the difference in salary they're talking about is more along the lines of small business vs venture capital-backed startup or established huge corporation. one joins a worker-owned coop for the alternative to corporate life, not the high-paying salary. and you'd have to try pretty hard to become unemployed at a coop. there are generally no "layoffs" since there is no greedy billionaire at "the top" needing a second yacht. it's tough work, but it is totally worth it if you have a seething hatred for capitalism. fuck the billionaire class with a cactus, sideways.
drapeaunoir
joined 2 years ago
Knows so little he uses an image of Iron Eyes Cody? Nah, seems too ironic to be real.
y'all are acting like the rich don't already have mercenaries and mafia
I can't! :) all governments are fucking evil and must be destroyed
you can't fix the foundation of blood and suffering that the house was built on top of
I usually couldn't care less about electoralism, but if any politician has get rid of police and government as their platform, I will vote for them and campaign SO HARD.
I really appreciate this thread and I feel inspired to reply. I think a lot of why anarchism is difficult to understand is because it is hard for us to imagine anything other than the "capitalist realism" that has spread to the entire world. As they say, it is the air you breathe, the water you swim in, so it can be hard to see.
So if you want to understand how anarchism can possibly work, really what you have to do is look at places where it is, in fact, actually working. Find the edges of society where affinity groups are actually doing real work in supporting the unhoused, defending marginalized and vulnerable communities, feeding and empowering one-another without any hierarchy. Look closely at the actions of Block Cop City for instance, or the Zapatistas, or Rojava. Look at how things worked in the Spanish Civil War, or Occupy Wall Street. As an added exercise, find some other examples of non-hierarchical activities and actions in your own life (you may be surprised how many there are).
Lots of hierarchy-apologists will decry these things always fail, or are only applicable in very specific contexts, but judge for yourself. There are obviously autonomous tactics that clearly work within these examples, but can you imagine them working in other contexts? How are they organizing themselves if it isn't by way of hierarchy? How are they getting things accomplished without rules and punishments? Keep an open mind, use your imagination, and you may just find yourself thinking that anarchy is indeed possible beyond these given examples.
getting steady work is critical. if work dries up, often everyone takes a pay cut till times are good again. some coops pay hourly, not salary, so subsidizing isn't a thing for them. for the ones that do salary, there is the temporary furlough route, but ideally there is savings for such eventualities. savings and / or loans can be used to ride out dry spells.
but generally speaking, coops are more stable than typical corporate businesses simply due to the lack of a billionaire class extracting profits and making big decisions on their whims. coops are democratic (even consensus-based!) so the coop does what is good for the worker, not the billionaire.