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To build huge farms, let's say for a cocoa plantation, capitalists need to acquire a vast area of land in the first place. There are two options (1) rent, which is uncommon due to the small profit margin, and (2) buy, which IMHO is too expensive for most capitalists.
Thus, the farmers/landowners create a co-op to gather all cocoa crops so that the chocolate factory can process it. Farmers get paid based on how many tons of cocoa they can produce. They can also buy fertilizers, insecticides, etc., in bulk with that co-op to get discounts so that farmers can save more money.
Good idea?
Off, I bookmarked this that day but it got late and then I forgot about it.
As I said it, even before Marx there was cooperation between manufacturers or farmers, in different forms. From the Roman empire to the guilds in medieval times people have always associated themselves, although not for the utopian principles of socialism but in order to compete and gain an advantage against the competitors, the principles of power in numbers. The best example of this is all of Europe's old and let's call them traditional regional products, people from different villages were competing against other villages and they were forming different types of associations to get their products better known and sell more at a more expensive price. Cooperation in anything, from agriculture to manufacturing doesn't mean socialism, socialists try to forcefully show these as a product of their ideology but it's obviously false.
Good idea? ..as you asked..
Of course yes, it has been shown to work in the past it will work in the future, the problems that I was addressing is when you start to impose this cooperation on parties unwilling to do so and when you run a business on other principles than economics. At that point, it turns from cooperation into bankruptcy.
