I’ve seen “market socialism” come back in popularity recently with figures like Richard Wolff, and as much as I appreciate him for popularizing aspects of Marxist theory, it’s something that I’m against, for the same reasons Marx was.
The fundamental elements of capitalism are wage labor, capital accumulation, and generalized commodity production. A co-op economy abolishes none of these. It maintains the most harmful aspect of capitalism: production for profit, rather than for use.
Getting rid of bosses is not enough, because the market itself is despotic. According to its whims, companies will still be forced to outcompete each other by lowering wages and increasing work hours not according to needs but first and foremost according to what's profitable.
I agree with Marx that a good thing about co-ops is that they debunk the myth that production requires separating people into workers and managers, executors and planners, but it is not socialism. It's not the abolition of capital, it’s merely a different way of managing it.
I also completely understand why it is so popular today. Without an organized working class, a society without markets isn’t even on the horizon of what people hope for, decades of neoliberalism has led people to only be able to imagine market solutions.
But any revolutionary socialist must see that this is a condition that must be overcome. The problem is not capitalists, it is capital as a social relation.
I'd also like to point out how today a non-market socialism is often accused of being "unrealistic", but back when the working class was organized, throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the "abolition of the wages system" was one of the main demands of the labor movement.
