>>488633>it would be nice if there was a leftist community that actually had an interest in throwing around ideas and testing them out rather than moaning and groaning about how all hope is lost and how voting for biden instead of trump is the le good and le socialist thing to doFor the record Anti-imperialists opposed Sleepy Joe.
>you asked about alternatives that can be built here and now, this is the challenge we should be confronting>ive been thinking pretty long and hard about what it means to build alternatives especially when it comes to the developed capitalist world,>as far as my own thinking goes bookchin and wolff look like good starting points, some kind of organized cooperative capitalist movement that can transition to market socialism after seizing state power, then that can transition into cybernetic socialism or whatever else makes sensean idea ive been tinkering with is to split the party into one which builds the movement and one which participates in capitalist state politics,
We could try Wolff's cooperatives, but you have to realize that you need to have coop-banks too, I can hear you grown
finance socialism ??. But consider that capitalist banks do not give money capital to co-ops. People have tried a lot and got nowhere. They've likely gone much further than that, and they're no longuer just discriminating on ideological grounds, they likely categorize people and only give money-capital to a particular type of person
with profitable character traits or whatever the actual euphemism is. So first step is coop-funding.
If this takes off and co-ops gain traction you cannot expect fair-play they will try to fuck with money flows of coops you know like sanctions but internally instead of internationally, so you need to have a means to insure money flows. They will also try to impede physical trade, like internal trade embargoes. You need to have a means to deal with that too.
>these ideas need to be put into practice though otherwise they are just fantasies, but even if they fail they can be useful learning experiences so that doesnt bother me too muchWe can't build capital accumulation tread-mills with red paint. Meaning that we can't start cooperatives that then go under and enable regular capitalist to buy out the accumulated capital for below value. The system is extremely good at finding exploitable patterns like that. I'm trying to remember that asinine neo-liberal word they use to describe stripping companies bare and then tossing it. There is a tendency that specifically wants people to start businesses that are destined to fail, because failed businesses still contain some capital and capturing that is by it self a business model. Cannibalistic capitalism. Most people have a sense of this and will be extremely paranoid about investing their hopes and energies into such a dead end.
The "coop business plan" has to either avoid accumulating capital all-together, or have contingencies for every possible trick capitalist could possibly use to drain capital from it. Otherwise the hole thing will be stillborn. For example you have to analyze the regulatory frame-work and only depend on regulations that are vital to super-powerful capital interests so that you won't have the rug pulled from under you because there's an 800 pound gorilla standing on the same rug.
There is so much other stuff like patent-trolls and copy-monopoly-trolls that will try to drain your coop with predatory litigation. You have to factor in that if you succeed in navigating this "system obstacle course", and you're coop movement goes beyond a few failed upstart companies. The next level is monopoly capital taking notice that there is business activity going on that is not paying them any monopoly-rent. That's when they will begin to color outside the lines, by hiring saboteurs that undermine your operation. This is the level of mitigating industrial espionage/sabotage, that means you have to involve you're self with the state machinery and that's a hole n'other can of worms.
At the present moment in time there is a lot of dying imperial legacy capital, that is now violently thrashing around in it's death throws. So there is added difficulty, of avoiding getting trampled by giants.
Lets sum up all this friction in actually existing capitalism as "green-tape".
I have lots of "business ideas" that would lend them selves to coops. You know low capital investment, relative fast turn around, relatively low technical coefficient (in the Marxist sense), pretty good value-add per worker/part-owner (in the classical sense) and so on. While i think this would succeed in the kind of economy that is advertised in the official marketing material they give you, i don't know how you deal with the green tape that exists in reality. We might need some kind of think-tank that creates elaborate recipes.
I want to stress this once more, we really have to pay attention to avoid parasitic capital drain. If worker coops are nothing but yet another grind without reward, it'll die. People can smell that from a mile away.