i can see why people would describe cooperatives as socialist. but...
the biggest ones in Scandinavia very much operate like businesses, including advertising and using various incentives to attract customers. you don't look at them and go "this looks socialist".
it's more like "shop with us and get cash backs and discounts"
the difference is more on the upper levels. no shareholders. the people who join the co-op are the "shareholders" and the amount you trade for determines your share of the profits.
it's not like you walk into the Coop grocery chain or get insurance from SpareBank1 and the flag of the Soviet union is waving there.
@thor there is a big difference between a co-op and socialism. The former is very limited in scope and limited in scale. Its also entirely voluntary. One can chose to leave and do it some other way. Socialism is nearly endless in scope and the scale is everybody. It inevitably becomes compulsory since once in place one can't chose to not participate. Thus it needn't stay sexy.
@Phil @thor the voluntary part is both important and cool! You can have mini-socialism inside capitalism but you can't have mini-capitalism inside socialism. It's probably the only form of "socialism" that's not severely harmful, precisely because of being voluntary. They also work much better than actual socialist states because they can still ensure everyone not working fairly is kicked out, which is something a state can't do, they either let people not work and degenerate, put everyone in jails, or both.
Though of course co-ops are usually less efficient than "normal" companies, the ones in Poland are mostly barely staying competitive.
@Amikke @Phil i don't collect a paycheque these days. i'm kept fed and housed because the government has a policy for that. i have friends who work. they don't seem to hate that their taxes help me stay afloat. this account and berserker.town would get much less attention if i also had to tend to a day job. i would probably also quite regularly get fired from whatever job i managed to get. that's what happened for most of my 20s and 30s. if you're arguing that i should be either unhappy or dead, do so.
@thor @Phil I'm not, people who are incapable of working in a way that can't be fixed should be supported, and those that can be helped and returned to the workforce should get that help instead of being thrown out to the curb. "Socialism" is when that goes to the extreme, with people getting the same rewards no matter if they work hard, hardly work, or not at all, which promotes the latter and results in a quick degeneration of the system.
We've had a proverb in the socialist times in Poland, "czy się stoi czy się leży dwa tysiące się należy" meaning "whether you stand or lie down, you're owed 2k", as that was the common practice – why work if the gov guarantees you a place to pretend to work and get rewarded as well as those who work hard?
With every decade of that system the proportion of those working efficiently to those not bothering decreased because of course it did, with a direct incentive to slack off and reap unjust rewards. Cultures adapt and ours adapted so that people choosing being lazy made fun of those working hard as suckers. The gov tried to fix it via propaganda, which was so obviously dumb that the only people that could possibly listen instead of making fun of it were and still are idealistic commies that really want to believe in the system working even when it so obviously doesn't, like our @moffintosh.
