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

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

Benjamin Kowarsch writes:

 > This is not an issue of capitalism versus cooperative, but an issue of
 > scale in general.

+1

 > Under a bottom up model, this consensus has to be reached by a very
 > large group of people, essentially all stakeholders.

Not true in worker cooperatives.  Customers and society at large are
excluded from decision-making.

 > Individual cooperatives are organised within a federation of
 > cooperatives through which certain assets (infrastructure,
 > know-how, intellectual property, marketing etc) are shared.

And pricing policy == monopoly power.  

I suspect this model doesn't work as well without government
regulation in network industries.  Cf. buttcoin, which was designed as
a federated distributed money supply, but has turned out to be a
monopolized pyramid scheme for betting on the stupidity of later-
comers.  Although nobody has ever spent Satoshi's original pile, maybe
that was the idea from the get-go....