(Preliminary note: I see you’ve had a lot of downvotes in this thread; none of them is from me.)
I agree that whether a policy is good or bad doesn’t depend on how it arises, but what other policies come along with it may do. For instance, so far as I can tell socialism as such doesn’t need to involve much in the way of totalitarianism, but governments brought in by revolutions tend to be totalitarianism whether they are left or right or something else. At least some of the harms of e.g. communism in the USSR seem to me to have been consequences of totalitarianism more than of economic policies as such.
In any case—my apologies if I wasn’t clear enough about this—the democracy-versus-revolution thing was not my main point; my main point was that there is a big difference between (say) Soviet communism (a way of running a whole country) and workers’ cooperatives (a way of running a company), and this difference seems highly relevant to the question of whether the disastrousness of the USSR tells us anything about the likely consequences of organizing more companies as workers’ cooperatives.
A nation isn’t really much like a business, despite occasional rhetoric along those lines from politicians when the policies they prefer for other reasons happen to have the shape of “run the country more like a business”. And a workers’ cooperative isn’t much like a communist or socialist country. If you think that running a company as a cooperative makes it more likely to fail in ways parallel to ways in which communist countries commonly fail, then I think you should show your working: explain how the relevant parallels work. (Including, in particular, explaining why you think such a company is more like Venezuela or the USSR than it is like, say, Sweden.)
(Why did I mention the democracy-versus-revolution thing at all? Because it seems to me that the most plausible ways of ending up with more workers’ cooperatives are more democracy-like than revolution-like, and e.g. it doesn’t seem likely to me that workers’ cooperatives will have much tendency to end up being totalitarian. And, in fact, so far as I can tell actual workers’ cooperatives don’t tend to be totalitarian.)
(Preliminary note: I see you’ve had a lot of downvotes in this thread; none of them is from me.)
I agree that whether a policy is good or bad doesn’t depend on how it arises, but what other policies come along with it may do. For instance, so far as I can tell socialism as such doesn’t need to involve much in the way of totalitarianism, but governments brought in by revolutions tend to be totalitarianism whether they are left or right or something else. At least some of the harms of e.g. communism in the USSR seem to me to have been consequences of totalitarianism more than of economic policies as such.
In any case—my apologies if I wasn’t clear enough about this—the democracy-versus-revolution thing was not my main point; my main point was that there is a big difference between (say) Soviet communism (a way of running a whole country) and workers’ cooperatives (a way of running a company), and this difference seems highly relevant to the question of whether the disastrousness of the USSR tells us anything about the likely consequences of organizing more companies as workers’ cooperatives.
A nation isn’t really much like a business, despite occasional rhetoric along those lines from politicians when the policies they prefer for other reasons happen to have the shape of “run the country more like a business”. And a workers’ cooperative isn’t much like a communist or socialist country. If you think that running a company as a cooperative makes it more likely to fail in ways parallel to ways in which communist countries commonly fail, then I think you should show your working: explain how the relevant parallels work. (Including, in particular, explaining why you think such a company is more like Venezuela or the USSR than it is like, say, Sweden.)
(Why did I mention the democracy-versus-revolution thing at all? Because it seems to me that the most plausible ways of ending up with more workers’ cooperatives are more democracy-like than revolution-like, and e.g. it doesn’t seem likely to me that workers’ cooperatives will have much tendency to end up being totalitarian. And, in fact, so far as I can tell actual workers’ cooperatives don’t tend to be totalitarian.)