Cooperatives are everywhere! Take ownership. 

+BostonBldgResources A hearty hello back at you! Thanks for commenting on the video. Happy (almost) Co-op Month!

Hello! And thanks for the warm fuzzies.

+OklaElec Thanks for commenting! Hope the Co-op Month celebrations are getting off to a good start this year.

+Denise Mushitz A little history lesson--great catch! Thanks for commenting.

I work with Farmers Union youth camps in the summer, and we teach the story of the Rochdale Cooperative every year.

Hello! I just wanted to share that I live in Oklahoma and I am a part of the electric co-op, the telephone co-op, and I work at the grain elevator in my town which is also a co-op! Co-ops are everywhere! :)

I bank with a credit union! You can anywhere in the country, if they’re federal, which some are!

I think that we are confusing the word co-op with membership, in a co-op the workers own the production means in a membership business the customers only receive a special discounts. A credit union would be a co-op if the employees own the bank. Co-ops are much more a membership system

Hierarchial business leaders have a vested interest in not letting you know what power you really have

​@@fernandofernandez8067 there are worker coops, customer coops and business coops that I know of. In the UK here, a customer coop is like the food cooperative where anyone who purchases from the business can be a member.

This isn't socialism, but it is a good alternative to the corporate top-down businesses we have today.

a coop is a fine example of capitalism, since coops rely on voluntary exchange and no intervention of the state. just because it doesn't fit the naive definition the capitalism = large corporation owned by a small group doesnt make it so.

+A Dignified Gentleman Co-ops are socialist; in that they are a practical form of social ownership and economic democracy. They also have a long history of support from socialists, dating all the way back to Robert Owen (who helped pioneer both). In fact, before the term 'socialist' became generally accepted around the 1850s, it had emerged from a pool of other commonly used words; one of which was 'cooperative'. Possibly the most famous advocate for co-ops in the US currently is Marxian economist, Richard Wolff. Other self-ascribed socialists like Noam Chomsky and Bernie Sanders also support them. There are even overtly-socialist co-op enterprises.

Totally agree with Mercurious Magus, co-ops are socialist, they are an answer to the Marxian conclusion that workers must own the means of production. However there's a widespread misconception that socialism is "anti-business" and must go through the government. That is not the case, as can be seen with co-ops.

Coops are owned by shares the worker invested in when they started working for the company, which means they bought a piece of that company's private property. Another coop that has no share in another coop does have any ownership in that coop because it didn't invest. It's like the stock market, if you didn't by a stock from Pepsi, then you get no dividends from Pepsi nor do you have a percentage of ownership in Pepsi. Just because the workers own the means to production in a coop it does not make it communistic or socialist. Socialism would mean the state has some kind of operation or ownership in the organization, which it does not. Communism would mean that the coop is not a form of private property, but a public good, which in that case the state would be in charge of that organization. Coops are not a form of kolkhoz, they're privately owned by a group of workers and administrators voted in by the workers that all have investment in the company. Communism would mean that there is no private share and that everyone has ownership of all goods in a nation since there is no privatism therefore the workers own their means to production and everyone owns as much product as they need, at least in the Marxian theory.

Co-ops can compete just like any business, it's just the internal organisation that is different. Co-ops can also expand, one practical way is helping another co-op to start up, and be linked as part of a co-op network. Such network can get pretty big, becoming comparable to multinationals. See the Mondragon network for an example.

Here is a cooperative in Canada, 22 cities, 4.5 members, very competitive, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Equipment_Co-op

It's not always the workforce though. Sometimes they put the money into product development or product acquisition. It depends on what the members can agree on

well no because its the members of the company that get to chose the outcome not the community as a whole. besides there are multiple types of cooperatives from workers coops, customer coops and buisness coops. when you look at payouts of profit in a worker coop its much more similar to the idea of dividend then socialism and sharing of wealth.

@@velvetbaize805 socialism is the democratic ownership of the means of production... which is what a workers coop does. That's why socialists support them??

@@velvetbaize805 socialism is workers in control of the means of production. A government representing the whole society of workers is only one approach to that ideal.

@@brickbuddystudios Not true. Socialism is a school of thought that has had many different opinions on how to achieve it by socialists, but the basic principle of it is just the workers owning the means of production as well as all the workers owning A share of the property, that's what they mean by not having private property. Public property doesn't mean some random guy is going to roll into your house, take food from your fridge, make a sandwich, and tell you that it's their property as well. A few basic tenets of socialism is to maximize democracy, often a direct democracy, starting in the workplace. By having more workplaces democratized, it shifts the Overton window of society. A destructive approach to socialism that is often seen as a clean the slate strategy by revolutionaries is to overthrow the current government, cease all private property through A new government, and centralize all things in hopes of getting people and things balanced enough to a point where there government no longer needs centralize the economy or society as the groundwork for having socialism is laid out. Historically, this is a terrible approach for any idea and authoritarianism even in favor of capitalism is bound to be a disaster. That said, socialism doesn't look to the government to achieve it nor does it look to the government centralize everything. Instead its a ground up approach that aims to unionize workers among firms, get communities to work together, encourage helping your neighbors (hence why welfarism often gets confused with socialism), and by doing all of that it leads to a democratized society. Socialism is also not always anti-business.

Capitalism.