201–210 of 291 posts
Hi, greetings from a worker that work at Ikerlan (a research/technological center part of the corporation). We are a second degree cooperative. Formed by workers and companies that we work for. You can see things that we do at https://www.ikerlan.es/en/ Happy to answer to questions if I can :)
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Is the alternative 100% top-down central-managed solution to ensure no externalization happens ever? In theory that's appealing (especial from the view from Chomsky's academic ivory tower), but then in practice every time it's been tried it hasn't worked well at all. Chomsky is smart, but not very useful because "In theory there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is" - Yogi Berra
Chomsky is anti-centralization, he is an anarchist (anarcho-syndicalist). In general, his ideal end-goal world would include smaller states with more direct control by the populace, with worker-owned and worker-managed corporations, with free markets of goods and services between different corporations and different states, and of course freedom of movement. Strong environmental control would be almost implied if the…
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Heh, you can't sell a worker coop. One of the key defining features is a "de-mutualization" provision in the founding documents. You can only sell your own share, which has, in our coop, a fixed value of $1,000. And you can only sell that share back to the coop.
interesting, does the value ever change? did you pay that $1.000 at any moment or was discounted from work at any moment? what about new members?
It's not co-ops that distort the value of the firm, it's that permanent ownership necessitates complicated and opinionated financial/statistical reasoning to put a number on what is fundamentally a weird social relation.
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Forcing profits is bad too. Just look at Boeing to see where the naked pursuit of profits can lead. It literally kills people.
If they had pursued profits harder and more effectively, they would not have had the accidents whose effect was to reduce their profits. Although there are some examples of outright malice or criminality out there, Boeing is closer to an example of an ineffective management culture than an evilly effective one.
I think this is a bit simplistic or at least too optimistic. The pressures of being listed on the stock market are such that management is more or less compelled to pursue short-term goals.
Indeed in the very long run a lot of corporations are harming themselves by harming the environment, impeding innovation etc. but in the short run firing people, cutting R&D budgets, digging up more coal, oil etc. can be very effective. And shareholders really only care about what your profits are gonna be in the next few quarters, not so much about what's gonna happen decades down the line.
There are lots of small tech worker coops in the U.S. and Canada. See https://techworker.coop . I co-founded one, Sassafras Tech Collective, in Ann Arbor. It's been an amazing journey. I don't think I could ever go back to working in a non-democratic workplace.
> It's been an amazing journey. So you sold it, eh?
;-)
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By that measure you shouldn't really consider any of the large Spanish companies, as all of them have extremely close ties to francoism. At least for Mondragon they are a drop in the other bucket. Still, I would be very skeptical about these "terrorism financing", since the data you acquired was very probably massaged by the Spanish authorities to look as bad as possible.
> any of the large Spanish companies, as all of them have extremely close ties to francoism Come on dude, is this really necessary in HN? Don't you think you're stretching it a bit?
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>Why does a price necessarily include a profit or a loss It includes a profit or a loss because you need to eat and provide for yourself. If you're making chairs but the cost of materials is larger than what you sell those chairs for, how are you going to provide for your family? If you want to save up for a house or a car, or family vacation, how are you going to do that if you don't sell your chairs with a surplus…
> If you're making chairs but the cost of materials is larger than what you sell those chairs for, how are you going to provide for your family? This is the "self-referential" thing I was referring to. You're entering into this thought experiment with a pre-defined conception of how an economic mode of production must operate. You're presupposing the profit motive.
The one that comes to mind is Communism (and its many flavours), and we've seen what a humanitarian and economic disaster that turns out to be.
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Well it's Catholic doctrine after all. Edit: Downvoters should read about distributism.
Hi, I'm a big fan of distributism and co-ops, and I'm also a Catholic. But I have to quibble with you. Distributism is not Catholic doctrine. It's a third-way economic system that is compatible with Catholic social teaching, and several influential Catholic figures, such as G.K. Chesterton, helped promulgate it. But you don't have to be Catholic to be a distributist, and you can be a Catholic without being a distribu…
Distributism is just a great idea that everybody should support.
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That's where it falls apart. Systems tend to aggregate to seek efficiencies of scale.
I tend to not agree with this line of thinking. This may be the case when you subject a company to financial market pressures by listing it on the stock exchange, but I don't think it's a natural imperative. Many companies do just fine without growing to enormous proportions, being acquired, acquiring others etc.
How do you account for that?
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> Capitalism itself cannot solve the problem of externalities. True. > That's what the government is for. False. Government can't solve the problem of externalities either, because government is even more at the mercy of the perverse incentives that create them than free market participants are. There is no "solution" to the problem of externalities, if by "solution" you mean some system we can put in place that will…
> if by "solution", you mean some system we can put in place that will magically prevent them Only a distributed system like capitalism rises to your bar of "magically prevent[ing]". Centralization is not magic, but when it works, it works. I prefer distributed systems too, but when it's hard to make the right incentivizes, we shouldn't throw in the towel. Surely the parent post doesn't use a definition of "solution"…
How is capitalism a distributed system? It concentrates capital in the hands of a small minority.
A free market is a distributed system, but "free market" is not a synonym for "capitalism".
> Centralization is not magic, but when it works, it works.
I guess we have very different definitions of "works".