Co-ops are generally good and worth supporting. They are undeniably a better alternative within capitalism to the standard business ownership model and they can be great for raising worker’s class consciousness. That said, the ones you might see in the imperial core or any capitalist nation are not a threat to capitalism itself (if they were, they wouldn’t be allowed to exist). This is in part because they are always going to be fighting an uphill battle in a competitive labor market where all other businesses get to exploit their labor, forcing co-ops to operate at a disadvantage. Even as they are at a disadvantage especially compared to large corporations whose scale alone give them a massive advantage over all small businesses, co-ops in the imperial core still benefit from the primary contradiction of our age which is imperialism, the extraction of super-profits from exploited nations. Which means you will still have co-ops that are reactionary when it comes to dismantling capitalist hegemony. In other words, the workers of a co-op may jointly own their own business and the portion of the means of production within the purview of that business, but ultimately the means of production include all the economic inputs from the rest of the world, like the minerals that co-op must buy from mines in exploited countries or the basic food ingredients grown on land in the global south. This puts the material interests of even the most egalitarian first world co-ops at odds with communism. It has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread that small business owners occupy a spot in the social hierarchy where they are squeezed from both above and below in terms of their material interests, well this is also true of co-ops but perhaps doubly so.


In short, yes worker co-ops are good, and if you can support them over other businesses it’s a good idea to do so. If you are fortunate enough to work in one, great. But don’t expect them to have more revolutionary potential than workers unionizing. You will be disappointed if you think that worker co-ops are the vehicle towards socialism that some of their biggest proponents often like to say they are.