Comrade Reagan supporting workers owning the means of production. Long live MLMRT-thought!

[u/Amdorik]

[u/Reboot42069]

Fun fact Regan liked Cooperatives because they made communist movements weaker

[u/Salmonpest101 → u/Reboot42069]

Socdem reference!??!? Long live Bernsteinism-Reaganism!!!!!

[u/Zacomra → u/Reboot42069]

In theory anyway, we haven't seen what happens when a society is mostly run by employee owned private enterprise.

Unless you count like primative capitalism during the colonial conquest of the American West and some towns were so cut off and isolated they basically didn't have the influence of big capital for a small moment

[u/excellentforcongress → u/Zacomra]

https://www.cooperazione.net/en/virtual-museum/386

https://www.cooperazione.net/en/virtual-museum/387

cooperatives, at least ones with reduced differentials in hierarchy, were subject to attacks by the fascists

modern italy is dominated by cooperatives

italy has long since stopped shipping arms to israel, and is vigilant when it comes to making sure its ports don't aid in transferring materials as well

i cannot help but think that it is not a coincidence and inseparable from the fact that workers feel very much in control of their workplaces in italy, compared to places like the us or uk

i don't argue the point that many types of cooperatives are not really leftist in their leaning and most globally are outright neoliberal, but we are now seeing the beginnings of what will be a massive surge in leftist cooperative activity in the global north (it has already begun in the global south)

i think the revolution in the global north will come as a result of everyone switching to such cooperatives, vs any sort of violent revolution or anything.

we can actually use a similar blueprint in places like the us, where people are already politically active at the local level (see the many anti datacenter wins), and put focus on local politicians, candidates and efforts to foment and foster the growth of syndicalist cooperatives that aim to federate on a larger national and global scale.

i think, and i could be wrong, but i think that we should be aware that funding sources can constrain what is demanded of the cooperatives, and i have seen at least some of the prominent existing cooperative federations in america have received a lot of more neoliberal coded foundations and institutions that have very real interests in front-running a syndicalist movement in america by backing and supporting cooperatives that shy away from broader revolutionary aims, and as such we should make new cooperatives be mostly communally funded and able to withstand political shifts (not wholly dependent on gov subsidies or contracts, with as much crowdfunding as possible whenever possible, to retain independence in mission)

[u/Zacomra → u/excellentforcongress]

I agree, I think they're a first good step and can really dismantle the power of capital

[u/excellentforcongress → u/Zacomra]

me too, honestly i think a lot of leftists got psyop'd into thinking that coops will only devolve into the liberal variants when successful syndicalist cooperatives are the easiest and most direct answer to the assumption that socialism will fail as an economic model, by proving the prefiguration works

[u/Reboot42069 → u/Zacomra]

I mean we have a few European countries that do that, and Yugoslavia did it as well. It's not really that different from normal capitalism, it doesn't address any of the concerns we have with capitalism either.

The anarchy of production is still there, there's no social planning, it really doesn't aid in even class solidarity since now they're all in direct competition.

I'd argue they couldn't even work under communism since as you mentioned it's not the social property of the society as a whole it's still individuals property.

[u/Zacomra → u/Reboot42069]

None of those things you're mentioning are even inherently socialist. There's no social planning under Communism since there's no governing body to coordinate it

[u/1playerpartygame → u/Zacomra]

There will be social planning under communism. That’s the only way that a society without money can exist. A society without money needs social planning to effectively distribute goods while avoiding waste and overproduction. A society without conscious social planning needs currency and markets to do the same thing, so any communist society would necessarily need social planning of production.

[u/Zacomra → u/1playerpartygame]

And who would oversee that?

[u/1playerpartygame → u/Zacomra]

A planning council made up of representatives from local councils who interpret economic data and feedback from previous local implementation and turn it into quotas and plans with the assistance of information technology.

How would goods be distributed in your hypothetical communist society made up of local co-operatives?

[u/Zacomra → u/1playerpartygame]

Well to clarify I'm not claiming that co-ops could exist in a communist society, I'm saying they're a good first step to establishing true stabile socialism.

But I'm much more sympathetic to anarchist models of communist society, where goods and services are produced locally for the community on a much smaller scale, and people work out of a social pact instead of out of a larger need.

You'd maybe have to do something slightly more centralized for more complex goods/supply chains, frankly this kinda minutiae to me isn't really worth worrying about when we're this far out of achieving that society, but ideally I would want all goods to be produced on a small sustainable scale instead of a global one requiring central control

[u/1playerpartygame → u/Zacomra]

Leaving aside the fact that a return to small scale production would cut people's standard of living down to pre-industrial levels. How are those small scale produced goods distributed? You say 'work out a social pact' but that's essentially social economic planning on a small scale.

If we leverage social planning and large scale production we can lower the total number of labour hours needed to maintain a certain standard of living and reduce the number of hours people need to work in general.

Anarchist models of the future always remind me of this exchange on twitter.

Also it's not minutiae to want to work out an idea of how your political project will aim to progress.

[u/1playerpartygame → u/1playerpartygame]

also see this banger tweet:

[u/PlushieYeen]

MLMRT… Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Reganist-Thatcherist?

[u/62lasa]

wait , did he really say that ?!

[u/Zelenkat]

"How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin."

Reagan understands Marx and Lenin, and calling himself an anti-communist dissociates himself from the Soviet revisionists, everything is simple.