>Cooperative businesses exist today, and prove there is an alternative model. Does the dominance of non-cooperative businesses today suggest that cooperative b

>Cooperative businesses exist today, and prove there is an alternative model. Does the dominance of non-cooperative businesses today suggest that cooperative business are less efficient? I mean, there aren't laws preventing the creation and operation of cooperative businesses, so if they're not less efficient then why aren't there any in the Fortune 500? If they are less efficient, this would mean that in a free society businesses formed in the traditional way would come to dominate. If anarchism doesn't propose to "make things illegal", then how would it prevent people who wished to from selling their labour to employers in the traditional business model? >A mutually agreeable exchange does not leave one person with a fraction of the value of their labor, and another with unearned profit. That depends on how value is determined. The judgement you're making relies on the labour theory of value, that value is determined by the amount of labour a person put into something. Morality is however an inherently subjective thing: there's no objective way to say that the labour theory of value is superior to any other theory of value. If value is subjective, then the value of an action depends on how other people value it. In which case the value of a person's work can be inferred from what other people are willing to give them for it; the more they are willing to give/pay the person, the more valuable that person's work must be to them. If the worker was able to produce a given amount of value without the aid of capitalists, there's nothing to stop him doing so. The fact that he chooses to work for capitalists hence implies that access to the capitalist's capital allows him to produce more value than he could otherwise produce. How is the capitalist's profit from this unearned? If they had not accumulated the capital in the first place, had not saved instead of consuming, had not invested their money and taken the risks that that entails, then the worker wouldn't have access to the capital that allows him to produce more and would necessarily be producing less (as if he could produce the same amount without access to the capitalist's capital, he wouldn't be working for the capitalist in the first place).