Mondragon as the new city-state

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.