[HN Gopher] Mondragon as the new city-state
___________________________________________________________________
Mondragon as the new city-state
Author : jinjin2
Score : 208 points
Date : 2024-09-03 19:06 UTC (1 days 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
| ladyanita22 wrote:
| Oh, I agree on that. I'm sure had we kept our currency,
| we would have suffered much less.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > a country not known for its vast wealth
|
| Its looting of the gold and silver from S. America apparently
| didn't help.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| They brought so much to Europe that they crashed the
| market.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Indeed. All they got was inflation. Just like our
| government flooding the country with printed money. Same
| cause, same effect It's not a mystery what causes
| inflation, and inflation does not result in prosperity.
| 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?
| gengwyn wrote:
| Because the failures of the USSR occurred entirely within
| the USSR's borders, under its jurisdiction, and were
| entirely within its power to resolve. Meanwhile, the 9
| million deaths of starvation you cite are across multiple
| countries with multiple overlapping legal regimes and are
| multi-causal, from corruption to war and failed states like
| Haiti and Syria.
| kylestlb wrote:
| This isn't the ringing endorsement of global capitalism
| that you think it is
| WalterBright wrote:
| > our current implementation of Capitalism is clearly
| wreaking havoc on our environment
|
| Communist countries are the most polluted ones.
| kylestlb wrote:
| "communist" countries are simply countries that are still
| operating within Global Capitalism that happen to be run by
| parties that are made up of communists. They would also
| freely admit that. There are no communist countries because
| communism isn't here yet.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I know. Every failure of communism is because it wasn't
| really communist! I wonder where the tipping point of
| "true" communism is? Because the closer one gets to
| communism, the worse the results.
|
| Free markets, on the other hand, work even if they aren't
| perfect. The more free they are, the better they work.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| On the other hand, countries with more regulated markets
| such as European nations, the U.K. and Commonwealth
| nations, and Japan and _some_ of the East Asian Tigers
| might have less pollution than the United States. You get
| Americans importing EU baby formula because they are more
| restrictive about what chemical additives can go into
| them.
|
| Couldn't it just be argued that free market extremism is
| as much folly as a pro-central planning position?
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Couldn't it just be argued that free market extremism
| is as much folly as a pro-central planning position?
|
| The trouble with calling free markets folly is they are
| enormously successful, in every place and time where they
| have been tried. The trouble with central economic
| planning is it always does badly.
|
| BTW, one of the functions of government in a free market
| is to regulate the externalities - costs of doing
| business that are not borne by the business. Pollution is
| the most obvious one of those externalities, so calling a
| polluting business "extreme free market" is incorrect.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The paradox of maintaining free markets is that you often
| need state power to ensure competition is being done
| fairly. That means regulations, and intervention from
| time to time. That's at least the ordoliberal line in
| Germany, at least, the Freiburg school. They seem to have
| built a quite successful postwar economy there. Endorsing
| free markets does not have to equate with an
| unquestioning obsession, bordering on fetishistic, with
| liberty.
| nec4b wrote:
| >> Couldn't it just be argued that free market extremism
| is as much folly as a pro-central planning position?
|
| You shouldn't have a problem demonstrating this then?
| It's easy to enumerate all failed central planned
| economies, there really never was one that succeeded. Why
| don't you give an example of country that failed
| miserable with millions of deaths because of too much
| free markets.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 1990s Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union?
| Crash in standards of living, skyrocketing alcoholism and
| suicides, societal immiseration.
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/22/1087654279/
| how...
|
| https://www.britannica.com/place/Russia/Post-Soviet-
| Russia
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/alcohol-
| blamed-ha...
|
| An infestation of pyramid schemes (also happened in post-
| communist Albania, too, leading to civil war).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Albanian_civil_unrest
| nec4b wrote:
| How are the events you listed a consequence of too much
| free markets? You just proved my point with your
| examples. Collapse of the Soviet Union was literally a
| direct consequence of failed central planing. It didn't
| work that is way it collapsed, hence crash in standard of
| living. Pyramid schemes were also very popular in the
| eastern European countries before the fall of communism
| as well.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| And what replaced central planning in those countries,
| and proved unable to stop the crash?
| aguaviva wrote:
| _Why don 't you give an example of country that failed
| miserable with millions of deaths because of too much
| free markets._
|
| The beauty of capitalism is that it works by
| externalizing its true costs to other countries.
|
| Though mortality rates seem not to have risen (and may in
| fact declined) in the U.S. during the peak depression
| years (1930-1933) -- as a global phenomenon, the collapse
| of a system based on "too much free markets" is generally
| seen as one of the primary drivers of WW2, so we would
| have to attribute some share of its 70-85 million
| fatalities this market-driven collapse as well.
|
| There's also the fact that "free market" interests and
| Western financial support were key to Hitler and
| Mussolini's rise to power in the first place, as the
| former saw the latter as a perhaps unsavory but
| ultimately necessary bulwark against the rising spectre
| of a global socialist movement (whether on the Bolshevik
| model or otherwise).
|
| So there's that. Plus the whole European colonial project
| in Asia, Africa and the Americas, and the several hundred
| million deaths that it brought to the table. Though to be
| fair, this wasn't so much a matter of a "collapse" of the
| free market system of the time -- but rather of it
| working exactly as it was intended, from the very start.
| 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.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| And it's the same idiotic one that comes up every single
| time. "MUDPIES CHECKMATE!!"
|
| Nevermind Marx accounted for demand and markets when
| talking about cost of labor, but people love to strawman.
| cooolbear wrote:
| Nice try, but getting 10,000 people to dig holes (e.g.
| gigantic infrastructure projects) ends up costing much more
| than what it takes for "one guy" to "design a microchip"
| jujube3 wrote:
| Sure, it costs more, and everyone agrees on that. Where
| we disagree is whether it provides more VALUE. The LTV
| says that it does by definition, because labor = value,
| and therefore more labor = more value.
|
| You may choose to disagree. Just as modern economists
| disagree with the LTV.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| The LTV effectively argues that competition brings prices
| of mass-produced commodities down to a magical threshold,
| and that magical threshold is the aggregate cost of labor
| in order to produce whatever commodity is being examined.
|
| Modern economists haven't refuted this, and in fact many
| parrot it, and anyone saying they have rejected the idea
| is misinformed. See for instance https://bnarchives.yorku
| .ca/308/2/20101200_cockshott_nitzan_...
|
| The LTV absolutely accounts for demand (what capitalists
| call "value") and in fact requires it for its description
| of how capitalism operates. It's really just saying there
| are two forms of value: aggregate demand and aggregate
| production costs, with competition driving prices down to
| production costs. If you don't agree with that, I don't
| really know how else to help because it's kind of a
| universal truth in a mass production market economy.
| jmyeet wrote:
| > "modern mainstream economics ..."
|
| It would be more accurate to say "modern mainstream
| _economists_ ". To say "economics" here is a real failure
| on Wikipedia's moderation. Because what they're actually
| talking about, is the Austrian School of Economics [1]:
|
| > The Austrian school is a heterodox[1][2][3] school of
| economic thought that advocates strict adherence to
| methodological individualism,
|
| "Individualism" is the key part here because it betrays the
| intent, which is to disempower people from acting
| collectively, such as by forming unions. This is a key
| tenet of classical liberalism so an appeal to authority
| like "modern mainstream economics" we're really just saying
| "neoliberalism".
|
| Neoliberalism isn't a neutral account or critique of
| capitalism. It wholly embraces capitalism as a solution to
| all problems. Neoliberalism can pretty much be summed up as
| weaker/smaller government (because it hurts profits) and
| indivudalism (because collective action hurts profits).
|
| > 10,000 people digging holes should be more "valuable"
| than one guy designing a microchip
|
| That's an asinine example. I mean what hole are they
| digging? If it's the Panama Canal, that's pretty valuable.
| Also, the example of one person designing a chip goes to
| the heart of the problem that LTV addressses. What does
| that design do? Well, nothing. It only has value if you
| make something with it you can sell (or you sell it to
| someone who does). You want to fab it? Well, TSMC involves
| a lot of labor. ASML involves a lot of labor. The materials
| required require a lot of labor.
|
| Plus there's the issue that the chip design itself is
| intellectual property, which itself is an _enclosure_ (in
| the capitalist sense).
|
| Everything we as a society is so fundamentally
| interconnected that it's arbitrary and selective to
| attribute the value created to a tiny few. And it's done
| for the gain of the few at the expense of the many.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school_of_economics
| jujube3 wrote:
| Look. The LTV has been rejected by mainstream economists.
| And this has nothing to do with Austrian economics (which
| has also been rejected by mainstream economists, for
| different reasons.) Now of course, you may choose to
| disagree, and say they're all wrong! But that's the
| current academic consensus. That's an
| asinine example. I mean what hole are they digging? If
| it's the Panama Canal, that's pretty valuable.
|
| It might be more valuable if they used construction
| equipment to dig it, rather than shovels. But that would
| mean acknowledging that "value" is different from "labor
| cost," which apparently is impossible for you.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| Milton Friedman allegedly repeated
|
| "You don't understand, Mr. Friedman, this canal is a jobs
| program to provide work for as many men as possible."
|
| "Oh, I see. I thought you were trying to build a canal.
| If you really want to create jobs, then by all means give
| these men spoons, not shovels."
| greenie_beans wrote:
| This is a common misinterpretation of the labor theory of
| value. I understand it like this:
|
| I am a capitalist and my money goes to pay labor to create
| a thing that I sell in a market. The workers create thing
| in the production process. I have captured a portion of the
| labor's true value based on the market, bringing me profit
| - what Marx called "surplus value."
|
| I turn around and reinvest that profit into another
| business that brings me more profit. Rinse and repeat,
| forever.
|
| But that profit is nothing but a portion of the labor's
| true value as reflected in the market price, and therefore
| the labor created the value. The market did not create the
| value. The market decided on a price to pay for the value
| created by the labor.
|
| Much like "machines all the way down", value is labor all
| the way down.
| Aloisius wrote:
| That seems awfully.. tautological.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| good, glad i was able to get the point across...even for
| you! :~P
| 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.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Crony-capitalism _is_ capitalism, if you don 't fall for
| the no-true-Scotsman fallacy.
| positr0n wrote:
| We don't collectively contribute to save shareholders. When
| a bank goes under the depositors are made whole through
| government insurance programs. Shareholders get nothing.
|
| In 2008 I believe bailouts did go to companies to keep them
| afloat (and thus helped shareholders). However, TARP
| returned a small profit for the government, so it didn't
| end up being a gift of free money overall imo. (reasonable
| people can say that the bailouts were excessive and
| introduced moral hazard for sure).
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The Soviet system only was able to provide basic needs
| when it decided to overlook the black market. It also
| allowed farmers to farm owned plots of land and sell
| their produce as they saw fit. This was the only way to
| stop the mass starvation.
| bboygravity wrote:
| "some initial mistakes" is quite something to describe 9+
| million people dying from hunger in Ukraine during the
| great famine.
| aguaviva wrote:
| More careful historians, such as Snyder, put the figure
| at around 3.5 million.
|
| Doesn't detract from your overall point though, which is
| quite valid.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| And how many famines were there under the Tsars?
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Companies go bankrupt all the time.
|
| > Our economic system is predicated on withholding basic
| needs for profit.
|
| An economic system based on "to each according to his need"
| has been tried many times. It fails to deliver.
| fragmede wrote:
| > An economic system based on "to each according to his
| need" has been tried many times.
|
| Have there been any attempts since the rise of the
| smartphone and the Internet? I'm only aware of attempts
| that predate them and those two things have changed
| capitalistic societies dramatically, for better or worse.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I don't think they've changed the way free markets work.
| If anything, it makes them more productive because of the
| efficiency of having better information.
| fragmede wrote:
| Summarizing the past twenty-thirty years as "slightly
| more productive markets due to efficiency thanks to
| better information" might be oversimplifying things a
| bit, don't you think?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I can be much more productive these days because I have
| the information resources on the internet. In the early
| days, for example, I'd mail order books and wait weeks
| for them to arrive, and hope they had what I needed in
| them.
|
| I also collaborate with people all over the world. That
| simply wasn't possible in the 1980s. I'd mail floppy
| disks internationally, and would use the fax machine for
| communication (at a dollar a page!).
| gengwyn wrote:
| There _is_ risk to capital. The government does not bail
| out every business that fails. That 's ludicrous. Investors
| like VCs can and do lose their investments all the time
| with no government intervention whatsoever. An owner is
| also risking in terms of opportunity cost - time lost to
| starting a business and failing is inherently riskier than
| working with similar talents and investing in safer assets
| like index funds for the potential upside of higher returns
| if the business succeeds.
|
| Bootstrapped companies also come with risks to the
| founder's own capital and credit risk if loans are taken
| and the business fails to generate revenue to service them.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > If the business fails, the owner simply has less money or
| they have to become a worker.
|
| The fact that you consider "losing everything you've saved
| up for your entire life, plus what you've borrowed, and
| destroyed your ability to borrow more" as "simply" is...
| mind boggling to me. I would rather work for someone else
| than risk losing everything by starting my own business
| (plus I prefer to develop software rather than run a
| business); that risk is _way_ beyond what I'm comfortable
| with.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| there is a risk for the worker and renter, too. and
| opportunity costs.
|
| my shelter not being destroyed is extremely more important to
| me and my life than my landlord who has insurance for such
| things, especially in a place with a housing vacancy less
| than 1% (aka very very hard to find housing). if i leave,
| they will have no problem finding a tenant to take my place.
| any repairs and maintenance are essentially paid for by my
| rent. they raised property taxes? no problem, just raise
| rent...
|
| from my POV, seems like a low risk investment to be a
| landlord.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Places with 1% vacancy rates only exist when the government
| prevents more housing from being built, or makes it
| unprofitable to be a landlord.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Other than the risk of being evicted from your rental, a
| homeowner has most of the risks of a tenant, plus more. And
| there are a fair number of protections for renters to lower
| that risk. There are some risks of the landlord being a bad
| player, which makes the renter's life worse.
|
| The landlord has the risks that the renter doesn't (that a
| homeowner does); which is risk offloaded from the renter to
| the landlord. The landlord then has the risks of the tenant
| being a bad player, which can be extremely financially
| risky (worse than being fired from your job).
|
| > from my POV, seems like a low risk investment to be a
| landlord
|
| Your point of view is extremely far from the truth.
| Especially for landlords that have one or a few places they
| rent out, it can be extremely risky. Everything from
| tenants just deciding not to pay (and taking a year+ to
| evict) to a Pacific Heights situation, where the place is
| destroyed with no real recourse. Or, on the lower end,
| tenants just leaving the place in bad shape, with
| bugs/mice/whatever; that itself can cost tends of thousands
| of dollars to recover from.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| The nuance in this argument is that _everybody_ shares risk.
|
| Workers take risk not only of the financial kind (choosing to
| take a job at company A instead of B is a bet), as well as
| physical risk most times.
|
| If we believe shareholder of a oil company is taking more
| risk than the worker in a platform, we value capital more
| than labour.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Not to mention, non-owner workers still bear some risk by
| virtue of the fact that they can be terminated at any time
| without cause. This in itself is a financial risk, as being
| without employment or income for an extended period of time
| can be financially devastating.
|
| If we want to play the "risk grants ownership" game, then
| we have to be honest: at some point, the risk of the
| initial investment is paid off, and the risk the employees
| take on _collectively_ matches or exceeds the risk of the
| investors. If we 're being logically consistent, ownership
| would transfer as these risk pools shift. But we're not
| consistent, and our system doesn't value risk, it values
| capital.
| 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.)
| jmyeet wrote:
| > But there is very little value without tools.
|
| Did those tools magically come into existence? Or were they
| made? Who made them? More workers. Where did the materials
| come from? More workers.
|
| The point here is that everything we as a society do is so
| fundamentally interconnected that thousands of people
| contributed to pulling gold out of a mine, for example, both
| directly and through the tools that were created to make it
| possible then why are we concentrating the proceeds of this
| enterprise onto the capital owner who got a lease from the
| government (with the threat of violence backing it) just
| because they wrote a check to fund the operation?
|
| > ... there's a third party in the situation
|
| Yes, more products of labor.
|
| > I can't buy "the worker deserves it all"
|
| I don't believe you intended it this way but it reads as a
| false dichotomy.
|
| I don't expect radical change in our economic system. I would
| be happy to see more cooperatives for housing and
| manufacturing (like Mondragon). This requires some class
| consciousness and collective action.
|
| So much of our modern society deifies hyper-individualism.
| You ever wonder why that is? It's sold as "freedom" but it's
| really to manipulate you because there's a massive power
| imbalance between your employer and you. If you withhold
| work, most likely that employer will be fine. If that
| employer withholds work, you might end up homeless. The only
| way to counter that power imbalance is with collective
| action.
|
| Modern political discourse is dominated by manufactured
| culture war issues. This isn't new. Post-Civil War there was
| fear in the South of emancipated slaves and poor white people
| uniting [1].
|
| To be absolutely clear, I'm not accusing you of racism or
| similar. My point is to show how this is manufactured to
| divide workers. Even the idea of the "middle class" is
| intentionally divisive. Why do the interests of a white-
| collar (middle class) worker differ from a blue-collar (lower
| class) worker? Why are we making that distinction?
|
| [1]: https://bittersoutherner.com/from-the-southern-
| perspective/m...
| 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...
| Aloisius wrote:
| _> There is no value without labor._
|
| Yet wine is higher valued than grape juice.
|
| Value can clearly exist without labor.
| cylinder714 wrote:
| Winemaking requires _far_ more resources, labor, skill and
| time than simple grape juice production.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Resources and time are, obviously, not labor.
|
| Turning commodity grape juice into commodity wine requires
| no appreciable extra labor compared to the required labor
| to _prevent_ fermentation.
|
| The grape juice vs. wine is a rather classic
| counterexample, but it's hardly difficult to come up with
| any number of other examples of value absent labor.
| fragmede wrote:
| Winemaking _uses_ far more, but does it really have to?
| Does the $10,000 bottle of wine really that much more labor
| in it to justify that price? or are value and labor only
| loosely related? If I get lucky and find some diamonds on
| the ground, have I labored a lot for the value of those
| diamonds on my patch of dirt compared to your patch of
| dirt. There 's no value with absolutely zero labor, sure,
| but there's clearly a difference between a carpenter making
| 100 chairs, and a programmer making 100 copies of a program
| they wrote.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > There is no value without labor.
|
| True, but there is also no value without investment and risk.
| Marx's failure was ignoring the other two ingredients.
|
| Marxism is building a road with hundreds of laborers with
| shovels. Capitalism is one guy with a bulldozer.
|
| P.S. Cuba has no riches to steal.
| kylestlb wrote:
| Marx wrote a gigantic book called Capital and it provides a
| thorough analysis of investment and risk. He wrote a great
| deal of words describing how investment relates to surplus
| value (hint: investment is simply a capitalist's way of
| generating surplus value - profit, which is then used to
| generate more surplus value, which is... you understand the
| systemic contradiction here, I hope). You should probably
| read it if you want to discuss it!
| WalterBright wrote:
| I enjoyed reading Toliken's fantasy LODR very much, but my
| attempts at reading Marx's fantasies felt like hammering a
| nail into my skull.
|
| The attempts at implementing Marxism all ended in misery
| and famine. What more would anyone need to know about it?
|
| BTW, a capitalist investing money also entails risk. How it
| works is the more risk, the more potential reward. Does
| Marx account for risk? I ask that because the Marxists I
| hear never mention the essential role risk plays, they
| usually just assume there is no risk.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I haven't read Marx, nor do I particularly care to, but
| this seems like an endorsement for intellectual
| incuriosity.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There are so many interesting things to learn that are
| reality (like reading history books), why waste the
| precious remaining few years of my life reading books
| promoting nonsense?
|
| I read historical accounts about the Kennedy
| assassination, but don't waste my time on the conspiracy
| theory books. Nor do I bother with treatises on ancient
| aliens or UFOs. Or books on astrology, kirlian
| photography, ESP, flat earth, religions dogma, etc.
|
| If Marxism worked, I'd be more interested in it. But it
| doesn't, so why bother?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| If you've spent your entire life building an identity
| around opposing something, the least you can do is try to
| understand it.
| nec4b wrote:
| From the same genre I like Grimms' Fairy Tales more. They
| seem more realistic.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Cuba's riches are Florida's electoral votes, often hinging
| upon the sentiment of the exiles in Miami-Dade County. Plus,
| their whole cigar thing.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Surplus-value as a notion is frankly completely barking mad,
| and bred from a mix of multiple different fallacies mixed
| together including the labor theory of value.
|
| In what universe does water by the river cost the same as water
| in the middle of the Saharra desert? A plant worth the same
| whether it is local or highly exotic? Where buying lumber at
| $300 a cord to burn fair, but buying it for the same $300 a
| cord but operating a warehouse selling it for as so much as
| $301 a cord retroactively somehow robbing the lumberjack? The
| madhouse world of surplus-labor-value! Boy, if Lewis Carroll
| had a field day with imaginary numbers then he missed truly
| golden opportunities of exploring an utterly mental system
| which demands fixed globally perfect valuations to avoid
| exploitation!
| 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 relations 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 it figured 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.
| ertian wrote:
| The claim that work is inherently coercive is crazy to
| me. In order to live, we need food, clothing, shelter,
| comforts. Those take labor to produce. We've abstracted
| labor using money, allowing for specialization, so you
| can perform some specialized labor to provide for all
| your needs.
|
| The needs aren't _forced upon you_. They 're inherent.
| Labor is _required_ to meet the needs you must meet in
| order to live (and live in comfort). They 'd be needed
| even if no board of directors had ever sat in a meeting
| room. So who's coercing you? It's like a farmer hating
| his field: you're mad that companies 'make' you work to
| survive; a farmer might hate his field for 'making' him
| plant seeds to produce food.
|
| I don't get it. It seems delusional.
| harwoodjp wrote:
| Automation makes jobs unnecessary. We should build social
| infrastructure that allows people to pursue their
| passions with basic necessities guaranteed. This has been
| possible for awhile now.
| chongli wrote:
| Nonsense. You can't feed people with machines. You need
| raw materials and you need land to produce those
| materials from. That productive land is already owned by
| a bunch of people who currently use it to grow food and
| sell at market for profit.
|
| Are you proposing we seize their land? That's what the
| Soviets did. Millions died. With the weaponry we have
| today it could be hundreds of millions or billions. All
| for what? So people don't have to work?
|
| Now suppose we do collectivize all the farms, this time
| miraculously without killing everyone, and we
| successfully set up the automation to feed everyone
| (despite the fact that a lot of crops still need to be
| picked by hand due to a lack of robot technology). We
| still don't eliminate the need for work. There's tons of
| other stuff to be done. Building houses, computers,
| trains, planes, automobiles, and new factory robots.
| There's still tons of research going into all this stuff,
| maintenance and repair. People still need to do all this
| work. Who is going to pay them? Who is going to own what
| they produce?
|
| If I build a robot in my garage to automate harvesting
| the peppers I grow in my backyard, do I own it?
| harwoodjp wrote:
| > Are you proposing we seize their land?
|
| Not necessarily, but I think the workers should operate
| their farm democratically.
|
| > That's what the Soviets did
|
| The USSR was state capitalist. Workers' councils (or
| soviets) stopped being considered very early on.
|
| > If I build a robot in my garage to automate harvesting
| the peppers I grow in my backyard, do I own it?
|
| Yes, it's your personal property. Private property is
| something else.
| kaibee wrote:
| > Are you proposing we seize their land?
|
| And how did they come to own their land? You trace the
| claims back enough and it'll resolve to "some ancestor
| took it from someone else at the point of a spear". But
| we don't need to seize the land. A land value tax
| achieves the same goals while leaving in place all the
| nice free-market stuff you're talking about.
| chongli wrote:
| _And how did they come to own their land? You trace the
| claims back enough and it 'll resolve to "some ancestor
| took it from someone else at the point of a spear"._
|
| Yes, this falls under the same umbrella of theories that
| Nozick's rectification [1] falls under, where the same
| critiques and remedies apply.
|
| _A land value tax achieves the same goals while leaving
| in place all the nice free-market stuff you 're talking
| about._
|
| Now you're speaking my language. I'm fully on board with
| land value tax, as it purports to achieve many other
| goals that I value, such as fixing up a lot of
| dysfunctional city planning and development.
|
| [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nozick-
| political/#RecHisI...
| fragmede wrote:
| Only the poors need to. If you chose the right parents,
| you got a trust fund when you turned 18, and don't need
| to labor to afford life's necessities. There's just this
| spigot that gives you $5,000 a month, and you don't have
| to labor, ever. If rich kids get to live like that, why
| can't more people?
|
| If we oversimplify a human's needs into clothing, food,
| and a dwelling, and ignore the concept of money, the
| industrial revolution has made it so that humanity is
| able to produce enough of those for everybody. It then
| becomes a distribution and coordination problem rather
| than a problem of there not being enough for everybody.
| Of course, if we abolished money there would be other
| problems, so it's still delusional, but if 100 people can
| make enough food and shelter and clothing for 1000 people
| using machines, why do the other 900 need to sit in an an
| office making spreadsheets five days a week?
|
| It's not that simple, of course (because those machines
| have to come from somewhere), and homesteading is a
| thing, but it's food for thought.
| 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.
| mikrl wrote:
| >Of course, another big "collectivist capitalism" success story
| is China, which is also fiercely nationalist.
|
| Yugoslavia had a dynamic market socialist economy and was
| powerful enough to align against the USSR for decades, yet was
| multi ethnic.
|
| It suffered from the typical authoritarian weak succession and
| was ultimately destroyed by its resurgent ethnic nationalism.
| cholantesh wrote:
| >Mondragon sounds a lot like the kind of late 1800s / early
| 1900s syndicalism that later evolved into Italian fascism and
| German National Socialism.
|
| Sure, if you dishonestly use their slogans rather than policy
| decisions as your barometer. What actually happened is that
| fascists co-opted the language of the left and deployed it in
| service of entirely different ends.
| 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...
| positr0n wrote:
| What different effects do stock buybacks have on corporate
| governance compared to dividends?
|
| My understanding is both return $X/share of capital to
| shareholders, buybacks are just more tax efficient,
| flexible, and a little more difficult to see the direct
| effect of.
| devman0 wrote:
| Dividends get taxed immediately, so there is more
| pressure to reinvest profits in the company to find
| organic growth which is captured as capital gains
| instead. That reinvestment can take a lot of different
| forms like R&D, training, hiring, etc.
| positr0n wrote:
| Makes sense, but weren't you just saying that the desire
| for constant growth/capital gains is a bad thing?
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| > Having worked for a company, doesn't entitle anyone to
| remain on the paycheck until death, despite not working
| there anymore
|
| This arrangement is called a pension, and is still quite
| popular in areas of the world with strong workers rights.
| max_hoffmann wrote:
| Living in a country with strong workers rights, this is
| not how pensions work. The pensions people receive every
| month are literally paid by the taxes which are collected
| from everybody and every company during that month.
| Pensions are not saved money from companies you worked
| for, but money coming from the economy at the time of
| your retirement. It's a common misconception that the
| state has a big pile of pension money sitting somewhere
| that you then get your pension from. That's just not how
| it works in reality. Another difference from pensions to
| receiving money from a company just by owning parts of
| it, is also that you don't continue to be on a company's
| paycheck when you quit. You need to reach a certain age
| to receive money and you get that money from the state,
| not the companies you worked for. That's how pensions
| work.
| defrost wrote:
| > The pensions people receive every month are literally
| paid by the taxes which are collected from everybody and
| every company during that month.
|
| That might be how _your_ pension works.
|
| Other pension schemes; eg Singapores and some other
| former and current commonwealth countries pay pension
| from the returns from 60 odd years of compulsary
| investment and additional supplementary investment.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Provident_Fund
|
| https://www.expatica.com/sg/finance/retirement/singapore-
| pen...
|
| "Returns from an investment fund" are not the same as
| "taxes collected monthly", money, being fungible, can
| make it seem that way.
| max_hoffmann wrote:
| That doesn't change the fact that every month there are
| people putting money into that fund and people getting
| money out of that fund. The money you put in, is not the
| same money you get out of it. It's still money that
| people working at that time, put into that fund. Nobody
| has their own personal savings account inside that fund.
| You only have a legal claim to a share of that fund once
| you retire, but that's not the money from your paychecks
| and it's not saved somewhere for you. A pension fund is
| not a collection of private pensions and it's better that
| way. Because with inflation, your pension can increase,
| even though you didn't "put in" that amount of money when
| you were still working. The government is able to
| increase pensions by shifting money from other parts of
| its balance sheet or by increasing debts or taxes to meet
| the pension demand. I'm sorry for Singapore if their
| state system works more like a private pension, because
| you don't know how long you'll live past retirement age,
| so you either take too much or too little out of that
| fund once you have retired and there is no adjustment for
| inflation. Yes, there are bad private pension systems.
| That doesn't change the fact that you benefit more
| working in a worker-owned compay than in a solely-owned
| company.
| 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.
| abeppu wrote:
| I think you may be too committed to dogmatic stances to
| constructively discuss other possibilities. I think this
| is no better when it's from the collectivist side than
| when it's from the capitalist fundamentalists.
|
| > Cooperative guarantee that profit is owned by the
| people who create it.
|
| I don't think all the value created by workers is
| realized as profit immediately. Workers can create value
| which only shows up in contributions to revenue much
| later. If you and your coworkers figured out the design
| and manufacturing process for a new product and the
| product only goes to market after you retired, you helped
| create the profits even if they arrive after you left the
| firm.
|
| If the coop structure as you narrowly define it doesn't
| allow workers to receive the profits of their labor in
| industries that have a long time to market or R&D cycle,
| then isn't that a recipe for those high value industries
| to be inaccessible to coops?
|
| Try to imagine an alternate history where Nvidia was a
| coop. A lot of the value behind its current high revenue
| was done many years ago. Cuda was released in 2007. I
| don't know how much of the hardware has inherited from
| older designs. If only current workers benefit from the
| current high sales, has the organization really ensured
| that "profit is owned by the people who create it"? That
| seems implausible.
| lishzen wrote:
| I understood from the article that workers remain working
| for the coop (possibly in different companies) until they
| retire, and then, the coop provides them with pensions;
| so they continue to receive value after retirement.
| chongli wrote:
| What if they pass away? I assume their shares are sold
| immediately and the money paid out to their estate.
|
| Now suppose that all the work they did was in the R&D
| phase (and fundamental to the project) but the final
| product had not been released at the time of death of the
| contributor -- so the profits had not been realized --
| thus the payout on those shares would be a small fraction
| of their true valuation.
|
| Imagine if a novelist died just after submitting their
| final draft to their editor but prior to the book's
| publication. Forcing the estate to sell off the book
| before it had a chance to hit the shelves -- and become a
| bestseller -- would be an outrage, yet the rigid nature
| of worker co-ops (cessation of work forces the sale of
| shares) guarantees this.
| max_hoffmann wrote:
| Where's the cooperative in your example? Either you are a
| freelance author who has a contract with a publishing
| cooperative. In this case you have a contract with that
| cooperative and during the negotation process both sides
| decide together what happens in case of death before
| publication. Or you are an author inside a publishing
| cooperative, so you own part of that cooperative and
| decide together with the other authors, publishers etc.
| what will happen, if somebody dies before the publication
| of their book. In both cases the author is part of the
| decision of what should happen in case of an early death.
| chongli wrote:
| The example way above was NVIDIA. Suppose the person who
| passed away was one of the founding researchers at the
| NVIDIA worker coop. They developed most of the key
| technologies that go into a graphics card, but they died
| during the later stages of production ramp up, before the
| first GPUs are able to hit the market.
|
| The issue is that the deceased researcher's contribution
| to the project may be so central and foundational that
| they may be entitled to a large plurality (or even
| majority) stake, but forcing the other worker-owners to
| buy out that stake to pay the estate would bankrupt the
| coop at this critical pre-production stage. Since only
| active workers are allowed to maintain ownership,
| allowing the estate to retain those shares and later
| receive dividends on future profits is off the table.
| This issue seems to tie everyone's hands and sound the
| death knell for the coop.
|
| The novelist case was meant to show an extreme non-coop
| situation. I don't see any compelling reason for writers
| of books to join coops, since the writing of the book is
| the only hard part these days (and countless ways to
| self-publish exist).
| max_hoffmann wrote:
| > I don't think all the value created by workers is
| realized as profit immediately.
|
| And as the worker creating that future profit you are
| very well aware of that, plus everyone else working on
| the design and manufacturing is in the same situation as
| yourself. The good news is: all of you are also owners of
| the company. So together you can decide how an exit
| package should look like for people deciding to leave
| before the design reaches the market and generates
| profit.
|
| The same situation in a non-cooperative is a lot worse,
| because you have no stake in the company. The owner might
| be willing to negotiate an exit package before you even
| start working there, but they also might not. Plus before
| working at the company, you have no idea what the profit
| margins look like and what you might be working on. It's
| the worst time for you to agree on an exit pacakge. Also
| during employment you are in a worse position, because
| the owner(s) can just let you go, if you are the only one
| asking for your fair share of future profits. You don't
| have a say in the company. Most often they see your
| current salary as your share of the profit, no matter how
| much profit your design might create in the future.
| 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?
| mikojan wrote:
| > ... so it's not ownership, right?
|
| "Ownership" as in: You control it, and you ought to control it,
| too.
|
| Control is exercised by means of the democratic process (the
| worst type of process except for all others).
| 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.
| cies wrote:
| In that case i just want to clarify it to others who may
| read it.
| 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.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I do feel like you've framed this as dichotomy: you either have
| a capitalist system or you have an autocratic centralized
| government.
|
| Many socialist democrats (or democratic socialist, whatever
| your flavour) believe that collectivism need not be autocratic
| and all encompassing. The negative aspects you're describing,
| in my opinion, are the results of the fascistic elements of an
| autocratic communist regime. "The Fascist conception of the
| State is all-embracing..." and so on.
|
| The liberty that open democracy promises is resistant (but not
| immune) to the kind of coercion you've correctly identified as
| being characteristic of the Soviet system.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The kibbutzim are failures propped up by generous government
| subsidies, using money taxed from capitalist businesses.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| It's not clear to me how this model can be meaningfully
| replicated. For instance corporations naturally minimize their
| labor costs according to the relative economic leverage of the
| participants often to the point of poverty vs those with little
| leverage whereas a cooperative would seem to be inclined
| towards decency at the cost of maximal profit.
|
| This difference in profit is invested back into the company in
| terms of capital investment and lower prices allowing more
| capitalist exploitive corporations to out compete and
| ultimately buy or destroy coops.
|
| Coops that exist in very small not very profitable niches may
| survive in the form of small businesses that make enough to
| survive but not to thrive its hard to see how this has any
| effect on the other 99.99% of the economy where most people are
| obligated to live.
| 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...
| cies wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Sure, that would be great. But what can govt do today to
| incentivize that?
|
| I'd say just relax (tax) law on w-coops to incentivize them
| compared to the less favorable forms of incorporation.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Especially in Canada, where capital is tight and
| productivity is low, I think incentivizing co-ops is a
| great idea.
|
| The Canadian gov't offers some grants for co-ops, but
| they are a pittance. Making debt cheaper for co-ops
| relative to corps (maybe via additional tax breaks on
| interest?) is, I think super important.
| Gaessaki wrote:
| Quebec probably has the single best cooperative financing
| ecosystem in the world (1B+$). There's a need for more
| risk-driven investment instruments in the sector however
| to seed early stage ventures. Most of the funds end up
| getting reinvested in existing cooperatives who can
| already access traditional funding.
| cies wrote:
| What do you mean by trad funding? Loans? Bonds? Equity
| investments?
| Gaessaki wrote:
| Mainly debt instruments (loans, lines of credit, etc.)
| and occasionally preferred shares.
| 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.
| cies wrote:
| If you invest you want some control. The law is very clear
| (lots of preceding cases) on your power as an investor in
| case of equity investments. In case of w-coop investment
| constructions as you mention the law is very unclear. Hence
| usually they start with basic loans (sometimes that the
| initial workers bare some responsibility for) or gifts.
|
| I agree with many VC-backed startups develop toxic
| behavior.
| waldothedog wrote:
| This is possible. I work at a worker owned cooperative with
| roughly this model.
| 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.
| SamWhited wrote:
| Start.coop (https://www.start.coop/) comes to mind, but I know
| I've read about others as well. I don't recall what their exact
| model is, so it likely doesn't match perfectly with what you're
| describing.
| 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.
| keyle wrote:
| Thanks for the book idea '2312', will check it out.
| 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?
| harwoodjp wrote:
| Why don't workers unite to democratically manage production?
| The police, propaganda, wage slavery.
| nyokodo wrote:
| > Why don't workers unite to democratically manage
| production?
|
| Because the majority of workers are doing the minimum
| amount of work to get by, because ~50% of workers are below
| average intelligence, because those with the
| entrepreneurial skill and/or business management competence
| necessary to make this happen benefit more from the current
| system and have less motivation to mess with it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There have been over 20,000 communes set up in the US. They
| are not illegal. Pick one and join it. Or set your own up.
| harwoodjp wrote:
| Socialism is seizing the workplace from the capitalist.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The problem with a system based on taking is that one
| runs out of things to take.
|
| Better to have a system based on creating things.
| harwoodjp wrote:
| Well actually socialism has been historically concerned
| with maximizing human creativity. Fourier's utopian
| vision was "libidinal" work that aligns passions with
| labor. Marcuse has a similar view in Eros and
| Civilization. Chomsky views creativity as axiomatic for
| humans, and syndicalism the appropriate system for
| harnessing it.
| max_hoffmann wrote:
| That's why cooperatism is superior to socialism and
| capitalism. It's a free market of worker-owned companies,
| creating things by running their businesses together.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's not a free market if you do not allow capitalism to
| exist.
|
| Note that capitalism does not exclude worker-owned
| companies at all. You're free to start one.
| KingMob wrote:
| > The problem with a system based on taking is that one
| runs out of things to take.
|
| Pretty damning critique of capitalists there, comrade.
| WalterBright wrote:
| What was America like before capitalists? and after?
| Where did all that wealth come from, comrade?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Did you know there used to be people who lived on that
| land
| WalterBright wrote:
| I missed the railroads, steel industries, chip
| manufacturers, iphones, etc. that were looted from those
| people?
|
| BTW, studies of the bones of pre-Columbian Indians shows
| they worked hard and suffered from periodic famines, as
| well as a lot of violence.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Therein lies the commonality between all economic
| systems: where there are people, there is the taking.
|
| Industries tend to require raw materials, which many
| times are located in or around land.
| trhway wrote:
| They don't allow genuine innovation in any shape or form, and
| that in particular leads to highjacking by bureaucrats and
| degradation. So they may work in short term (work for some at
| the price of oppressing the ones who don't fit well into the
| collective) - I'm from USSR for example - yet the result is
| predetermined.
| dbingham wrote:
| That is flatly false. Worker cooperatives are every bit as
| innovative as any other form of private corporation. These
| are owned by workers not a centralized government. There
| are quite a few of them and you may well have purchased
| their products with it even realizing it. Two additional
| examples you may have encountered are Equal Exchange and
| King Arthur Flour.
|
| There aren't more of them because they have a hell of a
| time securing financing when most businesses are financed
| through equity sales which they can't do.
| trhway wrote:
| Example of innovation please. I've seen first hand that
| no collective farm is able to produce nor SpaceX nor even
| EV nor even plant in time and harvest in time.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'm not close enough to manufacturing to evaluate how
| innovative their approaches to factory automation are,
| but it's not like they're based solely on turnips:
|
| https://www.mondragon-assembly.com/automotive/
| mikojan wrote:
| The collective farm that produced SpaceX is the United
| States Government. It carried out all the research and
| development necessary to create and further the North
| American space program. And it is existential in
| furthering it to this day. Without this source of
| contracts, research projects and income SpaceX would not
| be able to produce its commercial spin-off products.
| trhway wrote:
| You obviously never been to a collective farm.
|
| Despite government support to the extent much larger than
| that for SpaceX collective farms have nothing to show for
| it.
| immibis wrote:
| Maybe because they are farms and not rocket makers
| trhway wrote:
| Why they are farms and not rocket makers? Because
| collective.
| nl wrote:
| But there are very successful rocketry collectives! They
| just typically aren't called "farms".
|
| Things like Friends of Amateur Rocketry have all the
| characteristics of a collective (including legal status)
| https://friendsofamateurrocketry.org/
|
| The constraining factor is typically budget (as mentioned
| up-thread).
| immibis wrote:
| By this logic capitalism is the thing holding back
| capitalist farms from being rocket makers too? Or do you
| only apply it when you get to use the word "collective"?
| trhway wrote:
| Of course it is the logic of collective. In capitalism
| you decide how you'd want to spend your resources, on a
| farm or on a rocket. In collective it is collective who
| decides.
| immibis wrote:
| Capitalist farms - why are they farms and not rocket
| makers? Is capitalism holding them back?
| trhway wrote:
| In capitalism it is your choice how to spend your
| resources - on the farm or on a rocket shop.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| That's not an excuse. In socialist Czechoslovakia, a coop
| farm produced computers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JZD_Slu%C5%A1ovice#TNS_Comp
| ute...
| soulofmischief wrote:
| It looks like this system was created out of necessity;
| there was no viable product for what they needed.
| Necessity _is_ the mother of innovation after all, and we
| find this sorts of innovation frequently in non-
| collectivized entrepreneurships as well. Still, very
| cool!
| WalterBright wrote:
| If it weren't for the Wright Brothers, NASA would never
| have existed.
| mikojan wrote:
| Maybe so but I am not arguing with that. The original
| claim is much weaker: No "collective" produces
| innovation.
| immibis wrote:
| Open source software
| nl wrote:
| There are multiple Kibbutz in Israel that plant and
| harvest on time and are the major source of innovation
| for Israel's AgTech sector (which is only behind the US
| in terms successful startups).
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > most businesses are financed through equity sales
|
| Can you explain this more? As I understand, after equity
| IPO, most companies use debt capital markets to raise
| money to expand their business.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| You've just changed my brand of flour, thanks.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| It seems a bit premature to speak so generally about
| collectivism. It's quite possible that the USSR failed for
| reasons that do not apply to Mondragon.
|
| Maybe once we've seen a few hundred of these come and go
| it'll be time for a general theory of their kind.
| trhway wrote:
| >It seems a bit premature to speak so generally about
| collectivism
|
| 2B people spent better part of 20th century doing the
| experiments, killing tens of millions of those who didn't
| completely shared the ideas of the collective, and you
| think it is premature?
|
| General theory is in the Das Kapital. So far the things
| have worked as described. People by mistake ascribe
| happiness to the outcomes calculated there while there is
| no such happiness predicted by that theory. Ie communism
| isn't a happy place like some naive readers think,
| communism is prison and oppression.
| defrost wrote:
| Wasn't the USSR quite open about not being communist and
| at best _working_ towards "socialism" as a pathway
| towards communism?
|
| Surely the USSR is an example of the pigs pulling a bait
| and switch rather than communism.
|
| The failure of the USSR to achieve communism is a side
| show to all the variations on worker | producer
| collectives that didn't fall to Stalinism.
| max_hoffmann wrote:
| Totally. The USSR had no worker-owned companies. They all
| belonged to the state. There was no economy which is
| based on cooperatives in a free market, yet.
| kaibee wrote:
| I think we can also say that the former USSR has also
| failed to achieve capitalism despite having 30 years to
| do it. So maybe there's some other factors at play.
| gaadd33 wrote:
| Mondragon has lasted 68 years and I believe the USSR had
| lasted 69 years. Why do you think they will fail in the
| next year? Also given the speed of advancement has
| increased in the past 30+ years, it seems like they have
| kept pace a lot better than the USSR (or it's successor
| Russia)
|
| Or have you worked there and this is first hand?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I don't think the USSR is a great example. The region has
| been under the thumb of authoritarian dictators for a 1000
| years and those who most strongly disagreed with this have
| for that millennium either left or died leaving behind a
| nation largely populated by the children of people willing
| to go along to get along under such a system. Cultures and
| circumstances leave a mark on a people not least by the
| process by which survivors are selected.
|
| If anything the current situation stands to worsen that
| situation with smart young people who might contribute to a
| better future dying or fleeing.
| captainbland wrote:
| There are a few. There's a tech coop federation in the UK for
| instance. A big hurdle for efforts like this is access to
| finance meaning they often have to be bootstrapped.
| mikojan wrote:
| I do not believe it is necessarily about that.
|
| It might be a lack of education (not a value statement).
| Socialism in Spain was not established at once. It was an
| effort spanning many decades.
|
| If we would suddenly find ourselves in a medieval kingdom we
| would certainly need time (and help) to adapt to that system.
| Likewise, people from that period would need time (and help)
| to adapt to ours. Regardless of whether it is better.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Note that Mondragon is not a socialist enterprise. It's not
| obvious to me whether you're saying it is, but I think one
| of the interesting things about Mondragon is that it's
| somewhere in between the socialist-capitalist dichotomy. If
| you came along and said "good news, the state is in charge
| of all your businesses now" they would not consider their
| mission accomplished.
| mikojan wrote:
| Socialism traditionally meant workers control over
| production. To the degree that Mondragon is democratic it
| is socialist.
|
| Socialism came to be commonly associated with "State-
| capitalist monopoly" (Lenin) later in the 20th century
| but that does not describe revolutionary Spain at all.
|
| There companies were mostly worker owned, democratically
| managed and freely associated within democratic regional
| and industrial cartels representing consumers' and
| producers' interests respectively. Highly advanced
| democratic systems. Larger companies were expropriated
| compulsory. Yes. But they were transferred into the
| ownership of the workforce. While smaller companies
| generally were free to operate as "private" enterprises
| though at a certain size that rarely made sense because
| all of industry was structured to serve democratically
| managed industrial operations.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Socialism is about social control over production, _not_
| worker control. That 's the big difference here, so it's
| relevant to point out. A co-op gives you worker control
| within the framework of a private ownership society.
| mikojan wrote:
| Workers control over production was the objective of
| virtually every popular (socialist) movement well into
| the 20th century.
|
| Even Lenin propagandized "All power to the soviets!"
| because his coup d'etat would have been impossible
| without popular support.
| Aunche wrote:
| When you start a co-op, just like any other bootstrapped
| business, you're staking your livelihood, but you're forgoing
| most of the upside. You also need several other people to
| agree with you. This screens out most of the risk, which is
| why they're perceived as working well. This works out great
| if you're lucky enough to be employed by one, but not great
| for people who need a job immediately.
| davidw wrote:
| That's a good question and it seems like it's difficult to
| separate from people's ideological ideas about whether they
| are good or bad.
|
| My hometown in Oregon had a cooperative, Burley, that made
| bike stuff like trailers and tandems and some clothing. Word
| was that it was kind of dysfunctional because of how
| democratic it was even if all the people cared deeply. I
| think they finally ended up selling out to some outfit who
| scrapped everything but the trailers.
| nataliste wrote:
| The paradox of worker-coops is that workers capable of
| successfully running businesses together are also capable of
| running businesses independently, so there's no need to form
| a co-op. It's those incapable of running a business
| individually or collectively that then form co-ops. Mondragon
| is the exception, not the rule.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Put another way: Singers who aren't good enough to make it
| on their own form large idol groups (eg: AKB 48) to sell
| themselves, while those who are become stars on their own
| or form small bands with others of similar success.
|
| Or to put it another way: Ground meat is great, but the
| components thereof by themselves are generally regarded as
| waste.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| This whole train of metaphors is just bizarre and wrong.
| Singers who aren't good enough to make it on their own
| are never heard of or discussed. Ground meat made from
| poor quality meat is poor quality ground meat, and people
| do, in fact, grind the good stuff to make good stuff.
|
| And I'm sure that plenty of people who could start a
| business on their own could start a business with the
| help and support of like-minded partners, and might even
| be better off for it. I'm not sure where we get the idea
| that founders must be lone-wolf savants.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >Singers who aren't good enough to make it on their own
| are never heard of or discussed.
|
| Correct. I've definitely heard of AKB 48 and other idol
| groups; I have never heard anything concerning any
| specific member of one other than randomly showing up on
| a cheap variety show long after they retired
| ("graduated") from showbiz.
|
| >Ground meat made from poor quality meat is poor quality
| ground meat
|
| But it's generally preferable to the poor quality
| component meats, which was what I tried to allude to.
|
| >people who could start a business on their own could
| start a business with the help and support of like-minded
| partners,
|
| People with the chops to become founders on their own can
| also become co-founders joining with other similar
| people.
|
| People without the chops _can 't_ become founders without
| joining others to become co-founders.
|
| Basically: All apples are fruits, but not all fruits are
| apples.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Cooperation is difficult and does not scale well. One
| selfish person can act selfishly alone. But one cooperative
| person first needs to find someone else to cooperate
| with... and the other person also needs to have compatible
| skills and values... so it is often easier for the
| cooperative person to just give up, and work to make
| someone else rich.
|
| And the more difficult project you have, the more extreme
| this gets. If it is something that most people could do, it
| is easy for the cooperative people to find each other. It
| if it something that only one person in a thousand can do,
| the one-in-a-thousand cooperative person will have a huge
| problem finding the rest of the team.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Considering that I just started one, the reason is, nobody
| will fund it
|
| Why? Everybody with the money to start it, wants more money
| or special tax treatment via charity.
|
| I'm actively funding ours myself for 0% return in order to
| bootstrap the infrastructure we need
| SamWhited wrote:
| There are more of them, but good design "just works" and so
| goes mostly unnoticed.
|
| Actually, I wonder if there's a word for this effect?
| gradschoolfail wrote:
| A comment below suggests that they have a hard time
| recruiting engineers, but I believe also experts and talent
| in general..
|
| There's then also something deeper about making the trade-off
| between growth(rate) and stability..
|
| OTOH photographer coops are quite common, here is a famous
| one https://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Magnum_Photos
| gaadd33 wrote:
| Does the Basque region produce more engineers than other
| areas? I'm guessing their issue is more tied to the
| demographics of the area they are in and less of the
| compensation side of things. It's far harder to commit to a
| coop where your contribution is valued thousands of miles
| away and you don't have the immediate stake in things (e.g.
| your bar, bakery, barber, etc)
| gradschoolfail wrote:
| You are probably right.
|
| However, if your issues are tied to local
| characteristics, then (in maybe an abstract way) you
| still have another fundamental obstacle to scalability,
| not related to compensation..
|
| (FWIW i think an interesting related question is whether
| YC might be able to scale outside SF if they werent so
| into the slogan "do things that dont scale" -- which i
| sometimes interpret as the viridical paradox "scale by
| not scaling")
| anon291 wrote:
| Realistically Mondragon is rooted in Catholic social teaching
| (founded by a priest). Thus it requires someone to be
| motivated by something other than money. Religion is one of
| the few things that will be able to inspire such amounts of
| work while forgoing most economic upside.
|
| Maybe nationalism can do that, but keep in mind that when
| this was combined with nationalism we got Nazism (Nazism took
| lots of inspiration from Austrian corporatism which was
| similarly influenced by Catholic social teaching here). I'm
| not sure it's either safe or advisable to do this aside from
| religion
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| >anarcho-syndicalist
|
| I'm sure 99% of people first heard this term in the famous Holy
| Grail bit. I have never seen it used in the wild. Thanks!
| kragen wrote:
| you are overestimating the degree to which your personal
| social group is typical in the world by probably about a
| factor of 100
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I think you misunderstood. I said if someone has heard the
| term "anarcho-syndicalist", there is a very high chance
| it's from the Holy Grial. Not 99% of people in the world
| are familiar with the term.
| kragen wrote:
| you're still overestimating how much you know about the
| world, by a lot. in the spanish-speaking world, for
| example, anarcho-syndicalism is much better known than
| monty python (though, not among programmers, because they
| speak english and write python). and i'm guessing that
| monty python isn't that widely known among arabic
| speakers, russian speakers, and chinese speakers, while
| anarcho-syndicalism is a significant historical strain of
| socialism a significant number of them are acquainted
| with
|
| making _any_ statement about 99% of the people who have
| heard of anarcho-syndicalism represents a staggering
| degree of unconcern for veracity, given how hard it is to
| get a handle on that group
| throwaway48540 wrote:
| Monty Python is well known in Eastern Europe, much more
| than anarcho syndicalism.
| kragen wrote:
| i appreciate the additional information! are they funny
| in romanian?
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Probably more influenced by the Falange driving against classic
| capital and communist analogs. This was setup under Franco's
| Spain.
| tecleandor wrote:
| But not BY Franco. Note in the article how the government
| removes social security support from the coops and they have
| to set up healthcare themselves.
|
| Arizmendiarrieta wasn't a Franco follower at all. He fought
| with the Republicans and went to jail during the war. After
| that stopped writing in Basque, as that wasn't seen with good
| eyes in Franco times.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Frankly, people fight on all sides during wars. 20 years
| later, life goes on. Franco's government was in favor of
| co-ops and they flourished under his government.
|
| Work syndicates, cooperatives are absolutely in line with
| the Falange. Straight out of the 26 points
|
| "We seek redistributing arable land in such a way as to
| revive family farms and give energetic encouragement to the
| syndicalization of farm laborers"
| qrush wrote:
| Just wanted to flag that there are areas in the US that co-
| operative enterprises do flourish and have knock-on effects. This
| is biased by my food co-operative experience but just to show
| that there is an alternative to unfettered capitalism where
| businesses help each other thrive.
|
| - The Minneapolis/St. Paul region has so many food co-ops that
| there's a co-operative warehouse dedicated to serving them (and
| other businesses too) https://www.cpw.coop/
|
| - New England has a multitude of 30-40 year old food co-ops
| (along with startups like mine) and has its own association of
| food co-ops to help advocate for better state policy/governance
| http://nfca.coop/
|
| - National Co-op Grocers is a US-wide group that helps co-ops buy
| food at cheaper rates and provides a ton of great branding food
| co-ops who are members get to use https://www.grocery.coop/
|
| I'd love to see more tech co-operatives sprout up someday...
| there is an alternative to VC that keeps ownership equal, and
| it's been all around us this whole time!
| disqard wrote:
| Are there any resources for learning about tech co-operatives
| in the USA?
|
| Do you happen to know any (specifically in tech), that you
| would recommend?
|
| Thanks!
| qrush wrote:
| I still need to finish reading it, but this was published
| last year on the topic:
| https://www.versobooks.com/products/2839-own-this
| jszymborski wrote:
| If:
|
| 1 - Cooperatives excite you and
|
| 2 - You use social media
|
| you might want to look at the social.coop Mastodon instance (or
| cosocial.ca if you're Canadian).
|
| Not only has the community on both those sites been a breath of
| total fresh air for me, I am not worried about the server I'm on
| having decide between disappearing and selling ads, and I feel
| like I'm partaking in a social enterprise.
|
| Just recently social.coop had an open vote on how to donate some
| of our surplus to the open software we use and organizations that
| promote cooperation. It's been so nice to see and be apart of.
| fragmede wrote:
| That's neat! How is it funded?
| SamWhited wrote:
| By the members; we all pay a tiny bit into the co-op each
| month. Most people pay 1 USD or GBP per month, if you use
| some of the other services we offer through organizational
| memberships in other co-ops (ie. we're a member of meet.coop
| for video calls, May First Co-op for Nextcloud and email and
| what not, etc.) then some people pay a bit more (normally no
| more than 3 to 5 USD or GBP).
| rglullis wrote:
| Beware of social washing to justify higher costs.
|
| cosocial.ca charges CA$50 for its annual membership. Omg.lol
| charges $20/year for Mastodon and a bunch of services and for
| $29/year, I can offer Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix and Funkwhale,
| with 250GB of storage.
| jszymborski wrote:
| It's not "social washing" if it's actually a working co-
| operative.
|
| We all collectively own the funds, and if we ever want to
| lower yearly rates or pay our members dividends from
| surpluses, members are free to put it to a vote.
|
| Part of the reason we run a surplus is to deal with any
| unexpected costs (they don't just scale with users, but also
| the popularity of users on our server), but FWIW I think we
| should open up a pay-what-you-can tier much like social.coop
| has. Thanks for reminding me, I'll send it to the coop for
| consideration.
| rglullis wrote:
| What would be the point of "paying dividends from
| surpluses", if the funds are getting in and out of the same
| (collective) pockets?
|
| And if "everyone" owns the coop, then why do you need to
| get the surplus in the first place? Seems to be it would be
| just fine to say "Every month we run a report of the total
| expenses, and every member pays an equal share".
| debo_ wrote:
| I love how this article about a co-op that values workers opens
| with a clearly AI-generated image that is indirectly derived from
| the effort of many unpaid artists.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Just like those artists have benefited from the unpaid effort
| of their ancestors who invented fire. Please let's stop acting
| as if contributing to civilization is some kind of horrible
| injustice.
|
| If you make a picture and someone steals it, okay that's not
| fair. If you make a picture and someone makes a copy, also not
| fair. But if you and million others make pictures, and someone
| else looks at them and _learns_ how to make their own
| pictures... that 's basically how people were doing it since
| ever. Except now this process can also be automated.
|
| Every artist who never studied the art of others, and invented
| their own style from scratch, has a right to complain, of
| course.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > Mondragon provides us with a successful, working model. It's
| not throwing out capitalism, it's creating a better form of it.
|
| Can any people from this region tell us what the downsides of
| working for Mondragon are? The article only touched on lower pay.
|
| Also how much does the President of the parent Mondragon Corp get
| paid? The often cited 6:1 or 9:1 lowest paid worker to CEO seems
| to be applied to CEOs of the various corporations not the
| president of the parent company.
| jonnybgood wrote:
| In the OP:
|
| "Lorenzo estimates that the president of Mondragon is the
| highest-paid position (level 6) with a salary of around
| EUR200,000. Managers and directors earn between EUR80,000 and
| EUR120,000."
| ericd wrote:
| So the president makes less than a middle manager in a
| Fortune 500 company. I hope there are some other benefits...
| SamWhited wrote:
| The article talks about this extensively; both the
| benefits, and the difficulty hiring American workers
| because of our (I'm assuming "our", but I suppose I don't
| know, there are plenty of other countries with similar
| cultural norms) more individual, selfish, culture.
| ericd wrote:
| Well I said that because being an exec tends to be much
| more stressful, and I saw the discussion about the
| difficulty in hiring engineers abroad, but not about the
| execs. But maybe it's less stressful in a democratically
| run company where employees vote on plans.
| Aloisius wrote:
| The vast majority of Mondragon's revenue comes from foreign
| subsidiaries which, notably, are not worker-owned nor run
| democratically.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Its interesting that Rojava wasn't mentioned here. After driving
| out Islamic State, they founded their own country in north east
| Syria, not widely internationally recognised yet but functioning
| much better than the rest of Syria.
|
| They are still a developing country and by no means wealthy, but
| the average income in this area is double what it is in the rest
| of the country.
|
| Their economy is built almost entirely on cooperatives. The
| government provides land and seed funding to get the cooperatives
| going https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/the-social-economy-of-
| roja...
| cholantesh wrote:
| Might be because since 2019 and the withdrawal of the US
| military presence in NE Syria, the relative prosperity of
| Rojava has plummeted. This draws into question exactly how
| 'autonomous' said autonomous zone was.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Yeah that's on of the things that get hand-wavity when you
| bring up these city-state type plans as well as anarcho-
| whatevers. They generally wouldn't be big enough to defend
| themselves from religious extremists or nation states acting
| against them--many of them not even figuring in defense
| against other entities and saying "we're pacifists". That
| kind of stuff only works when external factors like
| aggressive neighbors don't figure in.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I mean, if you're going to make that kind of political
| argument you can claim that Western Europe's postwar
| prosperity and relatively strong welfare states are a by-
| product of America footing the bill for defense (plus the
| seed investment of the Marshall Plan).
| cholantesh wrote:
| That, and surplus value extraction from the global south,
| yes.
| jamil7 wrote:
| This is downvoted maybe due to its tone but I understand
| the general point here to be a valid and known issue with
| anarchist communities?
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Most models include various types of People's Militia. YPJ
| is the military of Rojava. Interestingly, it's a military
| without a hierarchy, just individual teams with some basic
| coordination.
|
| Yet with this they were able to beat ISIS when others had
| failed.
| darby_nine wrote:
| > This draws into question exactly how 'autonomous' said
| autonomous zone was.
|
| It seems like you're conflating sovereignty with economic
| dependence, which are two distinct concepts--being entirely
| economic independent seems highly geographically dependent.
| Few regions in the world are lucky enough to even have this
| option. For instance, you can be economically dependent on
| neighbors but still locally determine who runs the local
| courts. So it's not great evidence of how their society is
| run, particularly when other states--say, Afghanistan, where
| the current government has clearly exercised local
| sovereignty--have similarly been affected by the withdrawal
| of US troops and the seizing of assets.
| acoard wrote:
| To be fair, reality can often conflate those two concepts
| too. What I mean is that in some cases a lack of
| sovereignty can lead to economic catastrophe if people are
| willing to pillage your economy by force. As you note it
| depends on circumstance though - Lichtenstein can get away
| without having an army; Rojava can't.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| Seems to be not only a Spanish but a predominantly Basque
| enterprise. Cooperatives are relatively huge in Italy, too
| https://coops4dev.coop/en/4deveurope/italy Although the structure
| is a bit less monolithic than Mondragon.
| nickpinkston wrote:
| I've studied and visited Mondragon before, and hosted their
| students at my company. It's very cool, but I'm unsure how
| replicable the model really is.
|
| My conclusion is that it emerged out of the unique environment of
| already high Basque solidarity, but even more so under Franco's
| oppression. After a few generations, they admit that the hardcore
| spirit is gone and made initiatives to try to restore it, but
| still some of the biggest co-ops have died or been sold off (ie
| Fagor).
|
| My friends from there told me: "It's where your dumb cousin
| works", as it's very political with a lot of patronage kinds of
| networks that democratic elections at that scale tend to produce.
| They made a startup community there, but it seemed like most of
| the kids were trying to get out, not stay to reform the coop.
|
| I think the Italian Emilia Romagna region cooperatives [1] may be
| a less centralized model that could be better, as it does away
| with the big organization that eventually rots, like any big old
| org.
|
| [1] https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2016/07/05/the-
| italian-p...
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| thank you for these comments, makes sense to me.
| calf wrote:
| Based on what I've heard I'd love to visit there and even have
| a chance to intern there. I'd like to see for myself firsthand
| what life would be like. Would it be boring? Would it be
| bureaucratic or unmeritocratic? Would that bother me
| personally? I don't speak Spanish, unfortunately.
|
| Obviously this article gives a rosy picture. However, the
| renewed interest in alternatives is precisely due to the new
| forms of arbitrary oppression that 21st century capitalism
| inflicts on many people, so maybe that would be one pathway for
| Mondragon and other meta-coops to flourish. Who knows.
|
| Moreover, it's not like actually-existing capitalism doesn't
| tend to produce its own forms of inequality. Maybe a
| sociologist or economist could show that the "patronage
| networks" in something like Mondragon are an effect of their
| structure but the overall negative outcomes are
| lessened/mitigated compared to the negative social outcomes of
| Western capitalism. A proper comparison would be an open
| research question.
|
| That's too bad about Fagor, 10 years ago I ordered a pressure
| cooker from them but had it returned immediately due to an
| improper lid fit. That would've been around the time of its
| decline and eventual closing off. I ended up buying a 2x more
| expensive pot from a Swiss company, it's lasted me 10 years so
| far.
| nickpinkston wrote:
| They also don't speak much Spanish there, as the Basques have
| their own ancient unique language (a non-Indo-European
| isolate actually) and culture due to their mountain isolation
| and resistance to everyone, even the Romans. The people I
| worked with there all spoke English.
|
| You might try reaching out to these guys if you want to
| visit. They actually get a lot of visitors, and there's a
| whole tour program I did when I was there.
|
| https://mondragonteamacademy.com/
|
| As far as the effectiveness of Mondragon, I agree that we
| shouldn't judge it by capitalist standards, but more ask: Can
| it survive within capitalism while still doing well by its
| people?
|
| I worry that Fagor, etc. may point to that not being long-
| term true, but it has been around for a long time, so maybe
| not. I more think that their model is hard to replicate
| outside of their high solidary cultural environment, rather
| than predicting their demise.
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