Could you run an economy entirely with mutual and cooperative ventures?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I.e. could you run a large industrial or post industrial country, with sufficient investment to ensure steady growth if all banks are replaced with mutuals and all corporations are profit sharing co-ops?

[parochial boy]

This would be ideal imo, but the biggest problem I see with it is that if you are shutting down the option  to invest in equity, then you are effectively shutting off one of the two major ways of generating investment.

Of course, there are plenty of examples of co-ops being succesfully without needing to issue equity to third parties - but on the scale of a whole economy it might be trickier? Maybe you could have a requirement for employees to "buy in" to co-ops (which has a load of it's own problems); or you could obfuscate and claim that mutually owned banks can buy shares because they are mutuals after all; or you just have some sort of government investment bank, or allow non-employee/customer ownership up to a certain percentage or something like that...

At the end of the day, I reckon it could work, but would need need happen at a level above the nation state - otherwise you just get the same old story of the parasite sorry, investor class setting up opaque ownership structures through tax havens that let them bend the rules (and the same old race to the bottom story with regards to regulations and that).

[Cassandra]

Sure you could in theory, there are plenty of authors one could cite here (Proudhon being the obvious one). In practice? Who knows.

You might find After Capitalism by David Schweickart interesting. I remember back when I was active in DSA (~2014) a lot of their leadership were really into it.

[pbrower2a]

There will be a need for corporate behemoths to do metallurgy and vehicle manufacture, generate and distribute power, or operate railroads. I'm not sure that we want cooperatives operating toll roads that are nothing but two-lane blacktop roads.-A country like Tito's Yugoslavia had socialized giant industry and had lots of cooperatives.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

No.  A modern economy has some business sectors where a large entity is the most beneficial way of doing things. At that scale, only capitalism and socialism appear to be workable (or some combination of the two) as the foundation of how to organize an economy, tho it certainly is possible to include mutual and/or cooperative ventures within such frameworks.