A sufficiently large co-op could raise lot of money. For example, if you have 10 000 employees, and they democratically decide to invest $100 per person into a new project, you have $1M. Not enough for a power plant, but perhaps for something smaller. I think Mondragon Corporation does similar things.
But this probably wouldn’t feel sufficiently pure (ideologically) to many people. Imagine that you have a system of mutually connected co-ops with 1M employees total, and they decide to invest $1000 per person, and build an actual power plant. On one hand, you have a co-op-owned power plant, yay! On the other hand, the power plant itself is not actually owned (exclusively) by its own workers; it is mostly owned by co-op employees working in other businesses. Many people would feel that this is a mockery of their ideas; that the people working at the power plant do not have the true co-op-ness.
A sufficiently large co-op could raise lot of money. For example, if you have 10 000 employees, and they democratically decide to invest $100 per person into a new project, you have $1M. Not enough for a power plant, but perhaps for something smaller. I think Mondragon Corporation does similar things.
But this probably wouldn’t feel sufficiently pure (ideologically) to many people. Imagine that you have a system of mutually connected co-ops with 1M employees total, and they decide to invest $1000 per person, and build an actual power plant. On one hand, you have a co-op-owned power plant, yay! On the other hand, the power plant itself is not actually owned (exclusively) by its own workers; it is mostly owned by co-op employees working in other businesses. Many people would feel that this is a mockery of their ideas; that the people working at the power plant do not have the true co-op-ness.
They could incrementally buy it back for “purity”. Ends up being a kind of crowdsourcing.