Not only in the US, it is a universal fiction

Socialism. Plenty of models that use or aspire to that system, especially when it's part of a larger capitalist society and one can't expect the workers to change it all.

Few large coops are truly equal partnerships or that democratic though.

Generally speaking, what prevents it from falling under capitalism is non-transferable ownership stakes. Otherwise the workers can sell their stake and the system inevitably declines into capital interests hiring employees instead of a partnership.

That would be socialism because the power and profit of the company are eventually distributed throughout the workforce regardless of their capital investment.

Isn't a co-op just an individual organization where the workers have already seized the means of production and share it fairly among themselves? With every worker having a say right? Sounds like socialism on a small scale to me.

coöps are cool, but we can't just have coöps. their liberatory potential is cancelled out by the fact that they still participate in capitalism and they still need to turn a profit.

Even if the labour of individuals might be slightly transformed by having a vote over the methods and aims of production, the very nature of co-operatives as institutions for the production of commodities renders them a revolutionary dead end. Even enterprises seized by workers during struggle and turned to cooperative production face a dead end if the broader struggle across society does not continue to move forward.