have it, or better yet, think of how nearly monopolized industries have leveraged their power to move markets towards more profitable directions. Clothes - big, baggy, unicolor blobs. Phones - black squares.
It's not only more ethical for breadmakers to he democratic, it's simply more efficient in terms of delivering what the people want and need. Markets are a low resolution, exploitable mechanism that can lead to contrary incentives. Better to just cast a vote.
By the way I would add that co-ops are more ethical because if it's set up correctly, nobody is profiting from your labor more than yourself. In a traditional org, the vast majority of your productive profit is captured and used in a way you have no say - lately mostly to line the pockets of shareholders and a captured boys club of nepo MBA types that often don't even have that much experience in your industry. In a co-op, you the worker decide what happens with the profit margin on top of your labor. You can use it to have more money for yourself (and your coworkers), or you can invest it more intelligently in the business than an exec thousands of miles away in the private jet your profit margin pays for. This also works out better for your customers and users.
I agree with everything you've written here, and am a big fan of worker-owned co-ops. However:
> Better to just cast a vote.
It's not hard to see "do I buy the sesame or non-sesame loaf this week?" as a much more efficient method of voting and vote tallying than actually voting.
I think the most successful worker owned co-ops tend to appear to the outside world as more or less indistinguishable from a capitalist for-profit, but internally are quite different.
I've been thinking about this recently: I think our economy is fake.
Restaurants are expensive lately, but still, as a former restaurant owner, even the expensive 10$ takeout burrito I don't think would be possible without the great many laws the supply chain breaks. Undocumented labor from the farms through to the restaurants, for starters. Then the fact that the equipment we use is built in places that don't have our labor or health and safety laws, which lets those places manufacture for much cheaper prices, which feels like cheating.
If we actually had a level playing field and didn't break laws, I don't think most of the luxuries we enjoy could actually exist at anywhere near current prices (and thus not at all).
A lot of co-op talk around this thread, if anyone else has worked in / founded co-ops, I would love to chat, email in my profile. I founded one about 5 years ago and have been kinda shooting from the hip, would love to trade ideas.
I founded a software engineering co-op. We're always interested in finding new members. https://508.dev
Right now our main revenue is through subcontracting, and admittedly we haven't pulled a fresh gig in a couple months, mostly because most of us are working a gig which limits our ability to BD - a limitation we've been kicking around how to resolve for ages.
We want to come up with some alternative revenue streams that aren't directly selling our labor. I soft launched one recently (a mock interview thing that I'm not quite ready to link completely publicly) but I'm also really interested in ideas other people have.
My goal for the co-op has been to make it a greater than sum of parts actualizer for each of our potentials. So far it's been pretty good on that front but for me the big win is gonna be if we can get a revenue generating project out.
Anyway, rambling. Feel free to reply with questions or email me (email is better since I'm trying to stay off HN due to internet comment addiction). https://508.dev/join has more info on joining.
Random fun fact: all our internal SaaS is FOSS and self hosted! Excluding discord. Matrix didn't work well for us.
I think the idea is that since the inventers of bopomofo were exposed to other alphabets, it's still considered a descendant alphabet. I usually think of descendant as something that visibly manifests its ancestry, so for example modern traditional characters look somewhat like the earliest Chinese characters, or, all romance languages sharing some sounds or even words. So maybe we need a different way to describe things like wheels and alphabets.
> "let's all get together and build some free software collaboratively".
G0v hackathons in Taiwan are still this, at the end everyone presents what they worked on and there's no judging or anything. Some of the projects have been going for years.
There was a hackathon two weeks ago, you can see all the videos from all the demos here https://m.youtube.com/@g0vTW
They happen every two months. Some people have started g0v chapters abroad, maybe you could consider it for your region!
If we're gonna take a look at places, where I'm really interested in watching is the PRC, Cuba, and Vietnam. Capitalism managed to beat the Soviet Union, will it to any other remainders from the era, or will the conversion to state capitalism create a strange equilibrium? In any case it's not like the PRC is doing much better in terms of worker's rights, you still have to justify your existence through labor there more than you do in the aforementioned Nordic countries.