totally. we can badger people to buy from better companies but that seems so tough. better to just make it easier for people to buy from better companies :)
[−]appreciatorBus · 2026-07-01 Wed 21:43 UTC ·
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There is nothing inherently ethical about co-op owned organizations nor anything inherently unethical about privately owned organizations.
The party vanguard of the worker co-op is exactly as capable of selfish or abusive behaviour as the private owner.
> There is nothing inherently ethical about co-op owned organizations nor anything inherently unethical about privately owned organizations.
I disagree. Co-ops are inherently democratic. Privately owned business is inherently anti-democratic. The difference only becomes starker as the scale increases. That alone makes it seem more ethical to me, before you even get to examining the way democratic organizations obviously do a better job at checking any single person's power than rule by one, as well as other effects.
[−]appreciatorBus · 2026-07-02 Thu 00:39 UTC ·
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Why does it seem more ethical for the organization that makes your daily bread to be democratic?
I have no doubt that there are people who wish to attend meetings to vote and argue about minutia involves in the running of bakeries and other organizations. But just because people exist does not mean that the most ethical organization is one that gives them the most opportunity to exercise their particular interest in attending meetings.
The vast majority of people do not want every organization their lives to run like a mini democracy. Not only is this not necessarily more ethical than other alternatives, but it is definitely less efficient and that matters when it comes to the supply of material goods. I don’t want a vote on whether or not my bakery puts sesame seeds on the bread. I just want to buy a loaf of bread thanks.
> I don’t want a vote on whether or not my bakery puts sesame seeds on the bread. I just want to buy a loaf of bread thanks.
You have an illusion of choice right now between sesame or non sesame bread through the low-resolution "voting" mechanism of the market, which doesn't actually consider your desires when counting votes, merely the profitability between your desires and a supplier's margin. If you like sesame, but if it's not profitable enough, too bad, no sesame for you. "They can charge more," "someone will fill the niche," yes we've been told that about capitalism for the last century, yet it's never been true, so I guess it was a lie. Think of all the products people want that we just can't get anymore because some big org decided we can't have it, or better yet, think of how nearly monopolized industries have leveraged their power to move markets towards more profitable directions. Clothes - big, baggy, unicolor blobs. Phones - black squares.
It's not only more ethical for breadmakers to he democratic, it's simply more efficient in terms of delivering what the people want and need. Markets are a low resolution, exploitable mechanism that can lead to contrary incentives. Better to just cast a vote.
By the way I would add that co-ops are more ethical because if it's set up correctly, nobody is profiting from your labor more than yourself. In a traditional org, the vast majority of your productive profit is captured and used in a way you have no say - lately mostly to line the pockets of shareholders and a captured boys club of nepo MBA types that often don't even have that much experience in your industry. In a co-op, you the worker decide what happens with the profit margin on top of your labor. You can use it to have more money for yourself (and your coworkers), or you can invest it more intelligently in the business than an exec thousands of miles away in the private jet your profit margin pays for. This also works out better for your customers and users.
[−]PaulDavisThe1st · 2026-07-02 Thu 04:33 UTC ·
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I agree with everything you've written here, and am a big fan of worker-owned co-ops. However:
> Better to just cast a vote.
It's not hard to see "do I buy the sesame or non-sesame loaf this week?" as a much more efficient method of voting and vote tallying than actually voting.
I think the most successful worker owned co-ops tend to appear to the outside world as more or less indistinguishable from a capitalist for-profit, but internally are quite different.
I already expressed why I think that more democracy makes workplaces more ethical immediately after where I said that I think so. If you'd like me to expand on this: governments and large companies are more alike than you think. Both of them are huge power structures that control lots of people. And both are quite powerful - your job can have as much of an impact on your life as the government you live under. If unchecked, both devolve into a hierarchical tug-of-war between the interests of its higher and lower rungs. Democracy works against this to ideally create a more equalized power structure.
Now that I established these parallels, my question to you is - why do we as a society treat democracy as sacred and essential in one type of hierarchy but not another? Why don't any of your concerns apply to your government? For instance, would you live in a dictatorship if you got to avoid the difficult and annoying chores of going out to vote, informing yourself politically or listening to politicians endlessly bicker about things?
Your examples seem to just boil down to absurdism. They don't indicate what is so wrong with people voting on things in a company, they're just exaggerations to make the idea seem inherently ridiculous. Bakeries don't spend days arguing about whether they need to offer one of the most popular product variants for sale, and if someone did, this would in no way impede the customer's ability to just buy a loaf of bread thanks. But something like a tech co-op will spend time arguing about which risky investments, future moves and needed sacrifices they're willing to make, walking away from it knowing that this is what they agree is best for everyone. Which frankly seems a lot better than far-upper management decreeing that everyone must now do XYZ even if their only intention is to pump company valuations short-term without any regard for future stability. The fact that co-ops tend to be more stable seems to agree with that.
[−]PaulDavisThe1st · 2026-07-02 Thu 04:30 UTC ·
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In the long run, you likely also benefit as a consumer from a diverse retail ecosystem, and worker co-ops in general tend to support this much better than traditional capitalist for-profit corporations.
The typical (but not universal) model in worker owned co-ops is for them to fork off new "branches" that are historically related to the original but otherwise independent.
The result tends to be a much more diverse set of businesses, some of which do better than others and some of which are more attuned to your preferences than the others.
Small capitalist for-profit businesses do the same, but we've seen how that ends up, with vertical integration and mega-corporations owning nearly all of them.
Does adding democracy automatically increase ethical value?
Suppose a group of racists form a coffee co-op dedicated to some silliness like "keeping the brown away from your brown". Or a group of homophobes that votes that their new t-shirt line should all riff on "killing fags protects families".
Are those companies more ethical than a privately owned org that just wants any capable worker and any customer with currency?
Closed democracies can and do make all sorts of evil decisions all of the time.
>the way democratic organizations obviously do a better job at checking any single person's power
I don't think that's a clear victory for ethical behavior. A sufficiently motivated democracy (as above) could easily use such a mechanism to check the single ethical person's power from "ruining their vision" by suggesting something so asinine (in their opinion) as compassion or accessibility.
For more information on why I think democracy makes things more ethical, see the other reply I left in this thread.
But to address your counterexamples:
1. None of your examples are countered by private organizations, they can and do make decisions motivated by ideology all the time. In fact, whenever you see real news of companies doing or supporting insane things, you can almost certainly be sure these companies are privately owned and that the insanity is passed down from the top.
2. For the rest of companies that really don't care about ideology and only care about making money, there's the argument that making money isn't a neutral standpoint, but one of chaos that just supports whatever is profitable. If putting people into concentration camps based on their race became culturally accepted, you know that discount stores will start selling clothing with hateful graphics, news sites would put up real-time counters and tech companies would develop exterior cameras with racial scanning and automatic reporting to cater to consumer demands.
3. Most crucially, democracies usually have a moderating effect on people's viewpoints. It's trivial to find companies ruled by crazy people with many normal subordinates going along because they need to make a living. It's a lot more difficult to find one that's stacked with insane people that produce insane decisions on average. Democracy lends itself to compromise, authoritarian rule lends itself to sycophancy that reinforces whatever comes from up top, no matter if it's sane or sensible.
Ethical consumption in a capitalist economy is unachievable...but we can optimise
The party vanguard of the worker co-op is exactly as capable of selfish or abusive behaviour as the private owner.
I disagree. Co-ops are inherently democratic. Privately owned business is inherently anti-democratic. The difference only becomes starker as the scale increases. That alone makes it seem more ethical to me, before you even get to examining the way democratic organizations obviously do a better job at checking any single person's power than rule by one, as well as other effects.
I have no doubt that there are people who wish to attend meetings to vote and argue about minutia involves in the running of bakeries and other organizations. But just because people exist does not mean that the most ethical organization is one that gives them the most opportunity to exercise their particular interest in attending meetings.
The vast majority of people do not want every organization their lives to run like a mini democracy. Not only is this not necessarily more ethical than other alternatives, but it is definitely less efficient and that matters when it comes to the supply of material goods. I don’t want a vote on whether or not my bakery puts sesame seeds on the bread. I just want to buy a loaf of bread thanks.
You have an illusion of choice right now between sesame or non sesame bread through the low-resolution "voting" mechanism of the market, which doesn't actually consider your desires when counting votes, merely the profitability between your desires and a supplier's margin. If you like sesame, but if it's not profitable enough, too bad, no sesame for you. "They can charge more," "someone will fill the niche," yes we've been told that about capitalism for the last century, yet it's never been true, so I guess it was a lie. Think of all the products people want that we just can't get anymore because some big org decided we can't have it, or better yet, think of how nearly monopolized industries have leveraged their power to move markets towards more profitable directions. Clothes - big, baggy, unicolor blobs. Phones - black squares.
It's not only more ethical for breadmakers to he democratic, it's simply more efficient in terms of delivering what the people want and need. Markets are a low resolution, exploitable mechanism that can lead to contrary incentives. Better to just cast a vote.
By the way I would add that co-ops are more ethical because if it's set up correctly, nobody is profiting from your labor more than yourself. In a traditional org, the vast majority of your productive profit is captured and used in a way you have no say - lately mostly to line the pockets of shareholders and a captured boys club of nepo MBA types that often don't even have that much experience in your industry. In a co-op, you the worker decide what happens with the profit margin on top of your labor. You can use it to have more money for yourself (and your coworkers), or you can invest it more intelligently in the business than an exec thousands of miles away in the private jet your profit margin pays for. This also works out better for your customers and users.
> Better to just cast a vote.
It's not hard to see "do I buy the sesame or non-sesame loaf this week?" as a much more efficient method of voting and vote tallying than actually voting.
I think the most successful worker owned co-ops tend to appear to the outside world as more or less indistinguishable from a capitalist for-profit, but internally are quite different.
Now that I established these parallels, my question to you is - why do we as a society treat democracy as sacred and essential in one type of hierarchy but not another? Why don't any of your concerns apply to your government? For instance, would you live in a dictatorship if you got to avoid the difficult and annoying chores of going out to vote, informing yourself politically or listening to politicians endlessly bicker about things?
Your examples seem to just boil down to absurdism. They don't indicate what is so wrong with people voting on things in a company, they're just exaggerations to make the idea seem inherently ridiculous. Bakeries don't spend days arguing about whether they need to offer one of the most popular product variants for sale, and if someone did, this would in no way impede the customer's ability to just buy a loaf of bread thanks. But something like a tech co-op will spend time arguing about which risky investments, future moves and needed sacrifices they're willing to make, walking away from it knowing that this is what they agree is best for everyone. Which frankly seems a lot better than far-upper management decreeing that everyone must now do XYZ even if their only intention is to pump company valuations short-term without any regard for future stability. The fact that co-ops tend to be more stable seems to agree with that.
The typical (but not universal) model in worker owned co-ops is for them to fork off new "branches" that are historically related to the original but otherwise independent.
The result tends to be a much more diverse set of businesses, some of which do better than others and some of which are more attuned to your preferences than the others.
Small capitalist for-profit businesses do the same, but we've seen how that ends up, with vertical integration and mega-corporations owning nearly all of them.
Suppose a group of racists form a coffee co-op dedicated to some silliness like "keeping the brown away from your brown". Or a group of homophobes that votes that their new t-shirt line should all riff on "killing fags protects families".
Are those companies more ethical than a privately owned org that just wants any capable worker and any customer with currency?
Closed democracies can and do make all sorts of evil decisions all of the time.
>the way democratic organizations obviously do a better job at checking any single person's power
I don't think that's a clear victory for ethical behavior. A sufficiently motivated democracy (as above) could easily use such a mechanism to check the single ethical person's power from "ruining their vision" by suggesting something so asinine (in their opinion) as compassion or accessibility.
But to address your counterexamples:
1. None of your examples are countered by private organizations, they can and do make decisions motivated by ideology all the time. In fact, whenever you see real news of companies doing or supporting insane things, you can almost certainly be sure these companies are privately owned and that the insanity is passed down from the top.
2. For the rest of companies that really don't care about ideology and only care about making money, there's the argument that making money isn't a neutral standpoint, but one of chaos that just supports whatever is profitable. If putting people into concentration camps based on their race became culturally accepted, you know that discount stores will start selling clothing with hateful graphics, news sites would put up real-time counters and tech companies would develop exterior cameras with racial scanning and automatic reporting to cater to consumer demands.
3. Most crucially, democracies usually have a moderating effect on people's viewpoints. It's trivial to find companies ruled by crazy people with many normal subordinates going along because they need to make a living. It's a lot more difficult to find one that's stacked with insane people that produce insane decisions on average. Democracy lends itself to compromise, authoritarian rule lends itself to sycophancy that reinforces whatever comes from up top, no matter if it's sane or sensible.