Cooperatives within capitalism

About a week ago while I attended the workshop on the origins of Right-to-Work, I picked up a copy of Workers World. There were lots of copies at the meeting site. It didn't take me long to be wary of the bias in the articles. In one about the USA allegedly trying to pick a fight with North Korea so we would have an excuse to make it capitalist, there was praise for the government there, likely because it is communist. Nope, sorry, their leader is acting like a power, keeping his position through violence (at least financial and likely physical, mental, and spiritual too).

With that in mind, there is an article that caught my attention. It discussed worker cooperatives, or worker owned companies, which it praises (and which I see as a viable alternative to the excesses of capitalism). The article then laments the difficulty of such worker companies as long as they must compete in a capitalist system. The answer, the article claims must be the proletariat revolution envisioned by Marx and Engles resulting in socialism.

And again, I have a problem with that. I will disclose that I have not studied socialism or other economic systems (other than reading a few articles in Wikipedia). Even so, I'll share a few thoughts.

As I determined the last time I looked into this issue, Communism has to go too far in enforcing its commonality and Socialism appears to blunt ambition.

Which brings me back to worker cooperatives. I can't see how they would be successful except within a market-driven economy. The competition would force cooperatives to create better products. Contrary to the beliefs of the workers paper, I doubt the absence of corporate owners would prevent economic recessions (though that would have prevented the current mess). It seems viable to me to aim towards all corporations being worker-owned. Perhaps we should offer encouragement in that direction.

Yeah, I know the current 1% won't allow their corporations to become worker-owned. But as the idea catches on, their influence will wane. Perhaps I'm being naïve. It will be better than what we have now.