Comments by "Michael Mappin" (@michaelmappin1830) on "Worker Co-Ops Are Wildly Successful But U.S. Media Ignores w/Richard Wolff" video.
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@andrewbalderree338 , well I'm not sure how interesting it is. Capitalism is the private ownership of capital and the means of production. The capital and resources go to the highest bidder. there for you end up with a situation where the richest members of society control the resource. Those who control Capital get most of the wealth produced by labour.
So what Richard Wolff is proposing is that workers combine their resources to obtain their own Capital/means of production. That way they can actually keep the wealth that their labour produces. Otherwise, they have to rent themselves out as wage slaves.
Of course anyone in their right mind wouldn't want to work at a company making money for someone else. Well, not if they had the option of getting paid the full value of their labour.
I mean it doesn't really matter what you call it. you can attach whatever label you like. the key difference is that you get to keep the wealth that your labour produces.
for example, in Spain there's a worker Cooperative that produces 25 billion dollars per year in sales. that money goes to the workers because they are the owners. but when a company such as Amazon or Walmart does 25 billion in sales, most of that money goes to shareholders. that's really bad for the economy because workers have very little purchasing power.
jobs are tied to consumption. every dollar extracted from a worker is one less dollar they have to spend into the economy. that's why we have so much debt.
. Capitalism is a debt based system. in order to maintain consumption levels so that people don't get laid off, reduced purchasing power has to be offset with increased access to credit. that's why they came up with fractional Reserve banking. in order for the economy to expand and consumption to be maintained, you either have to pay workers more or you have to give them greater access to credit. One or the other. so they started printing IOUs.
without fractional Reserve banking you end up with a ceiling limit on how much wealth if you can extract from workers.
if you take 50% of the honey from a beehive, the bees have to work 50% longer in order to replace what you've taken. so how do you get around that barrier? if you take too much honey, the bees starve. so, they started replacing the valuable honey with high fructose corn syrup. with workers, they increased the access to credit. whether you're a cow, a honey bee or a worker, the point of capitalism is to extract wealth from someone else's labour.
if you give bovine growth hormone to a cow in order to double milk production, does that result in the cow getting to work half as many hours or getting twice the amount of milk? no. The firmer gets twice the amount of milk. that's why we still have the 40 Hour Work Week under capitalism. All increases in productivity go to the owners of capital which are the richest members of society. that's why we saw the Advent of the billionaire class rather than a reduction in the working hours when increases in productivity tripled since 1950 thanks to labor-saving technology.
capitalism is basically a human livestock management system. and that's why capitalism didn't exist prior to the enclosure movement. people had to be driven off of their land and placed into an extreme state of dependency before they would accept doing someone else's work. The conversion to capitalism was extremely violent and bloody.
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