[HN Gopher] Mondragon as the new city-state
___________________________________________________________________
Mondragon as the new city-state
Author : jinjin2
Score : 105 points
Date : 2024-09-03 19:06 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.elysian.press)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.elysian.press)
| svieira wrote:
| Another take on this kind of subsidiarity approach is Joel
| Salatin's "Memorandum of Understanding" which he talks about in
| detail in "Stacking Fiefdoms":
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbJc8i5B9RU
| sturmbraut wrote:
| I read about Mondragon in Pickety's works. That's why I went to
| Mondragon. I was deeply disappointed, the city and the
| surroundings look very sad. It reminded me a lot of the former
| DDR (german "democratic" republic which was under russian
| control).
| ladyanita22 wrote:
| It's located in Spain, a country not known for its vast wealth.
| Plus, it's in a special administrative region in Spain, the
| Basque Country. They enjoy subsidies and favorable treatment
| from the regional government.
| user-one1 wrote:
| Basque country is one of the richest regions in Spain, which
| is already a highly developed country. Not sure what you are
| talking about.
| ladyanita22 wrote:
| I'm from Spain, so I'm quite sure of what I'm talking
| about. Spain might be a highly developed country, but its
| gdp per capita is not too high compared to the likes of
| Germany, UK, France, Denmark, US, et al.
|
| Basque country is, again, rich because it has an special
| tax treatment and could be considered a tax heaven to some
| extent.
| nextos wrote:
| The Basque Country has a GDP (PPP) of 108 [1]. Higher
| than France (101), as an average, or Italy (97).
|
| I'd say its a well developed region comparable to
| Northern Italy. Both were badly hit by the Euro. Had they
| kept their own currencies, they'd be closer to Sweden or
| Southern Germany.
|
| [1] https://www.eustat.eus/elementos/tbl0012365_i.html
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Are you saying that Mondragon is a failure because you found
| the local architecture disappointing?
| prmoustache wrote:
| Basque people have a distinct culture. You can often figure out
| someone comes from there just based on their hairstyle, way of
| dressing or attitude. They will usually favor practicality and
| durability over style.
|
| You may think it is sad, they may just think it is the way it
| should be done and that's it. I don't think you can judge the
| coop concept based on the impression you got from the city. Its
| inhabitants may on average feel happier than those where you
| live.
| nextos wrote:
| Mondragon is where it started, to raise the standard for
| disadvantaged workers.
|
| But _lots_ of employees live and work in much nicer spots like
| the San Sebastian area.
|
| Many engineering and hardware companies all around the Basque
| Country are owned by Mondragon.
| jmyeet wrote:
| There is no value without labor.
|
| This was recognized by everyone from Karl Marx to Abraham Lincoln
| to Adam Smith. Smith even conceded that profit was impossible if
| workers retain their surplus value, which is exactly the point.
|
| I bring this up because that's what capitalism is: draining the
| surplus labor value from workers to the capital-owning class. In
| feudalism, the artistocracy and th emonarchy extracted that
| value. Jeff Bezos is the new king.
|
| Why do I mention this? Because it wasn't that long ago that this
| view was universally accepted. The Red Scare post-WW2 spread a
| lot of damaging propaganda that has led ordinary people to fight
| for the ultra-rich to have even more money, to their own
| detriment.
|
| Walmart killing all your local businesses then leaving, leaving
| you in a food desert with a Family Dollar store maybe. That's
| capitalism. Locally-owned businesses. That's socialism. Monsanto
| agribusiness? Capitalism. Family-owned farms? Socialism.
|
| Something like Mondragon shows that large-scale cooperatives can
| work. And the reason why these sorts of things aren't more
| prevalent is that laws are passed to make them difficult to set
| up or outright illegal. Many US states outlaw municipal
| broadband, for example.
|
| And any country in the last 70 years that even _thinks_ about
| nationalizing resource extraction finds itself having a coup that
| nearly always has the CIA 's fingerprints over it.
|
| Or we simply starve them to death under the sanitized euphemism
| of "economic sanctions" (eg Cuba, Iraq, Venezuela). I really want
| people to understand that we're not doing this for any moral
| reason. We're doing it at the behest of Western companies who
| would prefer to steal the riches of these countries.
|
| Co-operatives can go a lot further than manufacturing too. It can
| be a solution for housing. Housing cooperatives cut out
| landlords, who are rent-seeking both literally and figuratively.
| cholantesh wrote:
| Most likely a message that's lost on anyone offering oblations
| while facing Cupertino everyday.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| More importantly, a message lost on an audience who largely
| is dreaming of being one of the exploiters.
| cholantesh wrote:
| Yeah, but my blood sugar was pretty low when I wrote that
| comment so I may have been more sarcastic than necessary.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Nothing wrong with sarcasm, obsession with civility is a
| liberal past time.
|
| I was mildly critiquing the accuracy.
| shafoshaf wrote:
| I'm pretty sure your economic terms are not what the consensus
| of professionally trained economists would say.
|
| >>>Locally-owned businesses. That's socialism. There is
| definitely nothing in the definition of socialism that says
| everything is locally-owned. Moreover, that can be a way to end
| up with things like Redlining and other institutional racial
| issues.
|
| >>>There is no value without labor. The great thing Marx did
| was show that everything could be converted to a value measured
| by labor. But, economists afterwards showed that once you have
| that conversion, you can do it literally with anything. We
| could have a system based on the number of bumblebees required
| to build a house. That is a normative judgement that labor is
| somehow special.
|
| Now, our current implementation of Capitalism is clearly
| wreaking havoc on our environment. But it has brought the
| standard of living up across the entire world past a Malthusian
| cycle of more food means more people, means they eat the food,
| and we have starvation.
|
| The same can be said for current implementations of Communism
| all across the globe.
|
| Lastly, cooperatives may be a great solution for a lot of
| manufacturing and housing challenges. And when you get to the
| scale of a country, a co-op is just a government, and a
| capitalistic democracy feels a lot more like a co-op than a
| dictatorship or authoritarianism even with all its pitfalls. A
| populous who then really starts to demand through votes that we
| change to improve the blight of our fellow humans seems an even
| better place to live, if we can just get there.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| >>> Locally-owned businesses. That's socialism.
|
| >> There is definitely nothing in the definition of socialism
| that says everything is locally-owned. Moreover, that can be
| a way to end up with things like Redlining and other
| institutional racial issues.
|
| I read the OPs post as an example of propoganda (mega corp -
| capitalism, small company - socialism) not reality.
| sweeter wrote:
| Same here. It's to display the hypocrisy of those in power
| who declare things in their favor as beneficial and those
| that are not beneficial as harmful and bad.
|
| In reality it's almost the opposite, it's bootstrap
| capitalism for the little guys, and "socialism" and
| government handouts for the ultra wealthy. (I put socialism
| in quotes because this term is extremely commonly misused.)
| jmyeet wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure your economic terms are not what the
| consensus of professionally trained economists would say.
|
| It's an oversimplification to highlight the main point:
| workers' relationship to the means of production. In
| capitalism, capital owners own the means of production. In
| socialism, the workers own the means of production.
|
| IME most Americans not only don't know what socialism is
| (despite being opposed to it), they don't know what
| capitalism is either (despite supporting it).
|
| > Now, our current implementation of Capitalism is clearly
| wreaking havoc on our environment.
|
| It's doing an awful lot more than that. It's pillaging the
| Global South. It's impoverishing us under the massive weight
| of housing, medical and student debt. And it's quite
| literally killing people. People decry the failures of the
| USSR, for example, but 9 million people die of starvation
| every year. Why isn't this attributed as a failure of
| capitalism in the same way?
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| > There is no value without labor.
|
| is this a serious statement?
| CPLX wrote:
| Not only is it serious, it's the central argument of all
| political systems since there have been political systems.
| jujube3 wrote:
| He's a Marxist and believes in Marx's labor theory of value.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
|
| As wikipedia says, "modern mainstream economics rejects the
| LTV" (for very good reasons). It leads to some pretty obvious
| absurdities if you take it seriously. For example, 10,000
| people digging holes should be more "valuable" than one guy
| designing a microchip, because hey! The holes take more
| labor.
| harwoodjp wrote:
| Your "holes" example is a distortion (simplification and
| misinterpretation) of Marx's theory.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > There is no value without labor.
|
| While this is generally true, it's also not the entire
| equation. For example, there's no gain without risk.
|
| - When I work for someone else, I am offloading some of the
| risk to that person/owner. When someone starts a company and
| hires other people... if the company goes belly up, the founder
| loses their investment; the workers find another job.
|
| - When I rent from someone else, I am offloading the risk of
| owning a property to someone else. If I get a job across the
| country, I don't need to sell my house at a loss to move.
|
| None of this justifies people making insane amounts of money
| while others are starving. But neither should the worker expect
| to reap all the benefit unless their also willing to take all
| the risk.
| sgu999 wrote:
| > the founder loses their investment
|
| So does the bank, and the state that (more often than not)
| subsidised said investment through diverse vehicles. If the
| bank goes belly up, we've seen what happens, we collectively
| contribute to save them... because we're collectively sharing
| all the risk of investment in our financialized economies.
|
| I agree that some people don't want risk and others do, but
| as soon as you start sharing ownership that dichotomy simply
| disappears.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Sure, but using tax-payer money to save malfunctioning
| banks is pretty much the opposite of capitalism.
| jmyeet wrote:
| > When I work for someone else, I am offloading some of the
| risk to that person/owner.
|
| Workers generally risk their lives or simply injury. Owners
| "risk" capital. I put that in quotes because our government
| is typically set up to rescue failing businesses and by that
| I mean bailing out the owners. If the business fails, the
| owner simply has less money or they have to become a worker.
|
| So who is really taking a risk here?
|
| > When I rent from someone else, I am offloading the risk of
| owning a property to someone else.
|
| We shouldn't treat housing as an investment vehicle. It is
| shelter and necessary to live. Every level of government is
| subordinate to the cause of increasing property prices as
| society increasingly views housing as a vehicle to build
| generational wealth.
|
| The majority of housing in vienna is state-owned (so-called
| "social housing"). Any kind of state housing has been
| successfuly propagandized as a "slum" ("project") but there's
| no need for that to happen. The UK, prior to Thatcher coming
| along and dismantling the whole thing, almost completely got
| rid of landlords simply by being the buyer of last resort for
| owners that wante dto sell.
|
| > None of this justifies people making insane amounts of
| money while others are starving
|
| Our economic system is predicated on withholding basic needs
| for profit.
| bboygravity wrote:
| What are you suggesting as a better system?
|
| To withold basic needs for profit, you need to be able to
| provide basic needs in the first place.
|
| All of the alternatives I know of can't even reach that
| point.
| max_hoffmann wrote:
| A free market of cooperatives is an alternative. One
| might call it ,,cooperatism", if it needs a term.
| toyg wrote:
| After some initial mistakes, the Soviet system did
| provide basic needs. It was inefficient, badly led,
| conservative, repressive, ultimately undemocratic, and
| often produced very mediocre output (crappy houses, etc),
| but it ensured that everyone had food, shelter, work,
| healthcare, and education.
|
| Neither full-collectivism nor full-capitalism are the
| final answer.
| vladms wrote:
| Depends on the field what you risk. Many white collar jobs
| will not risk their lives or injury, plus nowadays
| regulations should reduce these extreme risks.
|
| Saying "owner simply has less money" can have many
| implications on their life. If they choose to put money in
| a company rather than have a bigger
| apartment/TV/car/whatever, I find it fair for that to be
| rewarded a bit.
|
| I think it is disingenuous to think "basic needs" is simple
| to define, considering that there is no cheap and free
| energy source (and other resources). For someone living in
| a warm climate, the basic need for heating in north of
| Europe will look like a waste.
|
| My opinion is that tax systems are completely outdated and
| they should use more "asymptotic/exponential/complex
| formulas". Sure a tax of x % on profit worked 100 years ago
| when most people were "closer" but with today's growth (of
| many things), you get too much concentration. But of course
| that would imply that people understand both tax and math,
| so most will not demand it.
| aegypti wrote:
| How much labor were they putting into those 1960s California
| starter homes!?
| crooked-v wrote:
| > In feudalism, the artistocracy and th emonarchy extracted
| that value.
|
| Feudalism was in some ways a bit kinder, because part of the
| basic arrangement was the expectation that the nobles would
| protect the peasantry (for pragmatic that's-where-the-food-and-
| supplies-come-from reasons, not ethical ones). Capitalism has
| no such expectations or incentives.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > There is no value without labor.
|
| Plausible.
|
| But there is very little value without tools. In fact, one
| could argue that all material progress has been in the form of
| better and better tools. One person with a combine beats 100
| people with sickles.
|
| Those tools are necessary for _almost all_ of the value that
| labor produces.
|
| So if we want those tools, in the real world we need to pay the
| producer of those tools. (Or make them ourselves, which is
| possible, but runs into division-of-labor issues.) The people
| who manufacture combines aren't a charity; they want to receive
| the value of _their_ work too.
|
| And unless the farmer (or custom cutter) has the money to buy
| the combine, then there's a third party in the situation - the
| capitalist, the person who provides the money to buy the tools
| that will give the increased productivity. That person usually
| isn't a charity, either. They need to get some return on their
| money.
|
| But the place where I at least partly agree is this: _The
| worker who knows how to use the tools is deserves at least part
| of the value provided by using the tool_. The tool-maker
| deserves part of the value; the capitalist deserves part of the
| value; and the worker also deserves part of the value. (If you
| don 't like the word "deserves", well, without all three
| parties, the value isn't produced, and none of the three are
| charities, so if we want the value, we need to give them part
| of the returns.)
|
| And currently, you can make a very solid case that the worker
| is getting the short end of the stick. I can't buy "the worker
| deserves it all". No, the worker does not. But I can agree that
| workers deserve more than they're getting.
|
| (In the cases where the workers either make their own tools or
| have the money to buy them, this argument breaks down. But in
| an industrialized society, that seems to be the exception, not
| the rule.)
| tmnvix wrote:
| > Co-operatives can go a lot further than manufacturing too. It
| can be a solution for housing.
|
| An interesting example of this in an article published
| yesterday (a housing/renovation co-op operating in Baltimore).
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/sep/03/wat...
| intalentive wrote:
| >If the model is a good one, detractors say it can't be
| replicated outside of the Basque Country, and there's some truth
| to that.
|
| The author doesn't speculate why, but I'd guess it's partly due
| to Basque ethnic solidarity. Mondragon sounds a lot like the kind
| of late 1800s / early 1900s syndicalism that later evolved into
| Italian fascism and German National Socialism.
|
| Of course, another big "collectivist capitalism" success story is
| China, which is also fiercely nationalist.
|
| I don't see either of those models working in the West on a large
| scale any time soon.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Now Basque country is not considered "the West"?
| intalentive wrote:
| >"on a large scale"
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I've heard this story ever since I was a shit-eating Ron Paul
| voting right-libertarian. The whole "collectivist success
| requires ethnic purity" argument. I don't buy it. It is,
| inevitably, either an excuse to destroy functional collective
| institutions, an excuse to advocate for ethnic cleansing, or
| both.
| intalentive wrote:
| To elaborate on my previous comment: if you want people to be
| less individualistic and more community-minded, and
| especially if you want economic organization to be more
| cooperative, decentralized and bottom-up, then people are
| going to need to feel a deep sense of buy-in and belonging,
| and you don't really see that in an undifferentiated mass of
| atomized "consuming and producing units".
|
| But you do see it among the Amish, and the Basques, and the
| Boers, and in the kibbutzim, and in families generally,
| because kin relationships are meaningful among humans and
| elsewhere in the animal world.
|
| And I'm not arguing that "collectivist success requires
| ethnic purity", just noticing a correlation. Where you see
| apparent altruism in economics -- including nepotism in
| hiring -- you tend to find kin relations.
|
| Probably the game theorists and evolutionary psychologists
| have figured it out.
| harwoodjp wrote:
| It's true that, in those groups, a shared ethnic identity
| enables economic cooperation. But the lack of solidarity
| you observe is the result of a regime of coercion. The
| official policy: leave your neighborhood, family, friends,
| and passions for 40+ hours a week to build a capitalist's
| business. You have to do it to survive. And the police are
| there to make sure revolts don't break out.
| mikojan wrote:
| The importance of "leftist" fascism is overplayed.
|
| "Socialism" back then, much like "Human Rights" today, was
| generally associated with what is morally right. It was not an
| ideology of extremist groups. Fascism "evolved" from socialism
| same as everybody and their mother evolved from it.
|
| And because of its dominance, everybody tried to exploit it,
| too. So you called your organisation "National Socialist Party"
| and your heads of propaganda copied the rhetoric.
|
| Also, libertarian socialism was nowhere as developed as in
| Spanish society at that time. This is not the most surprising
| society to generate Mondragon.
| abeppu wrote:
| A thing that is kind of glossed over is: what is "ownership" when
| we talk about worker-owners at cooperatives?
|
| > The profits generated by each cooperative are put to work for
| the benefit of the greater whole. Each cooperative gives 14-40%
| of their gross profits to their division (depending on the
| division), and another 14% to their parent company. The rest are
| invested back in the cooperative (60% of net profits),
| distributed among their employees (30% of net profits), and
| donated to social organizations in their communities (10% of net
| profits).
|
| > Workers buy into their cooperative when they become employees,
| investing up to EUR16,000 into a personal equity account. They
| pay 30% of that investment upfront, with the remainder taken out
| of their paychecks over following 2 to 7 years. After two years
| with the organization, workers become "members" and start earning
| interest on their investment at a rate of at least 7.5% annually.
| If the cooperative does well, they might earn much more than
| that. Workers can pull this money out of their accounts when they
| leave the cooperative or retire.
|
| ... so it's _not_ ownership, right? It 's profit-sharing while
| you're an employee (the "interest" the worker gets is out of that
| 30% of net profits discussed previously), but you don't own
| shares in the company that you can then sell, like an employee
| who receives an RSU or receives and exercises an option.
|
| In some sense, corporate employees that get some form of equity
| as part of their compensation are more literally worker-owners. I
| think the problem with American companies that have an employee
| stock plan is that the employee stock pool is a small slice of
| the total ownership, and employees don't participate in any real
| democratic governance. Despite being shareholders, they get far
| less information about the financial health or strategic position
| of the company than investors with board seats. Real partial
| ownership doesn't lead to real power or access to information.
| And the aim of the company is still to serve the larger
| investors, not the workers.
| metabagel wrote:
| I think that more important than ownership is the purpose of
| the company. Most companies have the purpose of making money.
| Few have a purpose which includes contributing to quality of
| life, unless that's something which can be sold for a profit.
| devman0 wrote:
| Not just making money, but making more money than they did
| last year, forever.
|
| Like a company can't just be cool with the fact that they
| serve a profitable market niche and gainfully employ people.
| Investors need capital gains and won't just be satisfied with
| getting reliable dividends!
|
| Stock buy backs ruined corporate governance...
| glutamate wrote:
| A workers cooperative is owned by its _current_ workers. Are
| you going to argue that consultancies and law firms are not
| really owned by their _current_ partners, either?
| max_hoffmann wrote:
| Profits belong to the people who create them, not to people
| who used to work at the same company in the past. Expecting
| future employees of a company to work for ex-employees in the
| future is unfair. Having worked for a company, doesn't
| entitle anyone to remain on the paycheck until death, despite
| not working there anymore.
| sgu999 wrote:
| > In some sense, corporate employees that get some form of
| equity as part of their compensation are more literally worker-
| owners.
|
| As soon as a worker leaves or sells their shares, these shares
| aren't worker-owned anymore and the interests of their owner
| can quickly diverge from the ones of a worker. That's roughly
| what a coop fixes I think.
| abeppu wrote:
| I can kinda see how one can argue that this is a feature
| rather than a bug, but I still think this points to the more
| distinctive feature in these coops being democratic
| governance of workers rather than ownership.
|
| I own shares of past companies I've worked at, but I don't
| have any representation in how the company is run. It doesn't
| matter if my interests have diverged from current workers,
| because I have no influence.
|
| If a company compensates its employees partially with RSUs,
| and those employees own and can eventually transfer those
| shares freely, and the company was also democratically
| governed by its workers ... could you not have "real"
| ownership (by current and past workers) and still protect
| current workers' democratic governance?
| drewmcarthur wrote:
| > democratic governance rather than ownership
|
| yes and no, i'd call the distinction collective ownership.
| you can sell your shares (by quitting), or you can stay and
| participate democratically. but you can't do both, and that
| protects your say in the company, preventing investors from
| overruling worker-owners.
|
| > i have no influence
|
| neither do the current workers. the issue isn't retail
| investors, but the ones with board seats. if boards only
| had one seat for an investor, that'd be one thing, but
| usually workers only get a single seat, if any.
|
| > protect current workers' democratic governance
|
| you could do this with preferred shares, voting shares,
| etc. investor shares are non voting, voting shares can only
| be owned by workers, etc. you still have to counter their
| concentration though.
| abeppu wrote:
| I think we're roughly in agreement?
|
| Any organization that arranges for its workers to govern
| it has some organizing document that describes this
| structure. Any organization that arranges for its workers
| to become owners must pick mechanism for this to happen.
| My view is that these can be basically independent
| choices:
|
| - A firm can pursue a profit-sharing-for-current-workers
| approach as described for Mondragon, or can issue RSUs or
| options ("real" and transferable ownership)
|
| - And regardless of what "ownership" vehicle they pick,
| they can still be organized to be democratically governed
| by its workers (establishment of which need not be
| dependent on any stipulated "ownership"). I.e. your
| organizing docs can describe a board composed of current
| employees, elected by employees, etc.
|
| I am skeptical of the claim that profit-sharing while
| you're an employee is "ownership" in part because you are
| incentivized to prefer that the firm take profits _while
| you work there_. By comparison, if as a worker your
| vested stake persists even after you leave or retire, you
| might be much more inclined to vote for large
| reinvestments this year (and for the next several) which
| may not yield a profit until after you 've left.
| Temporary "ownership" may not encourage the same long-
| term view as ordinary literal ownership.
| max_hoffmann wrote:
| Cooperatives guarantee that only people working in the
| company benefit from the profit of their own work. If one
| can stop working and still take a share from the profits,
| everyone else would have to not just work for themselves
| and lose part of their profit to an increasing amount of
| people, who are not taking part in creating that profit.
| Cooperative guarantee that profit is owned by the people
| who create it.
| tmnvix wrote:
| > ...these coops being democratic governance of workers
| rather than ownership.
|
| So who are the owners if not the workers?
| nostrademons wrote:
| Not all that different from shares in a private company, or an
| interest in a partnership or multi-member LLC. Many corporate
| shareholders cannot freely sell; the idea of being able to sell
| stock for cash whenever you want to is unique to _public_
| companies.
|
| And yes, the real problem is information asymmetry. This is
| always the real problem. Arguably the secretary who knows
| everything that's going on with the company via watercooler
| talk has more power than the CEO whose underlings tell him only
| what he wants to hear. A lot of corporate owners, even powerful
| shareholders like the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, have been
| bilked by unscrupulous but savvy management who knows how to
| control information flow.
| howard941 wrote:
| When they leave or retire how are the earnings taxed?
| samatman wrote:
| The difference between Mondragon, the kibbutzim, and other
| successful examples of collective labor, and the Soviet system,
| is precisely that the former are not governments, and operate in
| a capitalist system of property rights and free markets (in a
| practical rather than spherical cow sense of that term).
|
| I'm all for more cooperatives, it's a good model. Operating in a
| system which doesn't compel that form of organization is what
| keeps them honest. Mondragon is a profitable company, emphasis on
| _profitable_.
|
| The article talks a bit about how, while Mondragon is a pretty
| good deal for basic labor, they have trouble attracting high-
| demand talent like engineers, which they also need. In a free-
| market system, a worker's collective can solve a problem like
| that, by offering more perks, raising the 'level' for new
| engineering hires, waiving some amount of the up-front
| investment, or just getting by through, in effect, paying some of
| the salary in a nonmaterial reward of belonging to something
| which better meets some people's sense of ethics and fairness.
|
| That's not how it works when the company you work for is also the
| police and the military. It's also not how it works when every
| company is compelled to organize itself this way. That compulsion
| leads to dysfunction, corruption, cheating, and at the extreme
| end, gulags.
|
| So let's pass on all that. If you believe that worker
| cooperatives are a social good, as I do, buy stuff from them.
| Work for one, found one. It's working so far.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > The difference between Mondragon, the kibbutzim, and other
| successful examples of collective labor, and the Soviet system,
| is precisely that the former are not governments...
|
| I've heard it put as "Socialism works great, as long as the
| socialist community gets to decide who is included."
| cies wrote:
| The "soviet system" as you call, started (yes the revolution)
| with a slogan "power to the soviets". In the slogan the word
| "soviet" meant "worker coop".
|
| This slogan was abolished when more central planning took over,
| and the word soviet become more associated with the central
| govt/ the state.
| samatman wrote:
| I didn't say "soviet system", I said "Soviet system", as in
| the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I do know what the
| word means.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > The article talks a bit about how, while Mondragon is a
| pretty good deal for basic labor, they have trouble attracting
| high-demand talent like engineers, which they also need
|
| Perhaps that's not inherent to high-demand talent, but
| Mondragons current composition and markets. I know a handful of
| engineering consultancies that are cooperatives in everything
| but name - and I know _of_ a couple that _are_ legally coops.
| m_ke wrote:
| It's a shame there's not a YC like incubator for tech worker
| coops, cut out the VCs and have milestone based funding in
| exchange for a percentage of future profits that would be
| reinvested in future projects.
| cies wrote:
| It's inherent to the way a coop works that it's not possible to
| follow the same path. There is no 7% equity to be given, only
| the repayment of a loan. The coop model does not promote taking
| risk and hence have many fail, yet a few grow very quick.
|
| Another problem is law. At this point it favors the common
| ownership forms of business. Starting a coop is hence much
| harder than it should be. This is what i think where the "it's
| a shame" make most sense. We should make w-coops easier to
| start and give them tax benefits as they are on the long run
| much more beneficial/ less detrimental to society.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I'm not a finance person, but my understanding is that co-ops
| more often raise capital with traditional loans.
|
| While I believe you are correct that co-ops are not a great
| fit for the growth business strategy that VCs make their
| bread and butter on, I believe that on many metrics co-ops
| tend to be more sustainable than the corporate
| alternatives[0]. This means they are more likely to be around
| tomorrow to pay off a loan.
|
| All this to say, it would be great to see more capital for
| co-ops in the form of traditional loans with favourable
| interest rates.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-
| network/2014/m...
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Are there countries with legal structures more friendly to
| worker coops?
|
| For example I know Germany has structures like works councils
| that are foreign to us in N. America (though this is not a
| worker coop structure). However these structures historically
| arise from labor movements, not from top-down planning from
| authorities or electoral politics, which takes more than
| thinking up a design for a better society without considering
| who and why it would be implemented
| m_ke wrote:
| Yeah I'd imagine it would have to be a single holding company
| that has members join, instead of investing for equity.
|
| So as an example you could have hypothetical opensource.coop
| that funds open source projects like signoz or posthog,
| giving the team a year of runway in exchange for a cut of
| future profits, with follow on funding if certain milestones
| are reached.
|
| Same could work for "indie hackers" or boostrappers, merge a
| few successful companies into a holding company that shares
| office space, accounting, legal and etc, and reinvests a
| fixed % of profits to seed new projects that apply to join.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| A possible model is to divide your shares into
| ownership/control class shares (reserved only for workers)
| and profit shares which can be bought/sold by third parties.
| This gives workers ultimate control over the venture while
| allowing third-party investment. I don't know if this has
| been implemented anywhere, but it's a possibility. It's not
| going to fuel explosive growth like VC funds do, but TBH I'm
| finding as I get more experienced that those types of
| ventures generally end up being trash dumpsters once the
| honeymoon phase is over.
| hansonkd wrote:
| Isn't that almost the opposite?
|
| In a Co-op you put up your own money to buy into a co-op. This
| is the opposite of VC where an external party joins your org
| with money.
|
| So a co-op model would only help to serve the already wealthy.
|
| However, maybe it would be interesting to have a co-op for
| developer resources for example. As in companies or startups
| can buy into the coop in return for cheaper rates and more
| vertically integrated team augmentation.
| m_ke wrote:
| Imagine a indie hackers founders cooperative, you take a few
| successful bootstrapped founders and start a new holding
| company that shares an office space and has staff to handle
| legal, accounting and all the other stuff that most engineers
| hate to deal with.
|
| You offer founders that apply a coworking space and a stipend
| that can get renewed each year if the members of the coop
| agree to keep funding it. In exchange the new member commits
| to giving up 10% of their future profits that get split into
| an investment budget and dividends.
|
| If a company is failing the members can vote to stop funding
| them and set them free of the agreement.
|
| If a company needs way more funds and VC route makes more
| sense you spin it out as a c corp, convert the 10% profit
| agreement into equity and let them raise funding like any
| other startup would.
| mempko wrote:
| For those astute, workers owning the means of production should
| sound familiar. Mondragon demonstrates that it can scale.
| YossarianFrPrez wrote:
| It's interesting to read about Mondragon in more detail. I just
| came across the term in Kim Stanley Robinson's solar-system sci-
| fi epic "2312." The book (highly recommended) heavily references
| Mondragon; that's the name for the alliance / co-op of all of the
| planets and settlements that aren't Earth or Mars.
| conaclos wrote:
| The anarchist culture of the 1800s and 1900s in Spain, especially
| the emergence of anarcho-syndicalist structures [0], is certainly
| one of the reasons for Mondagon's existence.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism
| api wrote:
| Why aren't there more of these if they work well?
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