Is Capital Created in Coops?

[BornDeist]

So if capital is not created through the exchange of commodities, but is created by buying labor power and consuming it to create new value and selling that, then if workers control the means to productions then capital is not created correct? Even if the market still exists?

[Sea]

Both basic types of capital are required for starting a coop, and continuing to run one. This is one of the reasons that Titoite "self-management" will never work.

[Criminalize Heterosexuality]

That, and in coops workers do not own the means of production, a small number of workers becomes petit-bourgeois through being (collectively) self-employed.

I swear this is the seventh time I've said that. I'm beginning to feel I'm pigeonholing myself as that guy what doesn't like cooperatives. But this is the basic error of a lot of, ah, "left currents", from Pabloism to Titoism.

[reb]

So if capital is not created through the exchange of commodities, but is created by buying labor power and consuming it to create new value and selling that, then if workers control the means to productions then capital is not created correct? Even if the market still exists?

Value is not created through exchange. You can exchange a commodity through many hands and make a quick buck, but no new value is created doing this. Value production can still continue if workers own their own means of production via coops. The point being that these means of production are still independent from each other, the people working there still exchange commodities with other commodity owners either directly or indirectly.

[bropasaran]

ABC of Communism, 1, 11

"In capitalist society, machinery and factory buildings take the form of capital. But do machinery and buildings always take the form of capital? Certainly not. If the whole of society were a cooperative commonwealth producing everything for itself, then neither machinery nor raw materials would be capital, seeing that they would not be means for the creation of profit for a small group of rich persons. That is to say, machinery, for example, only becomes capital when it is the private property of the capitalist class, when it serves the purpose .of exploiting wage labour, when it serves to produce surplus value."

Communist Manifesto, chapter 2

"We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation."

Das Kapital, 1, 33

"Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producers’ own labour, the other on the employment of the labour of others. It forgets that the latter not only is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its tomb only."

"We know that the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital. They become capital only under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the labourer."

"There the capitalist regime everywhere comes into collision with the resistance of the producer, who, as owner of his own conditions of labour, employs that labour to enrich himself, instead of the capitalist. The contradiction of these two diametrically opposed economic systems, manifest itself here practically in a struggle between them."