.500NE:

Or system here in the U.S. is certainly free enough that a large groups can get together and do the co-op thing.

Well, I see that you are asserting this. But I do not see your argument for it. And my main response is simply to deny that the claim is true -- political economy in the U.S. is not really free enough that you can get any kind of useful competitive test to tell you what might become of co-op business models in a truly freed market.

Now if you mean that the system in the U.S. "free enough" in the sense that there are not any laws which forbid co-ops from existing, then sure, that is true, but I hardly think that's the only thing that you need to keep track of. Often the effects that government has on the economy have little to do with what it bans outright or what it mandates outright, but rather with what it subsidizes, what it taxes, and the ripple effects of the ways in which it reshapes certain key markets, e.g. for money, credit, land, insurance, etc. Actually-existing co-ops tend to face a lot of consistent practical problems that are related to a few key issues -- well-entrenched, often subsidized competition from big incumbents; the difficulty of getting access to capital, either for initial capitalization or for later expansion, relative to their conventionally capitalist-owned competitors; the large scale and volume that are necessary to cover the initial costs of starting up and the fixed costs of staying in business. There's a lot of stuff to talk about here, some of which we could dig into and some of which we could probably only get at in outline without some pretty serious digging into empirical research and number-crunching. But briefly what I'd want to say is that none of these common pain points is really innocent of, or independent of, government privileges or industrial policy. Governments have many policies which systematically favor large incumbents over small startups of any kind; which artificially juice credit to big businesses and artificially stabilize the operation of the kinds of financial markets that most favor corporate-owned over worker-owned businesses; which massively increase the fixed costs of starting or maintaining a business, in ways that most hurt small community-dependent operations like co-ops; etc.

There is of course a lot of fine-grained points to argue about here, and I'm mostly outlining my view rather than giving you the defense of it, but for the defense I would largely point you to the essays in, e.g., Markets Not Capitalism.

 

.500NE:

There is no doubt that at least in Argentina that the workers can run a factory once they have one to run. The real question is where did they get the factory?

That is a worthwhile question to ask. I think that there is an answer to the question, which we can discuss if you want. (*) And an interesting conversation to be had around it. But that question is not the question I was answering by pointing to that book. The question I was answering was Freedom4Me73986's question, "So how does a 'bossless' factory work if there's over 100 workers?" And if that's intended to be a question about day-to-day operations, as it seems to be, then I think obviously one way to answer it is to take a look at some of the actually existing working factors that have over 100 workers and no boss. Even if there are other questions to answer about, say, the justice or the wisdom of the process that led to them getting the factory in the first place.

If you want to change the subject from that question to an interesting, but distinct question, I'm happy to talk about that too, but I hope you'll allow that it's fair for me to try to answer first the question that was originally put to me.

I find it ironic that the workers movement in the book you site is called 'The Take'

I don't know that this matters, particularly, but just for reference, I think you misunderstood the content on the page I was pointing to. The "workers movement" that coalesced from the reclaimed factories is not called "The Take." The Take is a documentary film that Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis made about Argentina, which is mostly about the worker-run factories but also about some other things. The movement that the film and the book help to document is usually called autogestión (meaning roughly "self-management") or more broadly as an aspect of autonomismo.