Mondragon as the new city-state

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.

> 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 €16,000 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.