It’s a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing – rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services. Many are pieces of state infrastructure – toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics – handed over to the communities to run. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers.
“In Venezuela Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. So even something like firefighting-it seems hard for people make an argument that maybe the profit motive isn't something we want in the firefighting sector, because you don't want a market for fire. And I guess that comes from being Canadian, in a way, because we have more parts of our society that we've made a social contract to say, 'That's not a good place to have the profit motive govern.' Whereas in the United States, that idea is kind of absent from the discussion. And absolutely there are people that are at the far other end of the spectrum that want to communalize all property and abolish private property, but in general the debate is not between capitalism and not capitalism, it's between what parts of the economy are not suitable to being decided by the profit motive. Essentially, what we've been debating over-certainly since the Great Depression-is what percentage of a society should be left in the hands of a deregulated market system. “A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there's such a range of different kinds of market economies.
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