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Mondragon Corporation

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Re: Mondragon Corporation

#231

Post by pdonis »

tathougies wrote: post #226
pdonis wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a distributed system like capitalism 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".

Revenue is dictated by the various consumer demands of mainly individuals and families.

In a free market, yes. Again, "free market" is not the same as "capitalism". The robber barons who got the US government to grant them monopolies of railroad routes in the late 19th century were capitalists; but their revenue was not "dictated by the various consumer demands of mainly individuals and families".

Re: Mondragon Corporation

#232

Post by scrollbar »

neuw84 wrote: post #9

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 :)

Hello!

I've just started a worker coop last year with some colleagues. We serve for-profit traditional businesses in the cannabis industry, helping them build data and analytics capabilities.

I've wanted to do something like your "second degree" approach, with the goal of creating closer relationships to help guarantee a sustainable long-term lifestyle business.

Do you think you could have gone the "second degree" route if you had served for-profit clients? How did early conversations about this ownership model unfold?

Do you have any advice for others who want to follow your model?

Can new customer-owners join? How does that work with existing customer-owners?

Thank you! Much respect.

Re: Mondragon Corporation

#233

Post by EGreg »

tsimionescu wrote: post #152
jp555 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I know Chomsky. I went to meet him in MIT several years ago, when I was looking for advisors to Qbix. (Also met Tim Berners-Lee and his team at what was then known as Solid - a similar project to Qbix). The guy responds to email at 2am btw, quite cool for an 85 year old.

As I see it, open source technology IS the great decentralized of power. We just need people to build Good open source software.

My personal passion (which I poured a lot of money into) was qbix.com and intercoin.org . That’s also why I reached out to Andrew Yang back in early 2018 when he announced running and met him in May 2018. We agreed my company would build https://yang2020.app to support his campaign, and he would help introduce us to mayors of cities that want UBI locally (he knew a few dozen, like Michael Tubbs of Stockton, although since then Michael has not been a fan of Yang’s approach for various reasons).

I believe in UBI + Gift Economies / Collaboration as the best system, better than socialism or capitalism. But we have a while to get there.

Yang is trying to boil the ocean by going for UBI on a national level. I believe the future is in decentralization, and I talk about it extensively. I think UBI can be done via cryptocurrency on a local level. We can also do voting this way. I’m writing a piece about this at the moment, very apropos of the recent fiascos.

Printers, Email, Blogs, the Internet have replaced large corporate and state gatekeepers we used to have (newspapers, cable channels, telephone companies, printing presses etc) and costs went down to near zero. Technology decentralizes power.

We can have towns and cities run decentralized:

Solar power networks (resilient to EMPs and carrington events)

Mesh networks (better than cellphone networks)

Social networks (chat, events, appointments, everything that fb does but w local servers)

I’m trying to build the software to run on these networks (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI)

PS: sorry for all the links but honestly I am passionate about this stuff and need to illustrate it instead of talking. A video is worth a thousand words. To mitigate the shilling I will say that TimBL’s solid and MaidSAFE * IPFS and others are also working on decentralizing power

Re: Mondragon Corporation

#234

Post by dbingham »

andreilys wrote: post #151
dbingham wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not the alternative. The alternative is a system that isn't profit driven, where all the companies are worker cooperatives. In that system, there are no stock holders demanding ever greater returns, those doing the work are always completely in control. They can choose to do "just enough" to live a good life. Or they can choose to focus on the more fulfilling aspects of their work, and not on the profit. I…

“ The alternative is a system that isn't profit driven, where all the companies are worker cooperatives.” Enforced by a central top-down bureaucratic organization. In this hypothetical world would you let foreign companies motivated by profit compete in your country that only has worker co-ops? Or would you have a closed down market, similar to North Korea that only Approved Co-ops would be allowed to work in?

The current structures we allow today are "top down bureaucratic". How do you think the C-corp and S-corp got defined? The LLC, the partnership, the sole-proprietorship are all organizational forms defined and allowed by the government. The government defines the shape of the market, and then actors are free to operate with in that shape.

This is the same thing, just a different shape.

Re: Mondragon Corporation

#235

Post by WBrad »

andreilys wrote: post #155
nickbauman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever noticed that once you pierce the walls of "big corp", you find a command economy that's driven dictatorially from the c-suite? Capitalism and "free" markets are great for everyone else. Dictatorship is de rigueur inside the company.

Thankfully dictators of a company are less likely to use violence to coerce me to buy their products/services. Governments on the other hand have a monopoly on violence, so I am more wary of handing them power over the choices I can make in my life.

They are less likely but that does not mean it hasn't happened. The first air strike on united states ground was the national guard striking miners at the behest of the company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain#Battl...

If you're in another country working for a U.S. corp you're in much worse shape. Coca-Cola can murder you for forming a union in another country and get away with it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co.

Re: Mondragon Corporation

#236

Post by abathologist »

jp555 wrote: post #136
dbingham wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not the alternative. The alternative is a system that isn't profit driven, where all the companies are worker cooperatives. In that system, there are no stock holders demanding ever greater returns, those doing the work are always completely in control. They can choose to do "just enough" to live a good life. Or they can choose to focus on the more fulfilling aspects of their work, and not on the profit. I…

Forcing no profits is central management at it's very worst - Setting prices causes many downstream derangements to markets. A complex interconnected system will adapt in unforeseeable ways, causing novel externalities for which we have no built up immunity. Ask a soviet.

"not profit driven" does not mean "forcing no profits". The former means that your highest driving purpose and governing logic is not oriented around the accumulation of profit. The latter means you make it impossible to accumulate profit.

We can pursue self-organization that pursues escape from the pathological patterns of profit driven production without advocating for, striving for, or tolerating a totalitarian, bureaucratic nightmare. See, e.g., https://thenextsystem.org/start-with-worker-self-directed-en...

Re: Mondragon Corporation

#237

Post by abathologist »

hooverlunch wrote: post #83

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.

I've found this list of tech-coops useful as well: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

Re: Mondragon Corporation

#238

Post by pdonis »

chishaku wrote: post #215
pdonis wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Government can't solve the problem of externalities Do you enjoy the the benefits of the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act? In your view, does government at least partially solve the problem of some negative externalities? (Based on your bio, I assume you're in the US.)

> Do you enjoy the the benefits of the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act?

I like having clean water and clean air. That's why I have air filters in my house and don't drink tap water.

> does government at least partially solve the problem of some negative externalities?

Government can certainly change incentives in ways that will, at least temporarily, reduce particular negative externalities. But to say that "solves the problem" implies that, once that particular government solution is put in place, we can stop worrying about that particular negative externality and move on to ther things. I do not think that is the case.

Re: Mondragon Corporation

#239

Post by scrollbar »

Pfhreak wrote: post #184

I'm surprised that more disaffected tech folk aren't starting their own coops. People in companies like Especially in places like Seattle and San Francisco, where there are strong lefty communities. I wonder if we'll see the folks who get frustrated with the policies of Google/Amazon/etc splinter off to form coops.

Yeah. I had been trying to do it for awhile but there's surprisingly little activity around here in our sector (Oakland/SF tech)

My partners of the consultancy we founded last year decided to go this route. There aren't many great local examples to learn from so we're kind of figuring it out as we go. Obviously B2B tech/software/consulting is very different than for example Arizmendi, a local cooperative bakery.

If anyone else is interested or involved in coops in the Bay Area, please let me know and I'd be happy to meet up.

Re: Mondragon Corporation

#240

Post by ksdale »

nickbauman wrote: post #28
cies wrote: post #2

From the article: At Mondragon, there are agreed-upon wage ratios between executive work and field or factory work which earns a minimum wage. These ratios range from 3:1 to 9:1 in different cooperatives and average 5:1. That is, the general manager of an average Mondragon cooperative earns no more than 5 times as much as the theoretical minimum wage paid in their cooperative. For most workers, this ratio is smaller…

Does it matter if it's large? I was just talking to a friend who started a small company, merged with a bigger company and thought he had done everything right. After a few years, he regretted selling the company. Small is beautiful. We learned this as children. Challenge the mantra of size and growth.

I think from an aesthetic perspective, there's no difference between large and small, but from an efficiency perspective, sometimes it's important for things to be large.

And this isn't heartless, capitalist efficiency, sometimes there's a large environmental cost to distributing work across a population, like if everyone dumps a little bit of waste into the sewer because it's too expensive to treat (or burns their own coal for cooking), where a much larger entity has the efficiencies to treat the waste properly (or generate electricity much more cleanly) and the government can actually monitor the single entity.

Additionally, a lot of things are only affordable to most people because they are mass produced. There's a very good argument that a lot things that are produced are just utterly unnecessary, but that doesn't invalidate the point that some very necessary things are only affordable to the poor because they are made by the million.

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