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The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

theguardian.com

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Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#71

Post by gadflyinyoureye »

thesuitonym wrote: post #43
gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are co-ops anti-capitalist? They appear to me no different than a shareholder or partnership. Are most law firms socialistic in that they have partners who work for the firm getting a share of its profits?

The workers own the means of production. That's the only thing that socialism means.

a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole

The community is normal understood as the complete body politic.

A partnership is not socialistic. Lawyers are capitalistic in most books, but they have partnerships.

The organization of a business doesn’t matter in capitalism. Capitalism, boiled down to private property and market. A co-op competing with other companies largely without price control is just as capitalistic as IBM or Google.

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#72

Post by [deleted] »

orwin wrote: post #47
rybosworld wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Co-op is not a socialist model at all. It's just an alternative corporate structure.

It is the worker owning the mean of production, so i don't think you can do more socialist than that to be honest, it's almost the definition of socialism (communism for fellow europeans). You can find some differences between western co-op and the socialist ideal (mainly, you still have hierarchy and a power structure mostly determined by how much you make), but to me it seems mostly academics.

[deleted]

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#73

Post by xhkkffbf »

jmyeet wrote: post #20

For all the fearmongering of the Red Scare, this is what socialism looks like. Socialism is an industrial co-op like this where workers are fairly paid for their labor. Capitalism is Walmart where all profits are captured by a handful of shareholders and executives, being subsidized by the Federal government through food stamps to employees and decimating local economies to the point where they're left with dollar st…

Is this really socialism? It seems more like a company with lots of owners. I can imagine that the local residents who must buy from this cooperative may feel pretty excluded, especially if the cooperative overcharges. The insiders can still screw over the outsiders. It's just the proportions are a bit different.

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#75

Post by gadflyinyoureye »

greenie_beans wrote: post #65
gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are co-ops anti-capitalist? They appear to me no different than a shareholder or partnership. Are most law firms socialistic in that they have partners who work for the firm getting a share of its profits?

"capitalism" is simply a way to organize an enterprise. an enterprise can participate in a market without structuring the organization as a capitalist enterprise. free market != capitalism. american-style capitalism consists of a political system that supports the capitalist enterprise structure.

Definition of capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.

The private owner here is a co-op. Not socialist.

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#76

Post by adolph »

jmyeet wrote: post #20

For all the fearmongering of the Red Scare, this is what socialism looks like. Socialism is an industrial co-op like this where workers are fairly paid for their labor. Capitalism is Walmart where all profits are captured by a handful of shareholders and executives, being subsidized by the Federal government through food stamps to employees and decimating local economies to the point where they're left with dollar st…

> The Amish in question are entrepreneurial for sure but that's not capitalism.

The semantic challenge is that unlike the claimed differences between communism and socialism, Capitalism and capitalism share the same word, similar to Liberalism and liberalism.

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#77

Post by Workaccount2 »

jmyeet wrote: post #20

For all the fearmongering of the Red Scare, this is what socialism looks like. Socialism is an industrial co-op like this where workers are fairly paid for their labor. Capitalism is Walmart where all profits are captured by a handful of shareholders and executives, being subsidized by the Federal government through food stamps to employees and decimating local economies to the point where they're left with dollar st…

Socialism (communism?) is usually framed as "workers earning their full worth" but the dirty truth is that it is more "workers earning their preset cut of the pie, which is independent of the work they put in".

So while the shelf-stocker might be earning $24/hr, their actual hard economic output is much less than this - $19/hr. The difference is made up by the salesperson making $26/hr, instead of $31/hr.

Many sales people might be fine with this sacrifice, but even more likely will not, and will tire of being the ones who need to sacrifice.

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#78

Post by eatonphil »

Quarrel wrote: post #25

The co-op structure is less used in the US, but there are quite a lot of significant employee owned corporations (which come with the limited liability benefits to shareholders). There are also quite a few with mixed founder / employee ownership. Publix for instance employ 250,000 people across their supermarkets and are employee / founder owned. A recent list of the largest from Oct 2023: https://www.nceo.org/articl…

Co-ops in the US seems to be particularly popular in agriculture.

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#79

Post by greenie_beans »

jmyeet wrote: post #20

For all the fearmongering of the Red Scare, this is what socialism looks like. Socialism is an industrial co-op like this where workers are fairly paid for their labor. Capitalism is Walmart where all profits are captured by a handful of shareholders and executives, being subsidized by the Federal government through food stamps to employees and decimating local economies to the point where they're left with dollar st…

> The Amish in question are entrepreneurial for sure but that's not capitalism. The Amish keep their surplus labor value. It saddens me to see how fundamentally people misunderstand what capitalism actually is.

wish more people understood the historical roots of the word "entrepreneur". americans conflate business/enterprise/entrepreneurship with capitalism. i think most people would be more open to these ideas if it weren't from the misinformation dating back to the red scare.

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#80

Post by mistermann »

tossandthrow wrote: post #63
JTbane wrote: post #18

C-suite salaries are so high in America I'm wondering if these sort of co-ops could be more competitive on that cost saving alone.

If we factor in not just C-suite but the entire middle to top management, then I definitely think there is something to come for. Though, in the end, the US is extremely adversarial. So these people standing to loose out on the competition would do anything to stifle such innovations.

The US reputedly has the best Democracy money can buy.
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