Re: [tlug] Introduction to (Tech) Worker Cooperatives, 09:00AM on Sunday, July 12th JST

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com>]

Yasuaki Kudo writes:

 > Major international banks, for example, and I used to work for one,
 > have no social purpose - they have become mere predatory
 > instruments of ever more capital gains.  You must be a sociopath to
 > "make it" in that world.

Yes.  But I've *been a sociopath.*  I worked games in an amusement
park, and at the end of the day we played a game with the "animals".
The game was to see who could get a little kid to empty their pockets
for the smallest amount of money to play our game.  We treated those
children as cattle with coins, and did our best to make sure they
didn't win despite the fact that we normally charged $0.50 and our
most expensive prize was $0.25 (I didn't cheat, though others even did
that).  Some of them got screamed at by parents for dawdling -- that
was the "best"!  (You judge how "sociopathic" that was for yourself.
I'll just say I'm not proud of it.)

Look at the "yoru-no-machi".  COVID Central.  Are any of those folks
leaving the business because it's simply unethical?  Of course not; it
was unethical from the get-go: get people drunk, take their money.
Now it's potentially fatal, but that's not our problem, feeding our
kids is.

I do not think that cooperatives are at all proof against self-
centered ethical judgments of the "my living > your life" kind or
sociopathy of the "customers are walking wallets" kind.

 > So what are the worthy social causes?

All of them!  I'm definitely not saying "let's not go here".  I'm
saying, people suck, and if coops give us a better balance between
sucky people doing sucky things and "no sucky person is so harmlessly
occupied as when he's[1] making money" (which is what happens in an
idealized capitalism with decreasing returns to scale *absolutely
everywhere*[2]) than capitalist organization does, I'm all for it.  I
just don't believe https://youtu.be/-9DxpPiE458?t=85 <-CLICK


Footnotes: 
[1]  I thought about doing a SJW pronoun substitution, but then I
decided SJ demands the masculine here. ;-)

[2]  Marx was wrong about this, too.  This is why differential
calculus is good (sorry, mr gecko), another vocabulary Marx didn't
possess.  Morishima's "Marx's Economics" is a great exposition how to
do Das Kapital right.  There's a little > college math in it IIRC, but
mostly linear equations. ;-)