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First world social democracy has only been in decline since dissolution of USSR and rise of neoliberalism. The threat of socialist revolution kept capitalists from being too exploitative. It is unsustainable, capitalists will want their power back. Look at what happened to NHS in the U.K.
Also 'freedoms' for private enterprises and 'rights' for workers are straight up contradictory.
Exactly. Marx said "between equal rights, force decides." We have a class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It doesn't matter if your form of government is a so-called "multiparty liberal democracy" or a "parliamentary representative republic" when 95+% of the people who hold office are bourgeois and primarily make money through owning means of production or speculating on financial assets, rather than selling their labor power like everyone else. If the bourgeoisie guarantees rights for the worker, it is only because they have cynically calculated that it is in their long term interests to allow some crumbs to fall from their table. They will withdraw those "rights" as soon as they see fit. As soon as capitalism's immune system detects a threat. You can only get so far with liberal democracy, trade unions, and worker-owned cooperatives, because, while those things are nice, and certainly better than feudalism, you still fundamentally have a bourgeois class-dictatorship where all the so called "rights" of the worker are granted by the bourgeoisie and enforced through their class's monopoly on violence. They decide when rules can be bent, broken, changed, or ignored. The police and the military exist purely to enforce their ownership over the means and conditions of production.
What if the private enterprises are worker coops?
A worker coop taking care of its workers will always be less profitable than an exploitative capitalist company, and therefore out-competed. It's what happens when you design all of society around profit.
First, there is no rule that a worker co-op taking care of its workers will be less profitable than an exploitative company. At first glance, it seems reasonable. But it's not a truism. For example, a well-taken care of worker is likely to be more productive than one who feels exploited.
Second, profits are not how companies compete. Profits are by definition the extra money that goes into the owners' pockets. Companies compete in many different ways; quality, marketing, price, etc. The fact that there are many successful worker co-ops in capitalist nations should provide some evidence here.
Third, one could imagine a nation that mandates that all companies are worker co-ops. They would still be profit-driven private companies, but would be controlled by the workers (who would also be the ones saying the profit).
You're missing the point that those successful coops are only successful to the extent they are profitable within the larger capitalist framework, which means worker consideration will be secondary and most importantly they have to compete with capitalist enterprises that engage in heavy exploitation and wage suppression
As long as the capitalist profit motive survives it will in general win against those firms that don't engage in exploitation and wage suppression and limit the growth of competing coops, it's creates a ceiling for genuine worker friendly coops and ties them to the greater capitalist network in the form of regulating capitals
Profitability is the be all and end all of capitalist enterprise, the methods of competition are irrelevant (quality, marketing, price, etc) unless they produce sufficient profit, otherwise from the logic of capitalism there's no point in initiating the enterprise in the first place, this is the direct consequence of capitalist ownership of the means of production
Your mistake is assuming capitalist markets are a universal phenomenon that can be controled by all classes, that's not true, capitalist markets only exist as the result of a specific form of property relations, the logic that drives workers and the logic that drives capitalists are not the same, workers want their wages to raise, capitalists want profit, wages cut into profits, do you see the contradiction of the coop capitalism you're imagining?
Coops can't grow when regulating capitals limit their potential, and workers won't self-raise their wages if it means the over-arching profitability of the company is at stake hence threatening unemployment, in the world you're imagining the workers would still want to do away with this self-shackling profit system that limits their ability to grow and sustain themselves
You're making a hell of a lot of assumptions, both about me, and about the nature of reality.
You're also spouting a lot of nonsense. "The logic of capitalism" is a meaningless phrase. You're attributing a lot of assumptions onto something that just means "the means of production can be privately owned".
The fact of the matter is that there are existing, successful worker co-ops. That alone disproves most of your claims that you take as axioms.
Ok, there are actual implications and definitions behind the terms you're throwing around haphazardly, fact of the matter is you don't know what you're talking about, that's fine, you don't have the relevant knowledge of economics or theory, technical or historical, so a lot of what I said probably went over your head
So let's clear up some basics, there is a logic to capitalism; private ownership of the means of production is the framework, profitability is the fuel and commodity production is the output, those aren't assumptions, that is the "nature of reality" under capitalism
And finally I didn't say there are no successful coops, read more carefully, I said they're only successful to the extent they are profitable and are limited by competing firms that act as regulating capitals, firms compete by cutting costs or increasing productivity, but productivity is tied to technical developments, so that can't always be relied on, but cutting costs i.e. wages is always the first resort, hence the disadvantage for coops who theoretically value worker compensation over other more common capitalist concerns
That buddy is a form of systemic logic
I'd add also an inherent necessity in Capitalism's stability is the marriage of concentrated riches with the state's power and its monopoly on violence. Should worker co-ops ever seriously threaten the wrong bourgeois lot, restrictive laws that only apply to the co-op will appear, unlawful actions will go ignored, state officials will be pressed to harass, legal means will be levied, etc, all until the co-op is tanked. 'Successful' worker co-ops are only ever permitted to the point where they don't meaningfully threaten any bourgeois power, profit is paid no heed in these situations.
And you're making an even larger assumption by claiming your idealistic beliefs are "the nature of reality" you smug galaxybrained Reddit liberal.
From Value, Price & Profit :
Marx's critique of Trade Unions above also applies to cooperatives.
Prove wages don't cut into profits.
Prove profits don't cut into wages
Prove co-ops don't have to make profits
Private ownership over the means of production, generalized commodity production, industrialization, and generalized wage labor are the logical conditions of capitalism. Explain how this is not the case.
Successful in a capitalist context. Which is an exploitative context. They have to make profit to survive, which means they have to pay workers less than the value of their labor power on average. Read Value Price & Profit. Read Wage Labor & Capital. Read Capital. Read Theories of Surplus Value.
Worker-owned co-ops are definitely preferable to the alternative form of capitalist enterprise, but they can only get you so far, just like trade unions. These are tools for slightly alleviating the suffering of the worker in a capitalist context, but they are not the solution to capitalism.
EDIT: Coming back to this a few days later to drop some Stalin:
Most large successful worker co-ops make up the majority of their profit through the exploitation of part-time and seasonal laborers that are not on the same pay-scale and insurance plans as their full-time and co-owned employees. They then limit their full-time employment to a certain number of individuals, usually by understaffing, dangling the possibility of fulltime employment at these part-time members, but also by exploiting the surplus of third-world workers.
Co-ops within a capitalist market context cannot escape the basic wage-labor exploitation that is baked into the system and compete at-scale with larger more hierarchical firms.
I have worked for multiple worker co-ops in the U.S. and this is usually the case.
Co-ops may be profitable enough to stay in business and productive in a community, but if you plan on competing against larger organizations in meaningful ways, good luck.
Yes, that’s called socialism
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
would have been more graceful to admit that you don't understand what a dotp is
It's hard to be smug from an admitted position of ignorance, so they won't.
What you're thinking of is just one of numerous potential theoretical transitional states of socialism or a Frankenstein form of super military Keynesianism
But it's not something that's ever likely to happen, capitalists and the liberal states who serve them would outlaw workers coops before if ever got to a point they threaten capitalist property relations, that's the whole point of controlling the state, to prevent a hypothetical like the one you just advanced
then its not a private enterprise, its a worker coop.
No? A private enterprise means it's not run by the state. Worker coops absolutely are private enterprises.
I mean okay if you want to be a debate nerd about it. There are a variety of definitions for the term "private enterprise"
https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/private-enterprise
Half those definitions agree with me, and the other half say the definition is in some external material not linked to on that site.
I don't want to be a "debate nerd". You're the one being argumentative.
Well shucks, Chuck, you don't want to be one but you are one.
a collection of worker coops but operating through the medium of the market?
Sorry, what are you getting at?
I'm gonna copypaste what I said somewhere else ITT:
TL;DR Worker Owned Co-Ops exist embedded in a capitalist economy and are subject to its laws
In that case, Uncle Sam will do everything in his power to crush them. See Huawei.