[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Glice

Not necessarily - the co-operative movement shares ideological space with communism but isn't necessary synonymous with (or even complicit to) communism. In the same way that various 'socialised' things (health services, housing, water) are very much a part of (so-called) late capitalism in most developed (and undeveloped) countries except the US (and even then the US has plenty of co-operative and socialist-ish things on a national level).

i'm not going to reply to your previous post, but thanks for posting it anyway.

co-operative or employee-owned business in 'merica still compete in the free market-- horizon milk, king arthur flour, land-o-lakes butter, ocean spray cranberry products (all agriculture-related, hm), have to compete with all kinds of other products; co-op buildings are common in cities like new york; my food co-op has to compete with other retailers; my credit union (a financial co-op) has to compete with other credit unions and with private banks (and does so successfully); my electric co-op gets some kind of local monopoly (it's hard to switch powerlines) but it carved it out in competition with a larger privately-owned utility. still, there is a mixed economy here, just like almost everywhere else; the argument of my current read is that government intervention distorts the economy and causes inefficiencies (e.g., government lacks incentives to improve the services it provides, the minimum wage works for the employed but against the unemployed, etc.).

so, i'm not asking about the existence of these entities, or the existence of these policies-- what i'm asking about is how the economy is organized in whatever form of "redness" (to paraphrase your above term) you espouse-- in the utopian world that you envision, is there economic competition? if so, is competition regulated? how so? are there price controls? if so, who sets the prices and how?

obviously i'm not asking for a unified answer from everyone, what i'm after is a very informal survey of alternative economic models that people here consider viable-- not asking really for the Keynesian mixed economy model we all know well in late-capitalist societies, but rather, the utopian models i'm not hearing about anywhere.