alt Hacker NewsSomeone should coin a law that any time something vaguely cooperative or worker-focused is proposed, someone will inevitably reply that it will fail because the Soviet Union did something sort of maybe similar once.
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It can work, but ultimately it depends on the culture.
Europe has some corpo-sized co-ops, and while they're not perfect they seem to function better than anything in the US.
It won't work in the US at scale, ever, because US business culture is fundamentally hierarchical, competitive, entitled, selfish, and extractive.
Cooperation at scale is a completely alien concept in the US. Expedient synergies can be workable, but free-wheeling open decision making to benefit customers is only viable in small companies. And often not even then.
So it's dog eat dog. If you're not one of the predators you're the prey.
"Being the boss" of any business that's heading for IPO becomes an attempt to avoid being prey - which implies becoming one of the predators, and being comfortable with that.
If you don't start there your investors will still drag you in that direction, and remove you if you're not willing.
If people keep suggesting solutions that were tried and failed of course other people will point that out.
1930-s Gosplan, 1950-s Gosplan, OGAS, Cybersyn, they all failed. Come up with something new maybe?
It certainly has to be considered.
China and the Soviet Union are the largest scale attempts to implement a cooperative system and they failed in spectacular and tragic ways. So you certainly need to consider why the new plan will be different and won’t meet the same fate.