Rural Americans own their electric company. You should own yours.

It's the opposite. The government doesn't own a co-op, appoint anyone, or get the money. The Stanford definition says social ownership, and lists cooperative, community and employee ownership as forms of it. State ownership is one form among several, and the one that failed. Calling a co-op "the government doing things" is the Cold War definition talking.

In that sense, yes. And in that sense I need a different word for an enterprise owned and run by its members, because it isn't what the USSR did. Usage tells you what a word means now. It can't tell you whether the thing being named is there. North Korea calls itself a democratic republic, and if its usage became dominant the dictionary would record it, and nobody in North Korea would be choosing their government.

Marx didn't coin the word, and I don't need him. But he did count co-ops. In the 1864 Inaugural Address of the International he called the cooperative movement one of the great transforming forces of the age and said it proved production could run "without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands." In Capital, volume 3, he called worker cooperatives "the first sprouts of the new form" within the old. He fought the Owenites over method, not over what socialism was. The "socialism is a transitional stage run by a state" framing is Lenin's, from 1917.

Buying an input on a market doesn't make the buyer a capitalist. Capitalism is private ownership of the enterprise. Markets are a separate feature. A worker co-op bakery buys flour, Mondragon buys steel, Walmart buys from farmer co-ops, and none of those purchases changes who owns the buyer. Here's the test: name the capitalist. Who owns an electric co-op and takes its profit? If you can't name one, there isn't one.

Stateless means the state doesn't own it, not that it operates without a state. Every enterprise relies on courts and property law, including Walmart. If reliance on enforcement made a thing state-owned, nothing would be capitalist either. I'm a market socialist. The state should protect co-ops by law and then get out of the way. Relying on the state and being owned by the state are different things.

A member has an equity account in their name, votes for the board, can run for it, can demand the records, and a sale of the co-op's assets needs a member vote. In 2007 members of Pedernales Electric, the largest co-op in the country, sued, forced a forensic audit, threw out the board, rewrote the bylaws, and the old general manager went to court. That's what ownership does. A Tesla shareholder can't change the paint colors either. Ownership is governance, not operations.

True that it's consumer-owned, and fine. The definition says social and democratic control, not worker control. Worker co-ops, consumer co-ops and municipal utilities are all forms of it. Most electric co-ops are user-owned and their workers have a union. The two bargain, like anywhere else, except the owner across the table is a neighbor who needs the lights on, not a fund that needs a dividend.

Nobody asks you to. Owning has never meant running. The farmers who built the rural grid in the 1930s didn't know how to run a utility. They elected a board and the board hired engineers. Ninety years later it's the most reliable rural grid on earth. You don't need expertise to own Tesla stock and you don't need it here. You need to notice your bill.

Most members of electric co-ops don't care either. Turnout is around ten percent and the lights stay on. Ownership never required enthusiasm. It requires the structure to exist and a reason to join that isn't the ownership. Farmers didn't join the REA co-ops for democracy. They joined for electricity. The ownership is what kept the price honest afterward.

Network effects are real, which is why nobody switches alone. Networks move as blocks and on shocks. Threads got 100 million users in five days off Instagram's graph. Bluesky went from about 3 million to over 25 million in 2024, mostly in the weeks after Brazil banned X. Discord moved guild by guild. The question is which institutions move their members as a unit, and what makes staying expensive. And if social media is a natural monopoly, as the same critics say, that's the one kind of business economics doesn't defend private ownership of. Electric distribution is the textbook case, and the American answer was co-ops. The concrete reform is interoperability: take your followers with you the way you take your phone number. The EU already requires it for messaging.

Crédit Agricole, Rabobank and Desjardins are cooperative banks among the largest on earth. State Farm, Nationwide and Liberty Mutual are mutuals. CHS runs oil refineries. Mondragon builds machine tools and lifts. Where the critique is right is venture-style growth, because a co-op can't sell control to raise capital. That's a real limit, and it's one sector, not most of the economy.

The same way everyone else does, because the fab isn't being financed by selling control either. TSMC's Arizona plant got 6.6 billion dollars from the US government, Samsung's 4.7 billion, Intel 8.5 billion plus loans. The frontier is financed by the state and by debt, and co-ops borrow fine. Mondragon built its own bank in 1959 so its firms could finance plants without outside equity. Co-ops are weak where the gamble is the product. Everywhere else the money is a loan, and the question is who owns the thing the loan built.

Nearly every electric co-op was built on a Rural Electrification Administration loan in the 1930s and 40s, repaid it with interest, and the government has never owned a wire or appointed a director. Taking a loan isn't being owned. If a lender dictated the dashboard, every leveraged company on earth would be run by its bank. And a co-op's lender is usually another co-op: Mondragon's bank is owned by the firms it lends to, the Farm Credit System by the farmers who borrow, the CFC by the electric co-ops. When a crisis hits, the lender forcing cost-cutting is the borrowers, collectively, deciding how to save themselves. You've now argued co-ops fail if they stay small, fail if they borrow to grow, and fail if the state helps them grow. That's a definition built so nothing can meet it.

A co-op's members are also customers of every other co-op. The truck driver who votes himself a higher payout pays for it at the grocery co-op and the power co-op. Nobody in the chain can win by squeezing, because the person squeezed is him. Capitalist firms are the ones maximizing surplus against their suppliers and customers, with a clear outside winner when they succeed. The system where every node extracts from every other is the one we have. And co-ops don't refuse to trade. Fonterra sells to 140 countries.

Those interests conflict in every firm. In a capitalist one the conflict is resolved by whoever owns the shares, which means the worker, the user and the supplier all lose to a fourth party who isn't in the room. Multi-stakeholder co-ops exist and don't paralyze: Quebec's solidarity co-ops, several hundred of them, seat workers and users on the same board by law, and Eroski in Spain is owned jointly by its workers and shoppers and runs 1,500 stores. The budget has to balance, so the trade-offs are made by people who all have to live with them. The worker who votes for higher wages pays for it as a user. That's the only arrangement where the people voting bear the full cost of their vote.

Correct, and I've never said otherwise. About a third of Mondragon's workforce isn't member-owners, mostly in foreign subsidiaries that aren't co-ops, and Fagor collapsed in 2013 chasing growth. That's a failure of the principle, not a feature of it, and the fix is extending membership, which is what the cooperative movement's open-membership rule exists for. But notice the comparison. A firm two-thirds owned by its workers is being measured against perfection. The investor-owned firm it competes with is zero percent owned by its workers and nobody calls that an aristocracy. Only one of those structures has a mechanism for moving.

Correct, and the largest electric co-op in the country is the proof. For thirty years Pedernales Electric's board picked itself through a nominating committee, paid directors tens of thousands a year, and let the general manager funnel money to his brother through the co-op's law firm, until members sued in 2007 and forced direct elections, open records, a forensic audit and a member bill of rights. The manager was convicted. Member ownership doesn't run itself. What it gives you is the standing to fix it, which customers of an investor-owned utility never get. Every failure of co-op governance has a correction inside the structure. The failures of investor ownership have none, because the people harmed are not the people who decide.

True of every market system, including the capitalist one we have. Market socialism uses the same tools: carbon pricing, regulation, and national wealth accounts that track whether natural capital is being run down. I never said no planning. I said the plan should come from a legislature, not a composite number. The one thing ownership adds is that owners who live where the pollution lands vote differently than shareholders who don't. That's Elinor Ostrom's finding across hundreds of commons that lasted for centuries: the resource survives when the people who use it do the measuring and set the rules.

Fair. Better measurement changes spending at the margin. New Zealand's wellbeing budget moved real money to mental health and child poverty, and I'd recommend the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi dashboard approach to any country: keep GDP for the central bank, add distributional accounts, a wellbeing dashboard with no composite, and wealth accounts. What better measurement doesn't change is who owns the things being measured. That number hasn't moved in forty years of better measurement. Until the people being measured own the things being measured, the best you can get is a very precise picture of someone else's economy.

Electric co-ops have survived ninety years inside the most capitalist economy on earth and cover 56 percent of its land. Credit unions hold two trillion dollars. Mondragon has competed in the European market since 1956. Capitalism didn't stuff them down. It couldn't make a profit where they are, so it left, and they've been there ever since. The theory that socialism is either the end of history or impossible is the Cold War frame again. The thing on your power bill doesn't need either.