Yeah this same thing you’re saying has been tried. Just newer words for the same thing.
Unless you mean it should be an entirely voluntary system? More likely you’re thinking like the Bolsheviks and you’ll cause 20 million people to stave with your ideas.
No, that was centralized state socialism - it was authoritarian and centralized.
What I'm proposing is more akin to distributed democratic socialism. Our government is still democratically run. You still have independent banks (formed as credit unions) or crowdfunding to start businesses. The only difference is that once a business hires that first worker, then decisions start getting made democratically. And they continue from there. The state isn't running any of the businesses and there's no central planning arm.
To my knowledge, this has never been tried as a whole economic system. But worker cooperatives exist and are functioning just fine in the current system. Ever bought Equal Exchange chocolate? That's a worker cooperative. Heard of Mondragon? 80,000 member worker cooperative that's functioned successfully for decades across multiple verticals in Spain.
What I am proposing is that we do away with the traditional investor relationship and mandate that all businesses must be formed as democratic worker cooperatives funded either by regulated loans or some form of crowd funding.
This is all bog-standard bolshevik/communist propaganda dressed up in modern lingo. Your "co-ops" are just "soviets" (literal definition "council"). These "worker councils" were officially democratic as laid out in various USSR constitutions, and even the names of some communist bloc countries such as East Germany (German Democratic Republic) and North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea).
In practice of course, none of the freedoms of decision making we typically ascribe to western democratic nations existed despite these labels. The reason, as always, is that significant coercion and force is required to get people to give up control of their property and wealth. This inevitably leads to not only authoritarianism, but also wealth being transferred to the state instead of the people.
No the co-ops I'm talking about are businesses democratically run by their workers and they exist in the current economy with out coersion. Ever heard of Mondragon? 80,000 worker owner cooperative operating out of Spain for decades. Had an Equal Exchange chocolate bar? King Arthur Flour?
There's no reason you couldn't write the laws of business structure in such a way that all businesses have to be run democratically by their workers. Essentially you do away with the partnership, LLC, and Corporation and replace it with the worker cooperative. What you get is an economy of democratically run worker cooperatives competing with each other in a free market economy. No central planning. No government control. And this is different from the worker councils you're talking about which are, essentially, an effort at democratic, distributed economic planning.
If you and your hippie friends wanna band together and start a commune somewhere and commit mass suicide (or something), I got no problem with that. Just don't force everyone else to join you by gun point (the logical endpoint of enforcing laws).
Unless you mean it should be an entirely voluntary system? More likely you’re thinking like the Bolsheviks and you’ll cause 20 million people to stave with your ideas.
Remember Stalin was as evil as Hitler.